Scenario — Thursday freeze, two people out

You lead a QA team of five on a B2B product (billing + admin + a new “usage export” the sales VP wants in this train).

This week

Person	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu freeze 4pm	Fri release window
You (lead)	In	In	In	Evidence owner	Go/no-go
Priya	In	In	In	In	In
Sam	Sick	Sick	?	?	?
Riley	PTO	PTO	PTO	Back	Back
Jordan	In — week 3 of a PIP	In	In	In	In

Jordan's PIP bar: checkout exploratory notes must name a risk and a cut, two releases in a row. Last release they did not.

On-call: Priya was up 1–3am Tuesday for a payments page.

Immovable

• Contract renewal demo Friday 11am. Enterprise tenant uses SSO + billing.
• Sales wants usage export in this train. Engineering says it is “probably fine.” No one has a written test plan. Export can dump customer emails if a flag is wrong.
• CI flake rate on the admin suite is ~25%. Checkout API tests are stable.

You have already ranked eight tickets (same muscle as the eight-bugs lab). You cannot also staff a full settings-UI pass and a new export suite with this roster.

Write the call.

Go / no-go — (your name, date)

Copy this file. Fill every heading. Keep it to one page if you can.

The call (first five lines)

Go / no-go / go-with-conditions:

The sentence I will say in the room:

Roster (not headcount)

Person	This week	Role on this train

Who is burned / out / on a PIP, and what that does to the plan:

What we covered

What we are explicitly not testing

• Cut:
• Why that is acceptable for this train:

Three risks

Risk	Owner	If it bites

The VP sentence

They want all eight fires, including usage export, with this roster.

What I say:

Artifacts I used

• Quality-review deck outline
• Week grid (coverage lesson)
• Other:

Rubric

A pass is specific and short.

Must	Pass	Fail
Call in the first five lines	Go, no-go, or go-with-conditions, named	Status novel, “we feel good”
Roster	Named humans and shifts	Headcount or “the team”
Labor	Two people out / on-call hangover shows up in the plan	Fantasy five-person week
Cut	One named thing you will not test, with why	“We will try to get to it”
Risks	Three, each with an owner and a bite plan	A laundry list or CI-is-green as the only evidence
People	Jordan/PIP or equivalent is a staffing fact, not gossip	Personality story
VP sentence	One sentence they can argue with	A slide about process

Green CI alone is never a pass.

When members exist, this paper is what you could bring to a Leadership Circle. Until then, writing it is the practice.