The State of Team Alignment 2026: How Teams Really Plan and Deliver Work

This survey covered companies from 50 to 5,000+ employees across five countries. Respondents split between Program/Project Management (43.67%), Product Management (30.07%), and Engineering (26.25%). Almost half hold VP or Director positions.

The data reveals which problems are universal and which change with company size. Dependencies cause rollover everywhere. But smaller companies struggle with estimation accuracy while enterprises struggle with resource allocation. Mid-sized companies get hit with scope change.

What's in the report: Full methodology. Response distributions across all questions. How your answers compare to peers in similar-sized companies. Geographic and role-based breakdowns.

Here are some highlights from the report.

Sprint planning - High confidence, low accuracy

63% of teams feel confident about their estimates. But 44% miss the mark on half their tasks or more.

The issue isn't confidence. It's method. 54.6% of teams estimate in hours or days, which hides complexity. A three-hour task for a junior developer (updating button colours) and a three-hour task for a senior developer (debugging a race condition) both get estimated as three hours. But the debugging task could easily become 12 hours if the first hypothesis is wrong. The button update won't.

Only 31% of teams use collaborative estimation techniques like Planning Poker. That means 69% miss the chance to surface risks before committing to work.

What's in the report: How Planning Poker teams achieve higher confidence. Why time-based estimation fails. The complexity flags framework for teams not ready for full collaboration. When to re-estimate and when taking no action is actually the problem.

Sprint velocity and rollover - Why teams carry work forward

80% of teams experience sprint rollover. Over a third move 26-50% of their planned work from sprint to sprint.

Dependencies cause 35.6% of this rollover. Teams wait for another team to deliver an API, approve a design, or complete their portion of a feature. External blocking creates a pile-up where incomplete work prevents new work from starting.

The second-biggest cause varies by company size:

• 50-249 employees: Under-estimation (31%)
• 250-999 employees: Scope change (20%)
• 1,000-4,999 employees: Scope change (25%)
• 5,000+ employees: Team capacity issues (30%)

58.5% of teams use spreadsheets for planning. Most combine them with Jira, Confluence, and whiteboards. Planning lives in spreadsheets, discussions happen in Confluence, work lives in Jira. Nothing connects. Dependencies stay hidden until Wednesday.

What's in the report: How to calculate capacity buffers based on your actual rollover rate. How to map dependencies before sprint commitment. Why teams use spreadsheets (flexibility, habit, no better option) and what problems that creates. Tool consolidation strategies that don't require ripping out your entire workflow.

Scrum ceremonies - Retrospectives that don't create change

Teams run retrospectives. 61% rate them as "very" or "extremely" effective at identifying improvements.

Then they implement less than 60% of the actions they identify. 69% of teams, specifically.

Two reasons dominate:

• 28.9% of actions require changes outside the team's control
• 20.5% of actions never make it into sprint planning

One respondent put it plainly: "Every improvement identified should have a designated owner, a due date, and support to follow through." Another said: "Nobody wants to take charge. We need to delegate a leader."

The actions are good. The follow-through is broken.

What's in the report: Why treating retro actions as sprint tickets improves follow-through. How to identify which improvements are within team control. The framework for escalating systemic issues instead of letting them fester. Why spreadsheet-based retro tracking fails and what works instead.

Three things to try this sprint

1. Estimate your most complex items together. Not everything. Just the risky or uncertain work. Use Planning Poker or a similar technique. The goal is to expose what people assume differently about the work.
2. Take one retro action and make it a sprint ticket. Give it an owner, acceptance criteria, and an estimate. See if treating improvement work like real work changes whether it gets done.
3. Count how many tools you use for planning. If it's more than two, consolidate. Pick your primary system and commit for one month. Check if fewer context switches reduces the coordination problems that cause rollover.

These are the starting points. The report includes the full frameworks - get your free copy by filling up the form above.