--- title: Your Developers Aren’t Slow. Your Organization Is description: A development team manager argues that underperforming engineering teams usually reflect organizational dysfunction, not slow developers. Joining a company in... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/your-developers-aren-t-slow-your-organization-is-9jpoepddi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Your Developers Aren’t Slow. Your Organization Is | daily.dev og:description: A development team manager argues that underperforming engineering teams usually reflect organizational dysfunction, not slow developers. Joining a company in... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-developers-aren-t-slow-your-organization-is-9jpoepddi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/9jPOEPDDI.png og:image:alt: Your Developers Aren’t Slow. Your Organization Is og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Your Developers Aren’t Slow. Your Organization Is **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 15 min read · 51 upvotes · 14 comments ## Summary A development team manager argues that underperforming engineering teams usually reflect organizational dysfunction, not slow developers. Joining a company in 2017, she found Scrum ceremonies happening without purpose, a pattern she calls 'Cargo Cult Agile'. She fixed intake by formalizing requests through SharePoint and TFS, took on Product Owner duties herself to shield developers from competing stakeholder demands, and added a physical sticky-note task board for visibility. Stakeholder trust and developer motivation improved as a result. She warns that AI coding agents can now generate changes in minutes, but without fixing prioritization and decision-making, teams just produce the wrong things faster. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is Cargo Cult Agile? Cargo Cult Agile is when an organization copies the visible practices of a methodology, like daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives, without understanding the principles that make them effective. Stand-ups turn into status reports for management, retrospectives happen because they're scheduled rather than to drive change, and the backlog becomes an organized list nobody has actually prioritized. _Teams untangling real agile practice from performative ceremony can track these lessons on daily.dev._ ### Why might AI coding agents make a disorganized engineering team worse off, not better? Faster code generation amplifies the consequences of poor decisions rather than fixing them. If organizations automate execution without improving how they decide what matters, align competing priorities, and take ownership of decisions, they end up producing the wrong things at a much higher speed instead of the right things faster. _Engineering leaders weighing AI agent adoption against process fixes can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@tekn0wledg** · 5 upvotes > Yeah, this is basically my playbook. The process should be organic, not prescriptive. It depends on the business, the team and the products. **@lancelotoleriana** · 1 upvotes > "Without fixing prioritization and decision-making, teams just produce the wrong things faster." This is the best take on AI coding agents I’ve seen all year. AI can write the boilerplate in 30 seconds, but if the product requirements are garbage and the stakeholders are bypassing the backlog, you're just accelerating your tech debt. Spot on. **@akkitto** · 1 upvotes > The picture demonstrates 100% reality in many firms. **@baturhanpro** · 0 upvotes >  **@killmonger99** · 0 upvotes > so much true to the core. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Fastest Developer on the Team Is Creating Work Nobody Can See Yet](https://daily.dev/posts/the-fastest-developer-on-the-team-is-creating-work-nobody-can-see-yet-dzfivmqvy) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Your engineering team looks healthy. It probably isn't](https://daily.dev/posts/your-engineering-team-looks-healthy-it-probably-isn-t-to0izfpfa) · Lobsters · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Blog: The AI Velocity Paradox: Why Your Team Ships Slower When Developers Move Faster](https://daily.dev/posts/blog-the-ai-velocity-paradox-why-your-team-ships-slower-when-developers-move-faster-wtxobitud) · Wawandco · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [Scrum Isn’t Dead. It’s Never Been More Necessary.](https://daily.dev/posts/scrum-isn-t-dead-it-s-never-been-more-necessary--vpmoxvyzx) · SD Times · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Your Engineering Team Is Slow \(It's the Codebase, Not the People\)](https://daily.dev/posts/why-your-engineering-team-is-slow-it-s-the-codebase-not-the-people--uubshdpiu) · Ruby Flow · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership), [#agile](https://daily.dev/tags/agile), [#scrum](https://daily.dev/tags/scrum) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-developers-aren-t-slow-your-organization-is-9jpoepddi) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Your Developers Aren’t Slow. 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AI can write the boilerplate in 30 seconds, but if the product requirements are garbage and the stakeholders are bypassing the backlog, you’re just accelerating your tech debt. 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