Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster.
From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.
If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work.
The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time.
No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team.
I miss those days.
Sort of worst of both worlds. Everyone develops learned helplessness, checks out or leaves.
If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre.
Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
Lots of that, going 'round, these days. Companies are firing (or driving off) all the people that can do it right.
I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning.
A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.