Newsletter ( JULY 2025): Why Agile Isn’t Enough (And What’s Really Slowing You Down) - Part 1

Written By Team Topologies
 
 
 

This is part 1 of a 3-part newsletter series on ‘Why Agile Isn’t Enough’.

This newsletter was written by Rich Allen.


Many teams adopt Agile in the hope of moving faster. They introduce sprints and stand-ups, visualise the work, and improve discipline at the team level. The process brings rhythm, visibility, and a sense of progress, and yet, delivery is still slow. Work gets done, but the value takes too long to reach users. Dependencies multiply, coordination becomes a constant effort, and every step forward seems to rely on waiting for someone else. "We're doing Agile", but are we really being agile?

For many organisations, introducing Agile helps make the work more visible. Teams are more aligned in how they plan, estimate, and reflect. But visibility doesn’t equal flow, and progress on the board doesn’t always mean progress in the system. You can have well-run teams, but still struggle to deliver value end-to-end. At some point, you have to ask where the work is getting stuck, and why, what slows things down between teams, not just within them, and how are team structures within the organisation shaping the way value flows.

Handovers are often the silent bottlenecks

Figure 1 - Team Interaction Model showing handovers between functional teams

In many organisations, work crosses multiple team boundaries before it reaches a customer or user. One team completes a feature,  another team tests it, a third deploys it, and a fourth supports it in production. Each of these steps can involve separate backlogs, priorities, and queues, and the handovers between teams can create delay, confusion, and coordination debt. These frictions often go unnoticed, not because people aren’t paying attention, but because they’ve been normalised.

It’s easy to focus on rituals and tooling. But most of the friction sits beneath the surface, in how responsibilities are divided, in the assumptions about who owns what, and in the number of interactions required to get something done. If your teams are structured around internal functions rather than outcomes, value has to cross multiple boundaries to move forward. Agile has helped teams to do more iterative planning and adapt to changing requirements, but this won't help if the work has to pass through four teams to deliver a change.

As Matthew Skelton (co-author of the Team Topologies Distilled book) said,  “ reducing handovers by having the majority of people working inside cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility - what we call stream-aligned teams - is key to fast flow.” You can hear more in this free video from the “Team Topologies Distilled” course.

Shift the question

Instead of asking, “Are we doing Agile right?”, organisations could be asking themselves more useful questions to open the door to deeper insights about how work really moves through the organisation, and where structural friction may be holding them back. “Are we organised in a way that supports flow?” “Can this team deliver value independently, or does it rely on others?” “How much effort are we spending coordinating, rather than delivering?” “What would it look like if the platform were a product, with users, feedback and measurable outcomes?” If you would like help running workshops to explore these kinds of questions, feel free to reach out.

From questions to insights

If these questions resonate, you might be interested in a tool that Conflux has developed. This fast flow benchmark helps organizations pinpoint exactly where flow is constrained, and more importantly, which areas will deliver the most significant impact. The benchmark takes just 10 minutes and provides immediate insights into your organization's fast flow potential. As a Team Topologies Advanced Partner with years of implementation experience, Conflux has codified what actually works.

Unclear ownership as a source of friction

In teams where ownership is shared, fragmented, or unclear, work gets done, but outcomes often aren’t achieved. The team is busy, features get shipped, boards move from left to right, but the results don’t land. Everyone’s contributing, but no one’s accountable - nobody quite owns the outcome. So when something slips through the cracks, it’s hard to know where to look.

Figure 2 - User Needs Map showing team involvement across multiple capabilities


This isn’t about effort, it’s about structure. In many organisations, team boundaries have been shaped around systems, functions, or projects, not outcomes. Which means delivering value often requires three or four teams to coordinate across their respective slices of responsibility. Sometimes they align and sometimes they don’t, and the user experience reflects the gap. When ownership is distributed without clarity, it creates a coordination problem disguised as a delivery problem.

Why Agile alone doesn’t fix this

Agile helps teams prioritise and deliver, but it doesn’t guarantee that what they’re delivering is coherent, or that someone is looking at the whole. Scrum has a Product Owner, but when multiple teams are working toward the same user-facing goal, shared ownership can easily blur into uncertainty. Instead of asking who owns which tickets, organisations should be asking themselves which outcomes different teams are accountable for, and the boundaries of the outcome - where does it begin and end? Asking themselves whether their teams can make meaningful progress without depending on others can help organisations identify whether their delivery problem is, in fact, a boundary problem.

Ownership isn’t just about responsibility, it’s about reducing friction. Clear ownership reduces rework, improves alignment, and shortens feedback loops. More importantly, it allows teams to make decisions that actually move the needle, without waiting for consensus across a committee of teams. In complex environments, this kind of clarity helps contribute to flow.

Asking the questions that unblock flow

Agile has helped teams adopt better ways of working. We plan more collaboratively, reflect more frequently, and adapt more easily. But across many organisations, the same underlying question keeps surfacing: “Why does delivery still feel so slow?” In a follow-up piece, next time, I will explore other structural and interactional frictions that may be at play, as well as the new questions organisations could be asking themselves to achieve faster flow of value.

This newsletter was originally posted by Rich Allen on his LinkedIn.

Want to learn more about User Needs Mapping? Checkout Rich's new book.

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