June 03, 2026

What Cinco de Mayo Can Teach Us About Agile - Mike Cohn

4 minutes

Today seems like a good day to celebrate Cinco de Agile.
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla, when a smaller, less-equipped Mexican force defeated a larger French army.
There’s an agile lesson in that.
The side with the bigger plan, more resources, and more confidence doesn’t always win.
Sometimes the winner is the side that can adapt faster.
That’s one of the biggest differences between agile and waterfall.
Waterfall assumes that if we plan thoroughly enough up front, we can control the outcome.
Agile assumes that once real work begins, we’ll learn things we couldn’t have known at the start.
When customers change their minds, markets shift, or the team learns something new, fast feedback beats slow certainty.
A team that delivers something small, gets feedback, and adjusts can outperform a team that spends months moving confidently in the wrong direction.
That’s the real lesson.
It’s not that small always beats big.
It’s not even that agile always beats waterfall.
It’s this:
In changing conditions, adaptability is your biggest competitive advantage.
So if your current plan feels a little too certain, it may be worth asking one uncomfortable question:
What are we doing to learn faster?
Because in product development, learning speed often determines who wins.
Happy Cinco de Agile.