The Agile Pivot: From Useless Icing to a Pie in the Sky
Description
This is the second part of a chat conversation screenshot between 'PM' and 'John,' continuing the cake-baking analogy for a software project. The PM, having previously insisted John start on the icing without all ingredients, now asks him to bake the cake without eggs. John reluctantly agrees to start the icing but points out a new blocker: 'another team is using the stove this week,' a metaphor for a shared, contended resource like a testing environment. In a sudden pivot, the PM praises John for completing the icing, only to immediately announce, 'Change of plans though. Customer came back and said they actually want a pie.' The conversation ends with John's silent, frustrated response: '...'. This meme perfectly captures the pain of scope creep, where requirements change so drastically that completed work becomes entirely useless, leaving the developer speechless
Comments
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Congratulations, you've just completed the icing for a feature that's now been deprecated. Your JIRA ticket has been moved to the 'Won't Do' column, but the story points will haunt the sprint velocity forever
Nothing like a PM pushing frosting-first development: ship the UI behind a “hasEggs” feature flag, borrow the oven from DevOps, then pivot Friday from Cake-as-a-Service to full-stack Pie-Ops
This is why we now have a dedicated "icing storage" microservice that costs $50k/month and nobody remembers why we built it
This is the software equivalent of being asked to implement the frontend before the API spec is finalized, then being congratulated for shipping it, only to be told the customer actually wants a mobile app instead of a web interface. The '...' response perfectly captures that moment when you realize you've just spent three days building something that will never see production because requirements changed after you solved the impossible problem they originally asked for
Classic enterprise agile: ship the frosting microservice while the oven platform is booked, then the roadmap pivots to pie and we relabel the frosting as a “decorator service” to hit OKRs
Enterprise Agile: ship the icing while DB creds (eggs) are missing and the oven (shared cluster) is booked by Platform; then the customer pivots to pie and asks if we can reuse the CSS
PMs perfecting the art of 'frost UI before MVP foundations solidify,' only to pivot the whole stack to pie