The art and wisdom of changing teams

Heidi Helfand, author of Dynamic Reteaming, shares her experience across fast-growing SaaS startups and her research on how teams change through reorgs. The conversation covers involving teams in reteaming decisions, the five patterns of team change, and how to handle the people side of change.

01Key learnings

• Treat reteaming as a people-layer problem to be designed for deliberately, not just a product or delivery concern, since teams change constantly as companies grow or shrink.
• Use transparency tools like whiteboards showing proposed team structures, names, missions, and open roles to gather input and surface design mistakes before finalizing.
• Clarify who requests, who gives input, who decides, and who executes each change (the RIDE framework, credited to Pat Wadors) to avoid confusion.
• Time-box reteaming deliberations and bias toward shorter schedules, since involving many people can distract from the work.
• For isolated innovation teams, give them process freedom, a separate space, a senior decision-maker, and tell others not to pull them away, while avoiding creating things others must maintain.
• Build knowledge redundancy through pairing and switching so no one is a single owner of a system, which also protects against departures.
• Avoid anti-patterns like splitting resources by percentages across many projects, or spreading high performers apart, which can destroy a team's chemistry.
• Help new joiners feel belonging early (e.g., a first pair partner) and coach existing employees through changes they did not help decide.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.