Clean up org debt with systems thinking

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Widening the scope of considerations can help get rid of noise and remove team hurdles. 

As engineers, we are trained to reason about resource allocation, failure modes, observability, and lifecycle management. Yet when we switch to leading teams, many of us abandon that rigor and rely instead on gut feel or borrowed process frameworks. The result can lead to teams that feel sluggish, brittle, or mysteriously overloaded. 

However, by making more deliberate choices, leaders will find that their approaches to organizational design, technical debt, and operational maturity are a lot smoother. Thinking like an engineer about your team does not dehumanize it; it gives you clearer language and sharper tools to reduce friction for the humans inside the system.

1. Memory leaks and people leaks

Memory leaks – when a program holds onto information it no longer needs – offer a useful lens for understanding organizational health. Over time, memory leaks slow the system down until it becomes unstable and eventually crashes. In organizations, leaks appear as roles that remain vaguely defined, projects that never shut down, or feedback loops that quietly degrade.

I once inherited a platform group with seven pilot initiatives. Each had started as a promising experiment. None had a clear owner or end state. Engineers were context-switching across three or four must-win projects, and morale was sinking. 

To remedy this, the team and I ran a structured review, archived two pilots, folded three into a single roadmap, and appointed a clear owner for the remainder. Each initiative was treated like a long-lived object: we documented its purpose, active consumers, resource footprint, and exit criteria. We then asked whether it was still aligned with real customer needs or was simply lingering by default. Work without a clear owner or an upcoming milestone was explicitly deprecated or merged. By reclaiming that “organizational memory,” we reduced context switching and restored capacity without adding headcount. Within a quarter, cycle time dropped, and the team reported feeling lighter even though headcount was unchanged.

Just as you would use profiling tools to find memory leaks, leaders can run periodic audits of open projects, overlapping roles, and dormant processes. Each leaves recognizable signals if you know where to look.

• Too many open projects often show up as drag. Symptoms include rising cycle time despite stable headcount, work that sits “almost done,” and frequent mid-quarter reprioritization. Leaders can spot this by tracking work-in-progress per engineer, the ratio of started-to-finished initiatives, and the frequency of priority changes. 
• Overlapping roles leak capacity through duplicated effort and slow decisions. Common signs are large meetings “just in case,” repeated alignment conversations, or tension about ownership that surfaces only in retrospectives. A simple test is to ask who is single-threaded on a decision or system. If the answer is a group rather than a name, role boundaries are likely unclear.
• Dormant processes persist as rituals. They appear as meetings with no clear outcome, documents that are maintained but rarely read, or review steps that exist by default. Leaders can surface them by asking what risk or decision each process exists to address. If no one can explain the cost of removing it, the process is a candidate for deprecation. Revival only makes sense when the original failure mode still exists.

Other common leaks include excessive context switching from unbounded requests, decision backlogs caused by missing owners, and invisible work, like support or incident response, that is not reflected in planning. None of these is a personal failure; they are system behaviors. When leaders observe and reclaim this lost capacity deliberately, teams regain focus without burning out.

2. Organizational hygiene is important

In software, memory is managed either through constant small cleanups or less-frequent but more disruptive resets. Leaders face the same design choices when maintaining organizational health.

Regular rituals like quarterly planning, backlog reviews, or team rotations act as lightweight, ongoing cleanup. They help teams shed low-value work before it accumulates. But they are not sufficient on their own. Over time, deeper issues, unclear charters, outdated assumptions, or misaligned ownership require more intentional intervention.

In my organization, leaders ran a simple “fresh start” exercise every quarter. Engineers listed all active initiatives and tagged them as healthy, at risk, or no longer worth pursuing. Work flagged as low value had to justify its continued existence. Once a year, the group stepped back for a longer working session to revisit team charters and partner expectations. This combination of frequent, low-friction hygiene and occasional resets prevented slow organizational drift without the shock of unexpected reorganization.

2a. Dealing with reorgs 

Sometimes, reorganizations are an inevitability. Reorganizations, off-boarding, or role changes are unpleasant, but avoiding them carries a hidden cost: diluted focus, slower decision-making, and friction that spreads across teams.

No matter how logical the decision may seem to let go of roles or restructure hierarchies, it’s important that leaders approach the event with clarity and compassion. Letting someone go is not a failure; it can be an act of respect that allows that person to find a place where they can thrive while protecting the broader system.

3. Throughput, latency, and backpressure in teams

Every system has limits. When leaders overcommit on tasks and projects, queues form, latency spikes, and error rates rise. Alongside this, team morale can drop, and burnout hikes. 

To avoid this, you can instrument your team just as you would a microservice. Track lead time from idea to production, average pull-request age, or meeting load per engineer. Look at work-in-progress and context switches. These are your throughput and latency metrics. When these signals spike, leaders have several practical levers available. 

• Throttling intake can be as simple as introducing a visible request queue or intake form and agreeing on explicit capacity limits, so new work competes transparently with existing commitments. 
• Redistributing load to rebalance ownership rather than adding people: moving a high-churn area to a more stable owner, rotating on-call or support duties, or temporarily shielding a team to let critical work complete. 
• Investing in automation should focus on recurring pain like manual releases, repetitive partner requests, or flaky test and deployment paths, where a small tooling effort can permanently remove load from the system. The goal is not to maximize throughput at all costs, but to keep the system operating below its saturation point so quality and morale remain intact.

In one case, I had a lead engineer proudly tell me their team was handling double the requests from partner groups. When we looked at our metrics, we saw that cycle time had tripled, and the defect rate had doubled. To offset this, we re-established a request queue and an intake form and empowered the lead to say “not now” without guilt. 

Backpressure isn’t about saying no for the sake of it. It’s a signal that helps protect both the work and the people doing it.

4. Consistent communication

Communication breakdowns are one of the fastest ways organizational debt accumulates. As teams grow, spread across time zones, or span multiple functions, leaders often try to solve confusion by pushing for perfect alignment. The result is more meetings, slower decisions, and delayed information flow. This is a systems problem.

Most remote or cross-functional teams behave like distributed systems, whether leaders intend them to or not. And distributed systems rarely achieve strong consistency without sacrificing performance. Messages arrive asynchronously, context is uneven, and understanding converges over time rather than instantly. Recognizing this reality allows leaders to design communication deliberately instead of fighting it.

For high-impact changes, it can be worth paying the coordination cost by requiring a small quorum of leaders to sign off. For ambiguous ownership, a clear decision owner prevents the system from stalling. For day-to-day updates, lightweight asynchronous notes often move information faster than recurring meetings.

5. Trust as organizational glue

When cleaning up organizational debt, keeping trust levels high ensures everyone moves in the same direction together. Set clear ownership for each initiative, defining what success looks like, and agreeing on simple checkpoints for updates. 

Leaders can run short, structured 1:1s to confirm understanding, use lightweight shared tracking documents to signal progress, and establish recurring decision reviews for high-impact areas. Small, visible wins like delivering a committed task on time, promptly following up on a request, or flagging risks early build confidence that promises are reliable. Over time, these patterns act like system heartbeats: consistent, predictable signals that the team can depend on, even as people or priorities shift.

Final thoughts 

Most often, the same engineers who design resilient distributed systems often lead teams without applying the principles they already understand. By grounding organizational practices in computer-science fundamentals, you gain a shared language to discuss hygiene, load, recovery, resilience, and trust with both engineers and executives.

Approach your org like a system you care for. Monitor it. Clean it. Tune it. And watch it thrive. The best teams, like the best code, are resilient, self-healing, and designed to endure.

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