The decision is announced as good news. Your skills are in demand, so from next month you will spend half your time on the payments team and half on the new partner integrations. Two stand ups, two backlogs, two leads, and one of you.
Most people in this position end up doing roughly seventy percent of each job, feeling behind on both, and getting credit from neither. That outcome is common enough to plan against from the first week.
Start by getting the split in writing, in concrete terms. Not half and half in principle, but which days, or which mornings, belong to which team. Fifty percent of a week that is decided fresh every Monday turns into whoever shouts loudest. Fixed days let both teams plan around you.
Ask both leads the same question, ideally together. When your priorities clash, and they will, who decides? If the answer is that you should work it out, push gently for a name. You should not be the person settling disputes between two senior people about your own time.
Drop something. Two half jobs cannot carry every meeting of two full ones. Look at both calendars and agree which ceremonies you will skip on each side, and how you will catch up instead. A short written summary from a teammate often replaces an hour of a meeting.
Be careful about review season. In many companies, a person split between teams gets reviewed mostly by the lead who happens to write the review, who has seen half the work. Keep your own record of what you delivered for each team, and make sure both leads contribute to your review. Ask for that now, not in December.
There is a real upside here, if you notice it. You are one of the few people who sees how two parts of the company actually connect. You will spot duplicated work, mismatched assumptions and integrations that nobody owns. Saying so, clearly and early, is the kind of contribution that gets people noticed.
Set a review date too. After three months, ask whether the split is working for both teams. Arrangements like this tend to drift on long after anyone remembers why they started.
– Asael Shinder
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