This. Basically, our process before was that the PM would plan a release with the customer and a few senior devs, distribute the tickets needed for that releas

This. Basically, our process before was that the PM would plan a release with the customer and a few senior devs, distribute the tickets needed for that release to team members, and then the team shifted them around between eachother trying to make it work, sometimes we couldn't fit some tickets in, sometimes we were able to fit a bit more in. These were fairly long cycles like up to 3 months or even longer in one rare case. Then we became Agile. When you have 20 devs on a project, your standups won't take 5 minutes. Estimating the tickets won't be done in an hour because too many dependencies. They tried to split teams up into two, but then team A had no idea what team B was doing and there was just way more overhead. Most people will look at you in a weird way when you tell them you had 20 devs in one team. But what can I say, it certainly worked better than the other things we tried. As I said, I'm sure it can work, but you need to do it right, and we certainly didn't.