Rotating roles like Scrum Master often backfires. Team members who lack the skill or desire for facilitation will perform the duties with minimal effort and show no improvement, creating a recurring drag on the entire team's productivity and morale.

Coordination work does not disappear when roles like project coordinators or scrum masters are eliminated. Instead, a 'coordination vacuum' is created where essential tasks are either dropped or haphazardly absorbed by unprepared team members, leading to widespread inefficiency and chaos.

The trend towards flat organizations, often promoted in agile environments, can eliminate the middle management layer responsible for formal advocacy. This forces sponsorship into informal networks, which are less visible, less meritocratic, and more susceptible to affinity bias.

The crucial coordination and support tasks that act as "glue" for a team are often deemed non-promotable. Companies systematically reward individuals for visible, feature-focused work while overlooking those whose collaborative efforts enable overall team success.

Implementing a heavyweight framework like SAFe without funding its roles is not accidental. It's a strategy to gain the visible, auditable benefits of "being agile" for leadership without committing to the costly, people-centric work of true adoption.

Organizations rationalize not funding facilitator roles by claiming technology will automate the work or arguing team members should "step up" and take initiative. Both are ways to avoid paying for necessary, people-centric labor.

Instead of identifying who is "best" at a task, managers should focus on who "keeps getting asked" to do it. This question reveals critical but informal roles, hidden dependencies, and employees burdened by the "competence tax."

As teams grow, ambiguity over ownership increases, causing key tasks to be dropped. The RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) combats this by clarifying roles upfront for any project, ensuring clear ownership and preventing the diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes larger groups.

The traditional agile practitioner role is disappearing. Professionals are on two distinct paths: ascending to a strategic level by tying delivery to business outcomes, or seeing their roles diminished, absorbed, or eliminated. The middle ground has vanished, forcing a choice between strategy and obsolescence.