Stop Faking Agile: How to Actually Deliver Faster

Almost every company today claims they’re “agile.” They run standups, hold retros, track velocity. The word shows up in job postings, investor decks, and board meetings.

But let’s be honest: In 99% of cases, “agile” is just a buzzword. It’s a label slapped on the same old waterfall process, dressed up with sticky notes and Jira boards.

I’ve stepped into SaaS companies where work still moved in quarterly chunks, QA was a final-phase bottleneck, and priorities were dictated top-down. Nothing about that was Scrum or Kanban — it was waterfall in an agile costume.

And worse: the dysfunction was often reinforced by management, who wanted the optics of agility without facing the discipline it requires.

The Myth of Agile

If your organization looks like this, you might recognize some symptoms:

Rituals without results
Standups become status meetings. Sprint reviews turn into slide decks instead of working software. Retrospectives surface the same issues over and over, with zero follow-through.
Velocity theater
Management chases “story points per sprint” while customers still ask: Why does it take three months to deliver a feature promised last quarter?
Backlog as landfill
Thousands of tickets pile up, most irrelevant. Refinement turns into archaeology, not prioritization.
Scaled too soon
Leaders set up cross-team syncs and coordination meetings before a single Scrum team had mastered Scrum. Instead of scaling agility, they scaled dysfunction.

The reason is simple: “Agile” has been reduced to cargo cult practices. Leadership installs ceremonies, adopts buzzwords, and sometimes rushes into scaling frameworks before a single team has experienced real flow.

What Real Delivery Looks Like

As Head of Development and later CTO, I’ve had to dismantle this façade more than once. At one midsized SaaS company, sprints looked agile on paper, but in practice delivery still dragged. Features languished in refinement, dependencies caused bottlenecks, and leadership had already started synchronizing across teams as if scaling would magically solve the dysfunction.

Here’s how we turned it around — and cut average feature delivery times by 30% in three months:

Call things by their name

If we were doing Scrum, we said Scrum. If it was Kanban, we said Kanban. No fuzzy “we’re agile.” And no “Scrum, but…” experiments. Mixing frameworks or customizing them prematurely is the fastest way to fail — doubly so when you try to scale that mix.

Start small, then scale

We pressed pause on inter-team syncs and focused on getting one Scrum team working correctly: clear sprint goals, disciplined refinement, and something usable delivered every two weeks. Once one team worked, others followed. And instead of adding heavyweight scaling frameworks and roles, we leaned toward lightweight, Spotify-style squad autonomy — smaller, empowered teams coordinating only when needed.

Clear goals and contracts

Every sprint tied directly to a business outcome. Not “finish 100 points,” but “enable self-serve onboarding for 20% of new signups.” To make this stick, we introduced a Definition of Ready (DoR) and a Definition of Done (DoD) as binding contracts with stakeholders and POs. Stories not fulfilling the DoR were rejected by the team before estimation, and stories not meeting the DoD were simply not done. This alignment killed ambiguity and gave everyone—from business to engineering—a common understanding of what “ready” and “done” really meant.

Backlog discipline

We deleted 70% of the backlog in one afternoon. If a ticket didn’t have an owner or clear value, it was gone. Suddenly, refinement sessions were about focus, not archaeology. By pruning hard, we created space for real discussions about what to build next instead of debating ghosts of features no one cared about.

Fast feedback loops

We invested in trunk-based development and automated tests. That let us release weekly, not quarterly. Stakeholders could try features as they emerged. The faster the feedback, the faster we could course-correct before wasting weeks building the wrong thing.

Key Lessons for Leaders

If you want to stop faking agile, here’s where to start:

Stop hiding behind buzzwords – Don’t say “agile.” Say Scrum, say Kanban, say Lean. Be specific about the practice you’re applying.
Don’t scale on day one – SAFe or LeSS can be useful in certain contexts, but they’re fat scaling frameworks and they don’t replace disciplined Scrum/Kanban at the team level. Get one team truly working before you add layers. Personally, I find the Spotify-style approach closer to the spirit of agility — but whatever you choose, don’t scale prematurely.
Measure outcomes, not outputs – Stop reporting velocity charts. Start asking: What did we deliver this sprint that customers can use?
Clean your backlog – Ruthlessly prune. A bloated backlog is a symptom of indecision. A lean backlog is a focused backlog.
Lead with discipline – This isn’t an engineering problem; it’s a leadership one. If management thrashes priorities or clings to status rituals, no framework will save you.

The Bottom Line

Scrum, Kanban, Lean — they work when you do. Start small. Deliver outcomes. Then scale.

The hard part isn’t learning the mechanics; it’s having the discipline to apply them without excuses. If you hear “Scrum, but…” or “we customized Kanban for our needs,” chances are you’re building a fragile process that protects dysfunction instead of exposing it.

Agility isn’t about chasing rituals, it’s about being able to deliver. Ship something valuable. Show progress in production. Let the customer decide if it mattered.

Because at the end of the day, you can fake velocity charts, but you can’t fake working software in the hands of users.