In my mind agile, is about avoiding committing to a particular direction before verifying that it's the right one, and in a lot of cases (particularly in the st

In my mind agile, is about avoiding committing to a particular direction before verifying that it's the right one, and in a lot of cases (particularly in the startup world), verification requires shipping to potential customers. Agility doesn't promise fastest time to delivery. It's acknowledging that you'll probably build the wrong thing, so it's about making it easier to course-correct. The failure state of agile (waterfall hidden behind agile ceremony) is usually triggered by leadership/management teams not willing to _truly_ delegate. Once process becomes dominated by accountability and visibility (which I've never seen not happen with Scrum), rather than supporting the people doing the work, all bets are off.