Ask your engineering lead what's blocking the sprint and you'll get a list of tickets. Ask what those tickets are actually waiting on, and a good share of them are waiting on you.

Usually not on a decision that needs your judgment. On a two-minute answer that only you can give, because you're the one who sat in the customer call, and you're booked solid until Thursday.

This is the part of being the accidental PM that never shows up in a retro. Your team's throughput is capped by the open slots in your calendar. An engineer can be fully staffed and still stalled by Wednesday because the person who knows what should happen when a payment fails halfway through checkout is in a fundraising meeting. They'll go work on something else in the meantime, and it won't be the thing you needed shipped.

The tell is in your DMs. Six threads, each one a small question with a reasonable person waiting at the other end, and you answering them between calls with less context than you'd like to have.

What I do about this is unglamorous. I sit in the middle of that queue. Questions come to me, I answer most of them from context I picked up in the onboarding week and the stakeholder interviews, and what's genuinely yours to decide reaches you batched, once, with the options written out and a recommendation attached.

Founders rarely notice the interruptions until they stop. What they notice is that the sprint stopped ending with carryover.