Cost of Change is Agile’s ceiling

Agile is all about slicing the work.
Smaller chunks mean delivering value faster.
Smaller chunks mean the ability to reduce WIP and increase flow.
That’s what I kept hearing.

Until I discovered it’s only half of the story.
Cutting things into ever tinier pieces
Won’t move the needle if cost of change is high.

Cost of change is what it sounds like:
It’s the time it costs for making a change, but also planning, debugging, deploying…

High Cost of change incentivizes Anticipation
Costly changes mean: you better know precisely what you are doing before you do it.
Costly changes mean: it makes sense to invest time in upfront planning and design.

High Cost of change incentivizes larger scopes and fewer iterations.
Because 2 small changes are more expensive than a larger one.

Cost of Change is Agile’s ceiling.
When change is expensive, waterfall is the rational choice.

But product people don’t talk about it (or do they?)
Even though cost of change implies some “management overhead”
Or maybe precisely because some people’s role exist only thanks to that overhead.

So what happens if/when AI collapses the software cost of change?
Do we finally get to be more Agile?
How does product management shift?