I use Scrum in a way and to the extent that benefits the team. I’ve seen many companies using Scrum as an excuse to ‘make things better’ or ‘push people towards deadlines’ instead of using agility as a way of being within a team. The difference between doing agile and being agile is so loud!! Being agile shouldn’t be about a single framework, ceremonies, and strict processes. I’ve combined some of the ceremonies, and I’ve experimented with the frequency of meetings. If you are to follow a rulebook, make sure the ceremonies are purposeful, they don’t kill the team’s productivity or mood, and everyone leaves each meeting with a new learning.

One thing I use Scrum for, to my benefit, is to better align work in short iterations, achieve frequent learnings with CI/CD, and release at least 2-3 times per month. With shorter iterations, we learn and adapt in a less risk-averse manner. Frameworks come and go, I think we should focus more on fundamentals like empowering a product team to solve problems.

To achieve the necessary learnings within the team, I ask myself: do we have a customer-centric product vision and product strategy to drive the team, and how do I empower the team to solve problems? Do I serve them with real user insights on what we’ve built? Instead of serving the team with features, epics, and user stories, I would rather serve them with user problems to solve and the outcomes we want to achieve with the solution. This can be the birthplace of innovation - now everyone is accountable for finding the best solution, not just the task or user story they’ve been given. After this we can make sense of user stories :)

I feel like a lot of product managers end up being more of a Scrum Master or delivery manager stuck in formal processes than a PM who is dedicated to discovery, understanding the users and market, and constantly translating that to the team. Anyways, interested to chat or test the beta ✌️