90 % of them are the same five questions, every single time:
- “Which env vars does this need?”
- “Do we need a migration or is it backward-compatible?”
- “What should the feature flag be called?”
- “How are we monitoring/alerting this?”
- “Who actually reviews these changes?”
By the time the ticket is “ready,” half the sprint is gone and everyone is quietly annoyed.
This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a scale problem.
At 100+ people you can afford grooming ceremonies, template enforcement, and tech leads who chase answers.At 8 people, the person who knows the answers is also the person closing the $180k deal, debugging prod at 2 a.m., and pairing with the junior who’s stuck.
So the questions pile up. Velocity bleeds out. And founders wonder why “we move so slowly for such a small team.”
The Real Cost of the 40-Comment Ticket
- 3–6 hours of senior/founder time per ticket answering the same things
- 1–2 days of engineering delay before real work starts
- Context-switching tax that destroys deep work
- Juniors learning that “figuring it out themselves” means suffering in silence
- Quiet resentment that becomes churn 6–9 months later
Multiply by 15 tickets per sprint → that’s multiple engineer-weeks lost every month, forever.
How Actual <30-Person Teams Killed the 40-Comment Monster
- One source of truth that never gets staleA single “How We Do Things” page (Notion, Coda, whatever) with the canonical answers to the five deadly questions. Link it in the Linear template. Make it mandatory reading for new hires.
- Ticket templates that force the answers upfrontLinear/Custom templates with required fields:– Env vars / secrets– Migration: Yes/No + link– Feature flag name (auto-suggest convention)– Monitoring & alerting plan– Reviewers (pre-filled by component)
- Stop typing tickets when running between firesA 30-second voice note contains 10× more context than a rushed written one. The trick is turning that voice note into a ticket that already has the answers baked in.
- Let the tool remember the boring stuff foreverModern AI tools now let anyone on the team record “Add rate limiting to the file upload endpoint” and get back a ticket that already:– Lists the exact service & repo– Adds the correct env-var block– Creates the LaunchDarkly flag with your naming convention– Adds Datadog dashboard + PagerDuty escalation– Pre-assigns the right reviewers
At SprintSync AI we built exactly that. Teams that adopt it routinely see average comments per ticket fall from ~30 to ~3 in under two weeks. Work actually starts the same day the idea is spoken.
It’s $9/month. One prevented 40-comment spiral pays for the whole team for two years.
If your Linear tickets look more like WhatsApp threads than executable specs, try the 7-day free trial (no card required) — or at the very least, start recording voice notes instead of typing when you’re late for your next call.
Your future velocity will thank you.
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