I’m not sure if I’ve seen agile in big old corps. Usually they say, “We’re agile!” but are running waterfall with sticky notes or a kanban. And approval gates called alignment meetings. And lots of PowerPoints. Transformation while keeping everything the same. The vocabulary changed. The operating model didn’t.
That is a problem for experience strategy because agility is not decor. It is the power that makes it possible for people to respond to people.
I’ve said it before: agility isn’t about speed. People hear “agile” and think “faster.” Speed is a byproduct of agile-done-well, but that’s not the point. The point is responsiveness. The capacity to learn something real about a human and flex to do something about it.
Human needs aren’t etched in stone. (Today anyway). The person your product was designed for six months ago has shifted. Their context has changed. Their options have multiplied. Their tolerance for friction has decreased. If your development and delivery process takes twelve months from discovery to release, you are designing for someone who no longer exists. You will ship something accurate to a moment that has already passed.
Now, by “agility” I don’t (only) mean a way of dev-work. I mean the full stack of what it takes to respond in real(ish) time. I mean leadership that is close enough to the work to make decisions without three layers of approval. Teams that are empowered to act on what they learn from customers without waiting for a quarterly roadmap review. Systems that ship in time-boxed increments so that learning happens continuously, not at the end of a long build cycle when it’s too late and too expensive to pivot. Organizational trust as a prerequisite, not an afterthought.
The cost of delivering the wrong thing on schedule is worse than the cost of a short delay to get it right. Stinks to ship stuff that no one uses, can’t find, or find annoying. On time. On budget. Irrelevant. Eek. That is an expensive way to learn something you could have learned earlier (and cheaper).
Ten days with real user feedback costs a fraction of what it costs to build a full quarter’s worth of wrong. Businesses that have made agility work financially are not necessarily the ones moving fastest. They are the ones failing smaller and cheaper, learning more often, and compounding those learnings into products and services that are genuinely closer to what humans need.
Sure. There are contexts where agile is the wrong approach. Like if you’re building a bridge. But if you’re building a service, a journey, or a product: you need a different op-model.
The experience strategy conversation and the agility conversation can’t be separated. Experience strategy defines the direction: this is who we serve, this is what they need, this is the friction we are committed to removing. Agility is the engine that keeps that strategy moving and responsive. Without agility, experience strategy becomes a document. A beautiful one, sometimes. But a document.
The question is not whether your organization says it is agile. The question is whether the humans who interact with your organization can feel a positive difference. Whether the things that were broken are getting fixed. Whether the feedback is actually landing somewhere. Whether the system is learning.
If it isn’t, the methodology doesn’t matter. You’re not agile. You’re going through the motions, and the humans on the other end feel it.
Flex to build the real thing or don’t call it agile.