Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is one of the co-hosts of the Agile in Construction track at the Global Agile Summit 2026. In this preview episode, he and Vasco talk about why Agile belongs on the construction site, what the track’s speakers discovered when they stopped following the plan, and why software people should pay close attention to an industry that builds hospitals, not apps.
Construction Is 20 Years Behind — And That’s the Opportunity
“People don’t realize that those ideas absolutely work in other industries. Agile’s been successfully applied everywhere, and I think where it gets the least amount of publicity is in the construction sector.”
When most people hear “Agile,” they think standups in a tech office, not concrete and rebar. Felipe wants to change that. Construction, he says, is always about 20 years behind whatever process or technology the rest of the world adopts — a “very safe stock of keeping tradition.” That gap is exactly what makes this track valuable. Agile is alive and growing in construction, and the translation turns out to be simpler than you’d expect. Most of what needs to change isn’t the framework — it’s the vocabulary. The sessions in this track show how practitioners made that jump with surprisingly small tweaks.
The Speakers Don’t Know How Good They Are
“Half the speakers that I asked were like, ‘what, me? Do I have a story to share?’ I was like, yeah, you have this really amazing… people just don’t realize how awesome they are.” Continue reading BONUS: Hard Hats and Standups — Why the Construction Industry Is Going Agile at GAS26
