Your Team Is Not Slow. Your Decisions Are Just Decaying.

Most teams notice slowdown too late.

At first, it does not look like a problem.
A feature takes a bit longer.
A decision waits for more context.
A refactor gets postponed one sprint at a time.

Nothing is broken.
Nothing is obviously wrong.

So work continues.

What actually changes is not velocity.
It is confidence.

Teams start hesitating.
Ownership becomes implicit.
Every change feels heavier than the last.

Founders often describe this phase as complexity or technical debt.
Those labels feel accurate.
They are also incomplete.

The real issue is decision decay.

Every system is built on decisions.
Architecture choices.
Scope boundaries.
Ownership models.

When the reasoning behind those decisions fades, the system still runs.
But no one knows why it looks the way it does.

So decisions get defended long after their context expired.
Progress slows without a clear reason.
Delivery becomes expensive without being visibly broken.

This is why adding more process rarely helps.
It organizes the confusion instead of removing it.

Most teams try to fix this by shipping harder.
Hiring more people.
Adding tools.

What they skip is diagnosis.

Before changing anything, you need to know where clarity was lost.
That is the point where guessing stops working.

If parts of this sound familiar, your team does not need motivation or velocity hacks.
It needs an honest examination of how decisions are shaping delivery.

That is what an Engineering Autopsy is designed for.