The backlogs were wildly ungroomed.
That was the technical assessment. We had plenty of work, plenty of opinions about the work, and not enough shared context about what should happen next.
Reonomy was still small enough that process could sound like a thing for later. Later was already causing trouble. If the backlog did not show the real priorities, engineers could be busy all day and still move the wrong thing. If the system lived only in a few people's heads, a vacation could knock the whole rhythm sideways.
We started with the obvious stuff. Keep the scrums running. Give people enough roadmap context to understand the highest priorities. Hold short grooming sessions now, even though properly cleaning the backlogs would take longer.
Then put the work on a wall.
I wanted a physical story board in the office for everything in progress and everything validated and ready to go. Different kinds of work could have their own lanes, but the board had to stay current. It was not decoration. It was a visible message to the whole company about what the engineering team was actually doing.
The physical part mattered. Software can hide an incredible amount of confusion behind tabs, filters, and a login. A board in the office cannot. Missing work looks missing. Too much work looks like too much work. Anybody walking by can see whether our supposed priorities match the cards moving across the wall.
The all-hands gave us another place to repeat the operating decisions and close the loops. We talked about how work would enter planning, how releases would be understood, and how we would start showing more of the engineering and product team through a blog.
It was not a finished operating system. The roadmap would move. The backlogs still needed work. The board would only tell the truth if we kept updating it.
But by the end of the day, the mess had somewhere visible to go.