Home / Agile Approach / Section 07: What Most PMs Get Wrong

PM Pitfalls

These are the mistakes you will encounter in your first three months working in Agile teams. Knowing them in advance changes whether you recognise and fix them or replicate and perpetuate them.

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Scrum-but

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"We do Scrum, but we skip retrospectives when it's busy." "We do Scrum, but we do not write Sprint Goals." Scrum-but is the most common Agile anti-pattern: adopting the label and some of the ceremonies while dropping the elements that create accountability and continuous improvement.

Fix: If a ceremony is being skipped, ask why, and remove the constraint that makes it optional rather than treating it as optional.

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Backlog as Feature Wish List

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The backlog grows without order or pruning. Items are added by every stakeholder who attended a meeting. There is no explicit ordering logic. The PM “grooms” (more than correct term: “refines”) the backlog by moving things up and down without a defined prioritisation rationale.

Fix: Every item in the backlog must have a clear prioritisation rationale (RICE, MoSCoW, or Kano) and be able to explain its ranking to any stakeholder.

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Skipping Retrospectives

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Retrospectives are cancelled when the team is behind on delivery, which is exactly when they are most needed. Without retrospectives, the team cannot identify and fix the processes causing the problems. The problem that created the pressure accumulates across sprints.

Fix: Treat the retrospective as non-negotiable, especially under delivery pressure. A 30-minute retrospective that identifies one process problem to fix is worth more than 30 minutes of feature development it displaces.

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Zombie Agile

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The team goes through all the motions: stand-ups, sprints, retrospectives, but no one asks whether the sprint achieved its goal. Because there is no Sprint Goal, measurement disappears, and improvement stalls.

Fix: Every sprint must have a clear Sprint Goal and end with a decision: did we achieve the outcome? If not, why?

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Sprints Without Sprint Goals

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The sprint backlog is a list of tasks selected because they were at the top of the backlog. No one has defined what outcome the sprint should achieve. Developers are completing work, but not achieving any meaningful outcome.

Fix: Write a Sprint Goal before Sprint Planning. It should describe an outcome, not just a list of deliverables.

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Waterfall Disguised as Sprints

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Sprint 1: design. Sprint 2: all specifications. Sprint 3: all development. Sprint 4: testing. Sprint 5: release. This is a Waterfall project with two-week phases, not Agile. The ceremonies look like Scrum, the working model is sequential delivery with late-stage risk.

Fix: Every sprint should produce a potentially shippable increment. Design, development, and testing should happen within the same sprint, not across them.