In one of my past job, we were mostly pragmatic and humble engineers with strong ethos to solve most problems from first principles without ego or dogmas. We d

In one of my past job, we were mostly pragmatic and humble engineers with strong ethos to solve most problems from first principles without ego or dogmas. We didn't have a company-wide mandate to use any particular methodology. Every week, a bunch of leads met to share their retrospectives and learnings. Without any corporate diktat, most application and platform teams were following a lightweight form of sprint. You would find whitewalls filled with vast end-to-end system flow designs and besides them there were sticky notes which roughly looked like Kanban board. These things just happened – no dogma driven push from anyone. In an even earlier job, I saw an overzealous 'scrum master' certified engineering director trying to ticketify everything with Kanban boards and burndown charts etc. Engineering teams under them hated it. It was the least productive period for a division of 100+ engineers I ever saw. Moral of the story: methodology matters a lot less than culture and talent.