Most failures aren’t new. They’re the same handful of patterns, over and over — the shadow side of the method, the things teams do when they keep the form but lose the function. Learn to name them and you can catch them early, while they’re still cheap to fix.

The anti-patterns

• Tickets as the holy grail — bananaBananaA task without context — no "why", no link to a real outcome. The thing the method exists to eliminate. factories. When the backlog is treated as the source of truth, it fills with bananas: tasks with no “why,” no link to a real outcome. Context lives in the Initiative DocumentInitiative DocumentThe PR/FAQ-shaped document where an initiative's context lives — customer, solution, plan, business case, and success metrics. and the Daily Check-inDaily Check-inA 15-minute daily ritual where the team surfaces reality and unknowns rather than reporting status., not in epics.
• Skipping Initiative Planning. Jumping straight to tickets without an Approach guarantees mid-course rework, because the uncertainties surface late instead of being scheduled.
• Losing the narrative. If the weekly titles don’t read as a story end to end, the team wanders and the Product BoardProduct BoardTwo or more stakeholders who see the team's weekly demo and coach it — the human in the loop, with no single lead. loses interest.
• Over-loading Week Planning into the Check-in, or vice versa. They have different purposes — Week Planning specifies outcomes and distribution; the Check-in surfaces daily blockers, lessons, and focus. Blending them muddies both.
• Unprepared Check-ins. Without a few minutes of individual prep, the meeting turns discussion-heavy and runs over.
• Single-person administration. If one person types everyone else’s TFOThings to Figure OutEach person's one thing to figure out today, framed as a Why/How/What/When question that resolves into a Lesson Learned. and Lessons Learned, accountability evaporates.
• Vague success metrics. “Improve performance” turns into weeks of arguing what counts. Define Gold / Silver / Bronze, or use external judges.
• Ignoring uncertainties. If Initiative Planning doesn’t extract them and assign them to weeks, the team learns reactively instead of on purpose. A neglected Uncertainty ListUncertainty ListThe team's living list of open unknowns — sized 1/3/5, phrased as questions, reviewed daily and in planning, chipped away each week. is the same failure, slow-motion.
• Over-loading capacity past 75%. With no buffer for the unknownUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates., unplanned work derails every week.
• Big-bang management decisions. Engineering teams thrive on consistency, predictability, and focus. Processes that flow give less stress than things that pop.

The common root

Every one of these is the same move: optimising the appearance of progress over the reality of it. A packed week looks productive. A polished mock-up looks shipped. A tidy backlog looks like a plan. Each trades a real signal for a comforting one — and the method exists precisely to keep the real signal in view.