A strong answer. “I'd start with a hypothesis set rather than open-ended listening, because forty engineers generate enough noise that you can talk to people for a quarter and learn nothing.

There are only a few things that usually cause this. Dependencies — teams cannot finish without another team, so everything is blocked on coordination. I'd measure how many work items had a cross-team dependency and how long they waited. Work in progress — too many things started, nothing finished, which shows up as flat throughput with rising cycle time. Toil — the proportion of capacity going to operational load, which grows silently and nobody re-baselines. Quality debt — rising change failure rate, so more of each cycle is rework. Or the work genuinely got harder, which is a real answer and often the correct one.

Those are all measurable in about a week from existing data, and they point at different fixes. Dependencies are an org-design problem — I would look at whether team boundaries match the architecture, because if they do not, every feature crosses three teams and no amount of process fixes it. Toil is a platform investment. WIP is a discipline problem I can fix quickly.

The one I would be most suspicious of is dependencies, because it is the most common and the most invisible — every individual team looks busy and productive while nothing ships.

And I would be careful about velocity as a measure. It is team-relative and gameable; I would look at cycle time and throughput of things that reached users.”