Agile Is a Language

Agile isn’t a ceremony. It’s a shared way to speak strategy.

I’ve seen teams go through the motions: stand-up at nine, updates in turn, tickets sitting in the backlog like forgotten promises. Everyone half-listening until it’s their turn to talk. Agile as process theatre.

The best teams I’ve worked with looked nothing like that. At MetLife, we had an embedded Agile coach who didn’t just teach ceremonies—he helped us use them to build shared intent.

We huddled around a board, in person. Tickets actively moved because the team owned them. Sprint goals weren’t handed down; they were argued, agreed, and signed off together. Nothing entered a sprint that the whole team hadn’t decided mattered.

That’s when Agile stopped being a process and became a language.
A way of making decisions in real-time, of speaking strategy at the level of the work.

Done right, Agile doesn’t make teams faster.
It makes them clearer.