Address it straightforwardly In the end, I talked to this engineer and explained what the correct process would have been. It went like, “Your implementation was correct; the designs weren’t. It's fine to build it differently and to test your idea. I just wish you had gone to your product manager and your architect the next morning, and then we could have gone to the client together, to try to sell them on your idea.” Instead, it had turned into a catastrophe. We made it through, but we needed to do some cultural cleanup.
instead, it had turned into a catastrophe ... whyyyy