After writing about what Ted Lasso taught me about being a Scrum Master, someone asked if I had any other TV shows that shaped my thinking on teams. I hesitated before answering "Yellowjackets," because unlike Ted's relentlessly optimistic football club, Yellowjackets is about a high school soccer team that crashes in the Canadian wilderness and descends into Lord of the Flies-style chaos. But here's the thing: I've seen more development teams operating like the Yellowjackets survivors than I'd like to admit. And the show's unflinching look at what happens when teams break down under pressure offers lessons that Ted Lasso's feel-good narrative can't.
So yes, we're going from biscuits and believe signs to cannibalism and cult behavior. Welcome to the darker side of team dynamics.
Massive spoilers ahead for Yellowjackets seasons one and two.
When Leadership Vacuums Turn Toxic
We're all going to die out here. — Jackie Taylor
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, there's no clear leader. Team captain Jackie tries to maintain her social hierarchy from high school, but survival doesn't care about who was popular. Taissa attempts pragmatic leadership. Shauna quietly holds things together. Misty... well, Misty does Misty things. And into this vacuum steps something far more dangerous: desperation.
I've watched this exact pattern play out on development teams. The official Scrum Master leaves. The tech lead burns out. Product ownership becomes unclear. And suddenly, whoever speaks loudest or acts most certain fills the void, regardless of whether they should.
The Yellowjackets don't deliberately choose bad leadership — they drift into it because no one establishes clear roles and responsibilities when things get chaotic. By the time Lottie's mysticism takes hold, the team is so desperate for structure that they'll accept any framework, even one based on wilderness prophesies and ritual sacrifice.
Your team in crisis needs explicit leadership structure, not emergent chaos. When a project is on fire, that's exactly when you need to clarify who's making which decisions, not assume everyone knows. The absence of intentional leadership doesn't create democracy — it creates power struggles.
Jackie's failure as captain is instructive. She has the title but no actual authority because she can't adapt to new circumstances. The rules that made her captain on the field mean nothing in the wilderness. Similarly, that senior developer who's been with the company for ten years doesn't automatically know how to lead a cloud migration just because they have seniority.
Leadership isn't about titles. It's about who the team trusts to make good decisions in the current context. And when that context changes radically, leadership might need to change too.
Secrets and Information Hoarding Are Poison
We're all in this together, right? — Shauna Shipman (while hiding multiple secrets)
Nearly every character in Yellowjackets is hiding something. Shauna's pregnant and having an affair with Jackie's boyfriend. Taissa has dissociative episodes. Misty destroyed the emergency transmitter to keep the group dependent on her. Natalie's struggling with the fact that she shot someone. The secrets compound until trust becomes impossible.
In the present-day timeline, these secrets have metastasized into blackmail, manipulation, and murder. The survivors can't work together effectively because they're all protecting their own versions of the truth.
Sound familiar? Not the murder part (hopefully), but the information hoarding?
That developer who won't document their code because job security. The architect who makes technical decisions in private conversations instead of open forums. The product owner who has side conversations with stakeholders and doesn't share the context with the team. The Scrum Master who knows organizational changes are coming but can't say anything yet.
Every secret creates asymmetric information. Every piece of hoarded knowledge creates dependency. Every private agenda undermines collective decision-making.
Misty's destruction of the transmitter is the perfect metaphor for this. She sabotages the team's best chance at rescue because being needed is more important to her than the team's wellbeing. I've seen developers do the equivalent — making systems unnecessarily complex so they're the only ones who can maintain them, or withholding tribal knowledge to stay indispensable.
Yellowjackets shows the endpoint of that trajectory. The secrets don't stay hidden. They explode at the worst possible moments. Relationships fracture. Trust evaporates. And the team's ability to function collapses under the weight of everything left unsaid.
Radical transparency isn't just a nice-to-have Agile principle. It's survival. The Yellowjackets could have made better decisions if they'd known all the constraints they were working under. Your team can't optimize for outcomes if they're missing critical information.
Scapegoating Is a Symptom of Deeper Dysfunction
Pit girl, pit girl, we'll be the death of her. — The wilderness chant
The most horrifying element of Yellowjackets is the ritual hunt and consumption of one of their own. But before you dismiss it as pure horror fiction, recognize what precedes it: the team has been looking for someone to blame for months. They need an outlet for their fear, frustration, and hunger. The hunt isn't random violence — it's the culmination of deteriorating group dynamics.
They've already been scapegoating each other in smaller ways. Blaming Jackie for not contributing enough. Viewing Misty with suspicion. Questioning Shauna's decisions. Creating in-groups and out-groups. The ritual just formalizes what's been building.
Development teams do this constantly, minus the cannibalism (again, hopefully). When a project fails, whose fault is it? QA didn't catch the bugs. Product didn't define requirements clearly. Engineering over-engineered the solution. DevOps didn't scale the infrastructure. The scapegoat rotates, but the pattern remains.
This is a sign that your team has lost psychological safety and shifted into blame mode. Healthy teams treat failures as system problems requiring collective solutions. Dysfunctional teams treat failures as individual moral failings requiring punishment.
The Yellowjackets create elaborate rituals around selecting their victim — drawing cards, making it seem random and therefore fair. Your retrospectives might do something similar when they focus on who messed up rather than what system allowed the mess-up to happen.
Real talk: if your retrospectives consistently identify individual people as problems rather than process gaps, you're not doing retrospectives. You're doing scapegoating with sticky notes.
The hunt in Yellowjackets is preceded by dehumanization. They stop seeing each other as individuals and start seeing each other as resources or threats. When your standup language shifts from "we need to solve this problem" to "they didn't deliver what they promised," you're on the same path. Different destination, same dynamic.
Survival Mode Destroys Long-Term Thinking
We're not going to make it through the winter. — Taissa Turner
The Yellowjackets survivors are in constant crisis mode. There's always an immediate threat: hunger, cold, injuries, predators. Every decision is about surviving the next day, not building sustainable systems.
This is every death march project I've ever witnessed. This is "just ship it and we'll fix it later" technical debt. This is "skip the retrospective this sprint, we need the time for features." This is permanent crunch time, normalized.
The show demonstrates exactly where this leads. In survival mode, you make terrible long-term decisions. You eat the seed corn. You burn furniture for heat instead of building better insulation. You sacrifice future capability for present survival.
Taissa's election campaign storyline in the present day shows she never learned to operate differently. She's still in crisis mode, still making desperate short-term decisions that create bigger problems later. She's been in survival mode for 25 years and it's destroying her life.
I've been on teams like this. The "just until launch" sprint that became the permanent operating mode. The "temporary" workaround that became load-bearing architecture. The "quick hire" who became the senior developer you can't remove because they know all the tribal knowledge.
Yellowjackets shows that survival mode has an expiration date. Eventually, you run out of furniture to burn. Eventually, the shortcuts become the path. Eventually, the emergency becomes the culture.
Your job as a Scrum Master, tech lead, or engineering manager is to protect the team from permanent survival mode. Sometimes crisis happens — production is down, a competitor launched first, a key person quit. But crisis should be a state you move through, not a state you live in.
The Yellowjackets needed someone to say "we're going to die if we don't think past tomorrow." Your team needs someone to say "we're going to collapse if we don't invest in sustainability." Be that person. Even when (especially when) everyone else is in panic mode.
When Psychological Safety Collapses
I don't think we're on the same team anymore. — Natalie Scatorccio
In the early episodes, the Yellowjackets still function as a team. They make collective decisions. They support each other. They maintain the social bonds from before the crash. But gradually, psychological safety erodes.
People stop voicing concerns because dissent is seen as disloyalty. Questioning Lottie's visions becomes taboo. Speaking up about hunger or fear marks you as weak. The team fractures into factions: believers and skeptics, hunters and gatherers, Lottie's followers and everyone else.
By season two, they're not a team anymore. They're a group of traumatized individuals trapped together, performing team-like behaviors while fundamentally operating from self-preservation.
The parallel to development teams is uncomfortable but real. I've seen teams where it became unsafe to say "I don't understand this architecture decision." Where asking for help was seen as incompetence. Where disagreeing with the tech lead meant being frozen out of code reviews.
Psychological safety doesn't just disappear overnight. It's eroded by small incidents: a sarcastic comment in standup, a dismissive response to a question, a blame-focused retrospective, a decision made without consultation. Each incident seems minor. Collectively, they poison the culture.
The Yellowjackets show what happens when you normalize small violations of safety. Jackie's death isn't a sudden act of violence — it's the culmination of increasing hostility, diminishing empathy, and eroding trust. She freezes to death outside because she can't be in the cabin with Shauna anymore. The team has become so toxic that literal death is preferable to being with them.
Your developers quitting without another job lined up? That's the equivalent warning sign. When people would rather face uncertainty than stay with your team, your culture has failed catastrophically.
Rebuilding psychological safety after it collapses is brutally hard. The adult Yellowjackets still can't trust each other 25 years later. Once you've normalized blame, secrets, and scapegoating, returning to genuine collaboration requires intentional, sustained effort that most teams never commit to.
Don't let it collapse in the first place. Protect psychological safety like your team's survival depends on it. Because it does.
The Danger of Magical Thinking in Problem Solving
The wilderness chose. — Lottie Matthews
As the Yellowjackets' situation becomes more desperate, Lottie's mystical interpretations of events gain influence. The wilderness is a conscious entity. It provides and it takes away. It chooses who lives and dies. This magical thinking gives the team a framework for understanding their trauma, but it also absolves them of agency and responsibility.
They're not making terrible decisions — the wilderness is. They're not failing to plan effectively — they're following the wilderness's will. The framework becomes a substitute for actual problem-solving.
Tech teams do this with buzzwords and methodologies. "We're doing Agile now, so all our problems will be solved." "We'll just use microservices architecture." "AI will handle this." "We need to be more like [successful company]."
These aren't solutions — they're magical thinking. Rebranding your waterfall process as "Agile" doesn't make it Agile. Decomposing your monolith into microservices without addressing the underlying organizational dysfunction just gives you distributed dysfunction.
Lottie's visions are unfalsifiable. If something good happens, the wilderness provided. If something bad happens, the wilderness is testing them. This is how cargo cult Agile works too. Doing standups means you're Agile, even if nothing else changes. Having a Scrum Master means you're doing Scrum, even if you're still managing by Gantt chart.
The Yellowjackets needed practical wilderness survival skills: building shelter, preserving food, navigating terrain. Instead, they invested energy in interpreting signs and performing rituals. Your team needs practical engineering skills: writing tests, managing technical debt, documenting decisions. If you're spending more time on process theater than actual capability building, you're doing the wilderness chant.
Magical thinking is seductive because it's easier than actual problem-solving. It's easier to blame "the wilderness" than to acknowledge your team voted to eat seed stores instead of rationing properly. It's easier to say "we need to be more Agile" than to identify specific collaboration breakdowns and address them.
The wilderness didn't choose anything. The Yellowjackets made choices, and then invented a narrative to avoid accountability for those choices. Your team's failures aren't because you're "not Agile enough" or "need better tools." They're because of specific decisions and behaviors that you can identify and change.
Trust Is Easier to Destroy Than Rebuild
You're the only one who gets it. — Adult Shauna to adult Natalie
In the present-day timeline, the adult survivors can barely function together. They're bound by trauma and shared secrets, but there's no trust. Every interaction is transactional. Every conversation could be a manipulation. They know each other intimately and trust each other not at all.
Misty and Natalie's relationship perfectly captures this. They survived the wilderness together. They went through unimaginable trauma as teammates. And 25 years later, Natalie still has to check whether Misty poisoned her drink. That's not paranoia — that's pattern recognition based on decades of evidence.
I've seen team dynamics like this, though less extreme. The developers who went through a brutal death march together and now can't stand being in the same room. The engineer and product manager who had one explosive conflict and have been professionally hostile ever since. The team members who collaborate on work but would never trust each other with anything personal.
Once trust breaks, it doesn't heal on its own. The Yellowjackets prove this. They've had 25 years to process, heal, and rebuild trust. They haven't. Because nobody did the work. Nobody acknowledged the harm. Nobody created space for genuine repair.
Your retrospective where everyone says "let's just move forward" without addressing the broken trust? That's not healing. That's sweeping trauma under the rug where it will fester.
The show suggests that maybe some trust can't be rebuilt. Maybe some teams are too broken. Maybe some relationships are permanently damaged by what happened under pressure. That's a sobering thought for anyone who believes every team can be saved with enough facilitation and sticky notes.
Sometimes the healthiest thing is to acknowledge that a team composition isn't working and make changes. Not as punishment, but as recognition that some dynamics can't be fixed by the same people who created them.
The Aftermath Is Longer Than the Crisis
We've been lying about it for 25 years. — Adult Taissa Turner
Here's what Yellowjackets gets right that most team postmortems miss: the impact of trauma outlasts the crisis by decades.
The crash lasts a few seconds. The wilderness survival lasts 19 months. The psychological aftermath lasts the rest of their lives. Adult Shauna is still making terrible decisions based on survival instincts from 1996. Adult Taissa still can't let anyone see weakness. Adult Natalie still can't escape the guilt. Adult Misty still defines her worth by being needed.
Your team's death march ends. The product launches. The crisis resolves. And then what? The developers who burned out don't just bounce back. The relationships damaged by pressure don't automatically heal. The shortcuts taken under deadline don't magically refactor themselves.
I've watched talented people leave the industry entirely because one toxic project convinced them that all tech work is survival mode. I've seen teams that shipped something amazing and then imploded because they never processed the trauma of how they got there.
The Yellowjackets survivors need therapy. Serious, long-term, trauma-focused therapy. Most don't get it, or don't get enough of it, or don't get the right kind. They try to move on without processing. They try to pretend it didn't happen, or minimize it, or reframe it as "character building."
Your team needs the equivalent after a crisis. Real retrospectives that go beyond "what went wrong" to "how do we heal from this." Time to pay down technical debt. Space to rebuild relationships. Permission to acknowledge that what happened was traumatic and the team needs recovery time.
Companies want to declare victory and move immediately to the next thing. This is how you get the Yellowjackets pattern: traumatized people stumbling from crisis to crisis, never processing, never healing, just surviving.
Sustainable pace isn't just about hours worked per week. It's about having enough space between crises to actually recover. The Yellowjackets never got that space in the wilderness. They shouldn't have needed to create it in the aftermath, but they did.
Your team deserves recovery time built into the plan, not as a luxury but as a necessity.
When Loyalty Becomes Complicity
We didn't eat Jackie. We ate the wilderness. — Adult Shauna's rationalization
The adult Yellowjackets don't turn each other in. They don't tell the truth. They maintain a collective lie about what happened in the wilderness. This loyalty to each other has kept them out of prison, but it's also kept them trapped in dysfunction.
Their silence is both protective and poisonous. They can't move forward because they can't acknowledge the truth. They can't build new, healthy relationships because they're still covering for each other's darkest moments.
I've seen team loyalty become complicity in smaller ways. The team that covers for the developer who doesn't pull their weight because "they're a good person going through stuff." The engineers who don't report the tech lead's intimidation because "that's just how they are." The Scrum Master who doesn't escalate the product owner's scope manipulation because "we don't want to cause problems."
Loyalty is important. But loyalty that requires you to compromise your principles or enable harmful behavior isn't loyalty — it's complicity.
The Yellowjackets think their silence protects each other. Really, it protects the secrets, and the secrets are destroying them. Adult Shauna's marriage is built on lies. Adult Taissa's career is built on hiding her true self. Adult Natalie can't maintain any relationship because she can't be honest about her past.
Your team's loyalty should never require dishonesty. If "being a team player" means staying quiet about problems, your team culture is toxic. If "having each other's backs" means covering up mistakes instead of learning from them, you're setting up failure.
True loyalty means being honest enough to name problems, even when it's uncomfortable. It means caring about each other's growth more than protecting each other's egos. It means wanting the team to be healthy more than wanting the team to look good.
The Yellowjackets needed someone brave enough to say "we have to tell the truth about what happened, for our own healing." Your team needs someone brave enough to say "we have to acknowledge this isn't working, for our own growth."
What the Wilderness Teaches That Civilization Forgets
Out there, we were free. — Adult Lottie Matthews
Here's the disturbing part: some of the adult Yellowjackets miss the wilderness. For all its horror, it was simpler. The stakes were clear. The team had a shared purpose: survive. There was no ambiguity, no politics, no performance reviews. Just raw existence.
Adult Lottie creates a wellness cult that recreates wilderness dynamics. Adult Misty seeks out extreme situations where she can be needed. Adult Taissa runs for office because campaigning provides the same intensity. They're chasing the clarity of crisis because normal life feels meaningless by comparison.
I've seen engineers do this. The person who only comes alive during production incidents. The developer who needs the adrenaline of impossible deadlines. The tech lead who creates urgency where none exists because they're addicted to crisis mode.
This is the final, most insidious lesson from Yellowjackets: crisis can become comfortable. Survival mode can become identity. The team that bonds through trauma can struggle to bond through normal work.
Building something sustainable, with proper planning and healthy pace, can feel boring after you've experienced the intensity of a death march. Shipping features through systematic iteration can feel slow after you've experienced the rush of all-nighters and heroic debugging.
The wilderness isn't better. The crisis isn't preferable. But it's addictive.
Your job is to help your team find meaning and engagement in sustainable work. To make incremental progress feel satisfying. To celebrate small wins with the same energy as crisis resolution. To prove that healthy team dynamics can be as fulfilling as trauma bonding.
Otherwise, you'll have a team of people unconsciously sabotaging stability because chaos feels more real.
Yellowjackets is horror, but it's also a mirror. The dynamics that lead to cannibalism in the wilderness exist in miniature in every team under pressure. Information hoarding. Scapegoating. Magical thinking. Loyalty becoming complicity. Survival mode becoming identity.
You won't end up hunting your coworkers in the Canadian wilderness. But you might end up on a team where psychological safety has collapsed, trust is gone, and everyone's just trying to survive until they can leave.
The good news: you're not actually stranded. You have options. You can address toxic dynamics before they metastasize. You can prioritize sustainability over survival mode. You can choose transparency over secrets. You can build trust instead of letting it erode.
The Yellowjackets couldn't leave the wilderness. You can leave (or fix) the toxic team.
Ted Lasso shows us what teams can be at their best. Yellowjackets shows us what teams become at their worst. Both lessons matter. Both are real.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make sure my team's working agreements don't include any wilderness survival clauses. And maybe skip lunch.
