Strategic insights on technology leadership, engineering culture, and building great teams
Most teams are designed on the assumption that every leader can read their people, and plenty of them can't. Distributed work did not create that problem. It stopped covering for it, and a lot of leaders found out that the office had been doing the work for them.
Story points were never about complexity. They forced a conversation that used to be expensive, and AI planning made that conversation cheap. Which leaves the harder problem: which of the ceremony's other jobs were ever real, and how you commit to a date once the shield is gone.
Managers stop paying close attention to the people who look like they don't need it. The ones who keep paying attention often only ever name the gaps. Either way a high performer ends up with no idea what good looks like, or whether they are hitting it.