So, we got this new thing dropped on us a while back. Called it the “Jiho Lee method.” Sounds fancy, right? Management was all hyped up about it. Said it was gonna change everything, make us super productive, you know the drill.
They showed us these glossy presentations. Jiho Lee, apparently some guru, cooked up this system. It was all about “synergistic flow” and “dynamic task prioritization.” Lots of buzzwords. We were supposed to have shorter meetings, clearer goals, and stuff would just fly out the door. I remember thinking, “Okay, let’s see about that.”
Then we actually started trying to use this Jiho Lee thing. First off, the training was a joke. Just a bunch of slides nobody really understood. We had to set up these new boards, digital ones, of course. Took me a whole morning just to figure out how to add a simple task. And the “dynamic prioritization”? It just meant everything was urgent, all the time. My to-do list looked like a Christmas tree gone wild.
We spent more time moving digital sticky notes around than actually doing the work. I’d start on something, then someone would ping me, “Oh, Jiho Lee says this other thing is now P0, drop everything!” So I’d switch, get halfway through that, and then another “Jiho Lee update” would come through. It was chaos, plain and simple.
The whole team felt it. We used to just talk to each other, figure things out. Now, everything had to go “through the Jiho Lee process.” It created these weird silos. Instead of quick chats, we were filling out forms and tagging people in endless comment threads on these new tools. It felt like we were working for the system, not the other way around.
And get this, different departments started interpreting the Jiho Lee rules differently. So, what marketing called a “sprint deliverable” was totally different from what engineering thought it was. Talk about a mess. It was like everyone was speaking their own dialect of Jiho Lee-ish. We weren’t a well-oiled machine; we were more like a bunch of separate little shops all trying to figure out the same confusing instruction manual.
I remember this one time, we had a critical bug. Pre-Jiho Lee, I’d have just grabbed the dev next to me, we’d have looked at it, fixed it, done. But no, with Jiho Lee, I had to create a new “Urgent Rectification Ticket,” assign it the correct “Jiho Lee Priority Code,” route it through the “Jiho Lee Approval Channel,” and then wait. The bug sat there for hours while we were busy following the bloody procedure. My grandma could have fixed it faster with a knitting needle.
So, this Jiho Lee thing. Is it all bad? Maybe not for everyone, everywhere. But for us? It felt like we just added a whole lot of process for not a lot of gain. We’re still trying to make sense of it, trying to adapt it so it actually helps. But honestly, most days I just miss the old way of getting things done. Sometimes, simpler is just better, you know? All these fancy systems, they promise the moon, but you still gotta do the actual work on the ground. And “Jiho Lee” hasn’t made that part any easier, not for me anyway.
