Targeting Next Sprint

“Continued alignment on scope. Targeting next sprint.”

I wrote that before. Then I wrote it again six weeks later, and again after that, and if you lined up the dates you would watch a calendar year go by in three sentences that each sound like progress and none of which are.

In product they teach you to think about capacity as a layer cake. Every release has a bottom layer of tech debt, then bugs, then whatever the loudest customer was promised, then new ideas, and somewhere up top, thin as a coat of frosting, the meaningful improvement the whole thing supposedly exists for. The cake is honest in a way a roadmap is not. It doesn’t ask what you want to build. It shows you where the flour went.

My tech debt layer is status updates.

Not the work. The reporting on the work. The sheet, the rollup, the pre-read for the readout. It grows every time somebody upstream feels underinformed, and it can never be cut, because cutting it looks like you have something to hide. (I have gotten genuinely good at it, which is the part that stings…)

The hours that go into explaining why a thing isn’t built yet come out of the same jar as the hours that would have built it.

So the top layer thins. Then it thins again. And eventually a customer says out loud that they have been waiting years for something we talked about, and they are right, and the strange part is that everyone involved was working the whole time. Nothing was neglected. It was allocated.

A promise left alone doesn’t hold still. It goes stale in public, in front of the person you made it to.

I don’t think anyone above me knows how thick that layer actually is. If they do, it reads as tolerable. No line item, no fire, nobody’s quarter on the hook. A cost with no invoice attached is the easiest cost in the world to keep paying.

I got this wrong for years myself.

I used to draw my life as a wheel. Fitness, family, friends, finance, faith, fun, all the good f-words arranged in a pie with a score out of ten on every spoke, and the goal was to make the circle round. Each of those slices was a thing I was supposed to want more of.

No wheel has ever had a tech debt layer. A life cake does. The dentist appointment moved three times, the email from the school, the friend who needs a phone call you keep not making. It eats capacity and produces nothing you can point at, and the wheel has no vocabulary for it, so you just feel behind without knowing why.

Every life has a VIP customer, too. Not the person you love most. The obligation that pulls capacity out of all proportion because saying no costs more than saying yes. Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes, if you’re honest about a Saturday afternoon, it’s you…

Stop trying to make the top layer thicker. That’s the whole pitch of the balance industry and it has the physics backwards. The frosting is thin because it is sitting on everything else. A cake that’s all frosting slumps sideways on the plate before it reaches the table.

The layer worth fighting for was never the top one. It’s the one underneath, the one that grew while nobody was watching, the one you could cut in half tomorrow if anybody were willing to call it a cost.

Stay Positive & Want A Slice?