Seth Godin gave developers a rule in 2005: don't shave that yak. As a team lead, I found a good reason to break it. My engineers' status updates kept opening the same way: a smile, then a story about the yak they had to shave before getting to the actual task. Not the state I wanted my team in. But every story named something missing: a tool, a piece of infrastructure, a conversation that never happened. Naming it was the first step to fixing it. In five minutes we'll get introduced to the term through a webcomic and an early-2000s sitcom. We'll see what the standard advice throws away, and how a yak story turns into better tooling and the architecture conversations nobody schedules. You'll walk out knowing what to ask when the next yak story starts.
Independent consultant