You can code, code well, and then discover that the feature you just implemented was something that the upper management actually didn’t consider to be very important, or that they wanted something completely different from what you thought they wanted. That’s the sort of failure mode that Scrum and other development methodologies are trying to protect you against.
I tend to think bringing in agile specialists and installing scrum process to save the project is a bit dogmatic. If you worked on a project for sometime and wrote/rewrote a lot, you probably know what's needed to be written. It's fairly unlikely the scrum process actually helps at that point. What keeps you going at it is probably "faith" you built through out the year since the onset of scrum installment... and, just a habit.
If you are afraid of writing unneeded, unimportant, and unpopular things enough to label them as a "failure", your focus may be to find needed and important things for your audiences.
Your focus may be to read the draft to a select sample audiences everyday, every week, continuously, and apply various analytical techniques to different statistical models you built from the feedbacks to overcome your fear of rejection, and "manage" direction, completion, and shipment of your writing.
Or just write. A lot. And read. A lot. You'll "get" trends. You'll "get" what works and what doesn't. Of course you need feedbacks. Of course you need plans and management especially if you are co-writing with many authors.
