The Slow Adoption

Thursday, 08:26 — Katja’s Office

Katja had learned to work in the gaps.

Not the healthy kind of gaps. Not the ones you take because you planned your day like a grown-up.

The gaps you steal between a Slack fire and a calendar ambush.

A build was running. Her laptop fan was screaming, the machine hot enough that she’d moved her coffee mug away from the vent. Somewhere in the open office, someone laughed like sleep was still a thing. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright for her tired eyes. Her neck ached from hunching over her keyboard since 07:30.

Katja opened Navigator, her fingers moving automatically to the familiar bookmark.

No dashboard. No forms. No faux-psychology questionnaire asking how she felt about her journey.

Just a blank text box and a cursor. Simple. Almost too simple.

She typed fast, the way you type when you’re afraid you’ll be interrupted, her fingers flying across the keys.

- Standup devolved into blame again.
- Waiting for final assets, again.
- Hassan paged at 03:00, again.
- I spent 45 minutes explaining to Lukas that “faster” is not a mood.

She stared at the lines for half a second, her stomach twisting slightly.

They looked stupid. Small. Petty. Like complaining instead of leading.

But they were true. And that had to count for something.

Katja hit send before she could second-guess herself.

A second later, Slack lit up with a notification sound that made her jaw clench.

Of course. Of fucking course.

Katja closed her eyes, her shoulders sagging. Counted to three. Breathed. Opened her eyes.

Another day. Another attempt to catch signal in a room full of noise.

10:11 — One-on-One With Mariana

Mariana walked in late by exactly two minutes, hair still damp from a shower, laptop under one arm, and a black T-shirt screaming SEPULTURA in cracked white print. She smelled faintly of coffee and cigarette smoke.

Katja’s mouth twitched.

Mariana noticed immediately, her eyes narrowing. “What?”

“Nothing.” Katja nodded at the shirt. “Sepultura. Bold choice for a one-on-one.”

Mariana shrugged. “It’s just a shirt.”

“It’s not just a shirt.” Katja leaned back. “I’ve got an Opeth vinyl collection that takes up an entire shelf. My ex used to call it my ‘sad Swedish men corner.’”

Mariana blinked. Then laughed, quick and surprised. “Opeth? Seriously?”

“Don’t judge me.”

“I’m not judging.” Mariana sat down, grin fading back into her usual guarded expression. “Okay. Why am I here? Besides music taste confession.”

Katja slid her laptop around, the screen’s reflection catching in Mariana’s eyes.

Navigator was open. A single text box. Nothing else.

Mariana squinted, leaning forward. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Mariana stared like she was waiting for the second screen to load, her brow furrowing. “Where’s the… I don’t know. The framework? The questions? The ‘rate your happiness from one to ten’ bullshit?”

Katja’s smile turned sharp. “Exactly. None of that.”

Mariana leaned forward. “So what does it do?”

“You write what happened. In your words. Short. Honest. No performance.”

Mariana’s eyes narrowed. “And then?”

“And then the system synthesizes it weekly. It turns chaos into something you can actually talk about.”

Mariana sat back, arms crossing defensively over the Sepultura logo. “Sounds like another management tool.”

“It’s a reality tool,” Katja said, holding her gaze. “Management tools are for pretending. This is for catching what’s actually happening before it turns into another 2.1-star week.”

Mariana looked unconvinced, her jaw set. “And who sees what I write?”

“You write whatever you want to share,” Katja said. “Everyone logs, and the system creates a factual weekly report with recommendations and conclusions. It catches the stuff that keeps biting us while Lukas thinks we’re ‘moving fast.’”

Mariana’s jaw clenched at the name, a muscle twitching beneath her cheekbone.

Katja watched her for a moment, then leaned forward slightly. “Mariana. You know that all-hands? Half the room knew what was wrong. The other half had power. That’s a broken system. I can’t fix it blind.” Her voice was quieter now, almost pleading.

Mariana exhaled through her nose. “Fine. I’ll try it. But if this becomes HR theatre, I’m out.”

“Deal.”

Mariana took the laptop, her fingers hesitating over the trackpad before clicking into the text box. She stared at the empty cursor for a long moment, then typed with two fingers like she was suspicious of the keyboard, hunting and pecking deliberately.

- Inventory fix merged, but QA can’t validate because test environment is still broken.
- Waiting for art assets for the new tutorial flow.
- Got asked to “just quick change” requirements in the middle of implementation.
- I’m tired.

She paused, her finger hovering over the backspace key, then deleted the last bullet with three quick taps.

Katja noticed, her eyes tracking the movement. “Leave it.”

Mariana shook her head, not looking up. “No. That’s not data. That’s complaining.”

“It’s still true,” Katja said quietly. “And it matters. But write it how you can live with it.”

Mariana’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, frozen for a moment, then replaced it with something more clinical.

• Running on five hours of sleep. Reaction time is shit.

She hit send, her finger clicking harder than necessary.

For a second, she looked almost embarrassed, her cheeks flushing slightly as she pushed the laptop back toward Katja.

Katja nodded once. “Welcome to the cult.”

“Don’t call it a cult,” Mariana said.

“Fine. Welcome to the only honest thing we’ve tried in months.”

11:42 — Hassan’s Corner

Hassan’s desk looked like a crime scene.

Empty energy drink can, the aluminum dented. Two cold coffees in mismatched mugs, one with a lipstick stain that definitely wasn’t his. A notepad full of IP addresses and half-legible Arabic swearing in fading blue ink. The air around his workspace smelled like stale caffeine and the particular stress-sweat that came from overnight pager duty.

Katja didn’t ask when he slept. The answer would just make her angrier.

She tapped the edge of his monitor gently. “You got a minute?”

Hassan didn’t turn around, his eyes fixed on the terminal displaying a scrolling log of errors. “If the servers give me one.”

Katja waited until the alert sound stopped, a shrill beep that made her wince.

He leaned back, rubbed his face hard with both hands, the gesture pulling at his skin. Dark circles shadowed his eyes. “Okay. Minute. Go.”

“I want you logging in Navigator.”

Hassan blinked. “You want me to write diary entries now?”

“Not a diary. Reality. You’re in every conversation, Hassan. You’re everyone’s dependency and nobody’s planning around it.”

Hassan’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “So you want to prove I’m drowning.”

“I want to stop pretending you’re not.”

He stared at her for a long beat. Then: “Fine.”

He opened the site, the screen reflecting in his tired eyes. The same empty text box.

“No prompts?” he asked, one eyebrow raising slightly.

“No prompts.”

Hassan started typing with the calm precision of someone who’d long stopped believing in miracles, his fingers moving steadily across the keyboard.

- Pager at 03:07 for CPU spike. Root cause: analytics job running on wrong schedule.
- Asked to set up staging parity again. No time, no help.
- Got pulled into three meetings about hiring. Still on call.
- Everyone wants releases faster. Nobody wants to maintain the pipeline.

He hit send without hesitation.

Then he looked at Katja like she was the one being tested, his eyes sharp despite the exhaustion. “If this becomes a feel-good dashboard, I’ll burn it down.”

Katja nodded, meeting his gaze steadily. “Same.”

Hassan turned back to his terminal, his shoulders already hunching back into their defensive posture. “Also, tell Lukas to stop promising release dates in marketing meetings.”

“Already tried.”

Hassan laughed once, short and bitter. “Then write that down too.”

Friday, 16:08 — Leadership Meeting

The leadership meeting smelled like stale coffee and fake optimism. The conference room’s air conditioning hummed unevenly, making one side of the room cold while the other stayed stuffy.

Katja stood at the whiteboard, marker in hand though she hadn’t written anything yet. Lukas sat at the head of the table, hands folded, spine straight, looking like a man who’d decided he was going to win through sheer willpower.

Around them: Lars with his designer glasses and his permanent calm, tapping a pen against his notebook. Carmen with her arms crossed, eyes daring anyone to call her department slow. Claudia already halfway through her phone, thumb scrolling. Daniel looking tired enough to cry, his hands wrapped around a coffee mug like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

Katja didn’t bother with slides. Her PowerPoint days were over.

She opened Navigator on her laptop, then turned the screen so everyone could see. The simple interface looked almost embarrassingly basic on the conference room’s large monitor.

“Here’s the interface,” she said, her voice steady. “You write what happened. Short. Honest. Blockers and outcomes. That’s it.”

Lars squinted at the screen, then at her, his pen pausing mid-tap. “And the value is… what? We already have Jira.”

Katja looked at him directly, holding his gaze. “Jira is where work goes to die. This is where reality goes to live.”

Carmen snorted, the sound sharp in the quiet room. “Sounds like therapy.”

“It’s not therapy,” Katja said, her voice sharpening. “It’s evidence. Weekly synthesis. Trends over time. Repeated blockers. Hidden dependencies.”

Claudia finally looked up from her phone, her expression skeptical. “So you want everyone to do more admin?”

Katja’s patience frayed, her hands tightening on the edge of the table. “Thirty seconds a day. While your build runs. While your render exports. You’re already losing hours to rework you could prevent with visibility.”

Daniel cleared his throat. “I’d do it.”

Carmen stared at him like he’d betrayed the tribe.

Lukas leaned forward. “I’m not mandating it company-wide,” he said. “Yet. But I want department leads to try. For two weeks. Then we review.”

Lars spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t have time to write logs. I’m designing an entire monetization overhaul.”

Katja’s voice went cold, each word deliberate. “If you don’t have thirty seconds to tell us what’s blocking you, you’re not leading. You’re performing.”

The room went quiet. Someone’s phone buzzed on the table, ignored. The air conditioning hummed louder in the sudden silence.

Carmen muttered in Spanish, low enough that only Katja caught it, her voice barely above a whisper. “Qué fastidio…”

Claudia sighed heavily, dropping her phone on the table with a soft thunk. “Fine. I’ll try. But if this shows up in some investor report, I swear to God.”

“It won’t,” Katja said firmly.

Hassan, sitting near the door like he was ready to escape at any moment, said flatly, his voice carrying the weight of too many broken promises: “If it does, I’m quitting.”

Lukas held up a hand, palm out. “It stays internal. That’s the point.”

Katja watched their faces, reading the skepticism in their tight jaws and folded arms.

One maybe. Two reluctant. The rest already dismissing it.

Most of them still saw it as a tool. Another burden. Another checkbox.

Not as a mirror. Not as the thing that might finally show them what they kept refusing to see.

Friday, 18:23 — “We’re Hiring Ten Developers”

The announcement hit Slack like a grenade at 18:23 on a Friday evening.

Reactions exploded underneath within seconds.

Rocket emoji. Fire emoji. A few claps from people who didn’t understand what this actually meant.

And then the quieter reactions — the ones Lukas didn’t see.

Mariana sent Katja a private message:

Hassan’s message was shorter.

Katja didn’t reply to either message. Her hands were shaking slightly as she closed Slack.

She walked straight into Lukas’s office without knocking, her footsteps sharp on the hardwood floor.

He looked up from his laptop, already annoyed, his jaw setting. “I knew you’d come.”

Katja didn’t sit. She stood in front of his desk, hands at her sides, forcing them to stay still. “We can’t onboard ten developers.”

“We can,” Lukas said, closing his laptop with a soft snap. “We have money. We need speed.”

Katja felt something in her chest tighten, her breathing shallow. “Money buys contracts. It doesn’t buy absorption capacity. Tomasz is already breaking. Hassan is underwater. Mariana’s one bad week away from telling you to go to hell.” Her voice was rising despite her efforts to stay calm.

Lukas’s jaw flexed. “So what do you propose? We do nothing?”

“I propose we stop confusing hiring with delivery,” Katja said. “And I propose you look at what’s already coming out of Navigator.”

Lukas leaned back. “Three people writing bullet points.”

“Three people writing the truth,” Katja snapped. Then she forced her voice down. “Even with three, the same things keep showing up. Waiting. Interruptions. Dependencies. Hassan. Rework. Meeting time.”

Lukas’s eyes narrowed, his hands flat on the desk. “Are you saying don’t hire?”

“I’m saying: if you hire, you also fund onboarding. Documentation. Mentorship time. Reduced scope. Otherwise you’re just pouring water into a bucket with a hole and calling it growth.” She could hear her pulse in her ears.

Lukas stood up slowly, deliberately. He was taller than her, and he used it the way men like him always used it — as pressure. He came around the desk, closing the distance between them.

“We’re hiring,” he said, his voice final. “I’ll talk to HR. We’ll ‘make an onboarding plan.’ But we need speed. The board wants progress.”

Katja’s hands curled into fists in her pockets, nails biting into her palms.

“Then you’ll get activity,” she said quietly, her voice barely controlled. “Not progress.”

Lukas stared at her, his face hardening. “You’re being dramatic.”

Katja laughed once, sharp and bitter. “I watched Carmen almost punch Lars last week. Dramatic is the company. I’m just documenting it.”

She turned and left before she said something that would get her fired, her footsteps echoing down the hallway.

Back at her desk, she opened Navigator again, her hands still shaking slightly from the confrontation. Her coffee had gone cold. The office was quieter now, most people already gone for the weekend.

The cursor blinked, steady and patient.

Katja typed, her fingers finding the keys with angry precision.

- Lukas announced hiring 10 developers to “go faster.”
- Told him we can’t absorb that without scope reduction and mentorship time.
- He overruled.
- This will hurt.

She hit send, the small confirmation message appearing briefly.

Across the room, Mariana stared at her screen for a long moment, then opened her own log with a few sharp clicks.

Hassan, without looking up from his terminal, the glow illuminating his exhausted face, muttered in Arabic: “Ya rab…” and typed too, his fingers moving mechanically.

Three people. Three tiny voices writing truth into the void.

Eighty-two ignoring it. Eighty-two still believing status meetings told them reality.

And the noise still screaming, drowning out everything that mattered.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.