The Age of Agile Must End
Source: https://uxdesign.cc/the-age-of-agile-must-end-bc89c0f084b7 ↗
Burnett's argument is the one many product directors have been quietly thinking but struggle to say out loud: the word "agile" has been consumed by the industry it was meant to correct, and what is sold today under its name is mostly ceremony detached from the practices that made it work.
The piece is short, controlled in its anger, and lands because Burnett does not romanticise what came before — he simply shows how practice has decayed into theatre.
Read it alongside the Agile Manifesto in its original form to see the distance travelled.
For product direction it is useful permission: the problem with your current process may not be that it is insufficiently agile, but that "agile" has stopped being a useful word.
Central argument
Burnett argues that 'agile' as practiced in most organizations today has been hollowed out into ritual — standups, sprints, and retrospectives performed without the adaptive thinking and team autonomy those ceremonies were designed to support. The central thesis is not that agile principles were wrong, but that the label has been captured by the consulting and tooling industry, producing a cargo-cult version that preserves the form while discarding the substance. Burnett's implicit prescription is terminological as much as practical: the word itself has become an obstacle to honest diagnosis of process dysfunction.
Critique
The argument risks conflating the failure of a label with the failure of the underlying principles — if the practices Burnett defends (genuine iteration, empirical decision-making, team autonomy) are still valid, the problem may be one of institutional adoption rather than a case for abandonment. A thoughtful reader might ask what replaces 'agile' as a shared vocabulary for cross-functional alignment: critique without an alternative framework can leave practitioners with a diagnosis but no traction. The piece also does not engage seriously with contexts — regulated industries, hardware-adjacent products, large enterprises — where some ceremony serves legitimate coordination needs that lightweight agile thinking underestimated.
Why it matters for product
For a product director, the most actionable implication is diagnostic: if your team is delivering process compliance rather than learning, the issue is not that you need a better agile implementation but that the framework has become a shield against harder conversations about priorities, autonomy, and accountability. Burnett's framing also has direct bearing on organizational design — specifically on whether 'agile transformation' programmes are solving a real delivery problem or performing change as a substitute for it. The curator's suggestion to read it against the original Manifesto is particularly pointed for anyone who has inherited a scaled agile structure: the distance between the two documents makes visible exactly what was traded away in exchange for enterprise legibility.