The Tuesday Culprit
September 19, 2026
We spent three sprints delivering nothing and I blamed the code. The problem wasn't technical: it was my inability to stick to a decision under pressure
The team hadn't finished anything in three sprints and I was convinced the problem was technical.
I thought they just needed more discipline to close tickets: I walked into the retrospective ready to demand an explanation.
The retrospective
The room felt heavy with defeat, but before I could start my speech on efficiency, someone spoke up.
The problem isn't that we don't know our pace: it's that you change the priority every Tuesday and break our rhythm.
My first instinct was to defend myself, I spent ten minutes talking about market speed and why the business needed us to be agile.
Then I stopped and listened: they were right, my anxiety to answer every email was killing their ability to execute.
Locking the scope
We set a radical rule and froze the sprint scope: once the cycle started, absolutely nothing new was allowed in.
That first month was awkward, I had to tell a key client their emergency would wait two weeks and I felt like I was failing as a consultant.
The world didn't end, the client accepted the date and the team worked without interruptions for the first time in months.
A jump in results
The results were immediate, the team's velocity jumped from 18 to 31 points in just two sprints.
We didn't hire anyone or change the stack: we just stopped getting in each other's way.
I learned that protecting the team from my own ideas was better than any methodology: the tech is rarely the real bottleneck.
Are you auditing your team's technical capacity or are you auditing your own inability to hold a firm decision?