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Team States

A framework for describing teams and their performance within their surrounding context. Teams are slotted into a continuum of four states:

Falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than it was the week before. Typically, people are working extremely hard but not making much progress, morale is low, and your users are vocally dissatisfied.
Treading water if they’re able to get their critical work done, but are not able to start paying down technical debt or begin major new projects. Morale is a bit higher, but people are still working hard, and your users may seem happier because they’ve learned that asking for help won’t go anywhere.
Repaying debt when they’re able to start paying down technical debt, and are beginning to benefit from the debt repayment snowball: each piece of debt you repay leads to more time to repay more debt.
Innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.”