Scrum

“Instead, we want to have a whole idea, give it to a team. So they see the whole, they really understand it. Right. And then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more resp…”

“The person who's writing the ticket doesn't actually understand the work that's involved. You know what I mean? So there are so many unknowns and time bombs waiting in those tickets that sound reasonable, but they weren't really created by the person who under…”

“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage yo…”

“Take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally produ…”

“And agile coaches who have never been a product manager before in a well-run company are going to struggle there because they're going to revert back to agile processes and optimizing for things like scrum, but they're not going to do what that role is designe…”

“And immediately saw the difference and we were able to get things into people's hands quicker, which made them happier, but most importantly, we could get feedback from them. So we didn't go off in a direction for months and months just to discover, ah, that's…”

“I think I just, I really believe in it, but I just honestly believe this is the best way to manage projects that are high risk. With limited resources and that are going to have emerging requirements.”

“We have product managers who do scrums and do you know, these agile planning processes, and we apply that also to our platform development, even on the biology side. But at the same time, you know, drug discovery projects, which are years long, you don't do sc…”

“Try to tell teams that, you know, started with scrum or started with some of these more dogmatic processes. It doesn't serve you. Move on, change it, right? Everything's meant to be iterated on. Everything's meant to be adapted. If it does not work for you do …”

“What Scrum is, is it's a framework for managing projects and other bodies of work, is how I'm going to describe it, such that you focus on delivering smaller bits of usable functionality, getting feedback on that, As in, are we building the right thing? Are th…”

“And then the third flag to look for, I'm going to tell you right now, this is the most common, is you're on a project that is going to have emerging requirements. Meaning you cannot get all of the requirements up front for a very good reason. They don't exist …”

“At the beginning of the iteration, the team doing the work is going to make a commitment to have working product done by the end of that first sprint. So they make that commitment and then they build the working product. And at the end of the sprint, they shar…”

“There are projects that have these three characteristics, and tell me if yours had any of these. They are short. They are extremely well understood, and this last one's a big deal. It's something you've done a gazillion times before, and every time you do it, …”

“When I think about clients who I taught Scrum to Where I felt like it, they didn't get a lot of positive results from it, or at least not as much as I wanted them to. Very often they were clients that had the problem of having too much money.”

“So kind of deprogramming them from this belief that somehow, giant air quotes, we can get all the requirements up front when the people who are asking for this thing to be built don't even know what they want.”

“And it was so different when I started doing Scrum, because all that stuff, red, yellow, green, made up colors, who knows what percentage complete. All of that went away, and here's all I wanted to know from my team. What's done, and what's not done.”

“Now, for somebody like you who leads a company, you don't need to get into that minutia. Not at all. You want to take it up higher and say, okay, there's a, let's call it a feature that we want to roll out to our customers. Where are we on getting that feature…”

“The thing about a scrum team is everybody's equal, but this, you know, on his scrum teams, when he acts as a team member, he's like a unicorn and everybody else is a quarter horse. So that is, that doesn't feel that great to the quarter horses.”

“I find it very funny that when I go into a company of, let's say, 60 people, A lot of times if they have an argument with Scrum, they'll say, Scrum has so many rules, and so many restrictions, and so many things you have to do. I think it's way too restrictive…”