But I will say that agile (real agile, not agile-in-name-only) demands quite a bit of discipline and maturity from your people. If you don't have the people for it, it won't work.
The goal is to find a methodology that brings ease. So you can stop putting effort into the organization and meta work and instead put more effort into the work that actually brings value.
1) your team's code must have a clear, sane, documented interface/API
2) all teams should have a homogenous intake process for requests for change
Everything else becomes a matter of either priority or performance. These areas are where changes have real impact, so it's better to focus the conversation there.
> agile demands quite a bit of discipline
I'd say small-a-agile requires more discipline from managers rather than staff/line employees. Namely, discipline to refrain from imposing significant process overhead on their teams so they have a better feeling of control and predictability. Manager-driven, observability-oriented process changes seldom give managers more actual control. Instead, managers should embrace the uncertainty that comes with software development, demand only to see real progress on working code in short intervals (no milestones, delivery dates, etc.), and set ambitious goals for their teams only in these intervals.