hardScenarioDesignSeniorStaffLead
You discover two teams have independently built notification services that do roughly the same thing. What do you do?
4 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Find out why it happened before deciding what to do about it, because duplication is usually a symptom of a discovery or ownership failure that consolidation alone will not fix.
This is governance without bureaucracy. Good governance asks who should own the capability, what platform boundary would remove duplication, and what decision rights teams need. Weak governance creates a committee after the duplicate work has already shipped. Strong governance uses a platform only when shared ownership lowers coordination cost; a platform that nobody can change simply moves the conflict somewhere else.
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Likely follow-ups
- The second team says the first service does not meet their latency requirement. How do you test that claim?
- You consolidate onto one service. Who pays for it, and what happens when it becomes a bottleneck?
- How would you have caught this six months earlier?
- When is duplication the right long-term answer?
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