What a Broken Pipeline Actually Costs Per Week

Pull the last four weeks of pipeline incidents and put an hour next to each one. The total is rarely what you guessed.

Firefighting rarely shows up in a sprint report. It hides in Slack threads, reruns before standup, and the engineer who says “quick fix” three times a week.

So count it. For each incident in the last four weeks, write down:

• who picked it up
• engineer-hours spent getting the number right again
• whether it had the same root cause as an earlier one

Add up the engineer-hours and divide by 4.

If your weekly number is above a day of senior time, that’s before you count the roadmap work that didn’t happen. Or the engineer who’s quietly updating their CV.

It’s the first thing I count in a Platform Review, because it shows where senior time is going.

If the number surprised you, that’s worth 30 minutes: https://cal.com/thomasnys/30min?utm_source=linkedin&utm_content=broken-pipeline-weekly-cost