The Engagement That Started As A 10-Day Review

The brief says the dashboards are slow. Day five usually finds the reason nobody asked about.

On day two I’m reading pipeline code and query plans, and the slow dashboards do have a fix: a couple of models rebuilt incrementally, one warehouse resized.

Around day five the other thing shows up. Two teams load the same source with different logic, and with no staging layer every fix lands straight in production tables. The run order lives in one engineer’s head.

None of that is in the brief. From the inside it just looks like how things work.

The speed fixes go in the next sprint. The structural part goes into the 90-day plan, and that’s the part that decides whether the team needs ongoing senior help or can carry it themselves. Sometimes they can, and I say so.

Day ten forces a written answer to “what would you do first?” For me, that deadline is most of the value.

What would be missing from your brief? I wrote up what week one usually turns up: https://thomasnys.com/posts/platform-review-what-i-find-in-week-one/