PM hygiene debt

Hygiene debt is the gap between what your PM tool says and what's actually true. It compounds because the cost of fixing it grows every week.

A board that's 30% accurate isn't 70% useful. It's zero useful. Once readers learn they can't trust it, they stop reading it. The signal collapses entirely.

We measured this on three teams. The half-life of an accurate ticket without intervention is six weeks. After two quarters, the board is closer to noise than signal. The teams that intervene most aggressively are the ones whose boards stay useful.