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by donjapan22 53 days ago
The article gave me the impression we are all using AI and agentic AI to do all work now and agile doesn’t fit that model… but that’s far from where our team sits. It correctly calls out that our ceremonies have gotten so mundane they are worthless. Our standups consist of all engineers simply saying “no blockers” otherwise our product manager who isn’t technical will try to get involved to “help” and double/triple the work. Our refinement is our product manager rearranging our backlog while engineers just say “looks good!”. Our sprint end/start never correlates to any actual start or finish of work. We haven’t demoed anything since before the pandemic. But the ceremonies are all SUPER quick (5 min standup <30 min for all else) and serve as a general check in to get the temperature of the room, and maybe learn of some priorities from our manager (top down) we didn’t have awareness of.

But what we actually do is deliver micro changes often, engage directly with our users to tell them of updates (usually a slack blast) and provide them tons of opportunities to share ideas and feedback. That’s far from the old big quarterly release days. I probably incorrectly call that agile. So what is it?

“Quickest ceremonies to appease managers where we learn of new hot priorities from top down and say ‘no blockers’ then after that we get back to work delivering what’s needed for our regular user base.” Has a certain ring to it I think.

(Edited for typos and clarity)

1 comments

> I probably incorrectly call that agile. So what is it?

It’s so agile it doesn’t have a name!