AgileZen

» see agilezen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

AgileZen had three owners in eight years and the last one sent an email. On June 1, 2017, CA Technologies announced the end of life of a product it had received as part of a company it had bought as part of a different strategy, and agilezen.com stopped answering. The domain has not resolved since.

The thing itself was built in 2009 by Niki and Nate Kohari, trading as Enkari. Nate was already a known name in the .NET world as the author of Ninject, a dependency injection container that a lot of C# developers had in their project files. AgileZen was the pair's first product company, and it did one thing: it put a kanban board on the web, with a card for each piece of work and columns for the stages that work moved through. The part that mattered was a configurable limit on how many cards could sit in a column at once. Kanban is a method about not starting things, and a board that refuses to accept a seventh card is enforcing the method rather than describing it.

It launched in July 2009. By the following April it had over nine thousand users and was growing in double digits month over month, which for a web tool with no sales team was enough to get noticed. Rally Software, the Boulder agile vendor Brad Feld had backed since 2003, announced the acquisition on April 14, 2010. Feld's blog post about the deal opened with the line "how could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen?" Terms were not disclosed. Nine months separated launch from exit.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Rally kept AgileZen running as a separate product rather than folding it in, which was the unusual choice and the right one for a while. AgileZen stayed cheap and small while Rally's own platform stayed expensive and enterprise, and the two served different buyers. The logo picked up a "by Rally Software" line under the wordmark and the blog kept publishing, adding GitHub and Bitbucket integrations in January 2012 and a HipChat hook before that. For a 2012 development team wanting a visual board without a procurement process, it was a genuine option.

~ three owners ~

Trello launched in September 2011, free, out of Fog Creek, and attached to no vendor's agile platform. Everything after that follows from it. AgileZen had been first by two years and shipped work-in-progress limits that Trello did not have for years, and none of that counted against a board that cost nothing and that a project manager could sign up for without asking anybody. By 2013 the AgileZen blog had slowed to guest posts.

CA Technologies bought Rally Software in May 2015 for $480 million and renamed the flagship CA Agile Central. Acquisitions at that scale come with a product rationalization exercise, and a small standalone kanban board that competed with nothing CA sold and generated rounding-error revenue was never going to survive one. It took two years, which is longer than most. The end-of-life email went out and the service stopped on June 1, 2017.

~ the day it died ~

Kanban boards became ordinary in my working life somewhere after this, and by then the board was Jira or it was Trello, chosen by whoever ran the team rather than by anyone who cared what a work-in-progress limit was for. AgileZen's own death is recorded on the IndieWeb site-deaths page as a single line pointing at a Mailchimp campaign URL from CA, which is now the most durable artifact the product has. The 2013 version of the logo, wordmark plus the Rally line under it, is at the top of this page. It came out of the Internet Archive, since the company that owned the brand last never put it anywhere.

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