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Field Note
Short operational observations from running the company on sparQ. The heartbeat layer.
May 11
Team completed work but nobody marked tasks done.
Three days of "in progress" on shipped features.
May 9
The PM board looked healthy while Slack showed chaos.
The board is a lagging indicator of how people feel about the work.
May 7
Managers ask "are we on track?" more than "what's the roadmap?"
Operational visibility outranks planning fidelity by 4x.
May 5
Three weeks of standups. Zero blockers logged. Five real blockers happened.
Standup-as-ritual is not the same as standup-as-signal.
May 3
The team cap is suggested at twelve, not enforced.
Every team we've watched over 12 develops coordination drift within a month.
May 1
We caught our own PM board lying inside our dogfood instance.
The same drift we describe in essays, in our own dashboard.
Apr 28
One unmarked-done task in week 1 cost us five "what's the status?" pings by week 3.
The blast radius is wider than it looks.