Pointing in general is not very helpful in my experience. The engineering manager should know the product area and code well enough to gauge the LOE for tasks

Pointing in general is not very helpful in my experience. The engineering manager should know the product area and code well enough to gauge the LOE for tasks and plan, without the unnecessary step of estimation meetings (which likely aren’t going to produce accurate numbers anyway). Could also be a tech lead that does this, but prefer that they’re one in the same. Of course there are many aspects of “pure scrum” I don’t agree with, such as a single sprint goal shared among the team