The word agile has become a standard in software industry. Many spit it out without embracing the fundamental concept of it. This abused of word is pretty much bring a sad negative impact to product development, at worst it actually become a Bing Bang product launching covered under the prideful flag of “Agile”.
What I think about Agile, is fast cycle of product deliverance to Customers which in turns kick-off the iteration of learning for the Product team. The scope is the product team, which I defined here as consisting of all contributors and decision makers which can decide when a Product is given to Customers.
It’s not agile (at least for me) if only the Engineering team quickly churning of features from their Kanban / Scrum process but release of the features to Customers requires Product and Marketing people to sign-off, and they did it in a large batch of collection. This is actually a Big-bang product development, and comes along with it is the high-complexity of the product which consequently means it is harder to learn from as the number of variables are quite large, not to mention prioritising subject to learn about. Normally under this situation, the learning plan is vague or not considered important in the first place.
Agile is about learning, kicking off cycles of learning and build incrementally better products that fit the market. So in my opinion, if your agile iteration does not end in Product being touch by Customer and feedbacks flowing -in — it’s not agile at all, it either a Big-bang or Blind-launching (Blind as not planning any hypothesis to learn about at all.)