Agile Was About People. Then We Made It About Jira

The Agile Manifesto said “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

Then we built Jira, hired Scrum Masters, and made two-week sprints mandatory for everything. We stopped talking to users and started talking to backlogs.

We took the worst parts and called it Agile.

The Means Became the End

Agile is a means to an end. The end is solving real problems for real people. Fast iteration. Learning what works. Delivering value.

But somewhere along the way, the ceremony became the goal. Standups, retros, sprint planning, backlog grooming. We measure velocity and burn-down charts instead of asking if anyone actually uses what we built.

The process is not the point. The outcome is the point.

We Stopped Talking to People

The Agile Manifesto also said we should talk to customers. Not through layers of product managers, business analysts, and stakeholders. Directly.

But we built middlemen instead. Someone talks to users, writes tickets, prioritizes the backlog. Engineers never see the person they’re solving problems for.

This is backwards. If you’re building something, talk to the person who will use it. Not once, not in a demo. Regularly. Throughout. You’ll build better things faster.

Two Weeks Is Not a Law of Physics

Two-week sprints work for some teams. Mature products with predictable work. Teams that can slice features small enough to deliver value in that window.

But they don’t work for everything.

If you can’t deliver anything of value in two weeks, the problem isn’t your execution. It’s the constraint. Some work takes longer. Research, experiments, architectural changes. You can’t force them into arbitrary boxes.

37signals figured this out. They use six-week cycles with two weeks of cooldown. Enough time to do real work. Enough space to think.

Use the Right Tool

Kanban works when work is continuous and unpredictable. Two-week sprints work when you can plan and deliver in chunks. Shape Up works when you need focused time on hard problems.

None of them work everywhere. None of them are silver bullets.

The question isn’t “what process should we use?” It’s “what are we trying to achieve and what helps us get there?”

If Jira and two-week sprints help, use them. If they don’t, stop. Don’t cargo cult because that’s what everyone else does.

What Actually Matters

Here’s what makes teams effective:

Talk to the people you’re building for. Not through tickets. Directly.

Know what adds value. Ruthlessly cut what doesn’t.

Iterate fast. Ship, learn, adjust. Don’t wait for perfect.

Use tools that help. Drop tools that don’t.

Measure outcomes, not activity. Does it work? Do people use it? Did it solve the problem? (This is why we wrote a product manifesto that puts impact over activity at its core.)

That’s it. The rest is noise.

The Original Idea Was Good

The Agile Manifesto got it right. People over process. Working software over documentation. Collaboration over contracts. Responding to change over following plans.

We just forgot that part when we made Jira mandatory and hired consultants to teach us the “right way” to do standups.

Agile died when it became a product to sell instead of a mindset to adopt.

Use what works. Know why it works. Change it when it doesn’t. Talk to your users. Build things that matter.

Everything else is just process theatre.