The best performing team I've worked with so far contributed to my skepticism of Agile, or at least the Agile™ that is so mainstream nowadays, with scrum, story points, standup meetings, and scrum masters. The team had none of it, it had a simple kanban board, and projects followed almost a waterfall method: scope requirements, find initial customers, decide what the success criteria is, implement it, and reflect on how it went. Working on this team was so incredibly liberating and productive.
Unfortunately it did not escape the claws from corporate - a team with a long leash is a team that cannot be micromanaged. Nowadays it spends a lot of time churning Jira tickets, 30 minutes every day on Zoom chats regurgitating updates that could easily be done in 5 minutes on Slack, and bike-shedding wheter a bugfix is a 2 or a 3. Morale is down, productivity is down, quality is down, but least the higher ups are happy since they have a way to make sure people are completing all their week's story points. I left the company a few months after, but this version of Agile seems to be everywhere I go.
Unfortunately it did not escape the claws from corporate - a team with a long leash is a team that cannot be micromanaged. Nowadays it spends a lot of time churning Jira tickets, 30 minutes every day on Zoom chats regurgitating updates that could easily be done in 5 minutes on Slack, and bike-shedding wheter a bugfix is a 2 or a 3. Morale is down, productivity is down, quality is down, but least the higher ups are happy since they have a way to make sure people are completing all their week's story points. I left the company a few months after, but this version of Agile seems to be everywhere I go.