What We Lost When Agile Faded Into the Background

Agile thought leaders used to say: “Eventually, Agile processes will become the norm, so we won’t even use the term anymore.” They were right, but they also missed something big.

Indeed, for many years, when companies wanted to improve product development, their go-to strategy was to adopt Agile.

Most picked a framework (usually Scrum) and rolled it out across teams. But they didn’t change how they actually managed work. While they saw a few short-term gains, there was rarely a real breakthrough.

Eventually, some realized Agile could offer more, if they embraced its deeper elements: enabling leadership, mindset shift, product model, systems thinking, flow, real teamwork.

How did they realize that? because “Agile” is a thing — a coherent and holistic approach — not a bunch of practices. Leaders only needed to read a book or attend a conference to see that. Some went back, implemented the key parts, and saw performance improve.

But in the past few years, the dynamic has changed.

Many companies now use “Agile bits” — sprints, standups, story points, Jira, weekly deployments — but not as part of a strategic move. To them, those bits are simply part of modern software development.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work well enough, for the same reasons it didn’t 5-20 years ago.

You might say this was expected: Agile was so popular, it became the norm. A commodity.

But here’s the thing: what got commoditized are the surface-level tactics, and they’re available piecemeal, not as part of a deliberate, comprehensive strategy.

Leaders no longer go looking for what’s missing, because they don’t realize that something is missing.

They’re not asking questions like:

“How well does our management model support product success?”
“What is our way of working really optimizing for?”
“Are we maximizing customer value?”
“Does our process address our product development pain points?”
“Do our teams collaborate in a meaningful way?”

Now, a new “named thing” is gaining traction: the Product Operating Model. It includes much of what strategic agility always called for, and hopefully, it will help leaders see the broader system again.

Whether you call it Agile, Product Operating Model, or something else, the lesson is the same: don’t just cobble together practices. Be strategic. Look at the whole system. Keep learning and reflecting, maybe you’ve missed something.