I used Scrum with my teams for about 1.5 year, and tried hard to adjust the framework. Then we switched to Kanban, which matches much better the realities of an innovative and B2B product.
The main benefit of scrum is that it forces stakeholders to discuss goals and priorities.
But the framework itself has flaws in its philosophy. The Scrum book is adamant that the results of a sprint should be a user facing change, which doesn't always aligned with the "path of most value generated" that an organization should follow. For instance my team is working right now on transitioning our data storage system to a different offering in Azure as the type of PostgreSQL service we use is being retired. That's a non user facing but imperative change. Similarly, as our products are getting mature we work on both incremental improvements and longer term (6-12 months) ML/AI projects which are discussed with our clients. Our product manager has to be involved with those too and sometimes prioritize engineering work related to them. Scrum simply ignore this reality of operational tasks, and medium/long term value generation
I'd say Scrum is more about creating business value than user facing change. It is the business that consistently doesn't value long term value generation, not the process.
Yes, the goal is to generate business value. But Scrum requires to do this in small increments, and these increments have to be exposed to stakeholders. As per the Scrum guide (https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#increment):
"In order to provide value, the Increment must be usable."
So this conflicts with the fact that business value can be generated (or protected, in the case of maintenance/upgrade of a system) without generating immediately "usable" changes. Or said otherwise, a high value change may requires a succession of non-usable changes over many "sprints", and Scrum doesn't account for that.
The main benefit of scrum is that it forces stakeholders to discuss goals and priorities.
But the framework itself has flaws in its philosophy. The Scrum book is adamant that the results of a sprint should be a user facing change, which doesn't always aligned with the "path of most value generated" that an organization should follow. For instance my team is working right now on transitioning our data storage system to a different offering in Azure as the type of PostgreSQL service we use is being retired. That's a non user facing but imperative change. Similarly, as our products are getting mature we work on both incremental improvements and longer term (6-12 months) ML/AI projects which are discussed with our clients. Our product manager has to be involved with those too and sometimes prioritize engineering work related to them. Scrum simply ignore this reality of operational tasks, and medium/long term value generation