Once upon a sprint planning session, a product owner told me a tale that should be carved into the memory of every developer forced to sit through a meeting titled "Cross-Functional Synergy Alignment":
A Japanese and an American company decided to have a canoe race.
The Japanese team had 8 people rowing and 1 steering. The American team had 1 guy rowing and 8 people steering, documenting, power-pointing, and holding retrospectives about which way the boat should be going.
The Japanese team obliterated them.
The American company immediately commissioned a root cause analysis, held five steering committee meetings, and hired a transformation consultant who, in their final slide deck, declared: "The rower needs to row faster."
So, they fired the rower and hired a cheaper offshore contractor. Then they promoted one of the steering crew to "Chief Innovation Kayak Officer."
Next race? They lost by two miles.
The analogy ends there, but let’s be honest—we all know that canoe. We’ve lived in that canoe.
This is the tech equivalent of having:
- 4 product managers arguing over JIRA ticket priority
- 2 architects debating microservices vs monolith
- 3 scrum masters facilitating meetings that could’ve been Slack messages
- 1 poor dev duct-taping the system together at 2 a.m.
And when the delivery's late? Everyone nods solemnly and says, “Well, maybe the dev should work on their time estimation.”
Sure, because if one guy’s hauling the Titanic with a kayak paddle, clearly he needs a better fitness plan.
Here’s the hard truth: if your team has 9 people steering and 1 rowing, your problem isn’t velocity—it’s delusion.
You don’t fix bad team structures by yelling "Agile" louder or shuffling job titles around like a Silicon Valley shell game. You fix it by getting people to row. Together. In the same direction. Preferably toward delivering something other than slide decks.
Because at the end of the day, software doesn’t ship because of how well you “align stakeholder intent.”
It ships because someone wrote the code.
Be the team that rows.
Or at least, don’t be the team that fires the rower and hands out bonuses to the steering committee.
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