LinkedIn·Friday, 21 August 2026·4d ago

I used to spend hours in meetings answering questions our board should have answered in seconds. What’s everyone working on? Where is this…

Sonya Siderova

Founder & CEO at Nave | Helping enterprise agile coaches prove transformation value with metrics executives trust

I used to spend hours in meetings answering questions our board should have answered in seconds. What’s everyone working on? Where is this project? What’s blocked? What’s actually finished? And the ridiculous part is that we had a board. We just couldn’t trust it. There were cards everywhere. The actual state of the work and what the board showed were two different things. So every time we needed to understand what was happening, we did what seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. We had a meeting. Everyone explained what they were working on. We pieced together the current state. Then we went back to work. Until we needed another meeting to figure it all out again. As the teams grew, those conversations got longer and harder. I hated them. But it took me embarrassingly long to realize that the meetings weren’t actually the problem. We had created a system where the only way to know what was happening was to ask people. And once I saw that, I became almost obsessive about something that probably looks incredibly boring from the outside: If the work changes, the board changes. Work starts, move it. Work stops, show it. Something is blocked, make it visible. Priority changes, the board should tell me. I don’t want someone to have to remember the real story for me. Because I’ve already lived through what happens when the truth about the work exists only in people’s heads. I spent my days reconstructing reality instead of managing it. And apparently those years left a mark. I’m now the person who will notice that the card hasn’t moved. Who will ask why something marked “in progress” hasn’t been touched in three weeks. Who will finish a conversation and still ask, “Are we going to update the board?” I’m sure there have been plenty of people over the years who thought I was being unnecessarily particular about something that takes five seconds. Maybe I was. But those five seconds save me from going back to the way I used to work. And I’m not willing to do that again. So yes, I’m probably more obsessive about an accurate board than anyone reasonably needs to be. That’s the price I’m willing to pay for never having to run another meeting just to find out what’s actually going on.

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