Agile Coaches focus on the wrong things

Controversial thought: Agile Coaches spend too much time focused on team health and process; and not enough time on what it actually means to be agile.

The thing that differentiates agile from waterfall is iterative development. You can have great psychological safety in a team and be waterfall. You can have even have standups and time-boxed periods of work and still be waterfall. But you can’t be waterfall if you regularly release your product to customers, get feedback and iterate accordingly.

This is what it means to be agile. To build a slice of your product, get feedback from real customers, and then adapt the product based on what you learn. It’s that adaptation that literally means being agile. You can’t do this and be waterfall.

So in order to be agile, teams need to be able to value slice. In my mind, this is the most important skill to allow you to be agile. If you can’t value slice, you can’t release in small increments. If you value slice your work, then you almost definitely will be releasing in small increments, and will be able to get feedback and adapt.

But when it comes to agile coaching, I see lots of focus on Scrum / SAFe events and team health. But very little on value slicing.

And I’m not just talking about teams here. This is (even more) relevant for large scale software delivery. Agile coaches should be looking at large software initiatives and asking “how do we value slice this?” But I don’t see that happening.

As a result, we spend long periods of time developing stuff without releasing anything to the customer. In my book that’s not agile.

What do you think?

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