Agility matters in today’s product and engineering world — but reality matters more. Teams everywhere live in tension between agile ideals and business demands. Leadership asks, When will it ship? Sales wants to close deals with customers. Marketing needs launch dates for campaigns. Finance needs to draft revenue projections for the next board meeting. And engineers just want clarity instead of chaos.

Meanwhile, teams are buried in ceremonies and process dogma with endless documentation while the question of delivery remains difficult to answer. This disconnect creates frustration and a lot of wasted effort aligning the product development process with the needs of the business. This frustration can lead to burned out teams, low morale and poor business results.

That’s where Project-Based Agile comes in. This isn’t just another tweak on existing methodologies. It’s the natural evolution of agile that brings structure, design discipline, continuous delivery, and stakeholder alignment into a single actionable approach. Instead of theory and wishful thinking, it offers a practical narrative that bridges agile ideals with how work actually gets done in fast-moving, high-expectation businesses. Project-Based Agile isn’t waterfall, and it’s not chaos disguised as flexibility. It’s disciplined agility built around delivery containers that the business can track.

Why Projects Matter

Projects aren’t just containers for work — they are how businesses think and operate. Understanding why projects matter is essential for aligning teams and driving predictable delivery:

• Projects are the language of business. Stakeholders and executives think in initiatives and launches, not story points and burndown charts.

• Projects make commitments visible. They give teams clear containers to plan, scope, and track progress.

• Projects align cross-functional teams. Marketing, sales, and customer support can plan around them.

Why Agile Needed Evolution

Agile was born as a rebellion against rigid waterfall processes. It championed adaptability, collaboration, and incremental delivery, which is all great. But as it became mainstream, agile frameworks — especially Scrum — became weighed down with rituals, ceremonies, and process overhead. Teams found themselves drowning in meetings and endless re-prioritization, while leadership continued to demand dates, deliverables, and certainty.

The biggest gap? Pure agile puts the sprint at the center of delivery. But businesses don’t think in sprints — they think in projects. They want to know: What’s launching? When? What will it deliver for customers? Project-Based Agile solves this disconnect by making the project the primary container of work and accountability, aligning product and engineering outputs directly with business timelines and stakeholder expectations.

The truth is, this is how top tech companies have been shipping for years — using clear projects, owners, and structured execution. This approach has been hiding in plain sight, quietly powering successful product launches and predictable delivery at the companies we all admire. With Project-Based Agile, we’ve defined it, refined it, and made it accessible to every team that’s ready to elevate their execution.

Product Thinking at the Core

Project-Based Agile is not just about shipping — it's about starting with the right foundation. By centering projects as the container for work, teams have space to pause and focus on why they’re building something, not just what they’re building.

Before a single line of code is written or a story is drafted, we focus on product thinking: understanding the customer problem, aligning on goals, and making sure every effort supports the broader company strategy and market positioning. This alignment ensures that teams are not only shipping predictably, but also shipping the right things. Using product thinking up front also ensures the PRD, design, and development are purposeful and anchored in outcomes.

Throughout the planning process, teams are encouraged to ask: Are we solving the right problem? Are we aligned with the product vision? Are we prioritizing simplicity and customer impact? This level of deliberate thinking prevents teams from jumping to premature solutions, incorporates everyone's perspective, and ensures the work delivered truly moves the business forward.

How to Run Projects in Project-Based Agile

Here's the high-level playbook: 

• Plan upfront with clear business outcomes.

• Write and review a PRD or product brief for smaller features in the beginning of a project.

• Design intentionally before building.

• Break down work into small, testable, estimated increments.

• QA continuously, not just at the end.

• Outside of project work, track small improvements, tech debt, and discovered bugs and allocate capacity to it each sprint/cycle.

• Maintain regular project updates that facilitate decision-making, and allow stakeholders to influence scope before it’s too late.

  
  

Project-based Agile empowers teams to operate at their best. Here's typically how ownership in the product development team works: 

• PMs define and own success metrics and partner closely with design and engineering to scope and define projects. 

• EMs actively engage in planning to ensure alignment between engineering approach and project goals, including timelines. 

• Designers are a key part of projects, upholding quality and product-wide consistency from day one.

• Each project will have a dedicated project owner, often a senior PM or EM who owns cross-functional alignment and communicates progress, risks, and milestones.

  
  

How Project-Based Agile is Different

• Outcomes before stories.
  Start by defining concrete business goals and customer outcomes. Write these in the PRD. Every piece of work must ladder up to these goals.

  
  

• PRD and design upfront.
  In the first phase of a project, draft a PRD or product brief and align on scope and designs with product, design, and engineering leads. The PRD should include scope, success metrics, risks, and a delivery plan.

  
  

• Stories after clarity.
  Tickets are created only after the team has design, requirements, and acceptance criteria largely agreed on. Stories are delivery instruments — not discussion forums.

  
  

• Estimate for truth, not optimism.
  Push for honest conversations. If a story seems too big or unclear, take the time to investigate and break it down. No blind guesswork.

  
  

• Continuous QA.
  Testing is integrated with delivery. QA partners with engineering throughout. By the time the project nears completion, the product is already stable.

  
  

• Project milestone tracking.

  The project timeline is visible to stakeholders with regular milestone check-ins and real-time status updates.

  
  

• Dedicated time for non-project work.
  Each sprint or cycle reserves ~20% capacity for tech debt, bugs, and small but important product improvements.

Example: Shipping a New User Onboarding Flow

Here's a high-level overview of how a typical project would run: 

• Week 1: Define objectives (increase onboarding completion by 15%). Draft PRD, complete wireframes, hold reviews.

• Week 2: Finalize designs, review technical investigations and planned approach, break down into ~8-10 features or user stories.

• Weeks 3–5: Sprint execution with weekly demos. Continuous QA. 20% allocation for ongoing improvements and tech debt.

• Week 6: Regression testing, polish, stakeholder acceptance testing. Smooth, confident launch. Post-launch metrics review.

• Weekly, the team meets with leadership and stakeholders to review status of all projects in flight, discuss any risks and get input on any key decisions they are faced with. 

  
  

Why This Works

Project-Based Agile works because it meets teams and stakeholders where they are:

• It aligns with how business leaders think — in launches and milestones.

• It gives teams clarity and structure without losing creative control.

• It ensures product and engineering are operating in lockstep with stakeholders.

• It builds a culture of delivery, trust, and learning.

• It anchors every project in company strategy, linking efforts directly to OKRs, investment themes, and go-to-market priorities.

• It fosters transparency and accountability through clear ownership, continuous updates, and milestone tracking.

  
  

This isn’t a theory or framework experiment. It’s what the best teams are already doing — finally given a name and structure, with a repeatable process any team can adopt.

How Devplan Supports Project-Based Agile

Devplan was built for modern project-based development teams who want to move fast with clarity and confidence. It leverages AI at every step to make planning, estimation, documentation, and execution more streamlined. 

• AI-assisted PRD generation and refinement, ensuring teams start with clear, structured documentation.

• Automated story breakdown and task estimation based on project goals and design inputs.

• Continuous suggestion of edge cases, test scenarios, and overlooked risks.

• Automated stakeholder update summaries to keep leadership informed without manual overhead. (soon!) 

  
  

In short, Devplan makes the discipline of Project-Based Agile practical, fast, and scalable for modern teams — so you can spend less time managing operations and more time delivering outcomes.

We plan to expand on the Project-based Agile playbook in the future. If you'd like to contribute to the philosophy and approach we are developing, give us a shout at info at devplan.com