hardScenarioBehaviouralSeniorStaffLead
Two senior engineers on your team cannot work together and delivery is suffering. What do you do?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
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.
Conflict resolution matters here because the two senior engineers cannot work together answer has to show the boundary, not just the happy path.
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Likely follow-ups
- After the joint conversation it improves for three weeks and then relapses. What now?
- One of them is your strongest engineer and threatens to leave if the other stays on the project. How do you respond?
- How do you repair the damage to the rest of the team, who have been routing around both of them?
- What if the root cause turns out to be that you never decided who owns the service?
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