### 4 states of team progress - [How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg | First Round Review](https://review.firstround.com/how-to-size-and-assess-teams-from-an-eng-lead-at-stripe-uber-and-digg) / [The 4 States of an Engineering Team by @ttunguz](https://tomtunguz.com/an-elegant-problem-will-larson.md/) - The four states are: - **1. Falling Behind** - every week, the team’s backlog deepens. The list of bugs and feature requests outstrips the team’s ability to offset them with releases. It’s time to recruit engineers to add throughput to the team. Morale is low. - Fix: - System: hire more people until the team moves into treading water - Caveat is **scale tax** - Don't reassign people (people aren't fungible, too political) - Tactical: provide support - Setting expectations with users - Beating the drum around the easy wins - Injecting optimism. - **2. Treading Water** - the team sustains a good pace, but can’t embark on new projects or reduce technical debt. The solution is to reduce concurrent work (called Work in Progress in systems theory), so drive faster throughput by focusing on team projects rather than individual work. - Fix: - System: consolidate the team’s efforts to finish more things, and to reduce concurrent work until they’re able to begin repaying debt (_e.g._ limit work in progress) - Tactical: the focus here is on helping people transition from a personal view of productivity to a team view - **3. Repaying Debt** - to pay down debt, the team needs more time to invest in reducing the debt. - Fix: - System: add time to allow the compounding value of paying down technical debt to grow - Tactically: support users while repaying debt (don't switch technical debt for users' perspective) - **4. Innovating** - craft enough slack in the system to enable the team to transition to this phase, invest in good quality code. - Fix: - Sytem: maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work - Tactical: ensure that the work your team is doing is valued ### Manage junior PMs - This framework is especially useful for senior product managers & leaders to create clarity on the decisions team members can make on their own and the decisions you’d like to make with them. ![[PM Delegation Framework - Keith Rabois.jpeg]] ### Engineering organization - [Stripe Atlas: Guide to scaling engineering organizations](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/scaling-eng) - [KOUDETAT : Le process de sortie de produit - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiXQoheSiwA&ab_channel=Startupfood)