Why Scrum Is Dead: An Obituary from the Field

We have AI assistants that refactor code in seconds, we deploy to the cloud multiple times a day, and we validate MVPs in weeks instead of months. And yet, millions of developers still start their day standing in a circle (or Zoom call) answering three questions that nobody really cares about.

Scrum was a revolution 20 years ago. It freed us from the waterfall model. But today, in the era of hyper-agility and AI-assisted development, Scrum often feels like a 56k modem in a fiber-optic world. Here is my honest reckoning of why Scrum often fails in practice and what we should do instead.

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#The "Agile Wrapper" Problem

The most fundamental issue I see in companies today is that Scrum is used as a "wrapper" around a fundamentally non-agile organization.

It's a common pattern: The development team is forced to work in Sprints, do Dailies, and estimate in Story Points. They are trying to be agile. But the rest of the organization—marketing, sales, management, or the client—is still stuck in a Waterfall mindset. They want fixed deadlines, fixed scope, and guaranteed delivery dates months in advance.

The result is constant friction. The dev team is running in circles (Sprints) while the business is demanding a marathon plan. Scrum becomes a shield to protect the team from the chaos outside, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. It just adds a layer of meetings to report on the mismatch between agile execution and rigid expectations.

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#AI Requires Hyper-Agility, Not Two-Week Cycles

The speed of execution has changed dramatically. With AI coding agents and copilots, we can prototype and build features faster than ever before.

A two-week Sprint cycle feels like an eternity in this new world. Waiting for the "next Sprint" to fix a bug or try a new idea is absurd when you can implement it in 30 minutes with an AI assistant.

Scrum was built for a time when writing code was the bottleneck. Today, decision-making is the bottleneck. We need to be more agile than Scrum allows. We need continuous flow. We need to ship, learn, and iterate daily, not bi-weekly. If your process is slower than your tools, your process is the problem.

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#"Agile Theater" and the Illusion of Safety

Because of the "Wrapper" problem, Scrum often degenerates into a mere ritual. We call it "Agile Theater."

We estimate tasks in Story Points (a fictional currency that everyone secretly converts to hours anyway). We hold retrospectives where we write "improve communication" on a sticky note without anything structurally changing.

Scrum sells management and stakeholders an illusion of predictability. "We completed 40 Story Points!" – But did we create value? Or did we just move tickets? What matters is output in terms of solved user problems, not velocity in a Jira chart.

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#Overhead Eats Productivity

Let's do the math. In a typical two-week sprint, a developer has Daily Scrums, Refinement sessions, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Retrospectives.

That quickly adds up to 10-15% of working time spent only on process meetings. Add to that the context switching. In a world where deep, focused work is an engineer's most valuable asset, Scrum often acts as a constant interruption generator. As I wrote about in my piece on Deep Work, protecting uninterrupted thinking time is essential for meaningful progress.

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#Better Alternatives for Modern Teams

If not Scrum, then what? The answer lies in methods that put the focus back on the product and embrace the speed of AI.

Shape Up (Basecamp Approach) is my favorite. Instead of endless backlogs, there are 6-week cycles. Important: Scope is variable, time is fixed. If it's not finished, it doesn't automatically get extended (using "Appetite" instead of "Estimation"). This gives the team real autonomy.

Kanban & "Flow" is simply a priority list. Take the most important thing, finish it, deploy it. No sprints, no estimation orgies. Limit "Work in Progress" (WIP). This fits much better with Continuous Deployment pipelines.

The "Founder Mode" Approach works well for small, senior teams (and teams are getting smaller thanks to AI!). We often don't need a rigid framework at all. We need a shared goal and constant, asynchronous communication. "Just build it." Fewer tickets, more prototypes.

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#Break Free from the Chains

Don't get me wrong: The values of the Agile Manifesto (Individuals and interactions over processes and tools) are more important than ever. But Scrum has achieved the exact opposite: It has turned agility into a rigid process of certificates and meetings.

If your team spends more time maintaining Jira than shipping code, something is wrong. It's time to take off the training wheels. Trust your teams to work self-organized—without the Scrum Master as a kindergarten teacher. True agility happens in the mind, not in the calendar.