Artifact: Manager-vs-Maker Catch — Priya's Bad Week

A diagnosis of a week where a manager coded on the critical path and missed two 1:1s -- exercises co-20, co-01. Everline and every name here are fictional; every quote is an illustrative, constructed example.

What happened: a production data-quality incident hit Thursday morning. Instead of assigning it and coaching from the side, I opened the code myself and fixed it directly -- it was faster in the moment, and I was the person who knew the ingestion pipeline best. I then spent Friday finishing the fix's test coverage myself instead of handing it off, and cancelled both Thursday and Friday 1:1s to do it.

The bottleneck this created: nobody else on the team got closer to being able to handle the next pipeline incident alone -- I was, again, the single person who could diagnose and fix this class of bug fastest, which is exactly the bottleneck my promotion was supposed to remove. Two reports also went a full extra week without their 1:1, right when one of them needed a follow-up on a feedback conversation.

Corrective habit change: for the next production incident, I pair with whoever's closest to ready on that part of the system and narrate my diagnosis out loud instead of silently fixing it -- slower during the incident itself, but it's the only path that makes the team less dependent on me being available next time. 1:1s move only if the report agrees, never unilaterally.