Product dysfunction isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems problem.
Before I tell you what The Operating Gap is, let me tell you what it's for.
The dev team was drowning in multiple backlogs, stuck in a cycle of planning the next release, while fixing bugs from 6 versions back, and constantly receiving new priority requests.
The story being told to leadership is that they weren’t moving fast enough.
The team was fine.
Every sprint, the same thing happened. 100s of tickets from an accessibility audit had increased the backlog, while the team was trying to improve functionality in another area, and without a proper QA gate, bug reporting by users was high.
Next sprint, same story.
They made small decisions based on what they could handle, moving the software forward while drowning in different priorities — no buffer, no dedicated capacity, no structure that said this work is load-bearing and cannot keep losing — accessibility kept losing.
It accumulated. Sprint by sprint, invisibly, until the backlog had grown beyond what was manageable.
The dev lead had been quietly holding it together. Shielding his team from the pressure building above them, absorbing what he could, pushing back where he couldn’t. I won’t speak to what led to his decision to leave, but it’s easy to see how burnout and a lack of support could have been significant contributors.
When he left, the team stood exposed. And nobody, not the leads or the business, knew what they were actually sitting under.
This is where I came in.
The backlog was over 800+ tickets. That number alone made the work feel impossible: an undifferentiated pile of debt with no clear start, no clear end, and no way to know what actually mattered.
Creating a cutoff for version support was the first move. Then deprecating any tickets that fell outside that cutoff. Prioritization was next. Disciplined work to sort what was still valid and had actionable data from what was noise. After triage, the number came down to 256 tickets. Still significant, but doable if the team could stop inbound requests.
The team was struggling
The team was carrying all of this with no room to absorb it. The workload was never balanced to account for two competing workloads running simultaneously. Two overwhelmed engineers, with one still onboarding. 256 tickets. 4 sprints to get it cleared.
The business looked at that situation, saw a delivery problem, and failed to acknowledge the extent of the work being done by a small team.
I looked at it and saw the inevitable result of a system with no shock absorbers. No workload structure accounted for what the team was being asked to carry. Just people doing their best inside a setup that made success nearly impossible.
The people weren’t the problem. The system was.
This is the pattern I’ve spent years watching play out across product teams and delivery organizations. The names change. The industry changes. But the structure is almost always the same: indecision, unclear priorities, and testing in production have caused an accumulation of problems. Processes that should have existed don’t; workloads get distributed in ways that set people up to fail.
I started RaeVyn Consulting because I kept seeing these patterns and built a way to name them. You probably see them every day too.
This newsletter covers dysfunctional patterns you’ve probably lived inside. I’ll show you what’s actually broken underneath it, and I promise it’s not a people problem.
If you are watching capable teams get blamed for a problem that was built into the system long before they arrived — this is for you.
You saw it clearly. Most people didn’t want to look that close.
— RaeVyn
If your team is living inside a pattern like this one, I work with organizations to diagnose what’s actually broken and build the structure to fix it. You can learn more about how I work at raevynconsulting.com.