Teams sometimes lose momentum.
Collaboration gets harder. Work gets scattered across competing priorities. Interruptions keep things from getting done. Meetings start to feel like going through the motions.
Keeping a team gelled and high-performing over the long-haul is hard!
And the stakes are high.
Teams are expensive. Indeed, people are the biggest expense in most product organizations. Never mind the opportunity cost associated with lost productivity and lack of strategic focus.
The loaded cost of a single software team in the US can easily amount to $1.5-2m/year.
A struggling team represents tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity.
Fortunately, it’s possible to reset and realign a team and get it functioning better than ever.
Today, I want to share three ways we’ve seen teams get unstuck and relaunched with new energy and productivity. For each one, I’ll give the DIY version as well as some ways Humanizing Work can increase your leverage and momentum.
1. Declare backlog bankruptcy
Sometimes, a team gets bogged down under the weight of a pile of open commitments. When the backlog feels like an endless todo list, it’s time to go Marie Kondo with it. Here’s how…
According to tidying-up expert Marie Kondo, if you want to make, say, your sock drawer satisfyingly tidy, you don’t move things around in place. You pull everything out of the drawer, and you make each pair of socks earn its way back in. Those that don’t make the cut, you thank for what they did for you in the past (literally thank them, out loud, she says), and you let them go.
So, what does this look like with a product backlog?
- Rename your backlog from it’s current name to something like “Current Backlog Name (snapshot as of 2025-06-30)”.
- Thank that backlog for holding all of the ideas anyone has brought to your team as of today. Seriously, do it. You’re reframing the job of this collection of items.
- Create a new backlog with the old backlog name. Take a moment to enjoy the opportunity represented by that blank canvas.
- Now ask, “Out of all the things we could be doing right now, what’s the one big thing that matters most for our team to deliver?” Put that thing on your backlog.
- Refine the big thing on your backlog until you have a few weeks of well-shaped work.
- While your team is working on that, slowly fill out the next few months of the backlog.
- Consider setting up a separate list for ideas that you aren’t ready to commit to so the newly tidy backlog doesn’t become the place where your stakeholders’ dreams go to die.
How Humanizing Work can increase your leverage
Is your backlog structured in such a way that your team produces visible value, learning, and risk-reduction every day? If not, consider attending our CSPO workshop to learn how to create and sustain this kind of backlog.
Already know how you want the backlog to look but don’t know how to find good slices in your context? Contact us for more information on coaching to support you as you shape your new backlog.
2. Harness the magic of one-day sprints
Most teams run on two-week or longer cycles. This is good for being able to plan and deliver a meaningful chunk of work. But it can also lead to inertia. People mostly do their own thing in parallel, coordinating occasionally. Nothing much changes. Experiments, if they happen, tend to be minor tweaks.
We’ve seen great results from shaking up that pattern with two weeks of one-day sprints. Ten cycles of, “What meaningful outcome could we collaborate on today?” and, “How did that go?” and, “What should we do different tomorrow?” This makes space for 10x as many experiments, realigns a team around their shared purpose, and often creates breakthroughs that translate back into the team’s regular work in the future.
I’ve described the logistics of one-day sprints in detail before, so I won’t repeat that here.
How Humanizing Work can increase your leverage
Nothing stops you from just doing two weeks of one-day sprints yourself. But if you want more structure to it, if you want a higher likelihood of real change for your team, check out our Team Launch Sequence. It’s a set of videos, facilitation guides, and templates for 10 one-day sprints and 4 “booster sessions” to help your team align on a shared purpose, establish or refine a working agreement, build a better backlog, and ensure learnings from your one-day sprints make it back to your regular work.
3. Hold a reset event
When retrospectives don’t seem to be moving the needle anymore, it might be a facilitation problem. (In which case, we made a self-guided course just for that.
Or, your retro facilitation may be fine, and they’re just not the right tool for the situation you’re in.
Retros assume two things:
- 1. You have enough data in the last sprint or last few sprints to make sense of what’s really going on with your work
- 2. You have the models and concepts you need to make sense of that data and craft an experiment to make things better
That’s true enough of the time that well-faciltiated sprint retros can be quite useful.
But for a team that’s stuck, you may need to do something different. You may need to zoom out from just your recent experience, and you may need to introduce some new models and concepts to make sense of how to improve.
For that, try what we call a reset event: a combination of a larger retro and a group learning workshop.
Here’s how to DIY your own reset event:
- 1. Schedule between a half day and two full days. Ideally, get everyone in one place and make sure people will be able to take a break from regular work and focus.
- 2. Start by building a big timeline of the past project, past year, or whatever time period makes sense for your team. In our annual retro episode, we share an example of what this can look like.
- 3. Watch a 10-20 minute video together that teaches a concept that might be useful for your team. Lots of our Humanizing Work Show episodes would fit the bill. You’ll want to curate these in advance.
- 4. Facilitate a team discussion about how the ideas from the video might make sense of what your team has experienced. Look especially for constraints that are limiting how much impact your team has, how easily work flows through the team, and how motivated and engaged team members are. Note possibilities for things to try in the future.
- 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few more times, trying to generate more interpretations and ideas.
- 6. Facilitate a discussion to narrow down the possible ideas into 1-3 concrete experiments to try.
- 7. Finish by celebrating what the team has accomplished and appreciating each others’ contributions.
This is especially useful when a team is tired at the end of a long initiative. It generates fresh creativity and energy going into the next initiative.
How Humanizing Work can increase your leverage
Our 2.5-day Agile Team Reboot Workshop is a facilitated-for-you reset event. We align a team and its close stakeholders and leaders around key ideas and then use those ideas as lenses to look at the team’s past experience and future possibilities. The result is a more coherent, impactful set of changes than you’d get from a typical project retrospective.
Plus, the team goes into their new work with common language and mental models that make the changes much more likely to actually have an effect. Everyone knows why they’re doing
what they’re doing. And that’s powerful.
Try it!
Of course you can combine all three ways to reset your team when you’re stuck. Hold a reset event. Follow it with two weeks of 1-day sprints to get quick cycles on your improvement ideas. And return to routine work with a fresh and tidy backlog.
Or you can reach for the one that’ll have the biggest impact with the least disruption for your team right now.
What are you going to try with your team? Let us know!
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