After working in teams using Scrum and fully unstructured “trust the engineer”, I agree there are certain parts of Scrum that feel like dead weight / overkill.

After working in teams using Scrum and fully unstructured “trust the engineer”, I agree there are certain parts of Scrum that feel like dead weight / overkill. Daily standup can feel productive when you are doing it, but I think you have to be a very small and nimble team with high density of juniors for it to be appropriate to meet that frequency. With a mostly-senior team folks just reach out when needed to unblock each other, and proactively broadcast async updates. Tooling to encourage this “ambient information” is I think under-invested. Takes a lot of discipline in Slack to prevent channels from devolving into noisy discussions. I think a lot of teams think they need more predictability than they actually do, and sizing/points are overrated. Again this is contextual; in some projects you really do need to forecast a Q/H roadmap for customers. But if you are shipping every week or two, sizing barely matters as you can just Kanban it and keep picking the most important item to work on each sprint. I think retro is mostly time wasted. You can fill an hour per two weeks with it but I’m not convinced it’s the best use of that time when you are moving fast. Async tools that can measure a pulse survey & flag common themes that are bright red/green is probably a better place to be. I think some sort of stakeholder review on a regular cadence is great, and sadly is the bit that is taken least seriously in Scrum IME. When stakeholders (in small companies this means CEO and the rest of leadership!) take this seriously you get a great feedback loop. Too often I see folks skipping as they have “real work” to do. I think this also points to lessons for the engineers; really need to keep things snappy and customer-focused. Have your tech-facing demos another time. Or, even better, record your product facing demos and post them, so you can get feedback async. If the CEO comments regularly on these it can still provide that feedback that the meeting / demo is valued and important.