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Scrum was always a workaround.
7 min read4 days ago
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Three things you’ll walk away with after reading this:
- Scrum solved a real problem, but the problem has changed. The ceremonies existed because humans couldn’t plan large systems or build them fast enough. AI removes both constraints, and the methodology hasn’t caught up.
- Waterfall isn’t the answer either. What’s emerging is something new: spec-first development with continuous validation, where the upfront thinking is deep but the execution is fluid, not rigid.
- The teams pulling ahead aren’t tweaking Scrum. They’re replacing it. Small pods, full specs, AI-driven execution, and feedback loops measured in hours instead of sprints. The velocity gap between these teams and everyone else is widening fast.
I wrote about Scrum dying a few months ago. The response was sort off split down the middle. Half the comments were from people who’d already stopped doing standups and felt vindicated. The other half were Scrum Masters explaining why I was wrong while describing workflows that sounded nothing like textbook Scrum.
That second group was more interesting. Because what they were actually describing, stripped of the Agile vocabulary, was something closer to what I think comes next.
