Acme Industries has been a market leader for twenty years. Two of their products command significant market share, their brand is well known, and their financial results have consistently validated the way they operate. The leadership team is proud of what they have built, and they should be. Two decades of sustained success is not an accident.
When something works, the instinct is to protect it. When the numbers look good, there is no pressure to change. Acme has been running the company the same way since its founding, and the market has rewarded that consistency. But what Acme’s leadership lacks is business agility. They haven’t yet seen that the conditions that created their success have subtly shifted. The market is moving and their competitors are moving with it. Acme is comfortable in the status quo, confident that what worked before will continue to work. Soon they will be aware of how much that confidence is costing them.
This is not a story about a failing company. It is a story about a successful company that doesn’t yet know it’s in trouble. And its story is probably more familiar than you think.
How Acme Industries Operates
The product nobody wanted
Two years ago, Acme’s leadership identified a gap in the market and commissioned a new product to fill it. The brief was written, the budget was approved, the roadmap was locked, and development began. Eighteen months and several million euros later, the product launched to silence. Users did not understand it and buyers didn’t want it. The problem it solved was not as urgent as it was during the eighteen months Acme spent building. After this very public failure, the product was quietly shelved.
What they got wrong: Acme didn’t have a way to plan development that preserved direction without sacrificing the flexibility to respond when reality diverges from the projection. They lacked business agility in the form of shorter development cycles, continuous feedback from users and buyers, and the willingness to treat new information as an asset rather than a threat to the plan.
A product development budget that’s out of control
Aside from the new product that flopped, Acme’s two flagship products have dominated their category for a decade. The margins are strong, the customers are loyal, and the leadership team has the data to prove it. What the data does not show is the slow erosion happening at the edges. For several years now there has been a gradual shift in what users expect, what buyers are willing to pay for, and what a newer, leaner competitor has been quietly building in the background. Worse, their hero products have many features that are expensive to maintain. Each year, the overhead increases and more budget is funneled from product innovation.
What they got wrong: Acme wasn’t focused on innovation because their products are successful, but at some point the costs will outweigh any benefit. They hadn’t integrated feedback from external stakeholders into the development process. They didn’t use empiricism and experimentation, key principles of business agility, when creating new features and they didn’t have the courage to try new things that might reduce costs.
The process that outlived its purpose
It will take a long time for them to make changes because Acme’s approval process was designed when the company had two hundred people, two products and one office. Today they have ten times the headcount, international operations, and a product portfolio that has expanded significantly. But the approval process has not changed.
Getting a new initiative from idea to execution requires sign-off from five different functions, two of which have competing priorities, one of which has a four-week meeting cycle, and all of which have their own templates, criteria and timelines. Nobody designed this to be obstructive. It evolved that way, layer by layer, as the company grew and each function added its own governance to protect its own interests. The bottleneck is so embedded in how Acme operates that most employees have simply adjusted their expectations of how long things take.
What went wrong: Acme’s approval layers were built to mitigate risk but ironically, they were also creating it, because missed windows, delayed responses, and frustrated teams exceeded the cost of the errors the process was designed to prevent. Streamlining how decisions are made, clarifying ownership, and eliminating wasteful processes should have been part of Acme’s competitive strategy to increase business agility.
The problem they were afraid to flag
But Acme had other problems to deal with too. Six months ago, Derrick, a member of Acme’s product team, identified a significant issue with a product that was weeks away from launch. There was an error in the testing data that had regulatory implications and would have required a delay and a redesign of a key component. Derrick wanted to raise the issue to his manager Sarah, but he remembered when another colleague brought up a different issue. Sarah reprimanded her in front of the team even though it wasn’t her fault. He thought about going over Sarah’s head but then remembered how the CEO had made his position on problem-raising extremely clear: Do not bring me a problem unless you have a solution!
The product launched, and months later the compliance issue surfaced through a customer complaint. Post-launch, the cost of remediation was ten times what it would have been at the design stage, and the reputational damage may never recover.
What went wrong: Acme’s failure was a direct result of the culture that made speaking up feel riskier than staying silent. If Acme had reinforced an environment where people can surface issues early, challenge decisions constructively and bring their best thinking to the table, problems would not have stayed hidden.
The manager who controlled everything
Acme’s product team has been run by Sarah for 12 years. She is, by every traditional measure, excellent at her job. Sarah knows the numbers, meets her deadlines, delivers on budget, and she has never missed a quarterly commitment. She is also the reason her team has stopped thinking.
Every decision flows through her, task assignments come from her, and priorities are set by her. Budget commitments are made by her for the full financial year and locked before the year begins, regardless of what the market does between January and December. Her team has learned through experience that suggesting a different approach or raising a new idea is not worth the energy, because the answer will be a request to justify it against the existing plan, and the existing plan is never wrong.
What they got wrong: Acme’s managers clinged to a command-and-control style that no longer served the organization. As a result, teams didn’t have genuine autonomy. They didn’t think independently, adapt to new information, own outcomes, or innovate.
The manager who controlled everything
Things are not much better on the marketing team. There are fourteen people on the team but it’s hard to know this given one dominant personality. Brian is visible, vocal, and strives to get public recognition and rewards. He competes where he should collaborate, takes credit at the expense of colleagues, and through his actions has made it known that he is loyal to no one but himself.
The rest of the team, including his manager Jasmine, tolerate Brian’s behavior because he produces results. Some team members have become apathetic, while others have learned to work around him, keeping their best thinking to themselves to avoid having it appropriated. Because there is no trust, the team operates as fourteen isolated individuals, each doing their portion of the work in their own way, with their own tools and their own approach, producing outputs that do not look like they came from the same team.
What they got wrong: Acme had a culture that empowered Super Chickens. Individual star performance, like Brian’s, was recognized and rewarded. Collaboration was not valued and many employees had withdrawn and became apathetic. The culture reflected this in ways that were visible to everyone but the leadership team was so focused on the quarterly results they tolerated and even encouraged competitive behavior.
The leadership team with no North Star
Ask ten people at Acme what the company is trying to achieve and you will get ten different answers because no one at Acme has a shared vision. Each team has its own objectives, its own strategy and its own definition of success. The people doing the work have no clear connection between what they do every day and how they help deliver Acme’s strategic priorities.
The result is an organization that is busy in every direction and moving forward in none. Decisions that require cross-team alignment take months because there is no shared reference point to align around. Initiatives that would create value across functions do not get started because each function is protecting its own roadmap. And the people doing the work have no clear line of sight between what they do every day and what it means for the customers Acme exists to serve.
What went wrong: If you asked Acme employees, they knew what they do and how they do it, but no one knew WHY they do what they do. Without a clear vision that connects the work of every team to a collective purpose, every decision they made was less effective. And Acme leadership had no way to evaluate the value of their initiatives.
The new competitor they never saw coming
While Acme’s teams were continuing with the status quo, a smaller, faster competitor was doing something different. While Acme’s teams were executing their individual plans, hitting their targets, protecting their roadmaps, and managing their own kingdoms, this new competitor was leveraging business agility. They had noticed a market opportunity and were able to act quickly. They put things in motion and came out with a minimum viable product that wowed customers, including Acme’s. They were structuring their teams to respond to customer feedback in weeks rather than quarters. And they had taken a meaningful slice of Acme’s market share before Acme’s annual review surfaced the numbers.
What went wrong: Acme couldn’t move faster than their operating model allowed. They couldn’t make decisions at speed, react to market shifts, or pivot when a product didn’t resonate with customers. Nothing about Acme’s operations was adaptive or iterative, and they were drowning in data that didn’t serve them.
Acme’s Agile Transformation
Acme’s leadership team, faced with a declining market share and strong competitor moves, made a decision that many organizations in their position do not: they acknowledged that they needed to make significant changes. Working harder inside the existing model was not going to produce a better result. Something more fundamental had to shift.
Their transformation towards business agility touched every dimension of how Acme operated: how it planned, how it built products, how it managed people, how it made decisions, and how it connected the work of its teams to the outcomes that mattered to its customers.
Lean management was implemented
The first change was to the organization’s operating model. Acme’s Agile consultants mapped their core processes end-to-end and identified where time was being lost, where accountability was unclear, and where the approval structures were generating delay without generating value. Redundant sign-off layers were eliminated, decision rights were clarified, and teams were given explicit ownership of their domains rather than shared responsibility that belonged to no one.
Cross-functional teams were formed around customer journeys rather than functional departments. Instead of a marketing team, a product team and a sales team each optimizing independently, Acme’s consultants built integrated teams responsible for specific customer outcomes, from initial awareness through to delivery and retention. Each team had the skills it needed to execute without handoffs, with a clear and measurable definition of what success looked like for their customers.
A psychologically safe culture was built
The compliance incident became the catalyst for a conversation Acme’s leadership had been avoiding. The CEO acknowledged, publicly and specifically, that his expectation around problem-raising had helped create the conditions for people to remain silent. He committed to changing his behavior. Emboldened by the CEO’s vulnerability, problems started to surface in meetings where they would previously have stayed hidden, and ideas were raised and explored rather than defended against. The change was gradual and imperfect, as all cultural change is. But the direction was visible to everyone in the organization, and direction is what makes cultural change credible.
Psychological safety was built deliberately across teams through facilitated workshops and the consistent reinforcement of modeling the behaviors that make it real: leaders admitting uncertainty, managers welcoming challenge, teams learning together from things that did not go as planned. Curiosity was named as an organizational value and operationalized, not as a slogan on a wall but as a pillar that guided how teams retrospect on their work and how leaders engaged with new information.
Super Chicken behavior was addressed
While it is good to have people with drive and ambition, an Agile mindset requires a sense of collectivism in order to drive innovation and collaboration. Because Super Chickens like Brian are driven by self-interest and prestige, they usually create a competitive atmosphere where ego and status win out over teamwork, empathy and helping others. Super Chickens strive to be in the spotlight, but they can dim the lights of their colleagues. When you have too many Super Chickens on a team, or worse, a Super Chicken culture, competitiveness quickly deteriorates into a crab mentality where negativity and dragging others down become the norm.
While Super Chickens are defined by individual behaviors and motivations, the solution is reframing culture at both team and organizational levels. Things like annual review criteria, performance recognition, team dynamics, and hiring procedures were redesigned to promote and encourage teamwork and helping others. Not only did this improve collaboration for each individual team, it also improved cross-team coordination, which had a postitive impact on business agility.
Scrum was launched for the product team
Acme’s product team adopted Scrum as a development framework to shift from rigid long-term planning to short iterative cycles. The quarterly roadmap was replaced by a product vision and a prioritized backlog that evolved as the team learned new information. While it was difficult for her at first, Sarah’s role changed from decision-maker to direction-setter. The team began making decisions she had previously made for them because they were closer to the information that fed those decisions.
Consultants showed the teams how to leverage personas and stakeholder engagement practices to ground the team’s decisions in what users and buyers actually needed rather than what the internal roadmap assumed. A product vision was crafted collaboratively with leadership, giving the team a North Star that connected their daily work to the outcomes Acme was trying to create. Empiricism replaced assumption as the default mode: hypotheses were formed, experiments were run, and evidence guided the next step.
Internal stakeholders starting working together
The sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams became active participants in the products they were developing, rather than passive recipients of decisions made without them. Regular stakeholder reviews brought their perspectives early into the development cycle so that they could give feedback before decisions were locked, avoiding uncomfortable surprises that were too costly to change.
And by actively soliciting and sharing feedback from external stakeholders, all of the teams were able to work from the same information, making quicker and more effective decisions. This also enabled them to coordinate their activities so that they worked as symbiotic parts of a single machine, instead of mini machines working in silos. The results were more cohesive and directly aligned with the market, and both customers and competitors started to take notice.
Everyone rallied around a collective purpose
With the help of their Agile consultants, Acme’s leadership worked with representatives from across the organization to articulate something they had never formally defined: why Acme exists for its users and buyers. No one had ever asked what the organization was ultimately trying to change in the world it operates in, and what success looked like not just in financial terms but in terms of the outcomes it creates for the people it serves. The resulting conversation produced a company vision that was not a statement crafted by a communications team, but a direction that teams across the organization had contributed to and could genuinely connect their work to.
Finally everyone had a clear and compelling answer to the question of what Acme is trying to achieve. It was easy to focus on this new collective purpose and they began to measure it against every strategic objective and project pitch on the table. It was also used as a point of reference in employee performance reviews and shared with external providers so they could better help Acme reach its goals.
Where is Acme today?
The transformation to business agility was not immediate, and it did not happen overnight. But within two quarters the company saw tangible and sustainable results which continued to compound with time. The messaging aligned and the improved customer experience reflected teams that were working together towards a common vision.
Thanks to true business agility, its teams make decisions faster because they are closer to the information. Its products are built around what users and buyers actually need because the process for finding that out is built into how work gets done. Its people speak up earlier because the culture has made it safer to do so than to stay quiet. Its processes serve the work rather than outliving it. And its market sensing is continuous rather than annual, which means the next shift in their competitive landscape is more likely to be seen before it becomes a crisis.
Business agility is not a methodology or a software framework. It’s also not a fad or a trend. It is the organizational capability to sense what is changing, respond faster than the competition, and continuously improve how value is delivered to users and buyers. Acme found that capability by changing how they worked and your organization can do it too. Vertexia helps all organizations to identify bottlenecks, silos and cross-team blockages, and then plan and implement a scaled Agile framework that creates real and lasting benefits.