% Bureaucracy

I’ve recently had the misfortune of leading a contracted integration project with a very bureaucratic government agency, as a private sector vendor (software product startup). While my company was agile, our client was decidedly not. Emails I intend for one or two recipients end up with 20 ccs. Requests that take one minute to answer get passed to entire teams then down the chain of command to someone entirely clueless about the business context and needs to catch up all over again. Timelines keep getting planned, re-planned, secretly pushed. Complete requirements-gathering manage to both block the commencement of work, and remain arbitrarily variable after signoff. Random stakeholders would spring from the void and declare priority of their own scope. Meetings upon meetings get thrown on my calendar, half of which are their internal experts discussing with jargon that means nothing to us.I was wholly unprepared. As a product manager, a mostly internal role, I've been graced with plenty of client-facing experiences in which I've retained my style as a real human being, with goodwill and boundaries, and find like-minded allies on the other side to do mutually beneficial business with. This usually works. My company was unprepared too. For the most part, we've operated fluid and lean. Due to this interaction, executives at my company decided we should develop more bureaucracy to handle their bureaucracy. More chain of command, process of escalation, points of contacts. Every fixture our client had, my company wanted to have, too. Except we were 1% the size of them. I felt suffocated as walls rose around me. This is one of those depressing conversations you'd have as a child with boring adults, where you're told that grown-ups have responsibilities, and that's why they're boring like them. And you think to yourself, sounds like I'm doomed to become monotonically less cool. I don't want to grow up then.Except it wasn't true. I grew up, and discovered that adults can be