What the junior PM noticed that the rest of us missed.

We had been stuck for about six weeks. The pattern was the same every Tuesday: a list of five blockers, an hour of discussion about each, no movement.

In our seventh stand-up, the junior PM (three months into the company, the most under-titled person in the room) asked a question.

“Sorry, but what would have to be true for any of these to actually move?”

We stopped. I stopped. The senior engineer who had been quietly furious for two weeks stopped.

It was not a clever question. It was a perfectly normal one, asked perfectly clearly, that we had all somehow forgotten to ask.

We spent the next forty minutes answering it, item by item. Two of the blockers turned out to have an obvious owner who had not been asked. Two were actually a single blocker wearing different costumes. One was a thing that had been resolved three weeks earlier and nobody had updated.

We left the stand-up with three of the five gone.

I have thought about that meeting more times than is reasonable. I think there are a few things worth pulling out of it.

Seniority is not the same as clarity

The reason none of the rest of us asked her question is that we had all, in our own ways, become embarrassed to ask it. The blockers had been on the list for so long that asking the basic question started to feel like an admission that we had been doing the wrong thing for six weeks.

She had not been there for six weeks. She had no investment in pretending the problem was complex.

The cost of “we’ve already been through this”

A lot of programme rooms accumulate this particular sediment. Decisions that were made for a reason that no longer applies. Assumptions that were correct at week three and stopped being correct at week five. Items that everybody privately knows are weird but that nobody wants to be the first to mention.

The junior PM was useful not because she was smarter than us. She was useful because she did not have the sediment.

What I do differently now

When a programme has been stuck on the same shape of problem for more than two cycles, I write down what the blockers are and I hand the list to the newest person on the team.

I ask them to do exactly what she did: read the list and ask, for each line, what would have to be true for this to move.

It feels condescending to write down. It is not condescending in the room. It is one of the highest-value hours I spend in any given quarter.

What I told her, after

I told her, after the stand-up, that the question she had asked was the most useful thing I had heard in a month and that she should ask the same question, in the same room, every Tuesday for the rest of the programme.

She did. She is now a senior PM at a company I don’t run, and I am told she still asks it.

I hope she does it for a long time.