Always being rushed product owners yelling at us, managers telling us we need to do more, work faster. They say they’ll take the work off of us if we can’t get it done in time and give it to another team. what does that sound like to you?
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Tell them “this is a marathon, not a sprint”. Old buzz phrase that you don’t hear anymore, but used to hear it all the time. It’ll rattle them!
@13j+1jvet5hn8 If you want to do real Agile projects, you need to get out of here.
I would rephrase this. If you want to do real projects, you need to get out of here. I know some of you have severance and are "quietly quitting". Please weigh in the cost of "quietly quitting" the missed opportunities, the learning and upskilling, that will not be possible at this place. Its your career....
I posted this to another thread too, but we had a few Agile transformation coarches a few years ago. They used to tell me that they were struggling with stubborn executives who refused to listen to Agile coarches' advices. Wells Fargo leadership is mostly the "my way or the highway" approach. So those Agile trasnformatoin coarches were eventually let go. As of today, Wells Fargo is not following the real Agile process, and I don't think Wells Fargo leadership knows what they are doing either, and the bank is doing its own thing.If you want to do real Agile projects, you need to get out of here.
As someone who was in senior leadership, I have to agree with what I'm seeing in this thread. The "wagile" description is spot-on—we're not doing real agile, and the anti-patterns are everywhere.
The core issue everyone's identifying is psychological safety. You can't have POs yelling at developers, managers threatening to move work to other teams, or the constant pressure and fear that's being described here. That's the opposite of what the Scrum Guide calls for—peers working together as a cohesive unit.
What we're seeing is senior leadership still operating with a waterfall mentality while forcing agile processes on teams. The account scandal should have taught us that high-pressure, fear-based cultures lead to disaster, but instead we've just shifted the target from customers to our own employees.
The reality is WF doesn't meet the first criteria for agile success—we're not a psychologically safe organization. Until that changes, all the agile ceremonies and frameworks in the world won't work.
Here's what needs to happen from a leadership perspective:
Define the efficiency plan with clear scope and endpoints - Stop the constant uncertainty that's ki-ling morale
Get management involved in teams as participants, not overseers - If you're not in the trenches, you don't understand the real problems
Actually follow Scrum Alliance guidance on psychological safety - We're members but ignoring their core advice
Rewire HR to support team formation - Current HR protects the bank, not the teams
Fix job titles to match industry standards - Our weird hierarchy is confusing everyone
Expand risk management to protect employees from bullying managers - We manage financial risk but ignore cultural risk
Run real psychological safety surveys - Measure team health, not just engagement scores
Revamp compensation to reward collaboration - Stop incentivizing individual competition over team success
The truth is, we've become what the regulatory scrutiny was supposed to fix. We stopped abusing customers and started abusing employees instead. The same toxic culture that created fake accounts is now creating the fear-based environment everyone's describing in this thread.
Until we address this fundamental issue, we'll keep cycling through methodologies—Six Sigma, Lean, BPM, now Agile—without ever fixing the real problem: leadership that doesn't trust its people.
I think the problem is the Wells Fargo organization itself. The Sr. Leadership's mentality here is still 100% Waterfall, and they are shoving this old approach to Agile teams' throats with constant bullying.
This is from the Scrum Guide:
Scrum Team:
The fundamental unit of Scrum is a small team of people, a Scrum Team. The Scrum Team consists of one Scrum Master, one Product Owner, and Developers. Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-teams or hierarchies. It is a cohesive unit of professionals focused on one objective at a time, the Product Goal.
There is no hierarchy among PO, SM and Developers, they are all peers. POs are not above anyone else within the team. If POs are yelling at other team members, that is a gross violation of Agile principle.
Not sure what PO you have but in our group that would be not tolerated. No one screams. Is there tons of pressure and too
much work?? YES
Let’s be honest. No one is doing Agile. They are going through the motions and actually doing waterfall. Agile doesn’t scale to a dispersed huge org.
@fy+1jvet5hn8 Its scary to think but I believe the next methodology will be agentic AI control. If you program in all the anti patterns and have a response system that can detect and then correct "misbehavior" this new methodology theoretically could succeed. Ah maybe that's what BE, TK, AV, HB are doing at WF skunk works, Columbus, OH. In the meantime I suspect that WF is in the mide, mode, phoenix tarpit.
Agile has become a convenient excuse for lazy managers to dodge accountability. No project plan, no timelines, no real deliverables—just buzzwords and chaos disguised as flexibility. Meanwhile, they villainize traditional project managers, especially those using Waterfall or Six Sigma, because they hate structure, oversight, and—most of all—giving up control.
Let’s be honest: Six Sigma was probably the most effective methodology we’ve had. But it fell out of favor because the wins—especially financial ones—went to the project manager, not the people clinging to their titles. That’s the real issue. It’s not about methodology. It’s about ego. That’s the human condition.
Product Owners are evil.
You poor,poor bas7ards.
Sounds like the #wellsfargoshitshow
Agile is another failure. Senior management treated it like the jelly of the month club. Like Six Sigma, Lean, BPM, all discarded when the rank and file employees and managers couldn't comprehend the concepts and the goals. Same fate will occur with Agile.
Your stories of fear, bullying, and favoritism in Wells Fargo’s tech division validate what many are experiencing. This toxic culture, described as a “fearful organization” by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, echoes the 2016 account scandal’s high-pressure environment, now targeting employees. This new post exposes “wagile”—Wells Fargo’s failed agile attempt—where C&C managers pit teams against each other, yelling and threatening to reassign work if deadlines are missed. This isn’t agile; it’s psychological abuse, shredding team cohesion and psychological safety, which the Agile Alliance says is vital for agile success (https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/cultivating-psychological-safety-in-agile-teams/).
The decline of “team” language—replaced by “team member” or “peon”—shows how “wagile” and layoffs have fractured collaboration. Call the ethics line about this threat? No way. The Ethics Line and HR protect the bank, not teams
The root issue is leadership’s failure to foster safe, collaborative teams.
Don’t let fear win. Document everything , but watch for manager/HR posts. Collective action—like joining Wells Fargo Workers United or filing EEOC complaints —can amplify your voice. Share stories anonymously on social media, but protect yourself from retaliation. Read or listen to The Fearless Organization to spot dysfunctional cultures and find employers who value teams. Your mental health matters Let’s expose “wagile” and build fearless workplaces together.