Avoid Falling into the Agile Trap
Agile promised to transform how we build products by emphasizing collaboration, adaptability, and delivering value incrementally. Yet for many organizations, Agile has devolved into a series of rituals and jargon masking an unchanged, rigid approach to work. Too often, companies reduce Agile to a superficial checklist, ignoring the cultural shift it demands and continuing to operate with traditional mindsets.
From my experience helping teams build product functions and streamline operations, I’ve seen Agile misapplied in ways that undermine its core values. Many organizations claiming to be Agile fall into predictable, hybrid patterns that borrow Agile terminology but function more like traditional Waterfall.
Before exploring Agile pitfalls, it’s important to recognize that not all projects benefit from Agile. In certain cases, Waterfall may actually be the better framework.
When Waterfall Makes Sense
While Agile is celebrated for its adaptability, Waterfall excels in projects with fixed requirements and minimal risk of change. Here are a few scenarios where Waterfall is more appropriate:
Regulatory or Compliance Projects: Industries like finance and healthcare often require strict compliance with well-defined deliverables. Waterfall’s structured phases ensure thorough documentation and verification.
Hardware Development: Physical constraints and high costs of mid-cycle changes make Waterfall practical for hardware projects.
Fixed-Scope Contracts: Projects with set deadlines, such as construction or government work, benefit from Waterfall’s predictability.
Low-Risk, Well-Understood Projects: When requirements are clear and unlikely to evolve (e.g., system migrations), Waterfall provides clarity and efficiency.
Even in these cases, traditional frameworks can benefit from Agile principles like stakeholder collaboration and incremental testing.
The Faux-Agile Playbook
Problems arise when teams try to blend Agile and Waterfall without clear intent, leading to processes that feel Agile but retain Waterfall’s rigidity. Here are two common pitfalls:
1. Agile in Name, Waterfall at Heart
What Happens: A team spends weeks aligning on requirements, builds out Jira Epics with a broad estimate (e.g., three months), and organizes work into two-week “sprints.” Six to nine months later, only part of the scope is released, followed by three months of integration fixes.
What’s Missing: Despite extensive upfront planning, insufficient due diligence led to recurring rework as issues emerged. The team spun their wheels on an enormous project, revisiting plans instead of delivering incremental value, wasting time and resources without meaningful customer impact.
What’s Worked: One team needed upfront documentation to see the big picture. We created a high-level overview of multiple Epics and focused on delivering the highest-value feature first. After each release, we revisited and adjusted the overall plan based on learnings before tackling the next Epic, maintaining alignment while staying agile.
2. The Never-Ending Backlog
What Happens: A team builds a massive backlog and meets daily to check progress. Every two weeks, they review completed work, roll 80–90% of unfinished tasks into the next sprint, and add new ones. Releases occur only when enough cumulative work is deemed valuable.
What’s Missing: The team prioritizes task completion over outcomes, mistaking busyness for productivity. Unrealistic expectations lead to overpromising and underdelivering, with customer value often taking a backseat.
What’s Worked: To break this cycle, we implemented ruthless prioritization and aligned tasks with customer outcomes. By analyzing past trends, we set more realistic Sprint expectations and shifted focus to confidently delivering incremental value every two weeks. This approach improved alignment, boosted morale, and increased customer impact.
Recognizing When You’re Not Truly Agile
These patterns are common but fixable. Here are warning signs that your team may be stuck in a faux-Agile loop:
Prolonged Delivery Cycles: It takes months—or years—to deliver incremental value.
Process Over People: Teams spend more time updating tools than solving real problems.
Lack of Customer-Centricity: User feedback doesn’t shape priorities or releases.
Unending Backlogs: Your backlog is a dumping ground instead of a prioritized roadmap.
Resistance to Change: Pivots are seen as failures rather than opportunities to adapt.
Recognizing these symptoms is the first step toward realigning with Agile principles.
How to Shift Toward True Agility
Fixing Agile missteps doesn’t require throwing out your processes overnight. Here’s how to refocus on core Agile principles:
Start with the Agile Manifesto: Revisit its values. Are you prioritizing collaboration, adaptability, and customer feedback?
Release Early, Release Often: Deliver small, functional value increments quickly. Basecamp, for example, uses six-week cycles to keep work manageable and iterative.
Empower Teams to Own Their Work: Shift decision-making to teams closest to the work. Leadership should focus on enabling, not dictating.
Focus on Value, Not Velocity: Measure success by customer impact, not tasks completed.
Simplify the Backlog: Ruthlessly prioritize and maintain focus on the most critical work.
Create Space for Cross-Functional Collaboration: Break silos by aligning stakeholders and solving problems collaboratively. Design Thinking is a great tool for fostering these discussions.
Celebrate Adaptability: Embrace change as a sign of learning and progress, not failure.
Agile isn’t a checklist or a set of rituals—it’s a mindset that demands flexibility, collaboration, and a focus on delivering real value. Its downfall lies not in the methodology but in the way it has been diluted into rigid processes that mimic the very frameworks it was designed to replace.
By returning to Agile’s core principles, teams can unlock innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and foster a culture of adaptability and resilience. The journey may not be easy, but it’s well worth it.
