Sometimes you find a problem or a region for improvement that can be clearly defined and self contained, then given to an engineer or small team to work on until it's done. Some areas have more of these potential problems than others; in robotics adjacent companies they are more frequent than finance (in my experience).

Not everything is best managed by agile.

> in robotics adjacent companies they are more frequent than finance (in my experience).

I’m laughing a bit because I’ve been reading through this thread thinking about what I’ve been working on for the last few months. Robotics-adjacent, lots of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, ray tracing, optics, yadda yadda.

I’ve worked on more businessey problems a ton in the past. I built a company that made bespoke LOB applications. This work is way different. Agile was great for that. I would absolutely love to be left alone for a few weeks to just finish getting through all of this analysis. Going a couple of weeks in LOB-app land without feedback would be a train wreck the vast majority of the time.

IMO if you are working on a problem that needs stakeholder feedback then it is not the sort of deep problem the OP is talking about. Deep work is usually not Agile in nature. It is about diving into a hard problem, not iterating on standard features/bugs.