A client’s internal dev team keeps undoing our recommendations after every sprint, then blames us when performance tanks. I’ve tried explaining the impact, documenting everything, even looping in my PM. His advice? Pick your battles. But this one’s killing our metrics and making us look incompetent. I don’t want to nuke the relationship, but I also don’t want to keep fixing the same mess. How do you push back? Do you even bother?

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Keep documenting, responding when they complain, notifying your PM, AND let your account team know so they can do relationship repair / damage control. There's a "pick your battles" but then there's CSAT, net promoter scores , and customers that stick around. Communication is key, up down and sideways.

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Theres no battle picking to do when its affecting your success metrics. If your PM isnt helping as needed, its one of three things:

1. You're blowing things out of proportion
2. He/She doesn't get it
3. All of the above

Do an RCA on the performance issues. Document findings and recommendations, do explicit before and after testing showing the resolution of the issue. Publish the findings with the client and clearly indicate it as resolved and get confirmation from the client. Then don't stop them from breaking it, just wait for it to break. When it does , do much public wringing of hands and expressing confusion about how it happened. Then just as publicly do another RCA which must address why it broke. At that point, clearly document how it broke. Names, changes, approvals, code commits whatever, and how the previous fix was removed.
Throughout the entire process be professional and polite. When it breaks be supportive and sympathetic, when you point out why it broke be matter of fact and show full documentation and at that point include the documentation as explanation for the related poor metrics. Write up how this metric will be excluded until client reverses breaking changes and updates their process to prevent it from happening again.

This shouldn't be done in the background, it needs to be done with full management visibility on your side and client side.
Sometimes this is best done by bringing in another "expert" so the findings can come from an independent person not currently part of the team. All of this needs tuned based on your specifics and dynamics involved, but when done properly everyone can save face, relationships remain intact, and problem can disappear.

One of the other options is to change the team out working for the client because if the performance doesn’t change, then it can show that it’s the client. It doesn’t seem to be worse than the perception of incompetence.

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