The post-agile product era

Why two people with focus can outrun entire teams

For twenty years, software teams tried to optimise delivery by refining process. Agile ceremonies. User story templates. Jira rituals. SAFe pyramids. Frameworks for frameworks. Many organisations are still in this phase, adding more process because their products keep slowing down. But something has changed. Quietly at first. Then all at once.

The teams shipping the most ambitious products today are not obsessing over process. They are not running heavyweight rituals. And they definitely are not writing user stories that read like the specification of a committee.

They are working post-agile.

How are they doing this? They have two key components, or roles if you will:

• A subject matter expert who understands the problem.
• A design engineer who can vibe code, prototype and iterate fast.

1-3 weeks of focus. Real users. Real signals. Then a decision. Invest or stop. No theatre. No 200-line backlogs. No story points that have zero correlation with customer value. Just clarity, speed and validation.

Importantly though, this is not some utopian future of product development. It is the present. It's a present that is dramatically cheaper, faster and more reliable than the way most teams still work.

Why post-agile works: reduction, not addition

Agile was created in a world where software was expensive. Teams needed coordination to avoid chaos. Today though, the cost to explore an idea has collapsed. AI has lowered the cost of code. Design engineering has lowered the cost of prototyping and customers expect products to evolve constantly, not every quarter.

Linear’s Method captures this shift perfectly. A few of the most important ideas it highlights:

Stop writing user stories. Write issues.

User stories force a fictional narrative about what users “want”. Issues capture concrete problems and opportunities without pretending to know the solution. Teams move faster when they stop pretending to be playwrights.

Useful goals are small, timebound and measurable.

Not inspirational slogans. Not OKRs written by committee. Goals that say what will change for users and what evidence will prove progress.

Momentum matters more than methodology.

Linear emphasises uninterrupted focus and predictable cadence. This is what creates progress. Not ceremonies.

Build with users, not for them.

User research has traditionally been a long, formalised process. In a post-agile world, feedback loops are short. You ship prototypes early. You learn weekly. You correct course.

Enablers and blockers matter more than roadmaps.

Roadmaps drift. Reality always wins. Post-agile teams unblock themselves constantly and adjust direction fast.

Add all this together and something emerges. A simpler, leaner, more powerful way to build. The product operating model changes from “teams doing agile” to “teams delivering validated value at high speed.”

The two-person innovation team

I have seen this work repeatedly: in startup environments, at Marsh with Sentrisk back in 2022, and in complex enterprise settings like Wood Mackenzie and Quilter. A small, high-trust unit outperforms a large delivery organisation in the early phases of a product. Why? Because in the beginning, the hard part is not delivery. The hard part is understanding the problem. A two-person innovation team looks like this:

1. Subject matter expert

They know the domain, the constraints, the myths, the hidden workflow. They know why previous attempts failed. They know the customer. They provide truth.

2. Design engineer / product prototyper

They can go from conversation to working prototype in hours. They vibe code instead of over-engineering. They make ideas tangible so users can react. They bring speed.

Together, they:

• Understand the what, why and for whom.
• Vibe code the solution in the same week.
• Test with real users before writing a single ticket.
• Capture signals that indicate product-market fit potential.
• Return to the business with evidence, not reports.
• Only then is a delivery team installed.

This changes everything. Instead of spending three months in discovery, planning and estimation, you get clarity in two weeks. Instead of asking “should we build this” you know. Instead of guessing at value, you have evidence. Instead of trying to rescue late-stage delivery, you avoid building the wrong thing in the first place.

This is what post-agile looks like in practice.

Why this outperforms traditional agile teams

Traditional agile teams are set up to deliver. They are not set up to discover. The moment backlogs exist, they must be fed. The moment a squad is stood up, it must look productive. The moment engineers are allocated, they must ship code, but early product work requires freedom to be wrong.

The two-person post-agile model protects this freedom. It also reduces cost. In early-stage work, large teams don’t add value. They actually add noise! All those weekly meetings and few actually driving towards PMF. The thinkers and the doers need to be the same people!

The post-agile philosophy reduces that noise. It gives a business the answer early:

• There is value here
• There is not value here
• There is value, but somewhere adjacent
• This is not technically feasible yet
• Customers say yes, but behaviour says no
• There is PMF in this segment only
• This is a big opportunity, but needs reframing

This is the essence of a modern product operating model:

1. Small teams.
2. Short cycles.
3. Real signals.
4. Fast decisions.
5. Then scale.

Not the other way around.

Vibe coding as the new strategic superpower

Vibe coding is not amateur engineering. It is high-speed exploration with taste, constraint and intention. It exists to answer a single question:

What is the fastest way to make this idea real enough for a customer to react to it?

In a post-agile environment, vibe coding is the glue between:

• idea
• prototype
• user
• evidence
• decision

It compresses the distance between strategy and validation. It also creates a new expectation inside the business:

People don’t debate ideas.

They interact with them.

And this changes the culture.

A prediction: most enterprise product teams will shift to this model

Because it solves the problem everyone is currently stuck on: Agile is great at delivery, but it is poor at discovery. Conversely, Waterfall is great at planning, but poor at learning. Post-agile unifies both.

The product operating model of the next decade could indeed look roughly something like this:

Loop 0: Exploration

• Two people.
• Prototype.
• Validate.
• Decide.

Loop 1: MVP

• Small team.
• Ship a thin vertical slice.
• Start measuring.

Loop 2: Growth

Expand only where evidence is strong.

Loop 3: Scaling

Build the operating system around what works.

If especially enterprises adopted this, they would cut waste, move faster and increase the odds of building something customers care about. They would also avoid the trap Linear describes so well: mistaking “activity” for “momentum”.

Momentum is the new currency.

Velocity with direction.

Evidence with clarity.

This is product in 2026 and beyond.