My biggest surprise, when moving from 10+ years at FAANGs to a smaller valley startup, was the cargo cult worship of SCRUM, agile methodologies, story points and all that over just building and shipping value to the customer and moving metrics.
I was also surprised, when starting to get involved in the broader Product Management community, that PMs at most companies (especially outside tech), are mostly project managers pushing JIRA tickets around.
My experience echos your finding, but in reverse. Going from Enterprise companies to a tech company, I was surprised that PMs actually seem to do things. I was so used to Project Managers / Scrum Masters just taking up time with meetings and pushing around Jira tickets with status updates, that when I finally got a Product Manager that really seemed to do stuff, and get a vision for where things are going, but worked well with engineers to get a design it was a breath of fresh air.
That reminds me it's a been an entire decade since I have worked with an actual product manager who knows and cares about the product they manage. Project managers are NOT it
It's also that a huge number of new tech startups are operated by extremely green techs. That means that many have no management experience and very little practical software industry experience. Frequently, they've worked only at other similar companies.
So, a few things happen.
* The boss knows of nothing other than Scrum, so Scrum it is.
* The boss recognizes that he or she doesn't have that experience, figures something needs to happen, and leans on the biggest name in the game.
* The boss is so enamored of the idea that software applies to any of the world's problems that the process is offloaded to Jira or whatever, and now you've got this weird Scrumthing happening.
* The board realizes that there is insufficient management capability and pushes the organization toward it.
If you are a young leader in software, or new to the business, take stock of the reality that software, and business of software, are both far older than Scrum. Somehow, things got done. Ask, "is today's software superior?" That's not really an easy or very fair question, but consider if Scrum contributed to software quality before going all-in.
That is why I am building notik.app. Having worked at big tech, I have taken the essence of scrum: single person responsible for a project, weekly updates, clear success metrics and delivering incremental value, and removed the bs which surrounds it.
Oh and tie it with lessons learnt from other projects and suddenly you're in magical territory.
I was also surprised, when starting to get involved in the broader Product Management community, that PMs at most companies (especially outside tech), are mostly project managers pushing JIRA tickets around.