Series
Agile from First Principles
A nine-part series on agile as reasoning rather than ritual — rereading the manifesto's four values and twelve principles as engineering advice, running fully agile without Scrum or Kanban, cleaning up a rotten backlog, documented product stories (the FBI's Sentinel, the Spotify model, Cyberpunk 2077, Healthcare.gov) that show the principles doing actual work, a full autopsy of the daily standup, and what agile's constraints become when AI agents make implementation cheap.
9 parts · first published
- 01
The Agile Manifesto, Reread: Four Values, Twelve Principles
The Agile Manifesto contains no sprints, no standups, no story points, no backlogs — not one of the ceremonies teams point to when they say 'we're agile.' Reread as engineering advice instead of poster material, it's four priority calls under uncertainty and twelve principles about feedback, people, and simplicity. Everything else is derived — and derived practices decay into ritual the moment they're severed from the principle that produced them.
·10 min read - 02
Running Fully Agile Without Scrum or Kanban
Scrum and Kanban aren't agile — they're vendors of defaults. Defaults are great when they match your constraints and cargo cult when they don't. Here's how to derive the minimum process your team actually needs from the principles directly, five minimal shapes real teams run, and the honest cases where the frameworks are still the right answer.
·9 min read - 03
Backlog Cleanup: How to Actually Do It
A 900-item backlog feels like diligence and functions as denial. Here's the working playbook for rescuing a rotten one: the deletion pass, the now/next/never triage, the hard cap, and the standing hygiene rules that stop it from growing back — plus why the fear of losing important ideas is the least justified fear in product work.
·10 min read - 04
FBI's Sentinel: Green Status Reports vs. Working Software
The FBI spent roughly a decade and over half a billion dollars on two failed attempts to replace its paper case-management system — with reportedly 800-page requirements documents and status reports that stayed green right up until the products turned out not to exist. Then a small in-house team in the basement of the Hoover Building shipped it in about a year for roughly $30 million. The interesting question isn't which methodology won. It's why documentation can lie for years and a sprint demo can't.
·10 min read - 05
The Spotify Model Spotify Doesn't Use
The most copied agile framework of the 2010s was a 13-page snapshot of one company at one moment — a company that kept changing, whose authors spent years telling everyone not to copy it, and whose own employees later reported it didn't work as marketed. The story isn't that Spotify lied. It's that thousands of organizations bought the org chart and skipped the reasoning.
·8 min read - 06
The Deadline That Moved Three Times: Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077's release date moved three times in a single year — April to September to November to December 2020 — and each move was the plan absorbing information the organization refused to respond to. Scope didn't move. Marketing promises didn't move. The gap was paid first in mandatory overtime, then in a launch so broken Sony pulled the game from its store. The closing post of this series, on what 'responding to change' costs when you decline to pay for it.
·10 min read - 07
Healthcare.gov: The Rescue That Invented a Playbook
On October 1, 2013, Healthcare.gov launched after roughly three years of work across more than fifty contractors — and collapsed on contact with its users. Reportedly six people enrolled on day one. Two months later it worked for the vast majority of visitors, and the fix wasn't a relaunch or a new contractor. It was a small team adding the things the project never had: monitoring, twice-daily contact with reality, one prioritized list, and small releases shipped continuously. The interesting question isn't why it failed. It's why the rescue worked — and how a two-month emergency became codified government practice.
·10 min read - 08
The Standup Autopsy
The daily standup has the cleanest derivation in all of agile — peers synchronizing and surfacing blockers in under fifteen minutes — and it's still the most reliably dead ceremony on most calendars. Here's the full autopsy: where it came from, the five ways it dies, three questions to diagnose your own, and the replacements each mapped to the constraint it actually serves.
·10 min read - 09
Agile in the AI Agent Era: The Ceremonies Die, the Principles Don't
Every agile ceremony was derived for a world where writing code was the bottleneck. AI coding agents are ending that world — implementation collapses toward cheap, and review becomes the constraint. Sprints, estimation, and standups start running on fumes; the four values come through fine, because they were never about typing speed. They were about uncertainty and feedback, and those don't move.
·10 min read