No, some of them also confided they were heavily stressed due to pressure to deliver. I urged them to "work less" but the pressure was still coming in from above.
That's a great question! Because of this strategy? I wouldn't say it moved the needle in the slightest, and that was entirely expected. There was however a lot of churn because the platform we operate on launched some features that made our own product obsolete.
The goal of this strategy was merely to make the process and the releases more predictable, but it ended up being at the expense of designers and developers.
Was the design team fine during this time? They had no trouble designing enough stuff for you to implement, it didn't weigh on them in the same way?