Stop Playing "Planning Poker." You Are an Adult.
It’s 9:45 AM. You interrupt your deep coding flow to join a Zoom call. There are 12 people on the line. You listen to the Project Manager explain what they had for lunch yesterday. You recite your "Three Questions" like a hostage proof of life: "Yesterday I did X. Today I will do Y. No blockers."
This is not "Agility." This is a roll call. In 2025, "Agile" has mutated from a manifesto about speed into a bureaucratic religion designed to slow you down.
I have hired for the best engineering teams in the world. None of them use Scrum. Here is why the "Agile Industrial Complex" is scamming your company out of millions in lost productivity.
1. The "Scrum Master" Scam
What other industry has a full-time role dedicated to asking other people if they are working? A "Scrum Master" is often a non-technical middleman who needs to justify their salary.
- The Symptom: They schedule "Refinement," "Retro," "Planning," and "Review" meetings.
- The Result: You spend 10 hours a week talking about code and 30 hours writing it.
If your team needs a full-time babysitter to move tickets from "Doing" to "Done," you don't need a Scrum Master. You need better engineers. High-performing teams don't have Scrum Masters. They have Tech Leads who actually write code.
2. The "Story Point" Fantasy
"How many points is this ticket? Is it a 3 or a 5?" Who cares? Story points are made-up numbers. They are astrology for Project Managers.
- The Trap: Management inevitably weaponizes them. "Why did you only do 13 points this sprint? Dave did 20."
- The Reality: You can't estimate complex engineering work perfectly. When you force devs to play "Planning Poker," they just pad their estimates. A 2-hour task becomes a "5 pointer" just to be safe. You aren't getting accuracy; you are getting inflation.
3. Jira Is a Compliance Tool, Not a Productivity Tool
Jira was built for bug tracking. It is now used for "Employee Surveillance." Managers use Velocity Charts to measure output. But lines of code $\neq$ value.
- Junior Dev: Closes 10 tickets (fixing typos). Looks productive.
- Senior Dev: Spends 2 weeks solving a massive architectural bottleneck (1 ticket). Looks lazy.
If your boss manages by dashboard, they don't know what you do.
The Real Numbers: Scrum vs. Kanban
I tracked the "Cycle Time" (Speed to ship) of two teams.
| Metric | The Scrum Team (Meetings) | The Kanban Team (Flow) |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings/Week | 8 Hours | 1 Hour (Async updates) |
| Deployment Freq | Once every 2 weeks (Sprint end) | Daily (Continuous Deployment) |
| Developer Happiness | Low (Hates interruptions) | High (Deep Work) |
| Overhead Cost | $150k (Scrum Master Salary) | $0 |
The Verdict: If you want to ship software, kill the Sprints. Move to Kanban. Pick up a ticket, fix it, ship it. Repeat.
Frequently Asked Questions (That Consultants Hate)
Do we really need Daily Standups?
No. If you are blocked, put it in Slack immediately. Don't wait 24 hours to tell the team during a morning meeting. Async updates ("I'm working on the API") written in a Slack channel are 10x more efficient than a video call. It respects everyone's time zone and focus state.
How do we plan without Sprints?
You use a Rolling Roadmap. Prioritize the backlog. The team pulls the top item. Sprints are artificial deadlines. They force you to rush code on Friday just to "meet the commitment." This causes bugs. Kanban lets you release when the feature is actually ready, even if that's on a Tuesday.
My boss loves Agile. How do I fight this?
Don't fight the word "Agile." Fight the meetings. Propose a "No Meeting Wednesday." Then expand it to Thursday. Show them data: "Since we stopped doing Retros, we shipped 20% more code." Managers speak the language of output. Give them output, and they will let you kill the ceremony.
Leon Staffing places engineers in 'No-BS' environments. If you want a job where you ship code instead of attending ceremonies, check our async-first roles.