Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

This is the funniest post ever! Love it! You’re absolutely on point. By the way, I saw one of the responses referencing mastercard as an agile company and I can tell you after working there for 8 years, they are not. MC is the most broken company I’ve worked at—nothing there is agile!

q7, I disagree that Agile is impossible in highly regulated companies. There are plenty of counter-examples:

Capital One – widely cited for enterprise Agile and DevOps adoption in a heavily regulated banking environment

JPMorgan Chase – uses Agile at scale across technology, data, and product teams

ING – reorganized its entire bank around Agile “tribes and squads”

USAA – Agile and Lean practices for decades while operating under strict regulatory oversight

Visa / Mastercard – financial infrastructure + regulation, yet strong Agile execution

Defense & healthcare – even DoD programs and FDA-regulated medical device companies use Agile with formal controls

What doesn’t work is pretending regulation requires command-and-control management. Regulation constrains what must be documented, audited, and approved — it does not dictate how teams collaborate, plan, learn, or improve.

At Wells Fargo, what I’ve seen is less an “Agile vs regulation” problem and more a leadership and culture problem:

Managers acting as task controllers instead of leaders

Low psychological safety

Little trust in teams

Metrics used (when used at all) for surveillance rather than learning

“Agile roles” removed quietly instead of replaced or rethought

That environment ki-ls any delivery model — Agile, hybrid, or waterfall. This is why WF is at least 4 years behind other banks.

Agile doesn’t fail because it can’t coexist with regulation.
It fails when leaders aren’t willing to give up micromanagement, accept transparency, or invest in real product ownership.

If Wells Fargo is abandoning Agile, that’s fine — but it would be better to say so explicitly rather than letting it die by attrition while keeping the language.

@ae true Agile was never possible at WF nor any other highly regulated company. A hybrid is possible but not Agile. Anyone who is a true Agile practitioner knows this.

@OP okay so you personally are leading the transformation? Okay so you disclose your compensation on a layoff blog why? Do you nit think that puts you at risk of terminating your contract?

Agile is like the jelly of the month club. Just like Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, etc.

Wells Fargo has become a company that starts initiatives but consistently fails to finish them. This MO is fundamentally incompatible with the basic tenets of any Agile methodology and antithetical to Agile approach to work.

Total BS post. Agile has completely destroyed my team. Now the effort is gaming the metrics and gaslighting mgmt. Fun fun

For $425k who cares. Da he-l.

@ae
It will just die on the vine like every other initiative around here. It will just go away.

Btw- does Agile still exist at WFC? We lost our scrum master and product owner. Never get asked for stats or velocity. I don’t care either way because it never worked for us but just wondering of they are ever going to make an announcement about it ending or will it just be ignored

The next "agile transformation" will be from BE, BE's managers, and BE's contractors and AI (the all I-dia) workforce. BE & company will be the benevolent dictator that will transform the company; not agile, not teamwork. Look at what happen to the CI/CD development that was a concurrent activity with agile transformation. It failed. Openshift Tekton booted out Jenkins and PAAS. Mide/Mode/?? is booted out for platforms. For BE failure is not an option.

@OP I saw this on X earlier today….