The web experience team was seven people: two product owners, two UX designers, an analyst, a senior full-stack engineer and a junior front-end developer. On paper, a reasonable roster. In practice, a structural mismatch.
The two product owners and two designers generated scope continuously... wireframes, user stories, research findings, feature requests. All of it funneled toward engineering for execution. But the senior engineer was the only person who understood the backend data paths through a 159-page manual fulfillment system. Every feature, every fix, every integration had to pass through him. The junior developer was learning, but that learning consumed roughly a third of the senior engineer's available bandwidth.
Effective engineering capacity: 1.25 FTE. Upstream production capacity: 4 FTE.
Then there was the founder layer. New requests appeared without warning, reprioritized by executive attention span rather than roadmap logic. Features that weren't on any sprint plan would land in the engineering queue because leadership got excited about a shiny object. Whatever informal prioritization the team had built was regularly overridden from above.
There was no intake filter. No Definition of Ready. No sprint cadence to create predictable delivery windows. No mechanism to say 'not this sprint' to anyone... including leadership.
The senior engineer was burning out. The design queue was growing faster than code shipped. And the team had no structural defense against any of it.