I worked at a small startup that actually handled that distinction well for a while. We did 2 week sprints, but that really was more to keep a remote team regu

I worked at a small startup that actually handled that distinction well for a while. We did 2 week sprints, but that really was more to keep a remote team regularly in touch and updated. Sprint work was very much up to each dev, and at the end of the sprint anything that changed or slipped was just chalked up to lessons for future work. That did change eventually, both as the team grew a bit more and funding started to run low. Eventually we had the worst of both worlds mentioned in the article, sprints with more rigid goals leading to a quarterly goal driven more by marketing goals than anything else. Throw in the fact that the still rather small company ended up with one person making product, marketing, and even technical decisions and we devolved into glorified code monkeys pretty quickly.