Agile methodology was born out of the software world in the early 2000s. The original Agile Manifesto emerged as a response to traditional Waterfall processes — long, linear development cycles that left little room for change once underway.
Agile turned that on its head. It championed short sprints, iterative releases, constant feedback, and cross-functional collaboration. In many contexts — especially for in-house product teams — it worked beautifully. You shipped fast, learned faster, and course-corrected in real time.
But in the creative world, especially client-facing creative, that model doesn’t always translate cleanly.
Let’s zoom out. Agile, in its purest form, is a software methodology. It was designed to fix broken product pipelines, not birth brand identities or craft nuanced storytelling arcs.
Agile favors speed and predictability. But branding? Branding needs time to breathe. It’s not a bug fix; it’s a belief system. And you don’t build belief in 2-week sprints.
Still, we tried.
We ran branding projects like product builds—2-week design sprints, constant feedback loops, burndown charts for campaign moodboards. We turned creativity into code logic. And unsurprisingly, both our team and our clients felt the friction.
Our clients weren’t ready to “ship” every week. Most of them didn’t want to be co-designers—they wanted to reflect, digest, and make decisions with intention.
Internally, designers and strategists started pushing back. It’s one thing to iterate on an interface. It’s another to iterate a story into dust.
Creativity doesn’t thrive on checkpoints—it thrives on clarity. And we’d built a system that replaced space with structure. We were moving faster, yes—but not necessarily forward.
Ironically, the more we resisted the old-school “Waterfall” model, the more we started to appreciate it. Not as a relic, but as a rhythm.
Waterfall brings sequence. Milestones. Decision points. The kind of creative constraint that fosters commitment. You can’t stay in moodboard limbo forever if you’ve got a hard line on concept sign-off.
It forces both us and our clients to get intentional early—and that intentionality becomes a catalyst for better work.
What we needed wasn’t a binary choice between Agile and Waterfall—it was a hybrid. A system designed for design. Built with enough flexibility to sprint when it makes sense, and enough structure to pause when it matters.
Today, here’s how we work:
One of our recent digital builds exemplified this. The client needed a brand and a site fast. We began with fixed concept rounds and stakeholder approvals. Once approved, we moved to sprint-based dev and visual refinement. The result? A launch that felt fast, thoughtful, and cohesive.
The biggest myth in creative operations? That there’s a “right” process. The truth: the right process is the one that honors your people, your pace, and your purpose.
We don’t follow methodologies blindly. We shape them—just like we shape every system we build for our clients.
Because at CDA, design doesn’t end at the deliverable. It lives in how we work, how we think, and how we grow.
And that’s the most creative act of all: designing the way we design.