I’ve seen examples of this sort of unaligned autonomy play out all the time within engineering organizations. Individual delivery teams are working on technical initiatives that seem strategic to them, but a lack of alignment across those teams means that there’s little forward progress on an architectural level. Perhaps a platform team is investing heavily in a Kafka-based event-sourcing architecture, while a product team is cooking up their own solution based on RabbitMQ. Or, a product team is investing all their spare engineering cycles in reducing the latency of their API, while improved analytics capabilities would be much more valuable for their operational stakeholders. Despite each team feeling that they’re making good technical decisions locally, but there’s no coherent progress at an organizational level.