Is Your Team a Broken Teapot?
The expectation with agile teams is that they speed up over time. Sometimes the opposite happens. When your Scrum team stops being a high-performing crew of agile legends, you know something’s cracked — team has become a broken teapot.
The decline in team performance (or development stage) is a common occurrence in organizations. Team dynamics are fluid and performance levels fluctuate because people are not machines. This is logical, but yet surprising, even confusing to management and coaches, when it happens.
(Sidenote: I think that the confusion arises from Tuckman’s Stages (forming, storming, norming, performing) which suggest a linear progression that doesn’t account for setbacks. This model, developed over 60 years ago as an academic meta-study, fails to reflect the realities of modern teamwork. Tuckman’s observations did not involve real teams and it’s disappointing that this outdated model continues to be highly regarded.)
🫖 T-POT Model
When a team clearly falls of its mark, a coach better intervene. My easy-to-remember mnemonic for analyzing team performance is T-POT (spelled “Teapot”). It stands from Team, Process/Product, Organization and Technology. If any one of these stations boils over, your team might be suffering from a dysfunction. Here are stations (ellipses) and guiding questions (blue text):
Through these viewpoints and guiding questions, a team can quickly become aware about the outstanding issues hampering its performance. This could serve as a starting point to either drafting a coaching plan or analyzing things further (dysfunction mapping, metrics, health checks, interviews, feedback rounds, workshops etc.)
☕ Team: Is the Pot Dirty?
This is about the team itself, it’s structure, roles, communication and culture. Teams without trust or communication are like a dirty teapot —nothing tastes good and people might get sick. If people are walking on eggshells, confused about who does what, or quietly stewing in conflict it’s time for a longer retrospective.
🔁 Process / Product: Is the Recipe Off?
This covers a team’s processes and habits as well as product owner’s behavior and love for the product. Skipping refinement or doing zombie stand-ups? That’s like forgetting the tea leaves. Poor product vision, constantly changing priorities, and unclear DoD can turn a focused sprint into a foggy swamp.
🏢 Organization: Is someone shaking the Table?
This is about a team’s immediate periphery and the role of the leadership. When leadership treats agility like a buzzword and people like cogs, the result will be zoned-off employees and unrealistic roadmaps. Micromanagement, cross-project chaos, and “deliver more with less” syndrome are all signs your kettle is not standing on a solid foundation.
🖥️ Technology: Is there Rust beneath the Shine?
This is about the technical stack and the role of the architect. Technical debt, flaky tests, and no automation? That’s like a teapot that leaks when you pour — looks fine on the shelf but makes a mess in action. If your CI/CD takes longer than a japanese tea ceremony, maybe it’s time to upgrade.
Here’s the mnemonic with examples of symptoms/dysfunctions (red text).
The red texts are just to wet the appetite. Maybe your team’s problems are very different. Uncovering dysfunctions can be touchy. Depending on a team/culture, I’d do this silently alone or transparently in a team retro.
It should be noted that the four stations are not all-encompassing, but “good enough” to keeps things simple. Let’s not make team development a rocket science when it doesn’t need be.
🫖The Last Sip
If your team feels more like a cracked teapot than a smooth brewing machine, don’t just keep pouring and hoping for the best. Take a step back, diagnose across T-POT, and get things boiling again the agile way — with reflection, collaboration, and maybe a biscuit or two. Remember that even the best teapots need a polish now and then. ☕
