No Heroics: How do we know Agile is working?

By looking at sustainable development.

What do I mean by that? It’s the pace of work a team can maintain—not just for a sprint or two, but for months and years—without burning out, without late nights, without the constant cycle of “just one more push.” 

Why No Heroics Matters

When teams rely on heroics—long weekends, endless nights—it might look like productivity in the short term, but it isn’t sustainable. True agility isn’t about short bursts of output; it’s about building a rhythm where the team can consistently deliver value over time.

Sure, there will always be moments when an extra push is needed to get something across the finish line. That’s natural. But when “crunch mode” becomes the norm, it erodes trust, performance, and well-being. Agile at its best is about flow, not fire drills.

What Sustainable Teams Do Differently

This isn’t something that a team discovers overnight. It takes time and effort. The team has to commit to finding their rhythm. This will lead to predictability, trust, and confidence within the team and within the organization. 

A team that’s been working together for a while will know and understand their own capacity. They can look at a new feature, compare it with similar past work, and give a realistic estimate. That’s sustainable development in action—the ability to set expectations and deliver without heroics.

Customers know when to expect value. Leaders know when delivery is coming. Teams know what they can commit to—and they can keep that commitment over the long haul.

Shifting the Reward System

In my earlier article, "From Office Heroics to Healthy Workplaces: Rethinking Recognition," I discussed how we reward employees. Here’s the connection: instead of celebrating last-minute saves and burnout-driven efforts, we should be recognizing the teams that deliver reliably, sustainably, and without drama. That’s real agility.

The Upside

When we commit to sustainable development, the benefits are undeniable:

• Lower burnout

• Happier employees who actually enjoy their work

• Customers are getting value faster and more predictably

• Organizations with clearer expectations and delivery timelines

• Quickly change course to take advantage of new technologies and new customer demands

In short, sustainable development is the key to knowing agile is working. It’s how we build not just better products, but healthier teams and stronger organizations.