[TheOtherHobbes]

No it isn't. Agile software development assumes management knows what it's doing - which is often not the case at all.

Agile is primarily about managing down assuming a coherent goal exists - not about finding the best coherent goal when it doesn't, or even about being able to tell that it doesn't.

Agile business management doesn't really exist as an established practice. Although you can certainly find books, consultants, and all the usual noise that use the term, the idea that you can recursively define your business strategy - not your implementation - by solving the problems that provide the best customer satisfaction at the lowest implementation cost isn't as common as it should be.

The obvious complication is that the definition of "customer" varies. A bootstrapped startup needs to focus on real income-generating customers.

A VC-funded startup is in a different market. The primary customers are actually the VCs and other investors - not product users, whether they're paying or not.

Pieter Hintjens is always worth reading, even though his "solutions" are wildly oversimplified and contingent. Here he takes it for granted that solving customer pain points should always be the primary value-generating goal - which for better or worse happens not to be true, especially for startups.