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You walk out of the status meeting feeling good. Everyone's busy. Everyone's heads down. Three developers, three features, everybody grabbed one. Efficient, right?

Two weeks later you've got nothing to ship. Nothing to demo. Nothing to get feedback on.

Here's the part that stings: the team didn't goof off. They worked hard the whole time. The trap is the pattern, not the people.

When everyone starts something different, everything sits at 70% on day fifteen. And nobody — not your customer, not your stakeholders — gives partial credit. You can't ship most of a feature.

Now run the exact same team, same features, same two weeks, but finish one thing before starting the next. Two features shipped instead of zero. Same total work. The only thing that changed was the order.

"Almost done" is the most dangerous phrase in software delivery, and there's a context-switching tax on top that makes the all-at-once version even worse than it looks.

The full walkthrough — board and all — is in the video.