Your Backlog Is Rotting Faster Than Your Team Can Refine It
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
A Scrum Master posted recently in r/scrum:
“My devs are on AI steroids. Scrum is officially too slow.”
It wasn’t a rant. It was confusion.
The team had adopted AI agents across their workflow. Stories were being built before refinement sessions even happened. Sprint planning had started to feel like a retrospective on work already done. The backlog, once the team’s source of clarity, looked less like a roadmap and more like a museum of good intentions.
If something similar is happening on your team, this isn’t a rebellion against Agile.
It’s something subtler.
AI has changed the pacing of delivery. Most operating models haven’t caught up.
Decision Latency in AI-Native Teams
For a long time, coding capacity was the real constraint. Teams struggled to build fast enough to match demand. Planning rituals were designed around that reality. Two-week sprints made sense when implementation actually took time.
That’s no longer true for many teams.
Developers can prototype in hours. Refactor in a day. Generate test coverage in minutes. Features that once occupied an entire sprint are being shipped in an afternoon.
But prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and governance still move at the old speed. That’s where the friction lives.
When it takes longer to decide what to build than to actually build it, the backlog starts decaying in real time. Tickets written two weeks ago feel stale. Refinement becomes guesswork. Sprint commitments start to feel ceremonial.
Some teams respond by pushing velocity even higher. The numbers look good on paper. But velocity can climb while value stagnates.
If review capacity, stakeholder access, and strategic clarity don’t scale with output, you accumulate something quieter than technical debt. You accumulate misalignment.
AI doesn’t just accelerate delivery. It accelerates mistakes when the system around it can’t adapt.
The Question That Cuts Through the Noise
Instead of asking whether Scrum is broken, ask a sharper question:
Is your decision cycle faster than your implementation cycle?
If it takes ten days to align on what to build and two days to build it, your operating model is inverted.
Better facilitation won’t fix that. A tighter standup won’t fix that.
The delay lives upstream of the sprint, not inside it.
Rule that helps teams reset quickly If a ticket is older than your decision cycle, it’s probably not a priority, it’s inventory.
A Small Experiment (Two Weeks)
Try this for the next two weeks:
Shorten your backlog horizon to two or three weeks.
Stop maintaining a long runway of detailed tickets.
Replace ticket inventory with clear outcome themes.
Track, honestly, time-to-alignment versus time-to-ship.
The gap between those two numbers is your real problem.
You might discover that what feels like “Scrum overhead” is actually a pacing mismatch between your delivery system and your decision system.
That’s a different problem.
And a more fixable one.
How to Know If You’re Improving
You don’t need a new framework to validate this.
You need one honest comparison:
Decision cycle time (idea → approved priority)versus Implementation time (start → shipped)
When implementation is consistently faster than decision, your operating model has an upstream problem.
If you want a companion lens on what happens downstream when output outruns validation, stay tuned for our upcoming article:→ Velocity Is Rising. Quality Isn’t.
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