Key to the success of modern software development practices is maintaining a focus on the flow of work. Stream-aligned teams concentrate on a single, valuable flow — such as a user journey or product — which allows them to deliver end-to-end value efficiently. However, we’re seeing a concerning trend toward capacity-driven development, where teams aligned in this way take on features from other products or streams when they have spare capacity. While this may seem efficient in the short term, it's a local optimization best suited to handling sudden spikes in demand. When normalized it increases cognitive load and technical debt, and in the worst case can lead to congestion collapse as the cost of context switching across products compounds. Teams with spare capacity are better served by focusing on improving system health. To manage capacity effectively, use WIP limits to control work across adjacent streams, consider cross-training to balance periods of high demand and apply dynamic reteaming techniques when needed.
