What makes developers productive?
Business leadership is technical, they create the requirements with technical leaders, those leaders build out the roadmap.  I don't believe in 'agile' but I think 4-6week chunks of work broken off and worked on by a small team (2-4 people) works well.   I like to see small design doc to ensure open questions are ironed out that gets signed off on by stakeholders - everyone should be committed on the vision and these signoff should happen relatively quickly, ideally comments resolved and go/no-go decision within a week.<p>The small team should have a lot of support in terms of an infrastructure platform, strong culture and tooling for development/testing, project management set up for them, an escalation path and check-ins where they can raise blockers.  There is a template but essentially the small team is left to work how they want to work.<p>After the 'chunk' is delivered, there is a week of wrap up, and then a week of maintenance where people are allowed to work on whatever they think is the most pressing issue.