Why Engineers Are Burnt Out: The Ugly Side of Unrealistic QBR Planning
Levan MamulashviliShare
Introduction: When Planning Becomes the Problem
If you’ve worked in an engineering leadership role—whether as a tech lead, tribe lead, chapter area lead, or engineering manager—you’ve probably seen the chaos that follows Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).
QBRs are supposed to set strategic priorities for the next three months. But instead of providing clarity and direction, they often create:
🚨 Unrealistic delivery expectations
⚡ Constant priority shifts
🔥 Unmanageable workloads
💀 Widespread burnout
It’s a vicious cycle:
➡ Leadership over-promises during QBRs.
➡ Engineers get loaded with impossible deadlines.
➡ Business priorities shift mid-quarter.
➡ Work is stopped, restarted, or scrapped.
➡ Engineers feel frustrated, disconnected, and exhausted.
➡ Turnover rises, and teams lose motivation.
But why does this keep happening? And more importantly, how do we fix it?
In this blog post, we’ll break down:
✅ The hidden flaws in traditional QBR planning
✅ How unrealistic QBRs lead to engineering burnout
✅ Strategies to make QBRs flexible, realistic, and motivating for tech teams
The Hidden Flaws of Traditional QBR Planning
1. The Illusion of Predictability
QBRs assume that planning three months ahead is realistic. In reality:
- Business needs change unpredictably.
- Customer demands evolve constantly.
- Market conditions shift overnight.
Yet, teams are expected to stick to a fixed roadmap, even when it no longer makes sense.
👉 Result: Engineers are forced to rework, redo, and rush because leadership won’t adapt fast enough.
2. Business and Engineering Are Misaligned from Day One
Many QBRs are business-driven, not engineering-driven.
- Business leaders define goals without consulting engineers.
- Engineering teams are handed impossible deadlines with no say in feasibility.
- No one accounts for tech debt, dependencies, or unforeseen challenges.
👉 Result: Engineers feel like they are set up to fail before they even start.
3. The “Everything Is Urgent” Mentality
QBRs often lead to an endless backlog of “urgent” initiatives.
🚀 Launch this feature ASAP!
📈 Optimize for growth NOW!
🛠 Re-architect the system YESTERDAY!
There’s no room for technical debt cleanup, refactoring, or learning—just relentless delivery.
👉 Result: Engineers feel pressured to prioritize speed over quality, leading to burnout and increased production failures.
4. Mid-Quarter Chaos: The Plan Always Changes Anyway
Despite the illusion of long-term planning, priorities inevitably shift before the quarter ends.
📌 A high-priority project suddenly gets deprioritized.
📌 A new business opportunity requires an urgent pivot.
📌 A competitor forces leadership to change strategy.
Yet, teams are still expected to hit their original QBR commitments, even if they now make no sense.
👉 Result: Engineers feel disconnected from the work and stop believing in leadership’s direction.
5. Burnout, Turnover, and the Death of Engineering Culture
When engineers experience:
❌ Constantly shifting priorities
❌ Unrealistic deadlines
❌ Zero work-life balance
❌ No say in planning
They start checking out.
- Engagement drops.
- Turnover rises.
- Institutional knowledge is lost.
👉 Result: Instead of a high-performance team, you end up with burnt-out, disengaged engineers who stop caring about the company’s success.
How to Fix QBRs Before They Break Your Engineering Team
1. Shift from Fixed Roadmaps to Rolling Prioritization
❌ Old Approach: Set rigid goals in QBRs and expect teams to execute without changes.
✅ New Approach: Use Rolling Prioritization—review priorities every 4-6 weeks and adjust based on real data.
🎯 How?
- Set long-term strategic themes, but allow flexibility in execution.
- Reassess feasibility every month—adjust scope based on business and engineering realities.
- Keep a prioritized backlog that adapts to change without causing chaos.
👉 Outcome: Engineers feel less trapped by rigid plans and more engaged in dynamic, meaningful work.
2. Involve Engineering Early in QBR Planning
❌ Old Approach: Business leaders decide priorities, then hand them down to engineering.
✅ New Approach: Engineering teams co-own QBR planning from day one.
🎯 How?
- Product & Engineering should work together to set realistic OKRs.
- Technical feasibility should be part of the discussion before setting deadlines.
- Teams should highlight dependencies early to prevent bottlenecks.
👉 Outcome: Engineers feel valued and heard, leading to higher motivation and buy-in.
3. Protect Time for Technical Debt & Innovation
❌ Old Approach: QBRs focus only on feature delivery, ignoring long-term sustainability.
✅ New Approach: Allocate at least 20% of engineering capacity for tech debt, refactoring, and R&D.
🎯 How?
- Include tech debt initiatives in QBR objectives.
- Let engineers propose and prioritize improvements.
- Avoid the “feature factory” trap—invest in long-term scalability.
👉 Outcome: Engineers feel like they are building something sustainable, not just shipping rushed features.
4. Stop Measuring Success by “Work Completed”
❌ Old Approach: Judge engineering performance by how many tickets get closed.
✅ New Approach: Focus on impact, quality, and sustainability instead of just speed.
🎯 How?
- Shift from “Did we ship on time?” → to “Did we deliver value effectively?”
- Measure engineering health metrics: on-call load, defect rates, team satisfaction.
- Reward long-term impact over short-term velocity.
👉 Outcome: Engineers work smarter, not just harder, leading to lower burnout and higher retention.
Final Thoughts: Engineering Burnout Is an Organizational Problem
Burnout isn’t just an individual problem—it’s a systemic failure of planning, priority management, and leadership.
QBRs don’t have to be a death march. With realistic expectations, rolling prioritization, and engineering involvement, they can actually motivate teams rather than drain them.
Next time you're setting quarterly objectives, ask yourself:
❓ Are we setting up our engineers for success—or driving them toward burnout?
Because when engineering teams believe in the plan, they deliver their best work. 🚀
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