Just like a photo of a sandwich won’t stop you from starving (in fact, it can trigger your hunger), a bunch of low-quality JIRA tickets doesn’t build a product. But somewhere along the way, we began treating glorified sticky notes as the actual activity. Entire teams now spend their days shuffling half-baked tickets around Kanban boards, congratulating themselves for moving rectangles from “To Do” to “Done” or creating sophisticated flows with arrows and all, when everybody in fact knows that nothing was done in the classic sense of the word, from the times when things were done with tangible outcomes. Remember?
As we speak, backlogs are ballooning with vague imperatives such as “Refactor logic”, “Add logging features”. Some people get paid for ticketing: look how many things we’ve planned! Ka-ching. Engineers and developers, always seeking the path of least effort, either ask ten clarifying questions until the ticket morphs into a several-month-long project itself, or just take advantage of the fact that the ticket is so poorly written that they can strictly deliver whatever fits the title and carry on with their lives.
The ticket, in this twisted system, is an instrumental piece of the mechanism. Writing them feels like doing something. Prioritizing it feels like adulting. Following it up feels like leadership. Meanwhile, the real work—the messy, nuanced, human work of understanding problems, coding, debugging, performing trade-offs, and making decisions—is not captured there. No. Too analog. Too human.
Still, most tickets die forgotten. Every team knows the smell of a rotting ticket. It is born elegantly; gets tagged, triaged, and politely assigned. But no one touches it. Weeks pass. The context changes, as it always does. No one follows it up. Bam, now it’s a has-been.
JIRA boards are full of zombie tickets. In fact, there are entire clusters of zombie boards. They linger for quarters or years, haunting sprint planning sessions. Everyone sees them. No one deletes them. Better to let them rot in silence than be the one who takes responsibility.
So here’s a thought for teams that spend weeks “executing” against fictions. Creating reports with graphs full of fake metrics to be shown to some higher-up who won’t care as long as it doesn’t affect their agenda. A thought for those who get paid to spend their days in SaaS tools made far, far away.