After I wrote “Staying on the Path to High-Performance Teams,”8 quite a few people asked the same follow-up question: “Once a team has repaid its technical debt, shouldn’t the now surplus team members move to other teams?” This makes a lot of sense, because the team, with so little technical debt left, is now overstaffed relative to its global priority. Repeated across many teams, this could lead to an organization having far too many engineers allocated against last year’s problems, and too few against today’s. This is an important problem to address!
