Delivery Slows Every Time the Team Rotates

A new developer joins or is flexed in and delivery slows for weeks while they learn the domain. The pattern repeats with every rotation.
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  2 minute read  

What you are seeing

A developer is moved onto the team because there is capacity there and they know the tech stack. For the first two to three weeks, velocity drops. Simple changes take longer than expected because the new person is learning the domain while doing the work. They ask questions that previous team members would have answered instantly. They make safe, conservative choices to avoid breaking something they don’t fully understand.

Then the rotation ends or another team member is pulled away, and the cycle starts again. The team never fully recovers its pre-rotation pace before the next disruption. Velocity measured across a quarter looks flat even though the team is working as hard as ever.

Common causes

Thin-Spread Teams

When engineers are treated as interchangeable capacity and moved to where utilization is needed, the team never develops stable domain expertise. Each rotation brings someone who knows the technology but not the business rules, the data model quirks, the historical decisions, or the failure modes that prior members learned through experience. The knowledge required to deliver quickly in a domain cannot be acquired in days. It accumulates over months of working in it.

Read more: Thin-Spread Teams

Knowledge Silos

When domain knowledge lives in individuals rather than in documentation, runbooks, and code structure, it is not available to the next person who joins. The new team member must reconstruct understanding that the previous person carried in their head. Every rotation restarts that reconstruction from scratch.

Read more: Knowledge Silos

How to narrow it down

  1. Does velocity measurably drop for several weeks after a team change? If the pattern is consistent and repeatable, the team’s delivery speed depends on individual domain knowledge rather than shared, documented understanding. Start with Thin-Spread Teams.
  2. Is domain knowledge written down or does it live in specific people? If new team members learn by asking colleagues rather than reading documentation, the knowledge is not externalized. Start with Knowledge Silos.

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