Big Agile with Lance Dacy

Big Agile
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Most agile advice is theater. Big Agile isn't. Enterprise agile consultant Lance Dacy takes the beliefs the agile world treats as settled, velocity, psychological safety, AI governance, org design, and pressure-tests them against how work actually moves inside real companies. No ceremony worship, no framework dogma. Just systems thinking, hard research, and two decades inside organizations where the standups are perfect and the roadmap still slips. For Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches, and leaders who want agility that's real, not performed.

  1. 1d ago

    Why Your Fastest Reviewer Is Slowing Everyone Down

    This episode is about code review, and what happens when your whole review process runs through one person. I worked with a team whose senior engineer reviewed every pull request for four teams. Nothing merged without her. Her manager called her amazing, and she is. She also hadn't written a line of product code in a week. AI is now sending far more code into that same line. I dig into what a 2026 benchmark says about how long AI-generated pull requests wait for review, what Don Reinertsen and DORA say about batch size, and why hiring a second hero doesn't remove the dependency. If one person on your team went on vacation tomorrow, how many reviews would stop? Get the Big Agile newsletter: https://big-agile.com/newsletter Workshops and consulting: https://big-agile.com/events Send us your team's questions: https://big-agile.com/questions

  2. Oct 26

    Why Your Best Metric Is Hiding Your Worst Problem

    This episode is about steering your team with a set of signals instead of a single number. A team I worked with went from releasing once a quarter to shipping 30 times a day. That chart earned a leadership slide. Their incident rate climbed too. It got a 2 a.m. phone call instead. The metric wasn't wrong. It was alone. I dig into what DORA's own guide says about metrics that pull against each other, and why a 1992 article about airplane cockpits still fits engineering dashboards. If your team is being praised for one number right now, what is it costing the people who produce it? Get the Big Agile newsletter: https://big-agile.com/newsletter Workshops and consulting: https://big-agile.com/events

  3. Oct 19

    Skipped Refactoring Is a Loan

    Your team's velocity chart has never looked better. So why does Lance Dacy think that team might be borrowing? In this episode, Lance looks at what happens to a code base when new code gets cheap to generate and refactoring quietly stops. It starts with one team: roadmap on track, stakeholders happy, one refactor in six weeks. Then a customer gets billed on the wrong day, and the fix doesn't stick. If you lead a team that's shipping faster than ever, this one is for you. The cost is real. It just never shows up on the chart.

  4. Oct 12

    Why Your AI ROI Slide Can’t Show a Loss

    Your AI coding tools made the team busier. Can your ROI slide prove they made the business better? In this episode, Lance Dacy looks at why so many AI ROI numbers fall apart in front of a CFO. It starts at a board meeting. The VP of engineering puts up one big green number. The CFO asks a single question about it, and nobody in the room can answer. If you're the one building the slide that goes upstairs, this one is for you. The problem is hiding in the numbers you're proudest of.

  5. Oct 5

    Why Your Team Codes Faster but Ships No Sooner

    AI coding tools made your developers faster. So why isn't anything reaching customers sooner? In this episode, Lance Dacy tracks down where that speed actually went, and why most leadership dashboards can't see it. It starts in a staff meeting. A VP is beaming over a chart that's way up, until the product leader asks how much faster the team is shipping. Not one day. If your teams are producing more than ever and delivery hasn't budged, this one is for you. The fix is simple, and it's going to feel backwards.

  6. Sep 28

    Why Perfect Scrum Events Can Still Miss Every Date

    A coach is working with four teams. Every Daily Scrum stays inside the time box. Every retrospective produces action items. Sprint reviews are well attended, and people actually make decisions in them. By every measure that coach was hired to improve, the teams are thriving. They've also missed every delivery date this quarter. So the coach does what the job seems to ask for: a fresh retro format, a framework refresher, tighter facilitation. The events get healthier. The dates keep slipping. In the final episode of Q3, Lance Dacy digs into what the latest State of Agile survey says about coaches, a role now being pulled in several directions at once, and what it can't say about which of those directions has a future. He brings in DORA's 2025 research on AI and delivery, and a 2009 book that saw this problem coming long before AI sped everything up. His argument: the coach doesn't need a better checklist. The coach needs to look somewhere the checklist never points. If your events look great and your dates don't, this is the episode to start with.

  7. Sep 21

    Why Your AI Training Is Making Your Team Less Safe

    A team finished an AI course feeling great. Clean prompts, certificates, real progress from where they started six weeks earlier. Two weeks later, the model handed one of them an answer that was confident, specific, and completely wrong. It cited a number that didn't exist. It went into a document, and the document went to a client before anyone caught it. When Lance asked how it slipped through, the answer was simple: nobody questioned it. It looked fine. That's the gap this episode is about: the space between using an AI tool and knowing when not to trust it. Lance Dacy makes the case that most AI training is quietly solving the wrong problem. It builds fluency, which is getting cheaper every month, while skipping the skill that's actually scarce and getting more valuable. He digs into why a certificate on the wall can leave a team less safe, and what a program has to do differently before the training ever changes what people do at their desks. If you're spending money teaching your team to use AI, this is the question to sit with first.

  8. Sep 14

    Will AI Replace Product Managers? It Already Took Half

    A product manager sits down for backlog refinement. A year ago that meant estimating, clarifying, dragging cards and tidying columns nobody reads. Today she describes a feature out loud and has three working prototypes before lunch. So the posts go up again. Product management is finished. Somebody go update the org chart. The administrative half of the role really is evaporating, and most of it should. Nobody grew up dreaming of grooming a backlog. The trouble is that the busy work is what filled the calendar, and a full calendar looked like a job. In this episode, Lance Dacy argues the replacement case makes one specific mistake: it treats the tasks and the role as the same thing. The tasks were only ever how the role showed up when building software was slow. Take the slowness away and what is left is the part that was always the job, and it is now more expensive to get wrong, not less. He walks one real customer request all the way through to show exactly where the judgment calls land, and closes with a one-week exercise that makes the change visible on your own calendar. Progress over perfection.

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Most agile advice is theater. Big Agile isn't. Enterprise agile consultant Lance Dacy takes the beliefs the agile world treats as settled, velocity, psychological safety, AI governance, org design, and pressure-tests them against how work actually moves inside real companies. No ceremony worship, no framework dogma. Just systems thinking, hard research, and two decades inside organizations where the standups are perfect and the roadmap still slips. For Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches, and leaders who want agility that's real, not performed.

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