Status: Pilot approved · first teams up next

APEL is my Agentic Product Engineering Lifecycle. It takes its flow from Kanban: pull work when it’s ready and cap work in progress. For agent-assisted delivery, it adds a spec with test intent before any agent builds, a named person who approves each phase, and evidence before release.

Working rules

  • Pull when ready. Ready + unblocked + capacity = eligible to pull. Product sets priority, and each engineer works one item at a time, two at most.
  • Specify before building. Carry intended behavior and test intent into implementation.
  • Keep decisions owned. Agents assist; people approve changes and accept outcomes.
  • Verify the release. A successful build is only one checkpoint.

Track waiting, rework, and failures to improve the system. Staging runs on demand; production releases weekly. Teams can choose a different cadence without changing the model.

Discover, Refine, Build, Validate, and Operate, with owners and outputs. Failures return to Build or Refine; release failures trigger rollback; new findings return to Discover.
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From Sprints to continuous flow

Sprint planning and selected workContinuous Product RankPull the highest-ranked eligible item.
Work organized around a SprintReadiness + available capacityA spec, test intent, and clear dependencies.
Velocity tracking*Expected vs actual effortCheck estimates against rework and failures.
Sprint-linked releases*Two release speedsStaging on demand. Production weekly.

An engineer who finishes on Tuesday pulls the next eligible item that day. After validation it can reach staging on demand, then the weekly production window, without waiting for a Sprint to start. Resolve blocked work explicitly; starting more work does not make a dependency disappear.

Retiring Sprint events still leaves a need for shared goals, coordination, stakeholder feedback, and retrospectives. Make those responsibilities explicit, and pair effort measures with quality signals, as Goodhart’s Law reminds us.

The Scrum Guide requires neither velocity nor Sprint-linked releases. They’re common local practices, and they’re what APEL replaces.