Some of the irony of this is that the actual PM should be more like a mechanic shop manager rather than the customer. One of our current issues is that we got a

Some of the irony of this is that the actual PM should be more like a mechanic shop manager rather than the customer. One of our current issues is that we got a new PM who is, well, as you explained above. The hardest part is for them to even write sensical tickets. They can't figure out what is BE or FE work so their tickets mix multiple items while the company bans sub-tasks that devs make. All that said, I'm 80% sure the comment you made about sprint making it feel rushed is directly noted in Basecamp's Shape Up, which honestly is a great way to run small projects where results are more important than metrics.