The forever-sprinting approach indeed is unmanageable long term. In my prev job we used to have a cycle of 2-3 sprints followed by 1-2 weeks of rest (to handle

The forever-sprinting approach indeed is unmanageable long term. In my prev job we used to have a cycle of 2-3 sprints followed by 1-2 weeks of rest (to handle tech debt etc.) In other companies it could be named "innovation week" or something similar. I still didn't love this, precisely due to always wanting tangible deliverables within 1-2 weeks, while sometimes you just need more time to think clearly about some problem. We partially mitigated it though by explicitly stating whether a giving story is "delivery" or "discovery", the latter being used to better understand the scope of the problem, current status quo, validate assumptions etc.