I'm sure you've all heard this one: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
It seems to me that a lot of organizations lately have changed this question to: If you don’t track your work with a ticket, did it really happen?
In one of my recent Professional Agile Leadership classes, we talked about what happens when teams develop a paranoia with showing how busy they are by creating unnecessary tickets to track their work.
Now I am all for transparency, but many teams have taken this too far.
I once worked with a team that was so paranoid about this that if the Product Owner asked whether a certain idea was feasible, the team would create a ticket to research it! They were so afraid of making sure that they "looked busy" that they didn't even want to spend time on Refinement without proof -- aka, a ticket.
That’s not transparency. That’s paranoia.
When you start judging the success of individual team members by how many tickets they close, this is the result: a lot of unnecessary paperwork created by the Developer to justify their own existence.
Show me what you measure as success, and I’ll show you where your team is focused. If you measure success by outcomes — happier customers, improved outcomes, better quality, increased usability — your team will focus on outcomes. If you measure success by the number of tickets closed, you’ll get a tsunami of tickets.
I’m not saying there’s no value in tracking work. The Sprint Backlog exists to create transparency — showing the Sprint Goal, the selected Product Backlog items, and the plan for delivering them. Used well, it helps teams collaborate, coordinate, and inspect progress.
But balance matters too.
Not every valuable activity needs a ticket. Thinking, collaborating, answering questions, exploring feasibility, refining ideas — these are all legitimate and necessary parts of complex work. Just because they don’t produce a ticket doesn’t mean they don’t add value.
So, before you create that next ticket to track your work, as yourself this question: Am I creating this ticket to create transparency or to feel safe?
Because if your team believes that work only “counts” when there’s a ticket attached to it, the forest fills with paperwork while the trees that matter go unnoticed. Value comes from customer outcomes, not logged activity.