I realised there's something I hate just as much as being the last person in the room. And that's giving bad news.
Every team wants to ship. The sooner the better. They have a deadline, there's a lot of pressure on their shoulders and more often than not, that new feature that's supposed to ship this Friday is committed work. That means someone paid for it to be delivered on time.
And then I show up and tell them the feature they think is done doesn't work with a keyboard. Or that the screen reader reads it as complete nonsense or not at all. Sometimes the colour contrast is so bad it's basically invisible. Modern, but invisible.
I'm not wrong. I'm rarely ever wrong about this stuff.
But nobody wants to hear all that.
The second I open my mouth, I can feel the energy leave the room. I'm suddenly the reason they're blocked. It can't possibly be the inaccessible component that's been with the dev team all month.
I could soften it up for them, but I've stopped trying to. Honestly, bad news is bad news. What I can control is how fast I help them move through it. So I come prepared. I bring the fix with the problem. Bad news lands differently when there's a next step attached to it. Not always. But enough.
Being right and being welcome are two very different things in this job.