Agile Sprinting Doesn’t Automatically Make the Work Faster — Here’s What Actually Makes It Work
In a business setting, the moment people hear “Agile” or “sprints”, something fires in their mind.
They imagine speed.
Velocity charts.
Daily stand‑ups.
Two‑week miracles.
But Agile sprinting doesn’t automatically make the work faster. In fact, introducing sprints into the wrong context can slow you down dramatically, or frustrate the heck out of folks.
Sprinting is not a silver bullet. It’s a delivery environment. And for sprinting to work — really work — certain conditions need to be in place.
2. Empowerment: the team can make real decisions
Sprints fail when:
the team can’t approve its own design decisions,
every choice needs sign‑off,
risks need escalation upwards, or
priorities can’t be adjusted without a governance forum.
Sprinting only works when the team has delegated authority.
This doesn’t mean chaos; it means clear boundaries and the space to deliver within them. If decision-making power sits elsewhere, speed collapses.
1. A team that already knows the work, together
Sprints rely on the team making decisions quickly. That only happens when the team:
understands the domain,
shares context,
knows the product or service intimately, and
can make judgement calls without having to “go and find someone”.
If every question needs investigation, approval or clarification, you do not have a sprint-ready team. If the people who do know that stuff are not part of the sprint, you do not have a sprint-ready team. If what is being attempted is highly divergent of what your team can confidently do or decide on, you may not have a sprint-ready team (unless they have been actively empowered to explore a la an innovation practice)
3. Daily progress can be made
A sprint is a flow exercise (part of its beauty)
Sprinting assumes the team can flow and make meaningful progress every single day, not once or twice a week. That requires:
the ability to work asynchronously,
the freedom to unblock themselves quickly,
low dependency on people outside the sprint rhythm who can’t respond fast enough.
If the team has to wait hours or days for answers, or they are highly dependent upon handing things off to others who are not part of the sprint rhythm, sprinting will not make the work faster — it will just expose the slow parts more frequently (which, in my experience, creates more psychological frustration and makes it feel bizarrely slower)
4. The work is sliceable
Sprints thrive on incremental, inspectable work. What you’re delivering must be sliceable into meaningful, testable, reviewable increments in a short window — typically 1–2 weeks. That means:
deliverables or outcomes that can be broken into meaningful, valuable increments (not fragments that only make sense when stitched into a six‑month whole.)
feedback opportunities at least every 1–2 weeks
each sprint can release something of value
You’re not stacking up six sprints of invisible work waiting for a giant go-live — that’s just waterfall in fortnightly meetings.
If the work cannot be sliced, you won’t get agility.
If the work is tiny, you don’t need sprints — you need a simple change process.
5. Availability & Focus: sprinting requires the team’s attention
Sprinting assumes the people involved are present, responsive, and available daily.
A team that is “50% allocated” across five initiatives is not sprinting. It’s context‑switching under an Agile label.
To sprint well, the team needs focus — ideally majority, often total, focus during the sprint period.
6. A Product Owner (or equivalent) who is truly available
This person doesn’t have to be called “Product Owner”, but the function must exist. The team should be able and empowered to make the majority of their own decisions, collaboratively, but when they can’t, you need someone who is a part of that team who can:
answer questions in real time,
make prioritisation decisions instantly,
refine the work collaboratively within the team, and
be present during the sprint, not just at the start or end.
A sprint without a committed and final decision‑maker is like a racing car without a driver.
7. Psychological safety, trust & Culture
Sprints expose work in progress constantly. Every day, the team shows what’s done, what’s not done, what’s unclear, and where things are going wrong. That level of transparency only works in a culture where people feel safe enough to say:
“I’m stuck.”
“I’ve found a problem.”
“This isn’t working.”
“I don’t know the answer yet.”
Without that safety, or in low‑trust environments, sprints stop being adaptive and become performative. The team starts hiding problems rather than surfacing them. Agility dies in cultures that punish uncertainty or like to excavate blame.
If the culture values being right, looking certain, or sticking to the original plan to “save face”, sprinting is incompatible. Teams will cling to bad plans rather than surface new insights.
Some organisations love starting things. They applaud ideas, kickoffs, new requirements, new initiatives. Sprinting only works when the culture celebrates completion — the discipline of finishing increments and reducing work in progress. If leaders reward new requests more than delivered outcomes, sprints will fill up with work but produce nothing.
8. Room for Change — Not Chaos
You don’t need a perfect "scope” to sprint. You do need one that’s stable enough for the team to finish what they start.
A sprint can absorb learning and refinement, but it cannot absorb constant mid‑sprint changes. Change the goalposts every day and nothing gets delivered.
Enter: The Backlog. A healthy backlog is a disciplined storage system for ideas, insights, needs and opportunities. You want ideas to surface during a sprint — that’s part of working iteratively — but you don’t want them derailing the work already in motion.
A sprint-ready backlog has:
Clear priorities so the team stays focused for the duration of the sprint.
Clear outcomes so the team knows what “good” looks like.
Somewhere to put new ideas the moment they arise, without acting on them instantly.
Enough refinement that the next sprint isn’t guesswork or discovery masquerading as delivery.
Sprinting is flexible, but it isn’t a free-for-all. It is not impulsive.
Adapt between sprints. Commit within a sprint. Have the discipline to say, “Great idea — let’s put it in the backlog and look at it later.”
That’s how you protect flow, finish increments and actually deliver.
So when should you sprint?
Sprint when the work is too complex for a simple change, too fluid for a project, and too urgent to wait for upfront design.
Sprint when your team knows how to work together and are empowered and willing to make decisions of their own accord.
Sprint when your culture allows for open-air learning and has no interest in finding or apportioning blame.
Sprinting is a powerful delivery approach, but only when the environment is ready for it.
If you try to “go Agile” without the conditions above, you won’t get speed. You’ll get a frustrated team working inside a structure they can’t take advantage of. Sprinting is not a methodology. It’s a way of working that assumes:
very frequent collaboration,
autonomy,
transparency,
continuous progress, and
the ability to adapt daily.
When those things are true, sprinting can be transformative to delivery. When they aren’t, sprinting is just a word.