Agile Isn’t Slow; Your Decisions Are

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Artificial Intelligence  

Teams have never had more speed at their fingertips. Agile promised faster delivery, better iteration and tighter feedback loops. Then came the tooling upgrades, such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and real-time analytics.

Now AI has pushed it even further. Teams can generate working code in minutes, spin up prototypes in hours, and validate ideas faster than most organizations can schedule a follow-up meeting.

By every measurable input, execution has accelerated. And yet, ask almost any leader how delivery feels, and the answer is the same: We’re still too slow.

That disconnect is where most organizations get it wrong. The instinct is to look at the team, question velocity calculations, tighten sprint commitments and push for more output.

But the teams aren’t the constraint. In many cases, they’re moving faster than ever—and faster than they even thought possible. They’re just not the ones deciding what to work on next.

Work doesn’t stall because engineers can’t build. It stalls because no one can agree. Priorities shift mid-sprint, approvals and decisions linger or loop on themselves, direction changes after the work is already in motion. The team keeps moving, but progress doesn’t.

The problem isn’t the speed of the team, it’s the speed of decision-making. Until that’s …

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