"Success to the Successful": When Winning Teams Win Everything
System Thinking 101
You know that team in your organization that somehow gets all the cool projects? The one with the latest MacBooks, the dedicated DevOps engineer, and the executive sponsor who actually shows up to their demos? Meanwhile, there's another equally talented team working on "legacy systems maintenance" with hardware from three years ago and a backlog that looks like a graveyard of forgotten user stories.
This wasn't planned. It just... happened. One team got a small early win, which led to more resources, which led to bigger wins, which led to even more resources. The other team got stuck with a challenging project, which led to fewer resources, which made success harder, which justified even fewer resources. The End!
Welcome to "Success to the Successful"—the archetype that explains why your engineering organization sometimes feels less like a collaborative tech company and more like the Hunger Games with standing desks and free coffee.
Understanding the "Success to the Successful" Pattern
"Success to the Successful" is one of the most quietly destructive patterns in organizations because it masquerades as meritocracy while actually being something closer to random reinforcement. Here's how it works: You start with two teams (or individuals, or projects) that are roughly equal in capability and potential. Due to some initial conditions—maybe one team gets a slightly easier project, or better stakeholder support, or just plain luck—one side achieves an early success.
That initial success gets noticed. Success gets rewarded with more resources, better projects, increased attention from leadership. With these additional advantages, the successful team is now more likely to succeed again, which justifies giving them even more resources. Meanwhile, the other team, lacking these advantages, struggles more and achieves less, which seems to justify allocating fewer resources to them.
Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing cycle where early advantages compound into permanent advantages, and early disadvantages compound into permanent disadvantages. The irony is that both outcomes get attributed to "merit" when they're actually the result of structural forces that amplify small initial differences into dramatic long-term inequalities. In engineering organizations, this pattern shapes everything from project assignments to promotion opportunities to which teams get the latest and greatest.
The Hot Team Phenomenon
Picture this completely hypothetical scenario Team Alpha gets assigned to build a new customer onboarding flow. It's a high-visibility project with clear success metrics and enthusiastic product management support. Team Beta gets assigned to "modernize the legacy payment processing system"—a critical but unglamorous project with complex requirements and risk-averse stakeholders. I’m sure that you have a gut feeling where this is going…
Team Alpha ships their onboarding flow on time. User activation improves by 15%. Leadership loves it. They get featured in the company all-hands, receive budget for additional headcount, and get first pick of the next high-impact project.
Team Beta spends months understanding decades-old payment code, deals with compliance requirements that change mid-project, and faces integration challenges that weren't apparent upfront. They deliver a solid modernization, but it's a couple of weeks late and the improvements are harder to measure. Leadership sees a team that "struggled with execution."
Guess which team gets the next exciting greenfield project and which one gets assigned to "optimize the logging infrastructure"? Guess which team attracts the best candidates during hiring and which one people try to transfer away from?
The pattern continues: Team Alpha gets better projects, which leads to better outcomes, which leads to more resources, which attracts better talent, which enables even better outcomes. Team Beta gets stuck in maintenance mode, which leads to lower visibility, which leads to fewer resources, which makes it harder to attract top talent, which makes challenging projects even harder to execute.
The Greatest Hits of Organizational Favoritism
The Platform Team Paradox:
Infrastructure team enables everyone's success → Gets little visibility for wins → Receives minimal investment → Platform becomes unreliable → Everyone blames platform team → Even less investment and credibility
The Innovation vs Maintenance Split:
New feature teams get recognition and resources → Legacy teams get stability work → Innovation teams ship faster with more resources → Legacy teams struggle with old code and constraints → Innovation teams labeled "high performers" → Legacy teams seen as "low impact"
The Cloud vs On-Prem Divide:
Cloud-native team gets modern tools and architecture → On-premises team maintains legacy systems → Cloud team delivers faster with better tooling → Legacy team deals with technical debt and compliance → Cloud team gets promoted and recognition → Legacy team gets labeled "traditional"
The Frontend vs Backend Bias:
UI team creates visible user improvements → Backend team optimizes invisible performance → Frontend wins get celebrated in demos → Backend wins are harder to showcase → Frontend team gets design resources and attention → Backend team becomes "cost center"
The Security Team Sacrifice:
Security team prevents problems that don't happen → No visible wins, only visible friction → Security requests get deprioritized → Eventual security incident occurs → Security team blamed for not preventing it → Even less organizational support
The Invisible Hand of Resource Allocation
What makes this pattern so persistent is how reasonable each individual decision seems. Of course you want to invest more in the team that's delivering great results. Of course you want to give challenging projects to teams that have proven they can execute. Of course you want to promote people who are visibly contributing to business success.
Each allocation decision feels logical and merit-based in isolation. But collectively, these decisions create a system where initial advantages compound exponentially, and initial disadvantages become nearly impossible to overcome. The team working on boring but critical infrastructure will always struggle to compete for resources against the team building shiny new features, regardless of the actual business value of their work.
What makes this even more difficult is that, even when everyone recognizes the unfairness, it's hard to justify making different decisions. Deliberately giving fewer resources to a successful team feels like organizational self-sabotage. Giving more resources to a struggling team feels like betting on the sick horse.
When Success Allocation Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)
Sometimes "Success to the Successful" allocation is actually the right strategy. If you're in a competitive market where speed matters more than equity, if you have genuinely different capability levels across teams, if you're trying to maximize short-term impact with limited resources—then concentrating resources on proven winners might be optimal.
The problems arise when:
Initial "success" was due to project difficulty, not team capability
Success metrics favor visible/short-term wins over critical/long-term work
Resource allocation becomes so skewed that struggling teams can't recover
The pattern becomes self-perpetuating across hiring, promotion, and project assignment
The key is recognizing when you're optimizing for immediate results versus building long-term organizational capability.
Architect's Alert 🚨
The most dangerous thing about "Success to the Successful" is how it hides behind the language of meritocracy. "We're just rewarding performance!" "Good teams should get good projects/features!" "Results speak for themselves!"
But, in complex organizations, individual and team performance is heavily influenced by structural factors—project difficulty, stakeholder support, resource availability, measurement criteria, and plain old luck. When you reward "performance" without accounting for these structural differences, you're often rewarding luck and circumstance more than actual capability.
The goal isn't to eliminate performance-based allocation (that would create its own problems), but to recognize when structural factors are masquerading as performance differences, and to design systems that give all teams a reasonable chance to demonstrate their capabilities.
Breaking the Winner-Take-All Cycle
Want to prevent your organization from accidentally creating permanent winners and losers? Here's how to design more equitable resource allocation:
Rotate High-Impact Projects
Ensure all teams get opportunities to work on visible, business-critical initiatives
Balance portfolios so every team has a mix of maintenance and innovation work
Create "stretch assignments" that let teams demonstrate capabilities outside their current domain
Measure What Matters, All of What Matters
Develop metrics that capture the value of infrastructure, maintenance, and platform work (yeah, I know, impossible, but people love KPIs)
Track leading indicators (code quality, system reliability, developer productivity) not just business outcomes
Account for project difficulty and constraints when evaluating team performance
Design for Equal Access
Provide similar tooling, training, and support across all teams
Ensure budget allocation processes don't systematically favor certain types of work
Create shared infrastructure and platforms that level the playing field
Build Organizational Memory
Document the context behind project successes and failures (ADRs, maybe ?)
Track how resource allocation affects team performance over time
Create feedback loops that surface when structural advantages are driving performance differences
Your Turn
Look around your engineering organization: Which teams are in the "success spiral" and which are stuck in the "struggle cycle"? How much of each team's performance can be attributed to their capabilities versus their circumstances? What would happen if you deliberately gave your best project to your most resource-constrained team?
The "Success to the Successful" pattern isn't inherently evil—it's just what happens when you optimize for short-term performance without accounting for long-term equity and capability building. The key is being intentional about when you want this dynamic and when you want to counteract it.
What winner-take-all dynamics are quietly shaping your organization?