“They tried to help, and finally, it… it self-destructed the team.” – Mirco Gerling
The team was the supermarket of the organization. Cloud systems, versioning, developer machines, hardware — if another team needed infrastructure, this team built it. And when other teams asked, the answer was always the same: “We will try, we will try.”
Mirco watched what happened next play out in slow motion. The team escalated their overload to management. Management responded the way management often responds — sent in temporary help. The reinforcements solved problems quickly and left. But every system they built became permanent maintenance work for the original team. The pile grew. The team shrank.
People left for other teams, or left the organization entirely. The escalation that was supposed to save them became the signal that broke them. As Mirco puts it: running to the higher level “sends a signal that self-organization or self-management does not work.” Sometimes the help is the harm.
In this segment, we refer to the dynamic of team self-organization and how it can break down under pressure.
Self-reflection Question: When your team is overwhelmed, what does the act of escalating tell management about your ability to self-manage — and is that the signal you want to send?
Featured Book of the Week: The Kanban Maturity Model
In this episode, Mirco also recommends two books that shaped his thinking on process and estimation. The first is #NoEstimates by Vasco Duarte, which inspired Mirco to drop story-point estimation in some teams and simply count completed tickets per sprint. The second is the Kanban Maturity Model — a book Mirco uses to run workshops where teams discover their current level of process maturity. “The highest level says that you have a standardized process, and the result is always the same for the same type of work,” he explains. Most teams start at level zero, but that’s the point: knowing where you stand is the precondition for knowing where to go next.
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About Mirco Gerling
Mirco is an experienced Scrum Master in the public sector. With a strong IT background, he has spent 25 years developing software and driving agile transformations. Passionate about innovation and teamwork, Mirco brings expertise and dedication to every project.
You can link with Mirco Gerling on LinkedIn.
Eliza Gregory has worked as a Project Manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach for U.S. Defense and the German automotive industry. She uses teachings from Agile to hone her writing process, and has a new novel out this May about an IT Project Manager coping with burnout and work stress. Originally from Virginia, she now resides in Bavaria, Germany.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at
Mirela is the founder of Product People, a Product Management Consultancy on a mission to help companies discover and deliver great products faster. They have 41 full-time Product Managers who help companies focus on product-led growth and/or profitability.
Rik is an agile coach, who’s worked during the last years at the Volksbank, the Dutch Railways and ABN AMRO bank. Rik also teaches various agile courses such as Professional Scrum Master, DevOps fundamentals and Leading SAFe.
