Geo
March 6, 2025
The One Where PROD Got Stuck in a Bottle (Part 2)
PROD Gets Stuck In The Bottle
Previously on Complexity in a Bottle
Misleader proudly unveiling an ambitious plan to build "a better, swifter ship" in 12 months, complete with blueprints and applause. The team, inspired by the vision, charged forward with confidence, even as Dooehr muttered ominously about storms and fragile designs. But beneath all that optimism, complexity was already lurking in the shadows. Early production concerns were casually waved away—"We’ll handle that later."
Now, it's later. As we dive into months 6 to 12, cracks in the foundation begin to widen. Will the team face the full storm of delayed complexity, or can they still steer this ship to calmer waters? Let’s find out.
Month 6: The Complexity Crisis Swells
We'll get to that later. Just toss it on the backlog with the rest.
The Midpoint Denial
At this point, the project looks deceptively steady. The Progress Pageant is in full swing. Features continue to roll out, stakeholders seem satisfied, and demo after demo showcases shiny new functionality. But underneath the surface, tensions are building. Dooehr raises his hand again, this time more urgently: “We really need to plan for production. There are gaps we haven’t tackled yet—seaworthiness, unfinished rigging, then either stuck in a bottle or, worse, stranded at the dock!”
Misleader, still focused on short-term wins, shakes his head. “It’s too big to solve right now. Focus. Let’s stay on schedule. One sprint at a time, right?”
The team, relents but pressed by deadlines, drops the conversation. The sprint goal looms. Production complexities are mentally filed under “future problems,” with the hope that they'll somehow be easier to deal with later. But with every sprint that passes without resolution, those “future problems” quietly grow into formidable obstacles.
The Cost of Deferring Complexity
Avoiding complexity might feel like staying productive in the short term, but it builds long-term instability. As features accumulate without a foundation for scalability or deployment, the product becomes increasingly fragile. Teams patch things here and there to keep moving, but each patch weakens the overall architecture.
By now, what the team is building is less a cohesive product and more a fragile instantiation of a collection of features—each piece trying to fulfill a different feature without ever experiencing the burden of the real world. The mismatched solutions that "sort of work" but leave customers scratching their heads. The product may look functional during demos, but in reality, it’s fragile, overcomplicated, and primed for failure under real-world conditions.
The Debt Keeps Mounting
What’s worse, deferring complexity doesn't come without a price. Every unresolved issue adds to the growing pile of technical debt. Decisions made to "stay on schedule" now create extra work later—rework, rushed pivots, and last-minute firefighting. For example, a hardcoded fix to meet a deadline today could trigger cascading errors under load tomorrow.
The schedule is no longer sustainable. The team’s capacity is consumed not just by building new features, but by the mounting burden of old, unresolved risks. Technical debt, like financial debt, compounds: the longer it goes unaddressed, the more costly and painful it becomes to manage.
Month 9: The Warning Sirens Get Louder
Ignored risks don’t disappear—they quietly compound until a single spark ignites the time bomb."
The Backlog Time Bomb
Three months later, the cracks are undeniable. The team can feel it—everything is starting to slow down. Bugs are harder to fix, features take longer to ship, and testing reveals more hidden problems than anyone anticipated. “This is what we were worried about,” Dooehr sighs. “We’ve got a backlog of unresolved validation issues, and we’re barely keeping things running.”
But when the problem is raised again, Misleader shrugs it off. “I get it, but there’s too much going on right now. Let’s just park this on the backlog with everything else.”
By now, the product isn’t just fragile—it’s a ticking time bomb. Teams are stretched thin, spending half their time dealing with issues that could have been avoided months ago. The ship is still in a bottle, and the ship is cracking as we attempt to pull it out.
Avoidance Isn’t a Strategy
Agile thrives on incremental progress and early risk confrontation. Every sprint is an opportunity to surface and address complexity. But when leaders push those risks aside, hoping to "stay on schedule," they accelerate the inevitable crisis—trading short-term wins for long-term chaos. Complexity doesn't go away by ignoring it. Instead, it compounds, dragging teams into a cycle of firefighting and rework.
A sustainable pace isn’t achieved by sprinting blindly through deliverables—it comes from confronting risks as they arise. Agile is about learning and adapting continuously, not punting problems until they explode. The sooner teams acknowledge and plan for complexity, the more resilient their products—and their schedules and sanity—will be.
Month 12: The Crisis and the Spin
"Building a ship in a bottle wasn’t a mistake—Ship happens"
The Grand Spin
The day of reckoning arrives. The ambitious 12-month timeline has run its course, and the absence of a real, working product is now impossible to ignore. Deployment has become a nightmare, performance is tanking, and test users are flagging critical issues left and right. The very complexities that were pushed aside early in the project have come roaring back with a vengeance.
The team is exhausted, scrambling to patch things together with last-minute fixes. They’ve been here before. Stakeholders are growing impatient. Tensions are high. All eyes turn to Misleader for answers.
Misleader, ever optimistic, delivers the spin:
"We may not have hit every goal, but this experience has taught us valuable lessons. Building a ship in a bottle made us stronger at managing complexity."
The room is silent for a moment as the team exchanges knowing glances. Dooehr mutters a breathy, “Managing complexity? We've been drowning in it for months, with no retrospective in sight” Stakeholders give polite nods, but the damage is done. Trust is fraying. The spin isn’t fooling anyone; it's clear that preventable mistakes have been reframed to save face.
But Sometimes, There’s No Spin at All
As bad as the PR spin may be, there’s an even worse scenario: leaders who don’t acknowledge the failure at all. The anticipated celebratory meeting ends with the sound of chairs scraping back and nothing else. No admission of mistakes, no lessons learned. Just a deafening silence as the crisis is brushed under the rug.
For the team, this is demoralizing on another level. Without any recognition of what went wrong, there’s no opportunity to improve. It sends a clear, damaging message: "Failures are invisible. Feedback doesn’t matter." Teams stop raising concerns and disengage, resigned to the fact that no one is listening anyway.
The silence breeds resentment and fear. Developers worry that unresolved issues will simply repeat themselves in the next project cycle. Stakeholders grow frustrated, and trust deteriorates even further. At least a spin, however flawed, acknowledges that something happened—and heck, it even gives teams a chance to admire their leader’s storytelling skills. Silence leaves a vacuum where accountability once stood and growth should be.
The CEO of Netflix held a meeting with his team and cried while acknowledging that Qwikster failed. The tears showed reflection, and his emotional reaction stuck—but what teams truly respect is a leader who acknowledges when something goes wrong.
Better Leadership
Agile is built on trust, collaboration, and continuous learning. Failure isn’t something to hide or rebrand—it’s an opportunity to adapt. But this only works when leaders acknowledge mistakes, listen to feedback, and take action to correct course. Ignoring or spinning failures corrodes the very foundation of Agile values.
Intuitively we know: Complexity doesn’t go away when ignored. Deferring hard problems only compounds their impact over time. Real agility involves managing risk and complexity in each iteration, not sweeping it under the rug until it explodes.
How Leaders Can Break the Pattern
If things have gone off the rails, it’s not too late to rebuild trust. The first step is facing reality:
Acknowledge the failure: Take responsibility for decisions that led to the crisis.
Engage the team: Ask for feedback and solutions—listen to those who raised concerns early on.
Implement change: Develop a clear plan to address deferred risks and ensure they’re prioritized in future sprints.
Trust isn’t built through spin or silence. It’s earned through honest reflection and action. Agile teams thrive when leaders foster an environment where risks are surfaced and tackled early—before they spiral into full-blown crises.
The Path to Trust and Real Learning
Want to build a real ship—not one trapped in a bottle? Face the hard problems early, before they sink both your team and client's trust.
It’s tempting to reframe failure as a "growth opportunity" to soften the blow of unmet goals. But teams and stakeholders see through that facade. Real leadership—and real agility—requires accountability. It involves acknowledging where things went wrong, taking ownership of deferred decisions, and committing to improving processes.
Instead of spinning narratives, leaders can foster trust by asking, “What can we do differently next time?”
Admit where risks were ignored.
Create a plan to address complexity earlier.
Build a culture where concerns are acted upon rather than dismissed.
When teams see that their concerns lead to action, they become more engaged. The cycle of transparency, trust, and improvement becomes a core strength.
Lesson: No More Bottled Ships
It's not about ships in a bottle—it's about facing storms early, so you aren't swept away later. Agile is about breaking big problems into smaller pieces, learning as you go, and building systems to better navigate the crisis. Sure, it takes effort—but as the team knows all too well, it’s far less painful than scrambling to patch a sinking ship at the last minute.
Or as an engaged team member might put it: “Next time, maybe we just face the hard stuff earlier?”
