[This is part 1 of a two-part series on applying Simple Agility to escape common team dysfunctions. Part 2 drops Thursday.]
A Simple Agility approach to escaping user story hell
I was trying to guide a development team out of their feature factory trap. You know the pattern: user stories flowing in, story points flowing out, features shipping, but nobody could tell you if any of it actually mattered to the business.
But here’s what made it interesting - it wasn’t just the dev team that was stuck. Product couldn’t articulate why features mattered beyond “the roadmap says so.” Business couldn’t connect initiatives to outcomes beyond “we need to stay competitive.” The whole value stream was running on autopilot.
The team was just trying to make sense of what they were being asked to work on. And that’s where things got interesting.
The Real Problem
Feature factories don’t start with lazy developers. They start when everyone in the value stream stops asking “why?” and starts optimizing for output:
Business defines initiatives without clear intent
Product writes requirements without connecting to outcomes
Development builds to acceptance criteria without questioning value
Everyone measures velocity, throughput, and story points completed
It’s theatre. Agile theatre. Everyone’s doing their part, hitting their metrics, and the business isn’t moving forward.
The team I was working with knew something was wrong. They’d ask “why are we building this?” and get answers like “it’s on the roadmap” or “the competitor has it” or “just build what’s in the story.” They were smart people reduced to order-takers.
A Different Framework
I introduced three concepts to help them think differently about their work:
Business Intent - What business outcome is this product or service trying to achieve? Not features, not solutions - the actual business result we’re after.
Minimum Business Impact - What’s the smallest measurable change that would indicate this feature matters? If we can’t define minimum impact, we can’t justify building it.
Options - How do we break this work into staged pieces that let us learn and deliver value incrementally? Options aren’t phases or sprints - they’re meaningful slices of functionality that create decision points.
This isn’t complicated. It’s just asking better questions before accepting work.
The Behavioral Shift
But here’s what made this actually work - we changed what people did in the moments that already existed in their workflow. No new meetings, no additional ceremonies. Just different questions in planning, standup, and review.
Planning: Understanding instead of accepting
Traditional planning: “Here are the stories for this sprint. Any questions? No? Great, let’s estimate and commit.”
The new way: Before accepting any work, the team asks:
What’s the business intent behind this request?
What’s the minimum impact that makes this worth building?
What options could we explore to learn fastest?
The team earns the right to commit by demonstrating they understand why, not just what. If product can’t articulate business intent, the work doesn’t get accepted. Simple as that.
This isn’t developers being difficult. It’s developers being responsible for outcomes, not just outputs.
Standup: Inspecting instead of reporting
Traditional standup: “Yesterday I did X, today I’m doing Y, no blockers.” It’s a status report disguised as a coordination meeting.
The new way: The team uses standup to inspect their understanding:
Are we still confident this option serves the business intent?
What are we learning that should change our approach?
Do we need to pivot based on what we discovered?
It’s sense-making, not status updates. The team is actively thinking about whether they’re on the right path, not just marching through tasks.
Some days the standup is 30 seconds: “We’re good, nothing’s changed.” Other days it’s 10 minutes of real discussion about whether to continue or adjust. The team decides based on what they’re learning.
Review: Dialogue instead of showing
Traditional review: “Look what we built! Cool, right? Approved? Great, next sprint.”
The new way: Review becomes a dialogue about learning:
Did this achieve minimum business impact? How do we know?
What did we learn about the business intent?
What options should we explore next based on this evidence?
Stakeholders aren’t approving demos. They’re co-learning with the team about what actually creates value. Sometimes the answer is “this didn’t move the needle, let’s try something else.” That’s success, not failure - you learned something without building six more months of features.
Connection to Simple Agility
If you’ve read my Simple Agility framework, you’ll recognize what’s happening here. These practices embody the operating fundamentals:
Priority - Business intent forces clarity about what matters most
Simplification - Minimum business impact and options prevent over-building
Ownership - Understanding before accepting creates genuine commitment
Cooperation - Dialogue in review requires real collaboration across roles
Continuous delivery - Options enable staged value delivery and learning
Communication - Inspecting and dialoguing replace status reporting
Improvement - Every review creates feedback for the next cycle
The team wasn’t following a methodology. They were practicing fundamentals that made sense in their context.
What Emerges: Adaptive Intelligence
Here’s what happened over time with this team:
They stopped waiting for perfect requirements. When business intent was clear but the path wasn’t, they’d propose options and run small experiments.
They started pushing back on low-impact work. Not with “we don’t want to build that” but with “we can’t identify minimum business impact - help us understand why this matters.”
They adjusted mid-sprint when learning changed their understanding. No guilt about “not finishing the sprint commitment” because the commitment was to business intent, not to a specific solution.
Product and business started writing better requests because they knew the team would ask hard questions. The quality of thinking improved across the entire value stream.
This is adaptive intelligence. Not following a process, but developing the capacity to sense, learn, and adjust based on what matters.
Why Ceremonies Become Optional
Once a team has adaptive intelligence, prescribed ceremonies become less relevant. The team naturally does what’s needed when it’s needed:
They align when understanding drifts
They inspect when learning accumulates
They dialogue when decisions need input
You don’t need to schedule these things. They happen because the team cares about outcomes and has the fundamentals to work effectively.
This is where Simple Agility leads - not to better ceremonies, but to teams that don’t need prescribed ceremonies at all. The intelligence is distributed, not centralized in a process.
The Invitation
I’m not saying this is easy. Changing behavior patterns is harder than following a methodology. Product and business will initially resist questions that expose unclear thinking. Teams will fall back into reporting mode when stressed.
But if you’re stuck in a feature factory - if you’re shipping but not moving business outcomes - this is a way out. Start with three simple concepts and three behavioral shifts. See what emerges.
The full Simple Agility framework gives you more context and structure. But you can start here, with your next planning session, by asking: “What’s the business intent we’re serving?”
Everything else follows from that question.