events

At the Global Scrum Gathering in Lisbon, Philipp Pelka and Johannes Schartau give insights on how to combine Scrum with product development to succeed in dynamic environments and unleash the full potential of Scrum.

Product: The Missing Component on Your Agile Journey

The word “product” appears 89 times in the Scrum Guide, whereas the word “project” appears only once. Yet we see Scrum being used almost exclusively in project environments. This means we must work with fixed budgets and timeframes for delivering our product. Success is defined as shipping a big batch of features, usually without regard to the impact these features actually have. Discovery work, if at all, is done at the very beginning of the project. After development starts there is no space to further validate or test assumptions. So where does the agility that Scrum promises fit in?

We believe there are huge benefits to combining Scrum with product thinking, which rests on completely different assumptions. One is that there is no defined end date to our development. Continuously taking small steps towards specific outcomes allows us to guide our product through stages of a product lifecycle. While projects aren’t inherently bad, a lot of dysfunctions can be traced back to Scrum being used in a project-centric environment. In this session we will show you how to combine Scrum with a product development approach to survive in dynamic environments an unleash Scrum’s full potential.