We Moved 10x Faster With AI. We Also Ran Out of Places to Hide the Waterfall.
We doubled our velocity with AI tools. Then someone asked why we still had sprints. The answer exposed everything wrong with how we were working.
Everyone Said We Were Agile. Nobody Could Name the Last Thing We Changed Our Minds About.
I remember the exact meeting where it clicked for me. We had the sprints, the standups, the sticky notes — the whole liturgy. And yet, something felt deeply wrong. Every story in our backlog had been written four months ago, by people who hadn't spoken to a single user. We weren't doing Agile. We were doing waterfall in a costume.