Is Agile Dead? – Spoiler: No, but …
On social media, articles and videos claiming “Agile is dead” are becoming more common. What’s behind these statements? What real issues are they pointing to? And how can companies avoid starting an agile transformation only to end up with something “dead”?
What’s Behind “Agile is Dead”?
More and more companies are adopting agile approaches. Many realize their traditional methods are no longer reliably delivering the desired results, while others want to appear modern and agile to attract talented employees and investors.
However, an agile transformation is much more than a typical restructuring or introducing new practices like daily stand-ups or using a Jira backlog. Working agile requires a mindset based on specific values and principles.
The challenge is that values and principles cannot be directly translated into actions, especially if they weren’t part of the company’s culture before. Agile frameworks offer concrete structures and workflows to help bring this mindset to life. But if these frameworks—regardless of which one—are implemented without understanding the underlying mindset, things can and will go wrong. The result is anything but agile in the true sense: flexible, effective, and quick.
How to Recognize “Dead” Agile
Team-Level Symptoms
If employees answer one or more of the following questions with “No,” it’s a clear sign that agility is being implemented superficially, without connection to the core values and principles:
- Do teams understand their customers’ needs and actively collaborate with them?
- Can teams self-organize to align with shared goals?
- Do teams regularly deliver valuable and high-quality results?
- Is there an environment where teams can continuously improve?
- Do teams find the chosen framework, such as Scrum, helpful and effective?
Agile work should create customer value while fostering motivation and ownership. If these questions are answered negatively, it often indicates deeper problems rooted in unhealthy work practices.
Lack of Understanding of Customer Value
Teams work on tasks without clear value for users. Instead of creating creative solutions with minimal effort, they generate endless feature lists. This turns the team into a “feature factory” that produces output but delivers no real benefit.
Missing Priorities and Lack of Focus
In a well-prioritized backlog, there is only one most important task. Without clear prioritization, everything is treated as equally important—which ultimately means nothing is. Teams get lost in minor details and achieve little of real value. Often, significant time and budget are spent, but the results remain disappointing.
Responsibility Without Decision-Making Power
Teams are expected to deliver results but lack the authority to make key decisions. Barriers like lengthy approval processes or irrelevant KPIs (e.g., paying based on story points instead of problem-solving) cause frustration. When decisions are imposed externally, motivation to contribute original ideas declines.
Work for Work’s Sake
Processes are followed because “that’s the plan,” not because they make sense. Teams are measured by output (e.g., completed tickets) rather than their contribution to solving problems. This makes work an end in itself, causing teams to lose focus on what truly matters.
Anti-Agile Conditions Outside Agile Teams
Hindering Assignment Model
Paying based on story points and assigning tasks to individuals encourages labor-intensive micromanagement, where the focus shifts to billing “delivered” units rather than achieving real outcomes. Agile teams are unable to focus on achieving results with minimal effort or take responsibility for outcomes. Instead, they are reduced to assembly line work. The core advantage of agile collaboration—close team alignment, delivering more collectively than the sum of individual efforts, and shared responsibility for a common goal—is lost.
Awarding Individual Features to the Lowest Bidder
Rather than developing sustainable, long-term solutions, work is outsourced to the cheapest external resource. These contractors build the requested features, often without considering architecture or maintainability, and disappear once the task is done. This creates short-lived patchwork solutions that become increasingly unstable with every new assignment. What seems cost-effective in the short term becomes a barrier to innovation and quality in the long run.
Slow, Lengthy Processes Outside the Team
Agile teams aiming to deliver results in two-week cycles are slowed down by cumbersome external processes. For instance, a six-week release approval process or overly complex decision-making pathways disconnect teams from customers and drain their motivation. Agility thrives on short feedback loops and quick responses to change. When external delays hold up progress, teams experience frustration and lose the ability to identify missteps early, increasing costs over time.
No Budget or Time for Continuous Improvement
When no time or budget is allocated to reduce technical debt, improve architecture, or adapt processes, the focus remains solely on delivering new features. Meanwhile, the product’s foundation deteriorates. Agile teams need space for ongoing improvements to work sustainably and deliver high-quality results. Without this foundation, agility becomes a sprint marathon that inevitably leads to technical and human burnout.
Bureaucratic Decision-Making Hurdles
Decisions that could be made directly within the team are subject to lengthy approval processes. Whether it’s choosing a new tool or adjusting a technical solution, everything requires external sign-offs, often taking weeks. This lack of autonomy reduces teams to passive executors, contradicting the core principles of agile work. It stifles the dynamism needed to drive innovation.
Focus on Output Instead of Outcome
Success is measured by the number of story points a team has “completed” or the number of features delivered per sprint, while customer value is sidelined. Teams get trapped in a cycle of blind activity, solving the wrong problems. Ideally, delivered features should include mechanisms to measure their actual value to users. This enables teams to report real impact rather than just optimizing burn-down charts.
First Aid for Cargo Cult, Agile Theater, and Zombie Scrum
Overcoming Zombie Scrum
The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide recommends the following steps to tackle Zombie Scrum:
- Take responsibility: Be part of the solution instead of assigning blame.
- Analyze the situation: Identify problems, gather data, and explain their relevance.
- Create awareness: Highlight the issues and communicate their urgency.
- Find allies: Build networks and organize support.
- Start small: Begin with small, achievable changes.
- Stay positive: Focus on progress and avoid cynicism.
- Celebrate successes: Acknowledge small wins to stay motivated.
- Seek help: Leverage external support through meetups, workshops, and experts.
Still too abstract? The next section provides concrete revival strategies.
Practical Revival Strategies
Establish Clarity Around the Product Goal
It’s crucial for the team to have a clear understanding of the product’s goal. Every team member should always be able to answer the question:
WHO should be able to do WHAT better, easier, safer, or differently in WHICH SITUATION thanks to this product?
This clarity should cover all target audiences and use cases.
In “dead” settings, this information often exists but gets stuck somewhere, disconnected from the team. Knowing which value is being created for which audience makes the product’s users more visible, helps set focus, and prevents scope creep (the gradual and uncontrolled expansion of requirements).
Once the goal is clear, everyone involved can contribute their intelligence and experience to finding the most effective path forward.
Use of Customer Personas
Customer personas help teams better understand their target audience and develop empathy for their needs. It makes a significant difference whether a product is designed for 70-year-old retirees or 20–25-year-old IT students.
Transparency of Delays and Interruptions in the Development Value Stream
The development value stream includes every step from identifying a requirement to learning from user feedback. Making delays and interruptions in this process visible and measurable is the first step toward eliminating them. By addressing delays and the lack of clarity in the process, delivery times can be reduced without increasing the workload.
Examining the entire development value stream, from requirements to feedback, helps avoid sub-optimization and ensures improvements are focused on areas with the greatest impact on delivery efficiency.
Building Empathy for All Stakeholders
Stakeholders include not only the direct users of a product but also other teams, leaders, and external partners. It’s essential to consider their needs, requirements, and dependencies to answer:
- What support do they need to make their work easier?
- Where are Quick Wins that can create value without disproportionate effort?
In a dysfunctional environment, teams often focus solely on their own challenges and what needs to change around them for things to “work properly.” This exercise helps teams see themselves as part of the solution and recognize the purpose behind tasks that may not directly contribute to the product.
Conclusion
Agility is not dead, but the claim “Agile is dead” highlights real symptoms of dysfunctional work practices under the banner of agility.
When implemented correctly and accompanied by a cultural and mindset shift, agility offers significant benefits to companies.
If you’ve had negative experiences with agile practices, resources below can help you overcome obstacles. We also look forward to engaging discussions in the comments, via message, or in person!
Resources
Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Johannes Schartau, Christiaan Verwijs & Barry Overeem
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50416136-zombie-scrum-survival-guide
https://www.buecher.de/artikel/buch/zombie-scrum-survival-guide/58568072/
https://www.zombiescrum.org/
Customer Personas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)
Development Value Stream:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-devops-value-stream-mapping/create-value-stream-map.html
Riding dead horses (German only)
https://karrierebibel.de/totes-pferd-reiten/
