Actually (and I do this for a living as a management consultant) we are pushing all of our clients to an Agile operating model. There are many reasons for this,

Actually (and I do this for a living as a management consultant) we are pushing all of our clients to an Agile operating model. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one being that consumers now expect to interact with all companies like CPGs. Agile lends itself very well to a top-down brands-and-products hierarchy. You build the core of the products in a shared engineering group (again, just like most CPGs) then apply localized branding and product focus as needed. And here's the thing: adopting Agile in the corporate world is less about "reacting quickly" (though that is one of the benefits, at least in comparison to the legacy methods) but really more about cost control. Agile is simply cheaper because you're not building shit that nobody wants. If you can build an Agile culture of "if it's not in the backlog that was approved by product and reviewed every couple weeks, you don't build it" you cut down on a lot of pet projects, deprecated features and duplication of effort. Is there still duplication? Sure; but often times companies will have 5 groups build the same thing and they just choose the one that gets the most internal traction. That's actually a viable strategy when you don't know the product you need to build, but you need it to work. It also tends to help find the right "home" within the organization politically (i.e. the people who really need said functionality will build it, use it, make it popular, and then get the money to maintain it while fringe users lose funding and migrate to the shared platform). The key thing is that the engineers aren't in control. And with good reason; engineers are paid to build products, product managers are paid to design products and brand managers are paid to build portfolios of interrelated products. You cannot run a large company without this kind of P&L discipline.