Your strongest team is doing a lot, the updates sound good, and everyone would tell you things are fine. This is when drift is hardest to see.

Talented people find ways around whatever is in their way: a stalled decision, a priority that no longer fits, or a problem the team can't solve as it's set up. The workarounds look like real work, and from the inside it feels like progress.

In this talk, I'll show how capable teams lose their way while status looks good, and how leaders can catch it early. You'll learn three patterns that hide inside productive teams, what each one needs from you, and why adding pressure or process can make things worse.

Based on 20+ years in engineering, 17 of those leading engineering teams at Google, and interviews with more than 30 leaders at companies including Netflix, NVIDIA, Google, Anthropic and beyond.

Key takeaways:

- Spot the three patterns while the team still looks healthy: work that has scattered, work that is stuck, and work that keeps a team busy without moving anything forward.

- Match the fix to the pattern. Scattered work needs to be pointed at what matters now. Stuck work needs someone to clear the way. Busy work needs a hard look at whether it should continue.

- Treat workarounds and repeated heroics as signs of what the team is missing.

Ask your best team three questions this week:

What happens if we don't do this work? Why does it need to be now? What workarounds are you relying on to keep moving?

Level: Intermediate
Audience: Leaders of teams: managers, directors, VPs, and executives. Works for team leads too.
Format: 25-minute talk, can be expanded to a workshop or other format.