Agile theater

[#1]

A standup where 3 product managers ask for percent complete is not a standup.

It's a status report.

Some engineers have started calling this Agile with none of the actual agility:

→ 90-minute daily standups
→ Story cards created with no requirements attached
→ Estimates at the epic level, months out
→ Retros that produce action items nobody follows through on
→ Deployments gated behind change requests approved by someone who doesn't understand the change

The rituals are Agile. The feedback loops are not.

Agile is supposed to put decisions close to the work. Short cycles, visible blockers, context shared by the people doing the work. When the ceremony gets adopted without that intent, teams route around it.

The actual coordination moves to Slack DMs. Sidebar conversations before the standup. A shared doc someone updated once. The context that moves the work doesn't live in the ceremony. It lives in the conversations the ceremony was supposed to surface, and usually disappears with them.

That's where delivery breaks down. Not in the planning. In the reasoning that never got written down.