I don't want to be "that guy" but everything you're describing above is not a symptom of Scrum per se but of a toxic working culture. Scrum does not suggest mic

I don't want to be "that guy" but everything you're describing above is not a symptom of Scrum per se but of a toxic working culture. Scrum does not suggest micromanagement or assigning tasks, the goal is for the team to be given a goal and work out what is needed to be done to achieve it. The team works together, no passing back and forth. As for the PO being a "they" that's something that needs to be addressed. I'm not going to assume ill intent on your part, so let's assume this is again a symptom of a poorly performing team rather than you (or the PO) being unreasonable. But also bear in mind that the PO going off doing "stuff" is generally supposed to be all those things that get in the way of development, e.g. talking to stakeholders & customers, addressing prioritisation problems and trying to prevent the team being overwhelmed with too many goals at the same time. I'm definitely not saying that micromanagement doesn't happen but I'm saying that you could take your new company's approach (no processes, just let the devs do anything) to the old company and you would have many more problems. It all, as ever, boils down to working culture and practices, and a company that is agile in name only. You can't fix that by splitting things into 2 week chunks and making people talk to each other once a day.