Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I would like to arrest the entire court.
The crucial evidence missing from both sides of the argument are the same crucial bits of evidence missing from almost every part of business discourse, almost everywhere.
When Agile was introduced, it was in the context of traditional management systems where managers fundamentally understood how to do business. Everyone knew about Porter and Ansoff and the BCG matrix ... and everyone knew about risk management. The idea of launching a product without market research would be absolutely inconceivable.
Agile teams developed within those companies and were hugely successful because they were supported by the underlying framework of business expertise.
In the years since, Agile has come to replace those supporting structures, and I've only seen two frameworks that seem to have any idea of what enterprise businesses need, in the most basic sense, to succeed - and one is very literally RUP rebranded as "SAFe", and that makes teams miserable.
In software companies, most managers don't know how to do strategy, as in, it is a distinctive skill set that is traditionally formally taught and they have never had that education. There are no risk registers, no proper consumer research, and the failure rates are racking up.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft both hit the headlines recently for lack of proper testing. I see job adverts for UX roles and product managers that urge that you should be willing to stick out something half-finished and patch it later. This is making users miserable.
It is impossible for five people in a team to have the end-to-end skills necessary to launch a successful product (unless you're a mom-and-pop boutique provider, like a rural law firm) - this is why companies ever hire more people.
This is why companies hire specialists at the first opportunity - because someone who has done something full time for a few years will always be better at it than a generalist. A product generalist who is tasked with 'UX' will either be crappy at research or crappy at design, or both. Doesn't your product deserve better than that?
As a specialist researcher, I have a formal market research qualification, plus a certification in UX and plenty of practice in a range of methods over many years. I use that experience to flip back and forth as the situation demands - I'll stick a risk register on a Lean UX project, and a Gantt chart on a Design Thinking project. Some people find that peculiar, but it needs to genuine improvements.
But the overarching 'that'll do' attitude across the industry leads to sloppy, unresearched products that customers don't like being packaged into crappy-looking interfaces and thrown untested at the market, and we wonder why they "fail fast" - and we don't learn, because nobody in the building has the skills to point that stuff out.
It doesn't matter if you're doing Scrum or Kanban or DA or SAFe if the managers don't know how to run a business. Perhaps we need something altogether new, or perhaps we just need to stick a few guardrails and automated checks on systems and send the managers off to business school.
