Every sprint starts with optimism. The board is clean, the story points are perfectly balanced, and the team is ready to ship.
Then, Tuesday happens.
The CEO wants a "quick favor." A major client finds a critical bug in production. The marketing team urgently needs a landing page tweak. By Thursday, your pristine sprint board is buried under a mountain of "urgent" tickets that were never discussed in planning.
This is Unplanned Work, and it is the silent killer of engineering velocity.
Why Unplanned Work is So Dangerous
