[tdumitrescu]

"The team is expected to churn through a backlog of dozens of insignificantly small bits of larger features, which often lack foresight into the constraints that will be discovered and the interdepencies between smaller bits that result in developer deadlock."

Yep. This is where a crappy product manager can turn "incremental" into "myopic and inflexible" under the banner of Agile. Just trust your engineers a bit already.