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Here's a cost of being the accidental PM that nobody puts a number on: the distance between what you meant and what got built.
You write the ticket at 11pm, between an investor call and whatever else was on fire that day. "Add filters to the dashboard." You know exactly what you mean, because you've had that conversation four times in your head and once with a customer. The engineer who picks it up tomorrow morning has had neither. So they make a reasonable call, build a reasonable thing, and two weeks later you look at it and say that's not quite what I meant.
Nobody did anything wrong there. The spec lived in your head, and the ticket was a pointer to it.
When I come into a team, the first thing I look at isn't how messy the backlog is. It's how often work gets redone. Once a sprint is normal, every team has that. Twice a sprint and your engineers are effectively running at seventy percent, and the missing thirty never shows up on a chart anywhere. It shows up as a team getting slower for reasons nobody can name, and as engineers who stop asking questions because asking hasn't been helping.
Longer tickets don't fix this. What fixes it is a definition of done that lives outside your head: what has to be true for this story to be finished, written before anyone starts, in language an engineer can check their own work against. Ten minutes per story, when somebody is holding the standard.
That somebody doesn't have to be you. Right now it probably is, and you're doing it at 11pm.
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