I've never seen a working scrum/agile/sprint/whatever product/project management system and I'm convinced it's because I've just never seen an actual implementation of one.
"Splitting up major projects into tiny shippable features and calling that agile" feels like a much more accurate description of what I've experienced.
I wish I'd gotten to see the real thing(s) so I could at least have an informed opinion.
People misunderstand the system, I think. It's not holy writ, you take the parts of it that work for your team and ditch the rest. Iterate as you go.
The failure modes I've personally seen is an organization that isn't interested in cooperating or the person running the show is more interested in process than people. But I'd say those teams would struggle no matter what.
I put a lot of the responsibility for the PMing failures I've seen on the engineering side not caring to invest anything at all into the relationship.
Ultimately, I think it's up to the engineering side to do its best to leverage the process for better results, and I've seen very little of that (and it's of course always been the PM side's fault).
And you're right: use what works for you. I just haven't seen anything that felt like it actually worked. Maybe one problem is people iterating so fast/often they don't actually know why it's not working.
Yea, I think scrum etc is largely a failure in practice.
The manager for the only team I think actually checked all the agile boxes had a UI background so she thought in terms of mock-ups, backend, and polishing as different tasks and was constantly getting client feedback between each stage. That specific approach isn’t universal, the feedback as part of the process definitely should be though.
What was a little surreal is the pace felt slow day to day but we were getting a lot done and it looked extremely polished while being essentially bug free at the end. An experienced team avoiding heavy processes, technical debt, and wasted effort goes a long way.