Unifying engineering after a merger.

Post merger integration is the only time you get to redesign an engineering org from scratch with everyone's blessing. It is also the only time you can quietly make it worse forever. The window is short.

My first instinct used to be to standardize tooling. Same CI, same language, same cloud. I have learned that it is the wrong first move. People resist tools they did not choose, and you burn political capital you will need later.

What worked for me was to standardize the delivery cadence first. One shared planning ritual. One shared definition of shipped. One shared on call rotation. Tools follow naturally once the rhythm is shared, because the friction becomes obvious to the engineers themselves.

The full arc, including what we kept, what we killed, and the org chart we landed on, is on my main site.