Every show I’ve ever been part of ran on a production meeting. Somewhere between an hour and a handful of minutes, everyone who mattered aligned on the rundown, the risks, and the plan for when the plan fails. And here’s the thing: over twenty-five years, that meeting kept shrinking — better tools, better comms, tighter crews — but it never disappeared. Because the meeting was never the point. The alignment was the point.
Hold that thought, because our industry’s product and engineering organizations are about to relearn it the hard way.
Two ways to get it wrong
As AI-native ways of working accelerate the pace of building, I’m watching teams respond to their Agile inheritance in two opposite ways — and both are wrong in a familiar shape.
The first camp keeps every ceremony exactly as the framework prescribed — the full bucket of standups, refinements, plannings, retros, and program increments — while the underlying work has accelerated past what the calendar was built for. The result is teams spending more time synchronizing about the work than the work now takes. The ritual outlived its reason, and nobody wants to be the one to say it out loud.
The second camp burns it all down. No ceremonies, no cadence, no structure — we’re AI-native now, we move fast. And for about six weeks it feels fantastic… right up until two people ship conflicting decisions, nobody can say what the priority actually is, and the flood of cheaply-produced work turns out to need more alignment than the old trickle ever did, not less. They didn’t eliminate coordination. They just stopped doing it on purpose.
Separate the purpose from the mechanism
Here’s the discipline I’d offer instead, and it’s the same one that carried every technology transition I’ve lived through: separate what the ceremony was for from how it was done.
What Agile was for, underneath the branding, was four permanent things: shared priority, visible progress, fast feedback, and a regular moment to ask “is this still the right plan?” Those needs don’t go away when the work speeds up — they intensify. What changes is the mechanism. The cadence tightens. The batch shrinks. The status meeting dies and the exception-based check-in replaces it — the same evolution master control went through, from someone watching every channel to someone watching for what’s wrong.
The teams getting this right aren’t asking “which ceremonies do we keep?” They’re asking “how does each purpose get served now?” — and letting the mechanisms be renegotiated without guilt. Some old rituals survive, smaller. Some are replaced by tooling. A few new ones get invented. The purposes never change.
So let’s drop a waypoint: when the pace of the work changes, don’t defend the ceremony and don’t torch it. Ask what it was protecting, and protect that thing at the new speed.
The production meeting got shorter for twenty-five years. It never went away. That’s not tradition. That’s wisdom with a rundown.
Leave a Reply