Supersonic

Chris,

I had a senior leader at an old job who used to say, “You never want to kick down the door and tell the people there that their couch is ugly.” He was talking about when to start changing things.

The more I’ve learned, the more I see the balancing act underneath that advice. You don’t want to be stuck with the ugly couch forever — but you also don’t get to pretend it isn’t someone’s living room.

Your team is doing sprints and story pointing. That’s not a bad thing. I’ve come to think of ceremonies, artifacts, and frameworks as training wheels. They help a team find balance until it matures enough to need them less — or not at all. If the team needs them, or the people around the team need them, then they’re serving a purpose. When they stop serving a purpose, you put them away. No drama required.

Story points, for example, can be useful — not because the number matters, but because the conversation does. You learn a lot just by watching how a team sizes work. Who’s talking? Who isn’t? Are they accounting only for effort, or also for the reality of getting something into production? Are the stories they take on lining up with what they say they can do?

Those moments tell you where the teaching opportunities are. They also tell you when it’s time to stop teaching and let the team own it.

Sprints are similar. They’re not inherently evil. Used well, they create boundaries that help teams manage context switching, or give them a natural pause to check their own health before they disappear into the weeds. They can even create a sense of renewal — a chance to reset habits — which matters more than most people admit when they talk about change.

Well, am I making haste, or could it be haste is making me?
— Bad Religion (Supersonic)

That question keeps coming back to me.

There’s a concept around “fresh starts” that I find useful here. You’re in the middle of one right now. A new manager, a new chapter, a real opening to change how work happens. Fresh starts are powerful — but they’re also fragile. You don’t get many of them, and you can waste one by trying to do too much too fast.

Which is why the real question usually isn’t “Should I change things right now?”
It’s “What’s the smallest thing I can change that actually sticks?”

One of the most useful rules I’ve ever encountered is to make the smallest change you can without triggering pushback. What that looks like depends entirely on the team and the organization. It applies to stakeholders too — especially if the team has been beaten up before. You’re only going to move as fast as the system allows, whether you like it or not.

That kind of progress is excruciatingly slow. But it’s real.

I’ve been doing this Agile thing for a little over ten years now, and I’ve had about as many positions. When transformations fail — when leadership decides Agile was the problem and fires the Scrum Masters — the only thing that survives are the small changes that actually took root. The habits. The conversations. The bits of safety people learned to trust.

My goal stopped being “getting it right” a long time ago.
Now it’s making progress that outlasts me.

So don’t waste your fresh start with the team or the company. Take the small steps you’re allowed to take while you still have the space to take them.

Which brings me to the only questions that really matter right now:

What are your small steps?
What do you want to focus on first?
If you’re eating the elephant one bite at a time — and they’re going to be small bites — where do you start?

I hope that helps.

Mark