NEW YORK, NY — "Down and to the right," said Winston Waddle, engineering manager at Seattle One Bank, gesturing proudly at a cluster of glowing monitors. Jira dashboards, Miro roadmaps, and Excel spreadsheets that inexplicably also track Jira tickets filled the screens. "It’s a lot to keep in sync," he added. "But I manage."

Across the hall, his team tells a different story. In a conference room, developers hunch silently over laptops, trapped in a shared, collective panic. One developer stared at a whiteboard architecture diagram, as if waiting for it start talking back.

"I check Jira every morning," said Waddle, cheerfully. "The line goes down. That’s agile. That’s success."

Privately, team members noted the chart merely reflects ticket closures, not actual progress. Much of the remaining work for the quarter-end legacy migration is not even in Jira. Closed tickets are often untested, uninstrumented, and filled with tech debt. Some raise more questions than they answer. Others are closed just to avoid being discussed.

Waddle, who has never cloned the repo, continues to receive praise for his team’s strong velocity and spotless charts.

When asked about team performance issues and customer complaints, Waddle pointed to a dashboard boasting 100 percent velocity and a Trello board labeled "Q2 Wins." He then placed two engineers on performance improvement plans for "struggling to deliver code" on what is, by all visible metrics, a clearly high-functioning team.

Next quarter, he plans to add a new dashboard to track morale.