The pen I was using ran out of ink, leaving behind nothing but emptiness—a bit like the feature we had just been debating. I felt confused and not for the first time. It was like trying to piece together a puzzle that had taken me years to solve.
As I stood there searching for another whiteboard marker with a bit of ink left, it struck me that even if I found one, it wouldn’t help much. The pen seemed to symbolize my doomed effort.
I had spent hours working on that idea. Though it was just a small feature, it had already been committed to tickets, and the engineers were in the process of coding it. My colleague, a lead stakeholder—I’ll call him Michael—was deeply involved.
Michael really knew his stuff, and I fancied myself as quite knowledgeable too. More importantly, I could argue my points fervently. I was confident that what I was doing aligned with the values of ‘customer collaboration over contract negotiation’ or ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’ from the agile manifesto.
So, there I was, arguing endlessly in front of this particular whiteboard, convinced that the feature we were discussing was the key to success.