The mismanagement of the software development teams was mind-boggling. We were called agile, but we had no process to create cards from business requirements or estimate time or even anyone to keep track of what we should be building. Mostly, a director would come by one morning, say, 'I want it to do x' and then one person would go off and build x for the next two months on their own with no defined scope. Each scrum giving updates like 'working on x'. And then another manager of another team would come by them and say 'I want it to do x', and a person would go off and build that for 2 months. And what we ended up with was lots of the same things, built 8 different ways, for 8 different products, each one with its own bugs and a need for feature parity, once someone realized both products now do x.
Not only was there no communication between development managers and the business, but even between multiple teams supposedly working on parts of the same project. I was on back-end teams for my time at CB, and we would complete some api to return some kind of data for the front-end to display to the user, and it would just sit behind a feature flag for months because the front end teams' managers would decide that the feature was no longer priority and the front end wasn't going to use that data yet, or ever. Once I even went and deleted a full feature I had implemented because it was just dead code. Features that take a normal agile team a sprint, could take years at CB, simply due to never being priority for every middle manager at once.
Mostly it came down to what happens when a company in one industry (advertising) tries to pivot into another (software) and doesn't hire any outside leadership with experience in that industry. A lot of floundering and wasted effort.
