Invisible Forces: Building Teams That Actually Deliver

You’ve probably noticed it—projects slow down, engineers seem stretched thin, and delivery doesn’t match the plan. Yet the issue isn’t always visible. Teams carry invisible loads, and organizations often make structural choices that unintentionally amplify these hidden pressures.

Every team faces two intertwined challenges: shadow work and organizational friction. Shadow work is the unseen effort—mentoring, code reviews, ad-hoc production fixes, or small cross-team requests that never appear in tracking systems. Organizational friction arises when the team's structure misaligns with the work required to ship products efficiently.

Consider a startup post-Series A with 18 engineers, 3 PMs, and 2 designers. Initially, engineers work in broad technical teams—frontend with frontend, backend with backend, mobile with mobile. It seems ideal: peers in the same stack, shared knowledge, craft development. But the reality quickly becomes apparent.

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Projects rarely stay within one stack. APIs are delayed, mobile engineers feel sidelined, backend engineers feel pressured but disconnected. Engineers constantly shift domains, losing deep expertise. The product team struggles to coordinate with three separate technical teams. Productivity and satisfaction both suffer.

Tip: Observe where time is actually spent. Invisible effort and misaligned structures are the primary culprits behind slow delivery. Recognize them before blaming individuals.

Shadow Work – The Silent Capacity Drain

Even in the most disciplined team, shadow work silently consumes bandwidth. It comes in three primary forms:

1. Invisible production support: Investigating alerts, answering other teams’ questions, or fixing small but critical issues off the ticketing system. Without visibility, recurring problems consume far more time than necessary, and stability suffers.

2. Glue work: Mentoring, reviewing code, documenting processes, coordinating between squads. This essential work lands disproportionately on senior engineers, leaving them little capacity for strategic or high-impact initiatives.

3. Shadow backlog: Work that exists outside official planning—small fixes, off-roadmap improvements, or “longer route” technical choices. Without integrating this into planning, capacity estimates are misleading, prioritization is unclear, and frustration builds.

Tip: Make shadow work visible and manageable. Use lightweight tools that make reporting painless, rotate responsibilities, and allocate explicit time in planning for essential yet invisible tasks.

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Evolution of Team Organization

As teams grow, structural changes become inevitable. Let’s explore the progression:

• Technical Teams: Grouped by skill—frontend, backend, mobile. Pros: peer support, craft development. Cons: cross-team dependencies cause delays, coordination headaches, and domain-shifting frustrations.

• Squads (Domain-Focused Teams): Grouped around business domains rather than skills, squads deliver features end-to-end. Pros: direct impact on the product, rewarding team dynamic. Cons: technical debt and core engineering projects often fall behind; engineers become isolated in their stack.

• Chapters (Communities of Practice): Transversal groups around technical expertise, with chapter leads coordinating knowledge sharing and advocating for technical work. Pros: technical debt gets addressed, skill leveling occurs, and consensus on standards is faster. Cons: competing priorities between squads and chapters, and planning for engineer allocation becomes complex.

Tip: The best team structure is never permanent. Experiment, observe outcomes, and adapt to balance feature delivery with long-term technical health.

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Dedicated Core Teams and One-Shot Projects

To tackle persistent technical debt, some organizations form core squads—dedicated teams for infrastructure, framework updates, and other transversal projects. This can resolve backlog and technical debt, but introduces new challenges:

• Resource allocation conflicts between product squads and the core team

• Senior engineers stretched between leadership and hands-on work

• Risk of disengagement if core work feels less rewarding than product delivery

Alternatively, one-shot projects temporarily assign engineers to big technical initiatives. This approach clarifies ownership and timelines but brings its own trade-offs: scope uncertainty, timeline drift, resource juggling across squads, and potential burnout of dedicated engineers.

Tip: Allocate dedicated resources carefully. Define clear scope, timelines, and roles. Balance core or one-off projects with ongoing squad responsibilities to avoid overloading your most experienced engineers.

Staff Engineers, Metrics, and Sustainable Performance

The introduction of staff engineers can harmonize feature delivery with long-term technical health. Staff engineers are senior, autonomous, and act as force multipliers—framing work, guiding squads, and contributing where impact is highest. Combined with chapters, this setup allows teams to:

• Deliver features consistently

• Address technical debt without disrupting squads

• Share knowledge and standards across the organization

But there’s still the human element. Measurement of performance matters, but metrics must capture impact, not activity. Lines of code, commit counts, or story points alone fail to reflect real contribution. Look instead for evidence like:

• Project delivery relative to expectations

• Quality and reliability of systems

• Peer and cross-functional satisfaction

• Strategic influence and problem-solving contributions

Finally, sustainable performance requires conscious shadow work management. Rotate code review responsibilities, acknowledge invisible effort, and integrate shadow backlog into planning. Without these measures, even the most structured team will eventually hit capacity and morale limits.

Tip: Treat engineers like an audience of one—focus on their experience, impact, and growth. Align structures, roles, and metrics with outcomes, not just outputs. Balance visible delivery with the unseen work that makes the system run.

Closing Thought:

Building an effective engineering organization isn’t about a single perfect structure. It’s about recognizing the invisible work, balancing feature delivery with technical health, and structuring teams to maximize both impact and well-being. Teams evolve; so should your approach. The goal isn’t control—it’s clarity, alignment, and sustainable impact.

What’s your next spark? A new platform engineering skill? A bold pitch? A team ready to rise? Share your ideas or challenges at Tiny Big Spark. Let’s build your pyramid—together.

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