Couldn't agree more. Just quit my job of last six years the previous week. I really liked the team and the product. We had a very informal development process -

Couldn't agree more. Just quit my job of last six years the previous week. I really liked the team and the product. We had a very informal development process - we all agreed it was agile but not through following any formal process (Scrum or such). We still had retros and dailies. Planning was done by managers explaining a feature they'd like us to do, and the team then doing the planning, design and implementation. More processes and e.g. recurring meetings were erected and torn down based on the team's actual needs alone. If someone wanted an estimate, we'd give it, but we were not doing continuos estimation just for the sake of estimation itself, like in Scrum. Felt like the process served us, rather than us serving a process. If you'd taken a look at the Agile manifesto, we were ticking pretty much all the boxes: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html Then 1.5 years ago, company decided to roll out whole IT department wide SAFe, which is basically Scrum but on a whole organization level, and hence even more bureaucratic and with one additional level of mega-iterations added on top of Scrum's sprints. Suddenly, our team is assigned a Scrum master and we no longer even get to speak directly with the managers who previously negotiated new features with us. Instead, everything has to go through multiple levels of prioritization and broken telephones of new SAFe intermediaries. We started attending 2-3 new mandatory processes / recurring meetings, meaning time spent in inefficient boring meetings went up significantly. We had to also start a much more stringent ticketing system regime, including having to estimate ALL work. Despite multiple requests from Scrum master and managers, nobody was ever able to explain why estimating absolutely everything - even when nobody had even asked for an estimate - helped with anything. It was seemingly taken as a religious thesis that it was just the right thing to do. Soon, the team was paralyzed. Even simple features became harder and harder to develop. Despite the massive effort spent on estimating even the most trivial of tasks, the big picture was forgotten about because larger feature-level ballpark estimates were no longer acceptable, and hence unimportant. On a company level, the business managers that previously talked directly to us just basically quit working with the IT department because the SAFe process was such a beast to contend. It was easiest for them to just stop asking for new digital product features, and focus on non-IT projects instead. I know Scrum / SAFe proponents will say we were doing it wrong. It's ALWAYS that way - Scrum consultants love to gloat when some metric improves, but if things go south the org has only itself to blame for failing to correctly convert to their favorite flavor of True Agile System™. My experience was however seeing an Agile team (as expressed by the Agile manifesto) turn into a Monty Python parody of agile software development just by being forced to submit to these "fake agile" heavy processes and hierarchies.