This is a really good response, Brett, and it adds value to the article. Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts in detail. It is really hard to fit design into any Agile framework — perhaps impossible if you remain true to the framework. The one point you make that I find most irritating in organizations is the firm devotion to the release date. We often release a product with all of its features and then move on to the next set of features without improving or iterating the existing features. There also seems to be a mindset that once we release a feature, we don’t want to rethink it or return to it. I hear this all of the time from teams: “Well, we released that in 2.0 and we certainly don’t want to undo what we have already done.” In short, they are usually stating they do not want to revisit previous feature implementations.