By Leonard Greski, Chief Scientist, LeadingAgile
It’s been a little over three years since I last sat down with A&G Managing Editor Holt Hackney to talk about the State of Agile. As of May 2025, the bloom is clearly off the agile rose. This has been the case for long enough that one might say the plant itself is dead. Industry prognosticators have also been rather blunt in their recent assessments of “agile.” For example, earlier this year Scott Ambler wrote what he called his ‘agile scatological series,’ starting with The Agile Community Shat the Bed, where he attempts to hold the agile community to account for its failures. This article represents my take on the contributing factors that explain why “agile” failed as a brand, describes measurable sources of value contributed by the agile movement, and offers guidance each of us can use to start improving business results without the baggage of “agile.”
Going Off the Rails
While I agree with much of Scott Ambler’s recent writing on this topic, a primary contributor to the current state of agile was its focus on agility as an end rather than a means. That is, over the past 15 years a considerable amount of marketing material about “agile” made the pitch that the end state was “to achieve business agility,” versus agile being a means or tool that supports an organization’s objectives. These objectives invariably revolve around sustained, profitable growth. Absent a clear connection to profitable growth, it’s not surprising that “agile” is being tossed aside in favor of the next candidate for the hype cycle: AI.
…and speaking of hype cycles, another reason “agile” went off the rails is that while riding its hype cycle, “agile” never reached the plateau of productivity. Why? One reason is that agilists introduced too many conflicting and divergent approaches that fragmented the market. “Agile” meant so many things to different people that hiring managers could never predict what they were getting when a candidate’s resume indicated s/he was “experienced in agile development.”
Another reason organizations failed to generate value with “agile” was that too many agile approaches focused on changing practices or culture while ignoring the larger delivery system in which the practices operate, reinforcing a culture that is resistant to change. This shouldn’t be a surprise to people following our industry, as my colleague and LeadingAgile CEO Mike Cottmeyer has been talking about why agile fails for over a decade, such as his Agile 2014 presentation, Why is Agile Failing in Large Enterprises… …and what you can do about it.
The final reason that led “agile” to its current state of disfavor is that early in the agile movement there was too much money to be made in training and certifications. The industry’s focus on certifications had the effect over time of misaligning the goals of the methodology / training companies and their customers. “Train everyone. Launch trains” may be a short-term success pattern for a methodology purveyor, but it is ultimately unsustainable because the training and practices are too disconnected from tangible results senior executives need to compete and win in the market.
Show Me the Money
After the dust settles, there are three compelling sources of value from “agile” that business leaders ignore at their peril:
- Productivity,
- Risk Management, and
- Product / Market Fit.
Each of these sources of benefits can be measured and therefore tied to business outcomes that generate incremental profit and/or revenue growth.
Productivity
Productivity is the ability to efficiently convert inputs into outputs, We can measure it as the output per unit of input over time. Agile approaches help improve productivity in three distinct ways, including:
| Establishing Predictability | The ability to accurately identify when work is going to complete.
Many organizations struggle to know when work will be done, which makes it difficult to plan the introduction of new products and services to customers and markets. Improving predictability allows an organization to more efficiently align its resources around product and service launches. Agile approaches, starting with establishing the structure, governance, and metrics for a system of delivery, rapidly improve predictability.
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| Smaller Work | The ability to break large work units down into smaller ones that contribute business value and can be completed independently.
Agile approaches encourage decomposition of work into smaller units that are easier to estimate and therefore easier to deliver with speed and quality.
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| Eliminating (or Orchestrating) Dependencies | A relationship between two or more tasks where one task cannot start, continue, or finish until a predecessor is completed or reaches a specific milestone.
Unknown or unmanaged dependencies frequently cause teams to fail to deliver on commitments. Agile approaches, especially those that leverage the Theory of Constraints (where we design work around the limiting factor of a work system) improve the rate at which work moves through the system by reducing the impact of dependencies on cycle time. |
In combination, these factors contribute to significant reductions in the cost per unit of work, which directly contributes to profitability.
Risk Management
Risk management is the ability to identify and mitigate things that could go wrong with a project or work effort. It includes a well-known process: a cycle of identification, assessment and mitigation. Mitigation approaches range from the reactive (acknowledgement, avoidance) to proactive (hedging, transfer, and escalation). We can calculate the value of risk management with techniques like Expected Monetary Value, where one identifies the probability of occurrence and the financial impact if the risk occurs.
Agile approaches to work enable effective risk management, especially the combination of escalation (moving risky work earlier in a project) and hedging (investing in multiple alternatives to ensure a minimally viable solution exists when needed). An example of the use of agile approaches to manage architecture and delivery risks is the business fable, Risk Management is Never Having to Say, “I’m sorry.” In the fable the lead character takes on a highly risky assignment, delivering in ten weeks what another team failed to deliver in eight years. This fable is also a good segue to our last source of value generated by agile approaches: product / market fit.
Product / Market Fit
Product / Market Fit is the degree to which a product (or service) satisfies a strong demand in a specific market. It effectively meets needs in ways that, as one of my former product management colleagues describes it “…products that customers love to use.” We can measure product / market fit through a variety of metrics, including customer demand, retention, revenue growth, willingness to pay a premium price, and a differentiated value proposition.
Agile approaches contribute to product / market fit in four distinct ways. First, they help organizations quickly build things that customers want to use. The frequent, rapid delivery of working tested product allows a product development team to learn through customers’ actual use of a product the things they want to use.
Second, agile approaches help development teams more quickly eliminate things that customer don’t use, reducing wasted investment. Next, rapid iterations and customer feedback allow us to discover and eliminate customer dissatisfiers. Finally, the agile focus on simplicity, dependency removal and avoiding over-engineering results in products that are easier to maintain and change, contributing to increased profitability over the life of a product.
Where to Begin: Get Off the Pareto Chart
Over my career I have seen organizations take three basic approaches to change, including top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. With sufficient research, one can find a body of theory to support each approach.
However, they all converge at the role an individual leader plays within the organization. This is the approach I call “get off the Pareto chart.” A Pareto chart is a continuous improvement tool that combines a bar chart of problems in descending frequency with a line chart to illustrate the cumulative percentage of problems. The goal of the chart is to identify and mitigate the 20% of sources that generate 80% of the problems. The items on your chart should focus on business problems that your stakeholders care about and want solved.
Any leader can look at the pain points or problems within the leader’s span of control, and make those problems go away through a three-step process of:
- Organize teams and work to become predictable,
- Make work smaller to improve quality and make the pain go away, and
- Eliminate / orchestrate dependencies to improve cycle time.
By establishing metrics to measure improvements in flow, quality, and productivity, it becomes easy to communicate the incremental value generated in business terms: impact to business growth and profitability.
This approach also reduces conflict over change because rarely do colleagues argue with someone who openly discusses problems within his/her own organization and owns the solution of those problems instead of blaming others or making excuses.
Finally, by making small but measurable improvements over the things within one’s span of control, one can deliver significant improvements in as quickly as three months, making subsequent improvements “self-funding.”
The Future of Agile?
“Agile” continues to generate value, even if the “brand” of agile has become toxic. This is why the future of agile isn’t “agile.” It is demonstrably contributing to sustained, profitable growth. It is taking on business and technical risk to solve gnarly business problems. It’s about leaders modeling accountability by establishing the necessary structure, governance, and metrics so the organization can become predictable, make work smaller, and eliminate dependencies. It is leaders establishing dedicated, multidisciplinary teams with specific backlogs who frequently deliver working tested product to customers, resulting in products that customers love to use. It is teams delivering better quality products and services, faster, and in a sustainable manner.
In other words, we finally stopped talking about agile and started doing it.
Len has over 30 years of experience helping large organizations generate billions of dollars in economic value by leading high risk, high visibility business and digital initiatives. He currently serves as Chief Scientist at LeadingAgile, the leader in generating profitable growth by restructuring value delivery around business capabilities and domains. Len helps clients consistently improve productivity, quality, and business value by 30 – 85%. Len received Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago with concentrations in Organization Theory, Research Methods and Statistics. He can be reached at leonard.greski@leadingagile.com.