You want Agile results without the buzzword bingo. Here is what actually works in real teams shipping real products.
First make the work small and the team stable. A clear product owner with decision power beats a crowd of reviewers every time. Keep one shared backlog, sort it by outcomes, and revisit it every week to slice scope and drop old ideas. If you cannot explain the next three bets to a teammate from marketing or support, the bets are too fuzzy. Use visible boards in Jira or Trello which just joined Atlassian and keep columns simple so the signal is clear. The goal is not theater with ceremonies dressed up as progress. The goal is shipped value and a team that can keep shipping next week without a trail of regrets.
Rituals help when they are tight. A daily standup is about the plan and the blockers, not a status recital. Sprint planning sets one clear sprint goal and checks capacity against reality which means vacations, interviews, production fire drills. Sprint review means you demo every sprint to real people and ask what to change before writing more code. Retrospective means one change next sprint with an owner, not a wall of sticky notes that nobody reads. Your Definition of Done includes code review, tests, deploy, feature flag, and a metric to watch after release. Keep the pipeline green with CI and ship often with simple continuous delivery rules that anyone on the team can follow.
Use numbers that guide choices rather than punish people. Story points are not money, they are a shared guess that helps forecasting for the next few sprints. Track a rolling average of velocity, but make decisions with cycle time, throughput, and a quick look at a cumulative flow chart to see where work piles up. Limit work in progress with explicit WIP limits so you finish things before starting more. Blend Scrum and Kanban when demand is messy for example inbound bugs or design tweaks for a launch since the customer does not care which label you pick. Pair on risky changes, rotate ownership of modules, and keep one team room in Slack so decisions are public by default. Beware cargo cult copies of models from podcasts, like the Spotify model everyone quotes this year, and borrow only the parts that fit your size and market.
Agile that works is boring to watch and great to use, and that is the point.