Why we removed three statuses (and added one)

We started with eight statuses: Backlog, Todo, In Progress, In Review, Blocked, On Hold, Cancelled, Done. By month nine we had data showing "Blocked" was being used for at least four different things: waiting on a person, waiting on a deploy, waiting on a third party, and "I don’t want to work on this right now."

We split Blocked into Waiting and Snoozed. The team’s burn-down chart immediately broke — because "Snoozed" had been silently aging in the Blocked bucket. The first week post-launch, our weekly retro had five different teams say "wait, how do we have so much snoozed work?"

That visibility was the point. Two months later, 60% of snoozed work either got resolved or got explicitly cancelled. The other 40% became a recurring agenda item.