Interesting, I have a very similar story from last year. Existing CTO and head of product acted as if they were writing complex, mission critical software (they weren’t) and instituted processes to match. It went from overly ad hoc to over-the-top scrum. As a result, features took months to develop and everyone was terrified of releases. Teams bloated to massive size.

CTO was fired, I came in and evaluated everything, slashed the consulting teams down to the ones clearly performing, and slashed the processes down to boot. Within a month the team velocity was way up and we were releasing to a nice cadence without fear.

And this was not because I’m a super man. I’m not. Any competent tech lead or manager could have done the same. The only difficult part was dragging the product folks along, they kicked and screamed the whole way, predicting doom, and were amazed when the sky didn’t fall.