I'm old enough to remember the B.S/B.A. (Before Scrum/Before Agile) times.
Agile has mostly been a disaster IMO.. I've worked at big public companies and 2-3 startups during it's run. It works to come up with a "MVP for 1.0 and then it starts dragging everything down because it encourages tech debt.
My experience has always been the successful companies/teams were tongue in cheek telling everyone they were Agile when agile was popular while simultaneously trying to ignore Agile as much as they can because it was mostly ceremony and downsides once a product gets anywhere near mature. There was a lot of "we're agile with a lower case a" at places that could tell the Emperor's new clothes were suspicious.
Some of the old processes have been slowly creeping back in, and we're kind of at the point now where teams no longer need to feel like they have to advertise saying they're scrum/agile to appear competent. But I think you either need some older managers or something else to figure out what to do next and how to bring back the good parts of older process methodologies because it feels like theirs a vacuum.
The relationships between teams and PM have changed so much. Agile elevated PM a huge amount but as Agile moved on PM seemed to abdicate all responsibility to do their part in the whole agile process, and now you're left with a bunch of extra PM just getting in the way.
Agile without developers being included in estimates was one of the worst things.. non-technical PMs constantly shooting down estimates with "No, that is easy" is the worst. But Agile to me always seemed to be about management being able to absolve itself of all responsibility for not being able to figure out what to build or how to build it and to always be able to blame the engineers.
As we go forward teams need to look back at the past and what worked before Agile, not just make something new up out of whole cloth.
One agile team I worked on which probably was the strictest essentially pivoted the entire product to something else 3x because PM never had a clue what to build that would actually sell.
> But Agile to me always seemed to be about management being able to absolve itself of all responsibility for not being able to figure out what to build or how to build it and to always be able to blame the engineers.
This is Agile’s “Executive Armor Effect”, which turns developers into a sort of ablative armor that can take hits for executives.
Agile has mostly been a disaster IMO.. I've worked at big public companies and 2-3 startups during it's run. It works to come up with a "MVP for 1.0 and then it starts dragging everything down because it encourages tech debt.
My experience has always been the successful companies/teams were tongue in cheek telling everyone they were Agile when agile was popular while simultaneously trying to ignore Agile as much as they can because it was mostly ceremony and downsides once a product gets anywhere near mature. There was a lot of "we're agile with a lower case a" at places that could tell the Emperor's new clothes were suspicious.
Some of the old processes have been slowly creeping back in, and we're kind of at the point now where teams no longer need to feel like they have to advertise saying they're scrum/agile to appear competent. But I think you either need some older managers or something else to figure out what to do next and how to bring back the good parts of older process methodologies because it feels like theirs a vacuum.
The relationships between teams and PM have changed so much. Agile elevated PM a huge amount but as Agile moved on PM seemed to abdicate all responsibility to do their part in the whole agile process, and now you're left with a bunch of extra PM just getting in the way.
Agile without developers being included in estimates was one of the worst things.. non-technical PMs constantly shooting down estimates with "No, that is easy" is the worst. But Agile to me always seemed to be about management being able to absolve itself of all responsibility for not being able to figure out what to build or how to build it and to always be able to blame the engineers.
As we go forward teams need to look back at the past and what worked before Agile, not just make something new up out of whole cloth.
One agile team I worked on which probably was the strictest essentially pivoted the entire product to something else 3x because PM never had a clue what to build that would actually sell.