The Focus Leak | Article 8: The Feedback Lag
Engineers are hired to build the right thing the first time, but they are often forced to work in the dark. While the “Review Stall” (Article 7) deals with peer approval, the Feedback Lag deals with the high “Round-Trip Time” (RTT) from stakeholders.
The Problem: High Round-Trip Time
In networking, RTT is the time it takes for a signal to go to a destination and back. If an engineer pushes code to a Staging environment on Monday, but the stakeholder doesn’t “QA” it until Friday, the RTT is 5 days.
By Friday, the cement has dried. The “Mental Map” of that feature has been deleted from the engineer’s brain to make room for new tasks. When the feedback finally arrives, the engineer is no longer “warm.”
The Reality: The “System Restore”
When a stakeholder tests the Staging link and says, “This isn’t quite right,” five days after the work was done, it triggers a System Restore:
- The Excavation: The engineer has to stop their current task and dig through a week-old branch to find the logic.
- The Rework: Because the codebase has moved forward, the engineer must now deal with “Regression Risks”—fixing the old bug without breaking the new features built since Monday.
- The Leak: You are paying for the engineer to “unbuild” work you already paid for.
The Patch: The “Continuous Preview”
The “Patch” is any method that gets the person who ordered the work to look at the actual work while the engineer is still holding the Lego instructions in their hand.
1. The “Sandbox” Link (Preview Environments) Instead of waiting for a “Big Weekly Meeting,” the engineer sends a private link to the stakeholder as soon as the code is “functional.”
- The Logic: The stakeholder sees the real, working app in their own browser. If it’s wrong, the engineer fixes it nowwhile their brain is already “warm.”
2. The “Hidden Switch” (Feature Flags) Sometimes code is finished but not ready for the public. We put a “Hidden Switch” on it.
- The Logic: The engineer pushes the code to the main system but keeps it “Off” for customers. They turn it “On” only for the stakeholder. Feedback happens in real-time, on the real site, without the engineer ever having to “unload” the task from their brain.
3. The “Priority” Rule The team agrees that Checking finished work is more important than Starting new work.
- The Logic: If a stakeholder takes 5 minutes to approve a task today, they save the engineer 40 minutes of “re-learning” it tomorrow.
Submit a Bug Report
Submit a Bug Report Identify a task that was “finished” on Monday but not “approved” until Thursday. Calculate the Reboot Cost: How many minutes did the engineer spend re-opening the code, re-reading the spec, and re-testing the logic just to make the final tweaks? If that number is >20 minutes, your Feedback Lag is a primary source of waste.