In 2001, a group of 17 software engineers famously drafted the Agile Manifesto at a ski resort in Utah.
They were frustrated by the limitations of traditional “waterfall” software development and wanted a more flexible, iterative approach. The term “agile” evolved into a collection of methodologies that not only changed software development but started to impact teams of all kinds.
As “agile” went mainstream and spread far beyond software, it became described less as a methodology and more as a mindset. It became thought of as a cure-all for inefficiency, slow delivery, and poor collaboration. Agile teams now sprout up for just about any sort of business project and take widely different forms.
One of the original 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas, later observed:
“The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is entirely meaningless.”
This cartoon was partly inspired by an Uncensored CMO podcast conversation I heard last week with Mark Abraham from BCG and Jon Evans from System1. At one point, Mark and Jon joked that agile teams were getting so bloated, they struggled even to find calendar time to meet.
Mark then described Amazon’s principle of “two-pizza teams” — that no team should be too big for two pizzas to feed them.
I learned that Amazon later realized that the problem had less to do with the size of the team, and more to do with singularity of focus. Amazon ultimately evolved the idea of “two-pizza teams” into “single-threaded leader teams”. “Single-threaded” is a computer science term that means to work on only one thing at a time.
I was struck by this insight from Dave Limp, Amazon’s SVP of Devices:
“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
