Leadership in most organizations have ideas about product but no idea what the actual product is that runs things.
Anything that a client or stakeholder wants is an automatic “P1.”
The senior dev team inevitably concludes that tech debt, which has been accumulated for years, has to be address due to near catastrophic levels of issues in security, compliance, performance, or maintenance.
Business analysts & PMs, almost always bright, well-intentioned people that don’t realize they are in Kafka-topia, believe that all that is missing is a clear business justification for prioritization & with calculated value to the end user. Those that go hunting for answers are soon shocked to discover their core users have no idea why they do what they do or what relevance it has to the org. All of the above drives additional, well-research product enhancements that get greenlit by leadership to be done “alongside the client P1s.”
If your pipeline is clogged, shipping value can’t happen. However little time it takes, it still takes time to change the way you work - which is what agile is about at its best: continual learning and improvement.
I learned a valuable lesson in game design - your constraints are your rules engine.
As much as the concepts and beliefs at the core of agile are an amazing “dev outward” approach to value creation, agile does not and cannot stand alone in the global dysfunction of human organizations.
Without clear leadership on priorities, without clear budgeting of investment in infrastructure, and most importantly without an actual feedback loop across all the players in a system, agile is not agile.
Agile is a way to get there, yes, but if you are in an organization that can’t answer basic questions about itself then you are probably in an organization that won’t be able to implement anything authentically. You will just have new shapes and sizes on the same lack of alignment, decision making, and insight.