LinkedIn·Wednesday, 26 August 2026·4h ago
Francine Milke noticed something unusual in her team's Cumulative Flow Diagram. The QA band was getting wider. Developers were moving work…
Sonya Siderova
Founder & CEO at Nave | Helping enterprise agile coaches prove transformation value with metrics executives trust
Francine Milke noticed something unusual in her team's Cumulative Flow Diagram. The QA band was getting wider.
Developers were moving work into QA faster than the QA team could handle it. That's the kind of thing that's easy to miss when you're inside the work every day. Francine, a Product Manager at ArcTouch, could see it in the data.
So she changed the way work entered QA. The team added an acceptance test cycle to developer tickets and started including more technical detail before work was handed over. The goal was to reduce the communication back and forth that was slowing them down.
Then they watched what happened. Ticket reopens went from 30% to 7%. Almost a 5x reduction. And bugs dropped from 29% to 11% over the same before-and-after periods.
I love this story because Francine didn't start with a solution. She started with something unusual in the data. A wider band. A question about why it was happening. Then one change to the way the team worked.
Francine describes Nave as giving her team "the insight and clarity we need to optimize our sprints." The 5x reduction says a lot about what she did with that clarity.
Thanks, Francine, for showing what evidence-driven improvement looks like in practice.
For those using flow metrics with their teams, what's the last thing you spotted in your data that made you change the way you work?
#NavigateYourFlow #FlowMetrics #ContinuousImprovement #EngineeringLeadership
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