We're a very small team all of whom are skilled senior-level developers, working on a greenfield product. Basically boils down to back end guy, front end code guy, unicorn product designer/ front-end dev, and ops guy.
(Agile proponents have told me "Oh, that's exactly the wrong sort of group for Agile, it works best with larger teams of lower-level devs." Other Agile proponents have told me "oh that's the perfect sort of team for Agile, it doesn't work with big teams of juniors.")
The way it used to work was: Feature request comes from sales or upper mgt or customer or product designer. Designer does mockups or codes up a simple working prototype. Various team members look at it, we talk about how to implement it, everyone works on it as needed, we deploy it when it's done. If something else comes up in the meantime that's more important or more urgent, we set it aside in a different code branch until there's time to focus on it again.
The way it works now is basically exactly the same, except with lots more meetings and jargon and taxonomizing of tasks and arbitrary milestones.
(Agile proponents have told me "Oh, you were doing Agile already, you just didn't know it! Other Agile proponents have told me "oh, you're not even doing Agile now." Even its proponents can't seem to agree on what Agile is, which makes it really easy to tell its detractors that it's not Agile's fault, you're just doing it wrong...)
Getting stuff done, but in the eyes of management not fast enough. Just guessing but this seems to be the rule.
If you really need agile it will not help and if your team already rocks agile won't improve it, likely you'll already be doing something like it but customized to your needs.
I've seen a couple of fairly efficient teams utterly ruined by switching to 'agile' and I've yet to see an inefficient team become more efficient by deploying it.
(Agile proponents have told me "Oh, that's exactly the wrong sort of group for Agile, it works best with larger teams of lower-level devs." Other Agile proponents have told me "oh that's the perfect sort of team for Agile, it doesn't work with big teams of juniors.")
The way it used to work was: Feature request comes from sales or upper mgt or customer or product designer. Designer does mockups or codes up a simple working prototype. Various team members look at it, we talk about how to implement it, everyone works on it as needed, we deploy it when it's done. If something else comes up in the meantime that's more important or more urgent, we set it aside in a different code branch until there's time to focus on it again.
The way it works now is basically exactly the same, except with lots more meetings and jargon and taxonomizing of tasks and arbitrary milestones.
(Agile proponents have told me "Oh, you were doing Agile already, you just didn't know it! Other Agile proponents have told me "oh, you're not even doing Agile now." Even its proponents can't seem to agree on what Agile is, which makes it really easy to tell its detractors that it's not Agile's fault, you're just doing it wrong...)