Perhaps everything seems OK in all of these indicators, but the team still just is not performing as well as you believe they should. You know the talent is there, the team is happy, and they’re not being overburdened by production support. So what’s happening? Now is the time to start doing some potentially destructive investigations. Sit in their meetings. Are they boring to you? Is the team bored? Who is speaking most of the time? Are there regular meetings with the whole team where the vast majority of the time is spent listening to the manager or product lead talk?
Boring meetings are a sign. They may be a sign of inefficient planning on the part of the organizers. There may be too many meetings happening for the information covered. They may indicate that the team members don’t feel they can actually help set the direction of the team, or choose the work that will happen. They often signal a lack of healthy conflict on a team. Good meetings have a heavy discussion element, where opinions and ideas are drawn out of the team. If the meetings are overscripted, so that no real conversation can take place, it stifles that creative discussion. If people are afraid to disagree or bring up issues for fear of dealing with conflict, or if managers always shut down conflict without letting disagreements air, this is a sign of an unhealthy team culture.
Be aware, though, that while teams can be black boxes, they share a characteristic of another famous box — the one containing Schrödinger’s cat. The point of Schrödinger’s experiment was to show that the act of observing changes the outcome, or rather, causes an outcome to happen. Likewise, you can’t go into a team and not change the behavior of that team by being around them, sitting in their meetings, and watching their standups. Your presence changes the team’s behavior and may hide the problem you’re trying to find, in the same way that a log statement can cause a concurrency issue to be magically erased, at least for some time.