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After Agile: Leading Teams When Execution Is Cheap and Judgment Is Scarce
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 15 2026
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.42 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For three decades, software leadership ran on one assumption: building was expensive, and execution was the bottleneck. AI changed that in twelve months. The scarcest resource is no longer speed. It is judgment - knowing what to build, what to ignore, how to lead through ambiguity, and how to make decisions that hold up in a world where intelligent tools can generate output but cannot replace responsibility.
In After Agile, B. Torkian explains what leadership actually looks like when the old constraints stop binding, and why most organizations are still running an operating model that no longer matches their cost structure.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN- Why Agile ceremonies have become structurally Diminishing to the intelligence AI-era work depends on
- How to replace sprint-and-story decomposition with specification-first development
- Why the shape of your team - not the size - is the ceiling on what it can build
- How to allocate the rarest resources in your organization: judgment, clarity, and ambition
- What to stop hiring for as the cost structure of execution collapses
- How to scope ambitious projects when the old wishlist is the real roadmap
This is not a theory book. It is a field report from production systems the author built and led - a retrieval-augmented advising system under institutional audit, a multi-agent admissions pipeline under FERPA compliance, and AI features embedded in an industrial product customers were already paying for. Each case chapter shows what worked, what almost killed the system, and what leadership moves made the difference.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FORFounders, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, product leaders, senior engineers, and engineering managers who sense the old playbook is no longer enough. Readers of Accelerate, Team Topologies, The Phoenix Project, Staff Engineer, and Liz Wiseman's Multipliers will recognize the territory - and find it sharper, shorter, and more specific about what the AI era actually changes.
When execution gets cheaper, judgment becomes everything.
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