So many +1s for you. I want to add that if the team is focusing on the present, it becomes clear that estimation is a passive, descriptive (rather than active,

So many +1s for you. I want to add that if the team is focusing on the present, it becomes clear that estimation is a passive, descriptive (rather than active, proscriptive) act. No ticket has time pressure on it. The manager predicts the future timeline based on how long similar tasks took in the past, on average. No idea if one task will take 5 or 15 days, but 10 of them will take about 100 days. Once you understand that, there are many very simple ways for a competent manager to get development velocity out without adding work for the developers... and all management actually wants is average velocity and remaining work in similar units. If your team tries to keep tickets about the same size, ticket throughput is your velocity. At most the devs can slap gut instinct Easy/Medium/Hard labels on the tickets so they don't have to "right size" everything. Either of those (or a thousand variants), when coupled with the pile of work left to do (in the present understanding) can give a competent manager high precision long term estimates with confidence intervals. No need to make it more complicated (or time consuming!) unless the devs tell you they NEED more. In my experience, teams that focus on the present, and which are in control of their own process (ie adding or changing only when DEVS feel the need) typically end up evolving their own agile process... which is way more effective than OOTB processes like Scrum, and doesn't feel like a burden (the team drops anything that feels like a burden). Teams who have a process imposed upon them, on the other hand, spend years ranting online about how terrible agile is, and waste a lot of time in unnecessary bullshit.