What you describe makes me think that you pivoted from an engineering role into a product role in order to make agile to work for you. This only reaffirms what I said, because if agile really empowered you as an engineer that transition would not have happened.

No. I went directly to the client and sold them on the idea of iterative process from first principles

The difference is that the emphasis is on knowledge creation and relationship building

Believe me that there is a way to do the right thing by everyone but most people set themselves up for failure at the outset

It's both way simpler and much more complex than most people can truly appreciate

By the way the word pivot is largely misunderstood

It means to change the approach while maintaining the vision and values

My values have always been on teamwork and knowledge creation and I pivoted in the sense of changing the approach but not in the sense of changing the vision