Blog 2 of 8: Poor or Superficial Agile Implementation When Agile Goes Ape Without the Bananas 🍌

Attia Jamil
Jul 4
10 min read

Updated: Aug 26

Estimated Read Time: 10 minutes

Diagnosing Agile Theatre and offering real-world remedies for meaningful transformation.

Missed Blog 1? Catch up on Resistance to Change: The Cultural and Mindset Maze . Our intro to the series. Coming next: Blog 3 – Inconsistent Training and Coaching (coming in 2 weeks!).

Let's get stuck in to Superficial Agile. When organisations in tech, banking, and other sectors think about poor or superficial Agile implementation, several key concerns tend to come to mind. These vary slightly by industry but share some universal themes:

Agile Theatre: “We have daily stand-ups and JIRA boards, but nothing’s really changed.” Teams go through the motions without adopting the mindset. Buzzwords replace actual agility.

Command and Control in Disguise: Leadership claims to empower teams but still micromanages and dictates priorities. Agile becomes a top-down schedule shuffle.

Misuse of Roles: Scrum Masters act like project managers, Product Owners are absent or unclear, and teams don’t feel ownership.

No Time for Retrospectives or Improvement: Delivery is king, and reflection is an afterthought, if it happens at all.

Over-reliance on Tools: The tooling becomes the agile process. (Looking at you, JIRA configuration wizards.)

Tech Sector Specific

Speed Over Sustainability: Agile gets mistaken for “go faster,” not “deliver value sooner and smarter.”
Feature Factories: Teams churn out features but lack customer feedback loops. No validation = no real agility.
Start-up to Scale-Up Gaps: What worked for a 10-person team falls apart at 100+. Leaders don’t adapt Agile practices to scale properly.

Banking & Finance Specific

Water-Scrum-Fall: Planning is waterfall, delivery is “Scrum,” and release is waterfall again.
Risk Aversion Masquerading as Structure: Regulatory fear means rigid gates and control, making Agile feel like a round peg in a square hole.
Contract and Vendor Constraints: External vendors locked into fixed-scope contracts stifle collaboration and iteration.

Other Sectors (Media, Healthcare, Retail)

Creativity Clash: Creatives feel boxed in by rigid backlogs and story points. Agile is seen as a killjoy.
Lack of Business Buy-In: Agile is viewed as a “tech thing.” Business stakeholders stay passive.
Over-standardisation: One-size-fits-all frameworks squash local team agility.

Across all sectors, organisations adopt Agile rituals without embracing the Agile mindset. This shows up consistently in three major patterns:

Cosmetic Compliance: Stand-ups, boards, retrospectives – check! But behaviours, culture, and decision-making stay unchanged.

Structural Mismatch: Old hierarchies and governance models stay intact, squeezing agility into an unfit form.

Tool Worship Over Team Empowerment: The obsession with tooling (JIRA, SAFe, Trello) replaces conversation and trust. Metrics become the goal, not the means.

Underneath it all? A behavioural blind spot. Most organisations treat Agile like a software rollout instead of a cultural shift. One that challenges power, communication, and team dynamics.

In this post, we’re focusing on what happens after the restructure. We assume you’ve done the hard yards – mapped your teams, analysed the pain points, applied Team Topologies, and connected structure to business goals. But even with a rock-solid base, Agile can still go sideways.

This blog explores the forming stage and the inevitable growing pains that follow. You’ll find real-world examples, practical insights, and clear steps to move from shallow implementation to meaningful agility.

🧍🏾 Stand-ups: From Theatre to Tool

Daily stand-ups often become Agile’s greatest performance art: 15 minutes of flat updates, buried blockers, and camera-off disengagement. But the purpose is coordination, not compliance.

Tips to keep your stand-ups sharp:

Align the format with team maturity. Use only the columns you need, don’t overcomplicate it.
Revisit and update your Definition of Ready and Done regularly.
Rotate the facilitator to spread ownership and skill.
Encourage video-on in remote settings to enhance communication.
Cap the meeting at 15 minutes. Move deeper conversations offline.
End with a meaningful update or shout-out to boost energy and alignment.

Make your stand-up reflect the people in it. Teams that work like clockwork may only need three JIRA columns. But if your team is still forming or moving through the norming phase, consider adding more detail to your workflow. A structure I’ve used successfully includes: To Do, In Progress, In Code Review, Pending QA, In QA, Done or something similar. The goal is visibility. Whatever helps the team quickly grasp where things are and where they're stuck is the right setup.

Facilitation shouldn’t be a monopoly. Start by identifying an early adopter on the team or someone naturally good at facilitating and let them demonstrate what good looks like. Once that's established, begin rotating facilitation. This not only shares the skill but also boosts engagement. As ownership spreads, so does accountability. Team members will start raising flags on vague tickets or calling out when the Definition of Ready is skipped. And yes, if you’re remote, keep those cameras on. Slack is great, but it doesn’t replace body language.

Keep your stand-ups tight. Fifteen minutes, max. If something goes deep, take it offline. Use the meeting to maintain momentum, not to rehearse a checklist. And in the final minute? Share a win. Announce something important. Remind everyone why they’re here. That’s how you keep the pulse alive.

🏢 Siloes: The Silent Saboteurs

Siloes are subtle. They start as “focus” and end as fragmentation. And they manifest in multiple domains, not just process, but perception, structure, and role clarity. Let’s look at three places where we’ve seen this unravel and, more importantly, how we stitched it back together.

Customer Services were stuck raising bugs with zero traction. When leadership finally gave them the wheel, the groundwork had already been laid: a manager with leadership leverage, a clear CS strategy aligned to business goals, and strong collaboration with Product and Design. CS started running feature discovery projects with the support of POs, engaging directly with Engineering, and sharing their impact proudly at all-hands meetings. With Enterpret aggregating data from Zendesk and SurveyMonkey, CS became an insights engine. They didn’t just point at problems they helped solve them. We also created lean GTM (Go-To-Market) plans with Product leading the charge. Early Miro drafts, Loom videos, and public Slack updates ensured Marketing and CS (customer services) weren’t left in the dark. CSAT rose. Visibility rose. Collaboration kicked in. And in a mostly remote setup where people only come in weekly or fortnightly, this shift did more than improve delivery. It built bonds. People started engaging with colleagues they wouldn’t normally cross paths with. Information flowed faster. Culture lifted. Morale improved. And empathy, the real driver of collaboration showed up in ways no process diagram ever could.

At one company, separate mobile and web teams ran their own roadmaps. The web team sprinted ahead while mobile lagged behind. Marketing had to create and manage three different campaigns for one feature. Customer Services handled complaints from users confused by inconsistent releases. With the right support, the CTO helped us merge all three into a single frontend team.

This wasn’t just a reshuffle it was a redesign. We partnered closely with the CTO to define how the unified team would operate: from setting up a joint JIRA structure and writing consistent tickets, to refining our Definitions of Ready and Done. We also had to plan how to brief large feature initiatives while some teammates were still handling important BAU tasks.

Some team members were hesitant at first, but they stayed open and quickly saw the benefits. That openness helped the team move through forming and norming and into performing in just three months.

What changed? Features now shipped across all platforms, with mobile trailing web by just two days due to the app store approval cycle. Mobile engineers no longer had to build workarounds after being left out of early technical discussions. Features became smaller and easier to ship. Marketing and CS were looped in earlier and could send coordinated comms across platforms. Most importantly, we had better data and the majority of users were on mobile, so prioritising web-first delivery now felt as backwards as it was. The new setup brought not only alignment but intelligence.

QA often gets boxed out too. We flipped it by fully embracing the shift-left mentality. Just like with CS, we started with the right leadership foundation: a manager with organisational clout and, in this case, a skilled, hands-on QA coach who was up to date with the latest techniques. We paired that coach with the nominated lead QA, and together they shaped a practical, business-aligned QA strategy.

We brought QA upstream, involving them in early discussions with Product Owners. They co-wrote BDD scenarios with the PO and participated in story mapping sessions with Engineering. Engineering then broke the features into smaller stories, and the whole team agreed to adhere to solid Definitions of Ready and Done, standards that were reviewed and refined in every retro.

We put automation on the roadmap, and while it took two years to move from 5% to 95% coverage due to other business priorities, we stuck with it. Could we have done it in six months with higher priority? Absolutely. But change takes time, especially in a company that’s been operating for over a decade.

We also invited the wider company to participate in exploratory testing. People across departments helped find edge cases, which boosted test coverage, strengthened confidence in releases, and perhaps most importantly we broke down siloes and fostered meaningful cross-functional relationships.

🧠 Mindset: The Missing Muscle

If you're going to play the mindset card, be sure to define what it actually means. For us, mindset is the set of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours that shape how teams respond to change, collaborate with each other, and pursue continuous improvement. It's the difference between going through Agile motions and living Agile values. We define a strong Agile mindset as being growth-oriented, collaborative, open to feedback, comfortable with ambiguity, and committed to ownership and improvement.

Books like Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson remind us how differently people perceive and react based on their behavioural style. In an Agile environment, this awareness is vital. what motivates a Red (assertive) personality may alienate a Blue (detail-oriented) teammate. Understanding these styles doesn't just help teams collaborate it helps them empathise, which is a foundational component of the Agile mindset.

Mindset isn’t taught in slides it’s shaped by experience. We ran a workshop where devs described a picture and business partners drew it blindfolded by a lack of feedback. The results were laughable. Then we added two-way dialogue. Boom: alignment.

That same thinking reshaped how we talked about tech debt. In fact, we stopped calling it 'tech debt' altogether because honestly, that term rarely lands with non-technical stakeholders. It sounds optional, vague, or worse, self-inflicted. Instead, we reframed it as platform health. Created lightweight business cases. Merged fixes with features. Brought them into OKRs. The shift wasn’t just language it was logic.

Mindset isn’t a box to tick. It shows up in every retro, every sync, every working agreement that actually works.

And here’s the rub – most people actually do have the right mindset. But governance and organisational constraints often keep them from putting it into action. So part of the job is surfacing those blockers and figuring out how to lift or reframe them. When you remove friction, people don’t just comply they engage.

We also ran a health check focused on culture, processes, and technology.

Wherever we found gaps, we didn't ignore them—we put those areas on the roadmap. That ensured improvements weren’t sidelined, and it made platform health something we could track and maintain. A healthy platform didn’t just mean fewer bugs; it meant we could deliver faster and more confidently. And most importantly, it stopped feeling like a heavy lift and started feeling like an enabler.

🧩 Patterns in Disguise

Across industries, Agile Theatre keeps repeating. The ceremonies happen, the dashboards glow – and yet, nothing improves.

Leadership says “empowerment” but micromanages priorities. Product Owners vanish. Retros become rare. JIRA replaces conversation. Tools replace trust.

As Accelerate shows, poor structure leads to bottlenecks. And no amount of Agile ceremony will fix that.

The Lean Startup reminds us that short feedback loops are everything. It’s how we learn, pivot, and build relevance into every sprint.

Marty Cagan says it plainly: “The best teams are empowered and accountable.” That’s not idealism that’s the playbook of companies like Google and Netflix.

Daniel Pink gets to the heart of it: “The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments – but that unseen intrinsic drive to do things because they matter.”

So no, Agile doesn’t fail because people don’t try. It fails because we underestimate what trying really means.

🧾 Conclusion

Superficial Agile might look good on paper, the boards are full, the stand-ups are daily, and the retros are on the calendar. But under the hood? There’s often dysfunction, disconnection, and doubt. As we've explored, true agility isn’t about ceremonies or tools – it's about mindset, structure, and cross-functional collaboration. It’s about doing the deep, sometimes messy work of changing how people think, communicate, and take ownership.

Whether it's reshaping how QA integrates, giving CS the visibility and voice it deserves, or aligning product delivery across platforms, the outcome is always stronger when you align mindset with action. There’s no shortcut. But there is a clear path.

Start small. Stay honest. Keep iterating.

👀 Keep an Eye Out

We're just getting started. Blog 3: Inconsistent Training and Coaching drops in two weeks. We’ll unpack how inconsistent upskilling efforts dilute transformation and what to do about it.

🙌 We'd Love to Hear From You

Have you seen Agile Theatre in action? Stand-ups that don’t stand up to scrutiny? Silos so thick even your Slack messages bounce back? Share your story with us.

We’re collecting tales from the trenches, anonymous, raw, and real.

Drop us a message or tag us with #AgileGoesApe. Who knows, your story might just swing into the next blog.

📚 References

Forsgren, N., Humble, J., & Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press.
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.
Cagan, M. (2018). Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. Wiley.
Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.
Scott, K. (2017). Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. St. Martin’s Press.
Erikson, T. (2019). Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life). St. Martin’s Essentials.

These works have heavily influenced the principles and practices discussed throughout this article and offer deeper insight for anyone looking to explore further.