Why Agile Made Us Slower

We implemented Scrum six months ago. Daily standups at 10:00, bi-weekly sprint planning, religious retrospectives. Everything by the book. The result? We ship slower than before.

The problem isn’t Agile as a methodology. The problem is we transformed simple principles into expensive ceremonies while the tools we already have—our CRM—sit unused as we gather in meetings to verbally tell each other what we did yesterday.

The Real Overhead of Ceremonies

Let’s do the math for our team of 3:

• Daily standup: 15 minutes × 5 = 1h 15min/week/person
• Sprint planning: 2h/2 weeks = 1h/week
• Retrospective: 1h/2 weeks = 30min/week
• Refinement: 1h/week

Total: 3h 45min per week out of 40h = 9.4% of time. For 3 people, that’s 11.25 hours per week consumed by synchronization.

This doesn’t include Slack, “quick sync” messages, or the 10-15 minutes after each meeting it takes to get back into flow.

The Information Latency Problem

Yesterday at 11:30, I asked in Slack: “What’s the status with the Everest lead?”

Maria was on a call with another client. Saw the message at 14:20. Responded at 14:35. Total: 3 hours of latency for information that already existed in the CRM since 9:15 that morning.

This happens daily:

Current flow (Agile + Slack-first):

1. Question in Slack: “What’s the status?”
2. Latency until response: 15 min – 4h
3. Context switch for the person being asked: 5-10 min recovery
4. Information disappears in history after a few days
5. Same question again in a week

Alternative flow (CRM-first):

1. Check CRM directly
2. Latency: 0 seconds
3. Context switch: 0
4. Information persists, is searchable, is structured
5. The question disappears as a necessity

We tracked this for a month. On average, each deal gets “asked about” 2.7 times before someone actually looks in the CRM. We write the information once in the CRM (where we have to write it anyway), then communicate it verbally 2-3 more times.

Unnecessary Information Multiplication

A simple deal update goes through an average of 3.4 channels:

1. Daily standup (verbal): “Had a call with the client, going well, sending proposal next week”

• Time: 2 minutes
• Persistence: 0
• Searchable: no
• Actionable: no

2. Slack thread (text): “Everest update: demo OK, waiting for feedback on pricing”

• Time: 1 minute
• Persistence: lost in scroll
• Searchable: theoretically yes, practically hard
• Actionable: limited

3. CRM entry (structured): Status: Proposal, Next step: Send pricing, Due date: Nov 20, Contact: John Doe, Notes: “Demo went well, particularly interested in API integration”

• Time: 5 minutes
• Persistence: permanent
• Searchable: yes
• Actionable: yes (notifications, pipeline reports, forecasting)

4. Sprint board (task update): “Everest proposal” moved to In Progress

• Time: 30 seconds
• Persistence: until sprint closes
• Searchable: limited
• Actionable: only for sprint

Total communication time for the same update: 8.5 minutes. If we only wrote in CRM: 5 minutes.

For 15 active deals and 2 updates/deal/week: 30 updates × 3.5 min overhead = 105 minutes/week lost to information duplication. That’s 1.75 hours per week just duplicating the same information.

Planning Poker with Three People

Last week’s sprint planning took 2 hours. We estimated 18 tickets. The process:

• I read the user story
• Clarifications: 2-3 minutes
• Planning poker: we all show cards, discuss if different
• Repeat until consensus
• Average time per ticket: 6.7 minutes

The problem: we’re three people. We talk every day. We know what needs to be done. 80% of these tickets didn’t need estimation at all. Clear technical effort, known dependencies, well-defined scope.

The alternative:

I write a document with sprint requirements: what features, what priority, what acceptance criteria. A language model processes the document and generates preliminary tickets with:

• Structured description
• Acceptance criteria
• Estimation based on similar tickets from history
• Dependencies identified automatically

Everyone reviews async: 10 minutes each. Comments or adjustments directly on the ticket. Complex tickets: we discuss individually.

Total time: 10 min/person × 3 = 30 minutes instead of 2h × 3 = 6h collective. Savings: 5.5 hours.

The argument is “we lose alignment.” But we’re three people. We’re already aligned. What we need is less time in meetings and more time actually working.

Impact on Effective Work

For our setup—where everyone does a bit of everything—the overhead is painful:

Standard week: 40h
Minus Agile ceremonies: -4h
Minus reactive Slack/messages: -3h
Effective work time: 33h

In async/CRM-first model:
Standard week: 40h
Minus CRM updates (structured, one time): -45min
Minus async communication: -1h
Effective work time: 38h 15min

Difference: +5.25 hours per person per week. For 3 people, that’s 15.75 hours—almost 40% of another full-time person.

What We’re Doing Wrong

Agile isn’t the problem. It’s that we’re following a playbook designed for 50-person teams:

1. We transformed “working software over comprehensive documentation” into “zero documentation.” Then we wonder why we keep asking each other the same questions.
2. We transformed “individuals and interactions” into “mandatory meetings.” We’re three people. We can just talk when we need to.
3. We treated all tasks equally. Most tickets are obvious. We don’t need a ceremony to estimate them.
4. We ignored our CRM. It has everything we need. We just don’t use it as the source of truth.

Conclusion

In the last 6 months we measured:

• 9.4% of time consumed by ceremonies
• 3.4× redundancy in information communication
• 3h average latency for simple questions
• 5.5h savings just by skipping planning poker

For a 3-person team, Agile ceremonies are overhead we can’t afford. We’re not suggesting we abandon structure completely. We’re suggesting we adapt it to reality: we have tools that can automate synchronization, we have AI that can generate tickets, we have a CRM that should be doing most of the heavy lifting.

Next article in the series: what an async-first workflow looks like in practice, with examples from our CRM.

PS: Some names and operational details in the examples have been anonymized or adjusted.