Situations to handle live: two senior engineers in conflict, an attrition wave, a project you inherit failing.
3 questions in Engineering Management.
Name the delivery impact concretely, then look for the structural cause — most such conflicts are an unadjudicated design or ownership dispute wearing a personality mask. Hear both separately, decide what they cannot, set observable expectations with a review date, and separate them only as a last step.
Verify the position from working software rather than opinions, re-baseline once with evidence and options attached, tell your leadership early and without blaming your predecessor, protect the team from the fallout, and fix the reporting mechanism that let a red project look green.
Own the decision publicly without pretending you authored it, find out individually what each person believes they have lost since the answers differ, then either win back real scope or say honestly that the team is now smaller than its ambitions. Quiet resistance costs you the team faster than the reorg did.