Agile Is a Race to the Bottom (Unless We Redefine What Value Means)

Author: Jurgen Appelo

The focus on faster delivery of value turns everything into a commodity. It is crucial to prioritize experience over product and understand that "faster delivery" is a sub-optimization and a narrow view of the customer experience. Agile is a race to the bottom if we don't change how we think about value.

Let me offer you an analogy.

Effort and Exclusivity

In the 80s, we experienced the enjoyment of effort and exclusivity.

I'm a passionate lover of arguably the campiest music genre in the world: Italo disco. In the 80s, when I was a teenager, I spent hours making music cassettes out of radio programs that played Italian disco. I had posters of Den Harrow and Sabrina Salerno on my bedroom walls. I went to discotheques to see performances of Albert One and Fred Ventura and spent a fortune on album and CD rentals to build out my library of tapes. Part of the experience was that—in Rotterdam, the Netherlands—this type of music was hard to find. Except for a few European mega-hits such as Dolce Vita, Tarzan Boy, Happy Children, Vamos a la Playa, and the controversial Boys, Boys, Boys (nipplegate, the European way), Italo disco was not a mainstream genre, and Italian import records were scarce (and for me too expensive—I was 16 years old). My wait for each next ZYX Best of Italo Disco album (from Germany) was torturous, and when a new album was finally available, I was ecstatic. I played the few songs that I had endlessly on my Walkman. To some extent, I loved Italo disco because it was rare and eccentric.

With business software and computer games, it wasn't much different. As a young student, I spent hours collecting (illegal) copies that I traded with other collectors. I could have bought a small car with the money I spent on floppy disks and diskettes. And most of my efforts went into hunting down games and tools that were hard to find. On top of that, I read 800-page books about the newest releases of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access, and I went to user conferences to meet book authors and software developers. What we experienced back then was the enjoyment of effort and exclusivity. And in those days, business people and hobbyists looked forward to the upcoming releases of popular software. I'm not sure, but I might have had one or two posters on my bedroom walls.

However, in 2001, seventeen guys got together in a ski resort and decided that "frequent and continuous delivery" was a good thing. And everything changed.

Agile Ruined Everything

Agile has turned customers into ungrateful, spoiled little shits.

Software has become a commodity. I can instantly download any app at the touch of a button. I expect new features to be added continuously, and I want problems to be solved in a day. I haven't read a software manual in over a decade and haven't looked forward to any particular software release in a long time. Agile has turned customers into ungrateful, spoiled little shits with its relentless focus on frequent and continuous delivery. We demand instant resolution of all our problems, or else we download a competing app. The excitement of leafing through a book to learn the purpose of one new icon has turned into endless rants on social media about how new features behave in ways that are not entirely obvious to the biggest idiot. (Yes, I'm looking at myself here.)

Agile has ruined the music experience as well. Spotify, the poster child of the agile community, gives me immediate access to a hundred million songs. Like water and electricity, music has become a commodity. Music is so instantaneous and ubiquitous I hardly know what to play anymore, and the value that I now attribute to individual songs has dropped to approximately zero. I was pleased to find a new album by Savage two years ago, but I listened to it only a few times. Every day, I get new recommendations, and the result is that I'm tuning out. Spotify said there was something new from Linda Jo Rizzo, and I was like, "Okay, whatever". I'm drowning in music. I stopped caring because I can just activate any of ten thousand playlists. The joy of discovering two 12-inch records of Eddy Huntington in a record store in Innsbruck in 1987 has turned into the agony of Spotify not connecting properly with the wireless speakers in our kitchen. I cannot send it my playlists, dammit. There are also no posters on my bedroom walls anymore.

Agile Has a Value Problem

High availability and frequent delivery can destroy the value proposition.

Thanks to the Internet and Agile, the last two decades have seen a revival of Italo disco. Producing and releasing songs has become so frictionless that there's more content than ever. There are dozens of new tracks each day. How much do you think I care? The effort and exclusivity are gone.

The idea that customers want frequent delivery is shortsighted. The more often we offer something to our users, the more we reduce its value. The more ubiquitous something is, the less people appreciate it. Just consider, how much would you value a new smartphone if you received every new model instantaneously and for free? Would you still enjoy your birthdays if you celebrated them every day? Would you be excited about Michelin-star dinners when they cost almost nothing, and you could order them in minutes? Would the Star Wars franchise still be exciting when they released a new movie every month? High availability and frequent delivery can destroy the value proposition. Value is not delivering more and faster. Value is making people happy by offering them a great experience, not by releasing stuff more often. If the agile community wants to stay relevant in the years ahead, it must redefine what value really means.

There's Value is an Experience

Creatives torture us by deliberately forcing us to wait for something we desire.

Game designers and creators of other forms of entertainment know there is value in craving and anticipation. They even have a name for the technique in gamification: Torture Breaks—creatives and designers "torture" us by deliberately forcing us to wait for something we desire. I wait for the next season of Peaky Blinders, the next book of the Murderbot Diaries, and a specific version of the Google Pixel smartphone. Sometimes, I check, "Is it there yet? When is it coming out? What is the release date?" Meanwhile, their creators torture me with previews, excerpts, teasers, and trailers. The build-up of anticipation is part of the fun. And when the release of the product is finally there, it should come with the release of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins: the happiness molecules. Developers might say, "Why not release in small increments?" And marketers would reply, "Because you'd lose the suspense and destroy the experience!"

There are many ways to create a fantastic customer experience without delivering anything faster. For example, some brands (such as Patagonia) tap into a sense of purpose and make customers feel better about stewarding our planet. Some brands (such as Minecraft) rely on the empowerment of users to co-create the product for each other. Some brands (such as Tesla) offer surprises with easter eggs that result in pure delight when users accidentally find them. Other brands provide a sense of belonging, beauty, loyalty, freedom, certainty, influence, or any of the other 25 drives. All of it is about customer experiences. None of this is about continuous delivery.

Happiness, not Speediness

We need faster detection of what is a good and bad experience.

My capacity to consume music has not changed. I spent several hours per week on my music library as a teenager. Now, in 2022, it's probably about the same. I'm still a disco dork. But the way I express this part of my identity has changed completely. I recently paid for a film festival ticket and forced my spouse to watch an Italo disco documentary together. I browse through all I Venti d'Azzurro charts to find songs that I somehow missed and add them to my extensive playlists. I sometimes watch old video clips on YouTube in my home office (because I had never seen those when I was a kid—Dutch broadcasting has been heavily biased toward British and American pop). I get very excited when I hear a Giorgio Moroder song playing in the background of a supermarket or retail shop, and then I want to listen to it until the end. This is absurd because I can hear the same songs on Spotify instantly. But it's not the same experience. Typing "Gazebo" in Spotify's search bar is nothing special. But suddenly recognizing "I Love Chopin" in a cafe is fantastic.

Agile gave users instant delivery of their favorite music, no matter where in the world they are. But it didn't provide them with an experience. Agile doesn't make users feel awesome. The meaning of value in Agile needs to change.

Sure, we still need fast feedback cycles. But besides mastering the continuous delivery of songs and features, we need speedier detection of what is a good and bad experience. We need to understand that optimizing product delivery is not optimizing customer happiness. Continuous delivery itself is a sub-optimization. Agile (as initially defined in the Agile Manifesto) is a race to the bottom. The more we offer what we think is valuable, the less our customers will care. It is a rather narrow view of what makes a customer experience. We need to learn from the arts, games, entertainment, Jobs-to-Be-Done, Design Thinking, Human-Centered Design, and much more. And we must reinterpret the Agile Manifesto with an eye on the human experience.

The Agile approach of fast deliveries made sense in B2B environments when corporate clients cared most about the cost of delay. Back then, continuous delivery was a serious competitive advantage and a superior risk management strategy. So, you can release your product twenty times per day? Good for you. But tell me, how do you make your users care about it?

Note: The human experience (not continuous delivery) is the foundation of the unFIX model. That's why it has an Experience Crew, for example. We prioritize experience over product. Every agile framework out there has a narrow focus on product backlogs, product managers, fast delivery, feature teams, and so on. The X in unFIX stands for the human eXperience. Let's redefine what value really means.