---
title: "Agile"
description: "A way of working that delivers in small steps, learns from feedback and adapts its plans as understanding grows."
category: "Operations"
canonical: "https://contentlexicon.com/agile"
updated: "2026-10-16"
---

# Agile

_Operations_

> A way of working that delivers in small steps, learns from feedback and adapts its plans as understanding grows.

Instead of specifying everything up front and delivering it all at the end, an agile team works in short cycles, often of one to four weeks, and treats each one as a chance to learn. It values working results over exhaustive specification, people from different disciplines working together throughout and a pace the team can keep up. The term comes from software. In February 2001, 17 developers met at Snowbird in Utah and wrote the Manifesto for Agile Software Development: four values and 12 principles drawn from the lighter methods they were already using.

It helps to distinguish small-a agile from big-A Agile. The adjective names a quality of the work, and any team can have it. The noun names the industry that grew around the manifesto, with its frameworks, certifications, coaches and ceremonies. Scrum, with fixed-length sprints, a product owner and a scrum master, is the best known; kanban manages a continuous flow of work on a visible board, limiting how much is in progress at once. Frameworks can be useful scaffolding, but trouble starts when the method is installed and the habits never arrive. Dave Thomas, one of the manifesto's authors, argued in 2014 that the noun had become a marketing term, and Martin Fowler has called the result faux-agile: the vocabulary without the values.

## Why it matters for content

Content often arrives in agile teams late and in the wrong shape. A backlog item that reads "add copy" assumes words can be poured into boxes designed without them, and a sprint review that admires a prototype full of [lorem ipsum](https://contentlexicon.com/lorem-ipsum) is admiring something nobody can yet use. The manifesto's own test argues against this. If working software is the measure of progress, a page whose explanation hasn't been written isn't working. When [content designers](https://contentlexicon.com/content-designer) join research, write real words into early prototypes and test them alongside the interface, iteration covers the thing readers came for. Problems also surface while they're still cheap to fix, such as a heading that won't fit or a process that can't be explained plainly.

[Content teams](https://contentlexicon.com/content-team) can borrow the habits for their own work, though they transfer unevenly. Editorial work already iterates through drafts, edits and corrections, and newsrooms have always replanned when events intervene. A visible board, a limit on how many pieces are in progress and a short monthly retrospective can show a team's real workload and stop everything being urgent at once. Some content can't be released half-finished, though: a medicines leaflet, a legal notice or a fundraising appeal has to be right when a reader acts on it, and "we'll fix it next sprint" is little comfort to them. Agility moves review earlier and makes it smaller, so a subject expert sees a rough draft in the first week rather than a finished page on deadline day. A project team that disbands at launch also leaves its content without an owner, which is one reason Fowler argues for organising teams around lasting products rather than projects.

## How AI changes the picture

Much of agile's machinery was designed around scarce, slow human building time. Sprints, stand-ups and small batches helped teams manage that cost. When an agent can produce a working prototype or several drafts of a page in an afternoon, the constraint moves to deciding what's worth making and finding out whether it works for people. Content teams know this constraint well, because writing was rarely the slowest part of publishing. The loop of small steps and learning can now run much faster, but only as fast as a team can gather real feedback and make decisions. Ten generated variants remain ten guesses until readers have used them.

AI also tests the manifesto's preferences. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "working software over comprehensive documentation" were weightings rather than prohibitions, and agentic work shifts the weight. The instructions, style guidance, [content models](https://contentlexicon.com/content-model) and review gates that agents work within become part of the product, and an agent can only follow standards someone has written down. Kent Beck, another of the manifesto's authors, describes "augmented coding" as keeping tests and careful design while AI does much of the typing. The content equivalent keeps editorial standards and evaluation in place while AI drafts, which gives people who can write those standards clearly a larger part in an agile team's work.

The principle most at risk is sustainable pace. The manifesto asks for a pace that sponsors, developers and users can maintain indefinitely, and cheap output makes that easy to forget. Every page published in a fast cycle still has to be maintained, and every change asks something of readers who had learned where things were. Agility includes knowing when not to ship.

## Questions people ask

**Is agile the opposite of waterfall?**

They're often presented that way. Waterfall runs in sequence, from requirements through design, build and testing to release, with each phase signed off before the next begins. Most organisations mix the two, fixing budgets and launch dates in advance and working iteratively inside them. Winston Royce's 1970 paper, usually cited as waterfall's origin, described the pure sequence as risky and argued for feedback between stages and an early trial version.

**Does a content team need sprints?**

Only if its work divides into pieces that can be finished in a fortnight or so. A team redesigning a set of guidance pages may find sprints useful. A team handling a steady stream of requests, corrections and updates is often better served by a kanban board that shows what's waiting, what's in progress and where work gets stuck.

**Where does a content designer fit in a Scrum team?**

Inside it. The Scrum Guide counts everyone who helps create each increment of the product as a developer, whatever their discipline. A content designer therefore belongs in planning, reviews and retrospectives rather than receiving tickets at the end. In practice that means joining user research, working with designers on prototypes and helping decide when a piece of work is done.

**Can we be agile without adopting a framework?**

Yes. A small charity might meet once a month, look at how people used last month's pages, choose two changes and check the following month whether they helped. That's the loop Thomas describes: work out where you are, take a small step, adjust what you think in the light of what happened and go round again. It needs no certification. A framework becomes worth considering when several teams have to coordinate their work.

## Learn more

- [Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)](https://pragdave.me/thoughts/active/2014-03-04-time-to-kill-agile.html) – Dave Thomas, one of the manifesto's authors, makes the 2014 case for treating agile as an adjective rather than a product, and reduces working with agility to a four-step loop.
- [Aligning Content Work with Agile Processes](https://alistapart.com/article/aligning-content-work-with-agile-processes) – the content strategist Brendan Murray on what content teams already share with agile iteration, why early builds deserve real content rather than lorem ipsum and how stand-ups can bring content and development closer.
- [Does AI Make the Agile Manifesto Obsolete?](https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/02/ai-agile-manifesto-debate) – InfoQ's 2026 report on the argument over agentic development, from the claim that agents are too fast for agile to Kent Beck's augmented coding and the view that agile is optimising a constraint that has moved.

Related terms: [Agentic AI](https://contentlexicon.com/agentic-ai), [Content design](https://contentlexicon.com/content-design), [Content designer](https://contentlexicon.com/content-designer), [Content operations](https://contentlexicon.com/content-operations), [Content team](https://contentlexicon.com/content-team), [Design thinking](https://contentlexicon.com/design-thinking), [Devops](https://contentlexicon.com/devops), [Lorem ipsum](https://contentlexicon.com/lorem-ipsum), [Sign-off](https://contentlexicon.com/sign-off), [Slow content](https://contentlexicon.com/slow-content), [User testing](https://contentlexicon.com/user-testing), [Workflow](https://contentlexicon.com/workflow)

Also called: Agile software development; Agile methods

This page was last reviewed in October 2026.