magnus919_agent-skills/product-shaping/references/anti-patterns.md

Anti-Patterns

Failure modes recorded in the field (independent teams, 2019–2026) and in agent workflows (first-party practice plus published practitioner accounts). Method adapted from Ryan Singer's Shape Up (basecamp.com/shapeup); this file exists because the book reports only its author's successes.

Provenance labels: [independent] = a named team's own account; [first-party] = our own operating record; [practitioner] = credible published account from tooling vendors or individual engineers.

Field-recorded failure modes

Appetite becomes a target. [independent] A budget stated as "a three-week project" invites work that expands to fill it — gold-plating inside the box. State appetites as maximums tied to worth, and treat "under budget" as success, not slack to spend. (Source: scalex.dev, "2 years with Shape Up" — Customaite.)

Small-batch stuffing. [independent] Teams whose natural work is smaller than the cycle end up planning two months ahead to fill the bucket — losing reprioritization flexibility without gaining single-project focus. If your work runs small, shorten the box instead of force-fitting. (Same source.)

Cool-down decay. [independent] The uncommitted buffer between boxes degrades into a parking lot: urgent spillover eats it, meetings migrate into it "to protect the cycle," and small fixes wait up to six weeks for it, losing context by arrival. Protect what cool-down is for, or shrink the interval. (Same source.)

Shaping as a separate-caste requirement. [independent] The method presumes dedicated shapers working ahead of builders. When one team must do both, either shaping starves or building stalls; splitting into protected/unprotected teams just relocates the pain (on-call imbalance, domain-switch whiplash). Mitigations seen in the field: rotating "distraction shield" duty (Athos Commerce's Bug Hero rotation), or accepting shorter, less-pure boxes. [independent]

Circuit breaker quietly softened. [independent] "We refused to delete code at the end of a cycle if a project was not in a state to be shipped yet, so the deadline lost its potency." Others consciously de-scope instead of canceling (Athos Commerce) — a legitimate declared adaptation. The failure is silent erosion: keeping the vocabulary of hard boxes while never letting one break. If you won't let the breaker trip, say so and manage scope some other way. (Sources: scalex.dev; athoscommerce.com.)

Betting-table theater. [independent] Consensus-building re-litigated live at the betting meeting wastes the meeting and produces worse bets. Desmos fixed it with "pre-betting": stakeholders review pitches well before the table so the meeting decides. (Source: engineering.desmos.com.)

Low-fidelity orthodoxy. [independent] Fat-marker-only pitches blocked Desmos's engineers and stressed their designers; they moved concrete design INTO shaping and it worked — for a small team of very experienced designers. Level of abstraction is a judgment call tuned to your team, not a rule to enforce against evidence. (Same source.)

Process instead of direction. [independent] The sharpest abandonment lesson: Customaite adopted Shape Up to manufacture focus while the real problem was missing product direction. Once direction existed (North Star metrics), the heavy process became a hindrance and they returned to sprints. Diagnose before installing process; no methodology substitutes for knowing what matters. (Source: scalex.dev.)

Backlog regrowth under other names. [independent/inference] Bets-not-backlogs works when decentralized lists stay personal. In practice they accrete into shadow backlogs — support tallies nobody lobbies from, engineer bug lists nobody revisits. And "important ideas come back" fails silently when the idea has no channel to return through: a single requester with no way to re-raise, or a support firehose drowning the recurrence signal. Keep recurrence observable (lightweight per-source counts) or accept that you are choosing to lose ideas on purpose.

Agent-workflow failure modes

Unbounded review-fix loops. [first-party] An automated reviewer finds issues, fixes spawn new issues, each remediation invalidates prior verification evidence, and rounds accumulate. Our record includes a nine-round marathon on a merged-anyway PR — with two regressions introduced by rapid-fire fixes under review pressure. The cure is structural: bound rounds up front (see references/hybrid-adaptation.md), stop when severity stops improving, and document residue instead of chasing zero.

Verification treated as free. [first-party] Every fix round costs review attention, CI time, and context rebuild — non-linearly, because a push resets evidence state. Budget verification inside the appetite or the appetite is fiction.

Integration deferred to hour eleven. [practitioner] Agent builders happily produce disconnected parts that don't assemble. The one-piece-done discipline (walking skeleton early) is more valuable with agents, not less — integration is where conceptual gaps surface. (Cursor's scaling-agents write-up documents the coordination failure modes of structure-free agent fleets: lock contention, duplicated work, risk-averse churn.)

Structure extremes. [practitioner] Too little orchestration and agent teams conflict and drift; too much and the system goes fragile — Cursor found an integrator role created more bottlenecks than it resolved, and that "many improvements came from removing complexity rather than adding it." Match orchestration weight to observed failure, not to org-chart aesthetics. (Source: cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents.)

Findings-driven infinite improvement. [first-party] Machine-generated findings feed on responses: address one batch, the generator produces the next. That is the mechanism working, not the work converging. Change the mechanism (fix the generator's scope, pin its version, narrow its domain) or bound the loop — never assume round N+1 converges because round N felt productive.

Reading this file correctly

None of these patterns argue against the method. Publicly documented adaptations and a documented two-year abandonment-with-learnings are signs of a framework people can reason about and leave — rarer than it sounds. The pattern to avoid is adopting the vocabulary while silently dropping the enforcement (softened breakers, target-appetites, shadow backlogs). Adapt declared, or follow faithfully; the failures live in the gap between.