Field notes on delivery truth.
Short, opinionated writing on the gap between what the board says and what the code proves — forecasting, watermelon status, review bottlenecks, and the signals a great delivery lead reads by instinct.
Why your sprints keep slipping — and the four causes hiding in your data
Roughly four in five agile teams roll work over every sprint. It is almost never a capacity problem. It is four specific, findable causes — and they are already sitting in your Jira and Git history.
More field notes
9 postsHow a CTO can actually know if the team will hit the deadline
Most status turns red overnight in week eleven — after the recovery options have expired. Here is how to get a defensible read on a deadline early enough to change the outcome, without micromanaging a single engineer.
Story points can’t forecast a date — and were never meant to
Velocity is a useful planning heuristic and a terrible crystal ball. If you are turning a story-point average into a delivery date, here is why it keeps betraying you — and what to denominate your forecast in instead.
Watermelon status: how to catch a project that’s green outside, red inside
Watermelon reporting is the most expensive lie in delivery because it is comfortable. Here is how green-on-the-outside, red-on-the-inside status forms, and how to catch it with evidence instead of accusation.
Monte Carlo vs velocity: how to forecast a delivery date you can defend
A single-date forecast from a velocity average is a promise you will almost certainly break. A probabilistic forecast gives you a range and the odds. Here is the difference — and why leaders trust the range.
Your Jira board is lying to you
Every “Done” column hides a question the board can’t answer: is there merged code behind it? The gap between board-done and code-done is where slipping sprints quietly wait — until demo day makes them loud.
Engineering metrics that matter — without surveilling your developers
The metrics that predict delivery and the metrics that destroy trust are not the same list. Here is how to measure the system without measuring the people — and why the distinction is the whole game.
Why late work hurts more: the S-curve nobody plans for
Sprint work does not finish in a straight line — it finishes on an S-curve. That single fact is why a late epic hurts far more than its point count suggests, and why naive burndown lies to you at exactly the wrong moment.
From dashboards to decisions
A dashboard reports the past and leaves the thinking to you. A chief-of-staff brief does the thinking and hands you a decision. Here is why one clear call a day beats ten charts that make you feel informed.
Reading about it is fine. Seeing your own truth is better.
Open the live demo and read a real delivery brief — built on real sprints — in the next 30 seconds.