There’s a specific high that comes from shipping fast: the backlog gets shorter, the feedback loop gets tighter, and you start to feel like you’re good at your job in a way that’s easy to point to. I chased that high for six months.
The problem is that a shorter backlog isn’t the same thing as a better one. I was optimizing execution on a list of priorities I’d stopped questioning. Every week I won the game in front of me without checking whether it was the game I actually wanted to be playing.
The tell, in hindsight, was how rarely I zoomed out. Tactics reward speed, and speed punishes the pause it takes to ask a bigger question. So I stopped asking it, and got very good at answering the small ones instead.
This series is the record of trying to fix that: fewer sprints, more standing back, and a real attempt to tell the difference between winning and winning the wrong game.
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