# Why are we stuck in the Feature Factory? Agile Theater vs. True Agility: transcript

Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio.

Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/why-are-we-stuck-in-the-feature-factory-agile-theater-vs-true-agility/
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Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English

## Transcript

[00:00:00] So why are we stuck factory side? A big reason behind that is what I call

[00:00:04] agile theater. Some people call it product theater or agile name only.

[00:00:10] In the agile theater you have stars like the Scramaster, the product owner, the agile team,

[00:00:16] the sprint. All of these are good ideas but in the agile theater all we're doing is we're playing

[00:00:27] we have the facade of doing things differently but essentially what we've done is we've just applied

[00:00:34] these names to existing ways of working. It's very easy to rename stuff. It's much harder

[00:00:43] to do stuff differently. It's much easier to say to the project manager or the engineering

[00:00:51] manager you're now the Scramaster. It's much harder to expect them to be a servant leader,

[00:00:59] to facilitate and coach and not be on top of everything and empower the team to figure things out.

[00:01:05] You're now a product owner or the BA you're now a product owner or a product manager for that

[00:01:12] matter. It's much harder to actually give them ownership of the product.

[00:01:18] To give them visibility if not control of the P&L of that product and ownership of an outcome of a

[00:01:26] North Star and trust them to figure out which features to deliver. So you can already see that if we're

[00:01:33] operating in an agile theater or product theater we might have some concepts in place and that

[00:01:39] helps us as an organization say yeah we're agile at this point or we're using a product

[00:01:46] we have product management we have a product organization but actually we're still stuck in

[00:01:54] that feature factory.