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Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams, which came down to four steps: A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before. Solve by hiring more. A team is treading water if they’re able to get their critical work done, but are not able to start paying down technical debt or start major new projects. Solve by reducing work-in-progress. A team is repaying debt when they’re able to start paying down technical debt, but progress still feels slow. Solve by staying the course: it’s actually working, you just have to keep the faith until you finish digging out. A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs. There’s nothing left to solve, at this point. Even now, I find this mental model extremely valuable, but I do think it is missing one interesting nuance that I’ve seen many teams run into in high-growth environments: suppressed and generated demand. Suppressed demand is the idea of incoming work that isn’t incoming, because teams stop asking you for help. Generated demand is when an increasingly effective team’s progress is noticed, and the previously suppressed demand is converted into actual demand.