Right, so I remember hearing about what Didier Deschamps supposedly said during halftime in that World Cup final. The story goes France was up, but maybe not totally comfortable, and the big message was basically: get the ball to Kylian Mbappé. Simple, right? Focus on your best weapon.
It got me thinking. Not about football, really, but about how things work in my own little world. I was managing this small project team at the time, nothing fancy, just trying to get a tricky software update out the door. We were hitting roadblocks, stuck in the middle phase, kind of like halftime, I guess. Everyone was doing their bit, but it felt scattered.
Trying the ‘Give it to Kylian’ Idea
We had this one developer, let’s call him Alex. Super sharp, really fast when he got into the zone. Honestly, way better than the rest of us on the core coding part of this specific update. Watching the team struggle, I remembered that Deschamps story.
So, I pulled the team together for a quick chat. Wasn’t a fancy dressing room, just the cramped meeting space near the coffee machine. I didn’t yell or anything, not my style. I just said something like, “Look, we’re spinning our wheels a bit. Alex is flying on the main integration stuff. For the next couple of days, let’s try funneling everything related to that core module directly to him. The rest of us, let’s focus on clearing the path for him – testing what he finishes, prepping the documentation, handling the minor bugs around the edges.”
The plan was simple:
- Identify our ‘star player’ for this specific task (Alex).
- Give him the ‘ball’ (the core coding tasks).
- Have everyone else play support, removing obstacles.
How It Went Down
Honestly? It was a bit awkward at first. A couple of the team members looked a bit put out. Felt like I was saying they weren’t good enough, which wasn’t the point. Alex looked stressed, like, “Great, now all the pressure’s on me.”
We pushed ahead anyway. For the first day, it was clunky. People were hesitant to pass things over, still trying to solve bits themselves. Alex was stressed, asking tons of questions because stuff wasn’t being prepped right for him.
But then, it started to click a little. The others saw that by handling the smaller, annoying tasks, they freed Alex up to really nail the complex part. He got faster because he wasn’t being pulled in five directions. We started seeing real progress on the main chunk of work that had been stuck.
Did we score a ‘World Cup winning goal’? Nah, not quite. The update went out, maybe a day or two earlier than it might have otherwise. It wasn’t a miracle cure. Alex was pretty burned out by the end of it. And I had to do some smoothing over with the others afterwards, making sure they knew their support work was just as crucial.
So, yeah. Tried the Deschamps halftime talk idea, in my own small way. It kind of worked, but it wasn’t magic. You gotta be careful not to overload your star player and make sure the rest of the team feels valued. Simple instructions sound great, but making them work with real people is always messier. Still, was an interesting little experiment to run.