Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

At the same time, people have to have the fortitude to bring up the issues that are really bothering them in a way that is solution oriented rather than accusatory. And the rest of the team has to have the maturity to hear the feedback, take it in, and look for a solution rather than get defensive.

Here’s how it works. At the end of each Sprint each person on the team answers just a few questions: 1. On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company? 2. On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole? 3. Why do you feel that way? 4. What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?

How can you prove you’ve made that improvement? You need to define what success is in a concrete, actionable way, so that in the next Sprint Retrospective it’s really easy to see if you achieved the kaizen.

One element of Scrum that’s often a prelude to achieving autonomy, mastery, and purpose is transparency. The idea is that there should be no secret cabal, no hidden agendas, nothing behind the curtain. Far too often in a company it isn’t really clear what everyone is working on, or how each person’s daily activity advances the goals of the company.

That’s why in Scrum anyone can go to any meeting. Any stakeholder can observe a Daily Stand-up or attend a Review.

As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in individual performance; I’m only interested in team performance. I can double a team’s productivity in a month, but an individual? That could take a year. And a whole bunch of individuals? A whole division? A whole company? That could take forever. So I use transparency to focus on improving the team.

I like this: focus less on improving the individual and focus more on improving the team!

So in Scrum, everything is visible. In my companies, every salary, every financial, every expenditure is available to everyone. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to keep this stuff secret except to further their own individual agenda, or to keep people infantilized.

If you can’t trust the people you’re hiring to be on board with what you’re doing, you’re hiring the wrong people, and you’ve set up a system that has failure built in. The most dramatic visual representation of this idea, and one you’ll see in every Scrum team room across the planet, is the Scrum board.

There are three task-status levels: To Do, Doing, and Done. When someone signs out a story, everyone knows who’s working on it. And everyone knows when it’s done. And because the board has sticky notes that represent everything that needs to be done in a single Sprint, everyone knows how the Sprint is going. Anyone can walk into the room, glance at the board, and know exactly how the team is doing.

In the digital age, the Scrum board has to be visible online. People are not usually meeting in a physical space.

We released a production version of an enterprise software product forty-five times a year. This isn’t Angry Birds updating; this is stuff deployed at major hospitals that people’s lives depend on. But because we were transparent with everything, we could get the product into the market faster than anyone in the world. That’s what Sunshine can do.

CEO Tony Hsieh wrote a book about it, Delivering Happiness. Tony writes about the unique culture at Zappos, which is based on creating “Wow!” moments for customers. It turns out that to make customers happy, you want happy people on the other end of the phone.

Christa Foley, the Senior Manager of Human Resources at Zappos, calls “boot camp.” For four weeks each employee is brought up to speed on how the company works, but also on how the company’s culture works. It is really the second screening within the Zappos hiring process. Even after getting the job offer, you have to prove that you can absorb the culture.

The company also offers free classes taught by other employees—Finance 101, Coding for Beginners, whatever. Zappos wants people to grow at and within the company.

For many who’ve plugged along in a very traditional career, this culture can be a breath of fresh air. “All of my career before Zappos I was mostly focused on recruiting,” says Foley. It was a rote job, she says, and she was burned out. Coming to Zappos reinvigorated her. It was the culture, she says. “It’s what makes me excited coming to work.”

Scrum, through its Retrospectives and transparency, illuminates this kind of behavior almost immediately. It becomes obvious where the roadblocks are, where the waste is. When I run a company, I tell those people with “miser” habits that they don’t have the luxury of holding the team and the company hostage. They can either change their mind-set or go work for someone else.

Zappos went from $1.6 million in sales in 2000, to over a billion in 2008. That’s a growth rate of 124 percent each year for eight years in a row. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty convincing argument for making people happy. And Scrum is a tool kit you can use to get there.

We should aspire not just to make employees “happy,” but to do so by helping them achieve great things. In short, we should earn our employees’ passionate advocacy for the company’s mission and success by helping them earn the passionate advocacy of customers.

Managers can encourage autonomy by letting people make their own decisions about their job. And they can make sure that employees know everything that’s going on, because, as they put it, “Doing your job in an information vacuum is tedious and uninspiring.” Managers should also have zero tolerance for incivility and never allow an employee to poison corporate culture through abuse or disrespect. And, finally, they should give quick and direct feedback.

They’ve self-organized, and they feel proud of their progress. And that’s when complacency can set in. They say to themselves, Hey, we’ve improved so much, we don’t need to improve any more. They hit a productivity plateau and pretty soon thereafter cease to do great work.

You remember how the story ends: No one said anything about the emperor’s nakedness, not wanting to be seen as unfit themselves. So the royal procession continued down the avenue until a small child called out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” At first the child’s father hushed him, but then, beginning with a whisper and growing to a shout, the people of the city started shouting, “He hasn’t got anything on!” The emperor, while fearing they were right, kept the procession going. And his courtiers followed him, holding a train that wasn’t there.

By contrast, traditional teams and organizations can blithely walk themselves off a cliff and wonder what possibly could have gone wrong. They wait too long to get actionable feedback from the market, and from each other.

People tend to fall into four types according to Ben-Shahar. The first type, the “Hedonist,”

So they hire a bunch of managers to ride herd on the hackers. And, suddenly, the hackers find that the world they enjoyed so much now sucks.

Then there are the guys who were brought in to run the place. They’re the ones willing to put in eighty-hour weeks (and willing to whip others to do so), because they think they’ll get promoted later, and they’ll be happier.

The fourth type of person is the one that Scrum tries to identify and encourage—the individual who is working at stuff that is fun today but has an eye toward a better future and who is convinced it will be fun forever.

It’s that top layer that Maslow was most interested in, and that Scrum focuses on: helping people achieve personal growth and fulfillment. People high up on that pyramid are not only happier and more fulfilled, they’re more effective and innovative. And they’re able to deliver greatness.

If you’re trying to make sick people better, maybe you measure greatness by the number of those who don’t die. If you’re trying to change the world, maybe you measure greatness by how much you’ve changed it. If you’re just trying to get your honey-do list done, maybe you measure greatness by how many weekend afternoons you have free to go fishing.

Quantify Happiness. It’s not enough just to feel good; you need to measure that feeling and compare it to actual performance. Other metrics look backward. Happiness is a future-looking metric.

Secrecy Is Poison. Nothing should be secret. Everyone should know everything, and that includes salaries and financials. Obfuscation only serves people who serve themselves.

Pop the Happy Bubble. Don’t get so happy that you start believing your own bullshit. Make sure happiness is measured against performance, and if there is a disconnect, be prepared to act. Complacency is the enemy of success.

But Scrum isn’t just about making teams go faster. It’s about boosting impact, which, in the case of the VC guys, takes a simple form: revenue. If a company isn’t making money, you don’t have a successful venture; you have a hobby.

What’s the difference between a Pets.com and a Zappos? They both saw a market segment that people spend billions of dollars a year on. They both saw a way to deliver products more easily and cheaply online. One became emblematic of dot-com excess and the squandering of millions and millions of dollars; the other company is worth more than a billion dollars. They both had vision—what Pets.com didn’t have was a sense of priorities. They didn’t know what to do when.

The first thing you need to do when you’re implementing Scrum is to create a Backlog.

It could be a product, a wedding, a service, a new vaccine, or a house painted. It could be anything, but once you have a vision, you need to consider what it will take to make that happen.

They’re building a system that can control every aspect of your home, from opening the front door, to controlling your heating costs, to turning on your lights—all from your mobile device. So they sat down and wrote out a list of everything they would need to make that happen—switches, controllers, interfaces, sensors, communication protocols, whatever. Not the specific rules and pieces, actually, but all the “stories” they would need.

The list turned out to be hundreds of items long. It’s a big, complicated system. The idea behind the Backlog is that it should have everything that could possibly be included in the product.

In product development there’s a hard-and-fast rule that has been proven over and over again. I talked about this earlier: 80 percent of the value is in 20 percent of the features. Think about that for a moment. In anything that you buy, most of the value—most of what people want—is in only a fifth of what has been built. In this company’s case they looked at this huge list of things that could be included in their home automation system, and they knew—they knew—that customers really only wanted 20 percent of them.

This is true whether you’re building a house or car, writing a book or videogame, or cleaning up crime or trash. Figure out where the most value can be delivered for the least effort, and do that one right away. Then identify the next increment of value, and the next. Faster than you think, you’ll have created something or delivered something with demonstrable, real results. The key is prioritizing the work.

Well, first you need someone who can figure out both what the vision is, and where the value lies. In Scrum we call that person the Product Owner.

There are only three roles in Scrum. Either you’re part of the team, and you’re doing the work, or you’re a Scrum Master, helping the team figure out how to do the work better, or you’re a Product Owner.

An individual’s responsibility for leadership is not dependent on authority.… the deep-rooted assumption that authority should equal responsibility is the root of much organizational evil. I believe misunderstanding around this issue is rampant, problematic, and runs so deep in our consciousness that we don’t even realize

So I went and got the smartest guy in Product Marketing—not in Engineering, mind you, but Marketing. And that’s how Don Rodner became the first Product Owner. He knew the product we were making not from a technical point of view—although he understood enough of that to communicate with the engineers—but, rather, from a customer point of view. What did the people who were actually using the product need? When you’re picking a Product Owner, get someone who can put themselves in the mind of whoever is getting value from what you’re doing.

Not only does the Product Owner need a wider range of skills than a Scrum Master, they need to be held to a different set of standards. The Scrum Master and the team are responsible for how fast they’re going and how much faster they can get. The Product Owner is accountable for translating the team’s productivity into value.

One, the Product Owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain.

The Product Owner

Two, the Product Owner has to be empowered to make decisions.

If the Product Owner isn’t available to the team, the whole process can fall apart. This is one of the reasons I rarely recommend that CEOs or other senior executives be Product Owners. They just don’t have the time the team needs.

Four, the Product Owner needs to be accountable for value. In a business context what matters is revenue.

If the team is producing forty points of work every week, I want to measure how much revenue is crea...

The key is to decide what the measure of value is and hold the Product Owner accountable for delivering more of it. In Scrum this kind of metric is easy to observe because of the method’s incredible transparency.

That’s the way it is, guys. As I said in chapter one, there’s a pretty stark choice in front of you: change or die. If you don’t get inside your competition’s decision loop, they’ll get inside yours. As Boyd said, “What I want to do is fold my adversary back inside himself.… Then I can drive him into confusion and disorder and bring about paralysis.” I don’t know about you, but me, I’d rather be on the doing end of that than the receiving end.