Are your teams working flat out, but delivery still feels slow, unpredictable, and hard to explain to stakeholders?

In this episode of Wicked Problems, Toby speaks with Sonya Siderova, founder and CEO of NAVE, a flow analytics platform that helps software and delivery teams identify process bottlenecks, reduce cycle times, and make performance visible through data. Sonya brings over a decade of experience in software development, product management, and process optimisation.

NAVE has been on the market for eight years and was built around a simple but powerful observation: the problems slowing your teams down are usually invisible, and the instinct to push people harder makes them worse, not better.

What We Cover

• Why optimising for busyness actively hinders your delivery process, and what to focus on instead

• How flow analytics reveals that 70% of work time is often spent waiting, not being worked on

• The mindset shift from managing people to managing the flow of work through a system

• Why 'stop starting, start finishing' is so difficult for management to accept, and how data makes the case

• How NAVE's AI layer translates complex flow metrics into plain-language narratives for non-technical stakeholders

• Why deploying AI upstream of an unresolved bottleneck makes the bottleneck significantly worse

• How to use flow data to have strategic conversations about reprioritisation and work in progress limits

• What reports from Atlassian, MIT, and Oxford reveal about why AI initiatives are hitting problems in delivery teams

Whether you are a transformation lead trying to build the case for change, an engineering manager looking to improve predictability, or a consultant working with delivery teams, this episode gives you a clear framework for understanding where work is really getting stuck and how to talk about it in language that resonates with leadership.

Chapters

00:00 — Why AI Amplifies Broken Processes, Not Just Good Ones

00:21 — Introducing NAVE and the Series on Transformation Tools

02:34 — What Flow Analytics Actually Measures

04:30 — The 70/30 Problem: Most Work Time Is Waiting, Not Working

06:02 — Why Keeping People Busy Is Killing Your Delivery

07:17 — Getting Comfortable With Data and a Different Way of Working

10:00 — Stop Starting, Start Finishing: The Management Mindset Shift

19:00 — How NAVE's AI Turns Flow Metrics Into Plain-Language Narratives

27:04 — Your Job Is Now the Change Work, Not the Data Translation

29:35 — The Bottleneck Problem: What Happens When You Speed Up the Wrong Thing

Resources

Wicked Problems Podcast

https://www.wickedproblems.fm

NAVE, Flow Analytics Platform

https://getnave.com/

Sonya Siderova on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/siderova/

Kanban Guide (Kanban University)

https://www.kanban.university/kanban-guide

Atlassian State of Teams Report

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/state-of-teams

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Aerovolt.co.uk

I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions, please write to me at: toby@wickedproblems.fm.