Re-release: We ditched Scrum because it slowed us down – and turned into a feature factory
From best in class to renegades
In February 2020 I published one of my most controversial articles, judging on the comments on LinkedIn. I still think it is a good one. I wrote it as a story to avoid making it too close to home for some.
It is about Scrum, but even more about forgetting the most important thing while creating a product: the outcome. I hope you enjoy it.
From best in class to renegades
At the town hall, the CTO took some time to praise team Can-can. Again. Harry is proud that they are seen as the shining example of the Product Development department.
He knows that others can’t help but be jealous. They also wish to be this successful. So when Sarah approaches him with a snarky remark, he’s not surprised.
‘I can’t believe that management doesn’t see how destructive your team is.’
‘You probably mean to say disruptive Sarah. Which is a good thing!’
‘No. I mean destructive. You create products that no one wants and you don’t see this because you stopped talking to your stakeholders. And people see you as a shining example. Absolutely destructive. You do many things very well. But you forget to deliver value.’
Harry dismisses this immediately and decides to end the conversation. There’s too much negativity here. He knows full well that his team is a machine. Ever since they decided to ditch Scrum, 6 months ago.
![Cogs in a machine Cogs in a machine](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F882ad7d9-3fcd-4bbf-8737-62febb89999b_800x534.jpeg)
6 months earlier
At the Can-can Sprint Retrospective, Angie drops a bomb: ‘I hate the Sprint Review. Nothing good comes from it. Only conflict with stakeholders who don’t have a clue what they want. We all wish to reduce the meeting time. So let’s stop this one.’
This remark has a liberating impact on the team. Lee immediately responds: ‘Yes! And let’s drop the Dailies too. And the Sprint Planning. Imagine how much time we win by this.’
The next 30 minutes the team is buzzing with energy. They decide to be drastic. They will throw Scrum overboard and start using one backlog/board with three statuses: To Do, Doing and Done. This makes the Product Backlog redundant. From the Scrum events, they will only keep the Refinement (I know, this technically isn’t an event) and the Retrospective. The Product Owner will prioritise the backlog and the team will simply pull items from the top to work on. Everyone is convinced it will be far more efficient.
3 months into the experiment
‘Twice as fast. We are twice as fast as when we used Scrum!’ Harry is ecstatic. His team raised its velocity from 86 to 175. No team comes even close to similar improvements.
The team managed to achieve this by eliminating almost all the Scrum events and introducing Mob Programming. The team works together, fully focused. What also helped to get this focus was limiting their Work in Process drastically. They only work on one item at a time — as a team — and once this is finished they pull the next item from the backlog. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it has increased their productivity. The magic words are teamwork and focus, resulting in reducing errors and rework.
The team starts to get noticed. Other teams are bewildered how team Can-can can be this effective while having so much fun and — amazingly — working fewer hours than they did before. Working overtime is a thing of the past for Can-can.
Back to the present – Harry with Sales
Harry can’t stop thinking about Sarah’s remark and decides to consult Anna from Sales. He’s convinced she will confirm that their product is awesome.
But Anna doesn’t. ‘Your product is the worst. We are ashamed to have it in our portfolio. We decided to be silent about it because we know that our customers don’t want it.’
Harry doesn’t believe Anna. ‘You’re pulling my leg. Everyone at Product Technology envies us. No one builds features as fast as we do.’
‘Do you think it’s something to be proud of? Building crappy software at a lightning speed? You know what I dearly miss? The feedback moments your team organised every week. I believe you call them Sprint Reviews.’
Harry responds: ‘We stopped those because they held us back.’
‘How did they hold you back? From making crappy software fast? I’m at a loss as to how you can dismiss an event where you get feedback from users and other stakeholders. Tell me: why are you building the product anyway?’
‘The only reason to build a product is to bring value to our users and as a result to our company.’ Harry replies. And then says: ‘I see your point. We were so fixed on delivering faster that we forgot the most important thing: potential value.’
Harry and Sarah
‘Hi, Sarah. Do you have a minute?’
‘Sure Harry. What do you want to discuss?’
‘I believe you are right. We forgot to focus on value and as a result, we are building stuff that no one appears to like. Could you help me to fix this?’
‘Sure Harry. I gladly help you out. To return the favour, could you help my team with improving their focus and teamwork? Because this is something that your team does awesomely well.’
Harry, Sarah and team Can-can
Everyone is bewildered. Lee decides to state what everyone is thinking. ‘What’s this? Why should we ever go back to the old way of working? We hated it and it didn’t work! I’d rather leave than return to Scrum!’
Harry responds: ‘Well, we aren’t doing well at all. No one wants our product. Because we never checked if people liked what we were doing. We ditched Scrum and with that, we stopped focusing on value. We turned into a feature factory. We are creating unwanted software very very fast.’
Then Sarah took the word: ‘You decided to stop using empirical process control for building your products. You still use it for your process improvements and what you do there is very impressive. But in a complex environment, you also should look into inspecting and adapting your product with the help of your stakeholders.’
After a lot of arguing — and very reluctantly — team Can-can agrees to reinstate the Sprint Review. After Sarah proposes to help them make the Sprint Review as worthwhile as possible.
Return of the Sprint Review
At the end of the Sprint Review, Angie says: ‘I was one of the people who wanted to remove the Sprint Review from our agenda. I have to admit that the format that we have used now makes far more sense than how we used to do it. We have been able to show our Product Increment in such a way that everyone could understand what we wanted to achieve by building it. This helped greatly to get real useful feedback.’
Lee adds: ‘Yes! And it also helped greatly that we discussed what our users expect from the product. We generated so many great ideas during this hour.’
‘There’s one thing though. With all these new insights we need to determine what we actually want to do in the coming week. We need to plan things.’
‘This is a great argument to have a Sprint Planning.’ says Sarah.
Lee and Angie never expected to agree with this. They hated the time wasted on the event, but now that they discovered the secret ingredient — empiricism — things changed.
At the Sprint Planning they decided to follow Sarah’s advice and work with a Sprint Goal. And to understand how they are working towards the Sprint Goal they will even reinstate the Daily Scrum. But then at the start of the day, the team doesn’t have to be interrupted while they are working together on the next Increment.
While they had lost their focus on value, team Can-can learned many great things about being productive as a team. These insights were quickly shared with the other teams.
Closing thoughts
Scrum is a framework that aims to deliver high-value products in a complex environment. Empirical process control is at the heart of Scrum to ensure that you are indeed working on that most valuable topic. Constant inspection and adaptation are key.
Don’t apply empiricism to your way of working only, building things right and fast in an enjoyable environment. While important, it’s even MORE important to build the right thing.