There’s a moment, early on in a team’s life, when everything just flows. You don’t need a status meeting because everyone already knows what’s happening. You don’t need a kickoff doc because someone said something out loud, someone else nodded, and the work just... started. Updates happen in the hallway or over lunch. You bump into a teammate and knock out three blockers without realizing you had a meeting.
But that magic starts to shift as the team grows. Someone new joins. Then another. The orbit expands. Suddenly you’re scheduling a weekly sync just to make sure everyone’s still aligned. You bring in a PM — or the team sort of collectively becomes one. People start relying on updates instead of osmosis. A doc here. A meeting there. A backlog groom. A stakeholder check-in. A pre-read for the stakeholder check-in. Before you know it, you're coordinating your coordination.
And it’s not just internal complexity — it’s the world outside the team that grows too. The leadership team still wants to know where things stand, even if they can’t be in the weeds with you anymore. Business owners want to know when their thing is landing. Your PM needs to manage expectations upward and sideways. All of these folks want a pulse on progress so they can intervene if something’s off — or clear blockers when they show up. That need is real. But if you don’t shape how that information flows, the team gets buried under it.
So what do you do about it?
The trick isn’t getting rid of structure — it’s making sure that structure serves the team, instead of the other way around.
One of the best ways I’ve found to do that is to build the work itself so that it reflects its own status. If you can break things down into phases or discrete releases — even if they’re small and partial — then you don’t need a fancy update. You can just point to the thing. Stakeholders can play with it, poke at it, and get their own read on how far along you are. If you’ve got users, that feedback starts rolling in early too. You get signal, and your partners get confidence.
And even when the work doesn’t slice cleanly, setting clear, externally visible milestones can go a long way. Not internal ADO/JIRA status fields — I mean actual project landmarks that people outside the team understand and can track. In my experience, a good milestone roadmap is one of the best ways to stave off micromanagement. When leadership sees you hitting meaningful checkpoints, they don’t need to tap the glass as often.
You can also make the most of your tools — but only if they’re actually doing something. A lot of engineers hate Jira and project management tools like it (fair), but when the board’s clean and up to date, it can serve as a quiet signal to PMs, partners, and whoever else needs to check in. The flip side is, it only works if those people actually use it. If nobody’s looking, it becomes theater. You’re maintaining the status fields for no one. That’s when teams start to resent the tool — because it’s extra effort with no return, and its very easy for a backlog to get unruly and disorganized.
None of this is set-it-and-forget-it. As the team changes — and as the surface area around it grows — you’ll need to keep reshaping how you coordinate. But if you do it right, you’ll still move fast, still build trust, and still keep the signals flowing... without drowning in them.