By Pasieka Manuel
Have you ever found yourself in a two-hour sprint planning meeting with ten people, most of whom are clearly disengaged, while the Scrum Master and Product Owner debate whether a ticket is still relevant—or why it was even created? Meanwhile, half the team is multitasking, the other half trying to get their microphone working while one colleague keeps dropping in and out of the meeting because of his flaky internet connection, and you wonder: “What are we even doing here?”
If so, you’re not alone. This is the lived experience of countless distributed Agile software development teams around the world. How much of it is the new normal, and how much of it we should blame on Scrum? How did a philosophy focused on adaptability and collaboration get reduced to calendar gridlock, rigid ceremonies, and team burnout?
In this opinion piece, I want to focus on the problems I have seen in teams that try to apply Agile Software development with Scrum and end up with a Cargo Cult instead of the principles in the Agile Manifesto.
I’ll end with a few suggestions on how to escape the trap of endless meetings that cause nothing but frustration and burnout.
The Promise vs. The Practice
At its heart, Agile is a mindset and practices: a set of values aimed at empowering teams to work iteratively, adapt to change, and prioritize people over processes. Scrum is one of the most widely adopted frameworks designed to implement Agile. It focuses — perhaps too much — on structure, roles, ceremonies, and artifacts that should help teams collaborate more effectively.
However, in practice, Scrum often fails to bridge the gap between management’s desire to plan, control and measure, and developers who want to build and operate high-quality software. Instead of fostering collaboration, many teams find themselves locked in mechanical routines that add more friction than value.
In theory, Scrum unites product and engineering under one umbrella. In reality, it often creates an illusion of alignment while embedding conflicting priorities. Management gets deceiving visibility through estimates and ticket updates. Developers get drowned in ceremonies and fragmented workflows.
The result? A system that no longer serves either side, resulting in failing deadlines and frustrated teams.
Where Scrum Goes Off Track
Too often, Scrum becomes a cargo cult—a form of mimicry where teams go through the motions of "Agile" without embodying its principles. Just like tribes that built mock airstrips to attract planes that never came, teams religiously follow Scrum rituals hoping they’ll magically produce innovation, alignment, and speed.
Here are the clearest warning signs that your team might be stuck in the Scrum trap:
1. Useless Stand-Ups and Endless Planning Meetings
Stand-ups should be quick syncs, not status-reporting marathons. Daily stand-ups and sprint plannings are supposed to create alignment. But when most team members have nothing meaningful to say, or when meetings stretch on for hours with little to show for it, they become a time sink. Developers start performing status updates as a form of appeasement, not collaboration.
The goal shifts from building value to checking boxes.
2. The Scrum Master Bottleneck
In theory, the Scrum Master is a facilitator who removes blockers. In practice, they often become the sole enforcer of "Agile compliance," turning the role into a bottleneck. When process adherence is outsourced to one person, the rest of the team disengages, removing ownership from the team. Instead of collective responsibility, you get passivity and indifference.
People show up, but leave their minds at the door.
3. Ticket Overload, User Underfocus
Scrum tends to revolve around ticket planning—creating them, estimating them, discussing them, updating them. But what happens when these tickets become the end goal rather than a means to deliver value? When ticket completion becomes more important than real user impact? If your team is constantly refining, estimating, and moving tickets without shipping meaningful features, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.
You end up with sprints full of busywork, but little meaningful progress.
4. Teams Running on the Spot
Despite all the structure, teams often work overtime, struggle to meet deadlines, and drown in technical debt. Parallel tasks, meeting fatigue, and constant context switching ensure that nothing ever really gets finished. It’s the treadmill effect: lots of motion, very little movement.
The outcome? Frustrated engineers, disillusioned stakeholders, and eventually—failed projects.
A Way Forward: Ditch the Playbook, Empower the People
Scrum was designed as a tool to support Agile values, not to replace them. The moment the framework becomes more important than the outcome, you’ve lost the plot. To reclaim agility, we need to shift the focus away from rigid roles and ceremonies and toward team ownership and empowerment.
Ditch the Sprint Planning and Review that block the whole team. Stop with guided retrospectives that discourage independent thought. Instead, here are some alternative practices that foster a healthier, more productive development culture:
Hold Product Meetings, Not Just Sprint Reviews
Instead of keeping product direction in the hands of a few, regularly gather the broader team to discuss progress, vision, and goals. These sessions can include developers, product leads, and even customer support. This creates transparency, builds trust, and aligns everyone under a shared mission. Engaged teams build better products while having fun doing so.
Create “Dev-Only” Spaces for Decision Making
Technical discussions don’t need a facilitator with a playbook. Let developers hold regular focused sessions to break down requirements, design systems, and make architectural decisions. This fosters technical ownership and surfaces hidden expertise within the team while building relationships that encourage one-on-one collaboration rather than large, unproductive group meetings.
Think in Epics, Not Tickets
Rather than breaking work into micromanaged tasks, assign long-term epics to individual developers or small groups. Let them own the outcome, not just the steps. This encourages responsibility, creative problem-solving, and a sense of personal investment in the work.
This ensures continuity, requiring fewer handoffs and supports employee retention.
Limit Work in Progress
Take a cue from Kanban: don’t let teams spread themselves too thin. Focus on a handful of features at a time and get them to “done” before picking up new ones. This minimizes context switching and helps teams actually finish what they start with the quality they need.
Doing fewer things better often beats doing more things halfway.
Establish Focus Periods
Instead of chasing every priority at once, declare focus periods—4 to 6 weeks where the team zooms in on a specific area of the product. Whether it’s performance, testing, debt cleanup or a specific feature set. This approach brings clarity and allows teams to say "no" to distractions.
Conclusion: Rediscovering Agility and building courage
Scrum promised a way to bring structure to Agile development. But somewhere along the way, it became a substitute for agility itself. By overemphasizing roles, rituals, and reporting, many teams have lost sight of what really matters: empowered people solving meaningful problems.
The antidote isn’t another framework. It’s the courage to discover what works for your team —and to build a culture where developers feel trusted, management sees real outcomes, and the entire team is united by purpose, not process.
You don’t need a Scrum Master to make your team effective. You need people who care, communicate, and take ownership.