Kevin E. Schlabach

Category: Clarity

  • Speaking for the Empty Chair

    Ten minutes left in refinement. The product owner steps out for a call. Half the team wanted to skip the last story until the next meeting. The other half wanted to guess and move on.

    I said what I remembered from a conversation with her last week: she’d push for the simpler version, ship it, then watch usage before building the rest.

    Most of the time I defer. But sometimes the room is missing the person whose call it actually is. That’s when I’ll say “here’s what I think she’d say,” and offer it as a stand-in. My job as the Scrum Master is putting their voices in the room.

    Waiting typically costs more than a wrong guess costs. A blocked team loses the time it takes to get the answer, then the momentum it took to build back up. A team that’s dialed in gets these calls right most of the time anyway.

    After the call ends, I catch her up on what she missed. She corrects me or she confirms it. Either way, the decision is still hers.

    That borrowed opinion carries no authority on its own. It’s a hypothesis that gets checked against the real thing as soon as I can reach her.

    Every voice in the room deserves space. But the role with responsibility and accountability for that topic owns the final decision.

  • Capacity Is Not the Constraint

    Over my career, the ask from leadership has been pretty consistent: more development capacity. The list of requests never shrinks, so the conclusion is always the same: we need to go faster. AI is now delivering on that in ways hiring never quite could.

    The list will always outpace the team. That’s not a capacity problem, it’s the nature of the work.

    What I haven’t seen is a matching increase in clarity about which parts of the work actually matter.

    Capacity without direction is just faster drift. You ship more, but you’re not sure what’s landing. You don’t know which features people actually use, or which ones drove engagement.

    There’s an infinite supply of “can we build this?” The constraint that’s always been scarce is “should we build this at all?”

    That second question is worth more than it gets credit for. Every feature you don’t build is scope your team doesn’t carry: no implementation cost, no maintenance burden, no support tickets, no documentation. The savings compound in ways that never show up on a roadmap because there’s nothing to point at.

    The gains from AI make this more urgent. When capacity goes up, the temptation is to fill it. But the better return is a leaner organization pointed at fewer, more deliberate bets.

    More “can we measure whether this mattered?” would help too. But it starts with being willing to ask whether to build it at all.

  • Watermelon Status

    You do a quick scan of the project status on your way to the next thing. Everything looks green. You move on.

    You didn’t realize that you just looked at a watermelon status. Green on the outside. Red on the inside.

    2 weeks later the project is slipping, and everyone is suddenly busy explaining what happened.

    Cut it open a week earlier and you’d have found it was already turning red inside.

    Why? People want to do a good job, and they’re optimistic. When there’s still runway on the calendar, it’s easy to defer raising the risk. There’s time. Someone will figure it out. And honestly, no one wants to be the person who surfaces the problem, because surfacing the problem feels like owning it.

    So they enable the status green. They believe it. Or they hope.

    Slipping is an event worth surfacing. Every dependency that wasn’t known up front, every friction point that showed up mid-sprint, is quietly pushing other things further back. By the time the dashboard turns red, you’re already weeks behind where the conversation should have happened.

    Many of your dashboard metrics are trailing indicators. The daily conversations are where the real signal lives. Your team and your Scrum Master must have the courage to keep those conversations focused and honest every day.

    Slipping is a signal to catch and fix before it becomes a sinkhole.

    The status report doesn’t tell you how the project is going. The people do. Go to them and listen.