At my current workplace, we do have a roadmap for the business, but the actual backlog of tickets to implement work is all waiting on other siloed teams to make decisions that we are downstream of. This ranges from our infrastructure model to simple things like “which CSS components are we allowed to use.”

We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.

The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.

It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)