Yup the other stupid thing that kept happening was sizing the work to fit the model. Medium sized tickets were least controversial in 3 hour backlog refinement meetings. Therefore every ticket began to ranked at that level. Which then beget us chopping up anything larger into these medium sized tickets, and avoiding creating any too-small tickets.

So instead of "ticket: make pasta for dinner" it was like "ticket 1: purchase prego & pasta from instacart" , "ticket 2: boil water & get out the jar opener", "ticket 3: cook the pasta and sauce", "ticket 4: place the meal and serve".

Zero chance all 4 finished in the sprint, in fact they were rarely even all planned for same sprint.

It became impossible to express to users what they were getting at the end of each sprint. "OK, so you've.. purchased ingredients, when do I get to eat?"

This happened with multiple product managers, agile coaches and tech leads so it wasn't just a single person forcing stupidity on the process..