Many IT organizations have adopted agile methodologies in some form—whether they call it “capital-A Agile,” DevOps, or lean. The harder challenge is scaling those practices beyond a single team or product group and embedding them into the broader organization. That scaling step is where most agile efforts stall.
“Doing DevOps in a small group or startup and doing it at scale are two very different things.”
Matt Hicks, Senior VP of Engineering, Red Hat
Jeff Shurts, Executive Vice President at SPR, frames the challenge clearly: agile is not a tool you install or a language you learn in a sprint. It is a set of habits that require ongoing discipline and organizational support to take root. “Successfully transitioning to agile is largely about forming and adhering to new, beneficial habits,” Shurts says. “Discipline only comes with time and plenty of support.”
One underappreciated catalyst for that discipline is culture—the inside jokes, shared rituals, and team traditions that make abstract principles feel tangible and human. Below, seven technology leaders share the agile traditions unique to their organizations. Some are practical process improvements; others are deliberately silly. Most are both.
1. Lighten Up: Themed Planning, Walking Meetings, and the Wheel of Chomp
Shannon Mason, VP of Product Management, CA Agile Central, CA Technologies
Over nearly two decades, CA Agile Central’s team has built rituals that are now deeply woven into team identity:
- Themed Quarterly Big Room Planning (BRP). Quarterly planning sessions are held with a theme—past examples include a Luau, a Big Lebowski theme, and an 80s theme. The reasoning is practical: planning sessions often surface hard decisions and interpersonal tension. A shared theme reminds participants that doing serious work and having fun are not mutually exclusive.
- “Old Man Walks.” When a person or team is stuck on a problem, the tradition is to take an “Old Man Walk”—a slow, deliberate walk that creates space for lateral thinking. The name is self-deprecating; the practice is grounded in the well-documented relationship between physical movement and creative problem-solving.
- “The Wheel of Chomp.” Meetings end with a single, synchronized clap—the style chosen by spinning a wheel. It functions as an inside joke that bonds the team, and it consistently produces laughter because synchronized clapping is harder than it sounds. Either way, it reliably lightens the mood at the close of a meeting regardless of how difficult the content was.
2. Live by a Motto: Patches, Animals, and the Weekly Wall Walk
Keith Nottonson, Senior Director of Development, Optimizely
Optimizely injects creative identity into agile by asking cross-functional teams—designers, engineers, and product managers together—to design their own team patches. Each team chooses an animal and a motto that reflects their mission. These are printed as actual iron-on patches worn on company jackets, giving teams a physical, visible identity.
On the process side, every Monday 30 people gather in front of a 50-foot physical wall that maps all work in flight—from early ideas and experiments through beta and production rollout. The same data exists in digital tools, but the physical wall serves a different purpose: it makes work visible and collective in a way that a dashboard on an individual screen does not. The act of walking the wall together creates a shared situational awareness that is difficult to replicate digitally.
3. Get Physical: Service Health Reviews and the Daily Plank
Rotem Kaner, Engineering Programs and Operations Manager, Perfecto
Perfecto’s engineering leadership runs monthly “service health reviews”—structured sessions where each production service is examined across KPIs including stability, quality, usage trends, operability, and cost. The goal is continuous improvement driven by data rather than gut feel.
On the lighter side, scrum teams hold their daily standup at 11:30 a.m.—and immediately follow it with a daily plank challenge led by one of the developers. The physical practice reinforces the idea that the team looks after its own health, not just the health of its services. It also serves as a memorable anchor that makes the standup harder to skip.
4. Think Tunes and Tacos: Bob Marley, Build Breaks, and Agile Beyond IT
Robert Reeves, CTO, Datical
Datical uses a combination of sonic and culinary cues to reinforce agile habits. Steve Donie, Datical’s most committed agile advocate, plays Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” to signal daily standup time. The musical cue is consistent and hard to ignore—a low-friction way to enforce a rhythm.
The more famous tradition: in Austin, Texas, whoever breaks the build brings in breakfast tacos the next morning. It is a lighthearted consequence that acknowledges mistakes without blame, maintains team cohesion, and—given Austin’s taco culture—actually gives people something to look forward to even after an incident.
Reeves also makes a broader point that is easy to overlook: agile is not only for software delivery. At Datical, sales enablement materials are produced using sprint cycles. A sales leader acts as the “customer,” defining a specific need. Product, marketing, and other stakeholders run a quick spike, produce an outline, collect feedback, then iterate through subsequent sprints until the material meets the real customer’s needs. This approach extends agile feedback loops into parts of the business—sales, marketing, operations—where they rarely appear.
5. Get into Character: Tours of Duty, Hackathons, and Comic Book Teams
Timothy Wenhold, CIO and Partner, Power Home Remodeling
Power Home Remodeling structures developer career paths around two-year “Tours of Duty.” During each tour, a team member focuses on a single business domain—mastering its technical and operational nuances—before rotating to a new challenge. This gives developers genuine business depth rather than surface-level feature exposure, and it creates natural knowledge transfer across the organization over time.
Three times a year, the entire technology team participates in a week-long hackathon solving a real, current business problem. These events provide broad organizational exposure and create space for cross-team collaboration that normal sprint cycles do not.
To sustain a culture of curiosity and fun, Wenhold drew on his background in comic books. His team refers to him as “Batman,” and development groups take on names from comic book and sci-fi universes—including The Defenders and The Titans. The naming convention is playful, but it serves a real purpose: it gives teams a distinct identity and creates a sense of belonging that generic project names never could.
6. Defy Geography: Letting Distributed Teams Own Their Communication Tools
Jamie Bolseth, President, MentorMate
The original Agile Manifesto values face-to-face communication above other channels. MentorMate operates across seven offices in the United States and Europe, plus client locations—making face-to-face a luxury rather than a default. Bolseth’s approach is not to pretend the Manifesto’s ideal is achievable in this context, but to invest deliberately in remote communication quality.
The key insight: individual teams are given autonomy over which communication tools they use. Some teams prefer structured video calls with scheduled agendas; others lean toward ad hoc group chats and spontaneous screen-sharing sessions. The goal is effective communication, not tool uniformity. By making teams responsible for their own communication quality—and giving them the freedom to choose their methods—MentorMate finds that teams invest more in making those methods actually work.
7. Be a Show-Off: Kanban Boards and Demo Fridays
Tyler Koblasa, CEO, CloudApp
CloudApp treats Kanban not as a project management formality but as a core visibility mechanism. Moving a card across a physical or digital board creates a tangible sense of progress—something that ticket-number-based workflows rarely provide. The visual movement from “in progress” to “done” generates momentum and a genuine sense of accomplishment that reinforces continued effort.
The second tradition is Demo Fridays: every one to two weeks, the development team demonstrates completed work to the broader company. The demos serve multiple purposes simultaneously:
- They give engineers a concrete deadline and a visible audience, which sharpens focus on deliverables.
- They create a structured opportunity to celebrate shipped work—important for morale in teams that often move from one feature to the next without pausing to acknowledge what was accomplished.
- They inform cross-functional teams—marketing, sales, customer success—about what is approaching production, enabling coordination that would otherwise happen too late or not at all.
What These Traditions Have in Common
Across these seven organizations, a pattern emerges. None of these traditions are mandatory Agile framework requirements. All of them are locally invented, often absurd on the surface, and clearly effective in practice. They share three characteristics:
- They create rhythm. Whether it is Bob Marley at standup time or a Monday wall walk, recurring rituals build the muscle memory that makes agile habits automatic rather than effortful.
- They build shared identity. Comic book team names, custom patches, and the Wheel of Chomp are inside jokes that only make sense if you are part of the team. That exclusivity is a feature: it creates belonging and psychological safety.
- They acknowledge that people work better when they enjoy the work. Breakfast tacos after a build break, themed planning sessions, and daily plank challenges are not frivolous additions to a serious process. They are the mechanism by which serious processes survive long enough to become habits.
If your DevOps or agile transformation is stalling, the problem may not be your toolchain or your sprint length. It may be that the process has no soul yet. Borrowing—or better yet, inventing—a few traditions of your own is a low-cost, high-leverage place to start.
Original reporting by the Enterprisers Project. Quotes sourced from that publication.