These stories highlight how engagement plays a big part.
Yesterday, I did Scrum. Today, I am doing Scrum. No impediments. I do this for two weeks. Then, I start it all over again. Yes, my friends, this does not scream, “Fun!”
These days, finding fun in your Scrum journey is more and more elusive. The engine of scaling up dilutes our engagement. We find ourselves feeling like a cog in the wheel, far removed from our end customer. Our contribution has become isolated and our purpose muddled.
A vision of a hamster on a wheel comes to mind.
”If you are not changing, you are stagnating.”
—Seth Godin
Scrum performed right means high engagement. High engagement means you have vigor, dedication, and absorption in your work1. Often, this results when you experience high autonomy, mastery, and purpose. High engagement will stack the odds in your favor for having fun2.
Some of my most memorable career experiences occurred when I was thrust out of my comfort zone enough to challenge my skill boundaries. It was transformative. In the moment, there were plenty of challenges and vulnerable times. Success seemed elusive. But the journey was fun. Having fun is taking the journey. It is the thrill of contributing as part of a team and being in control of your destiny to master your technique. It is having a purpose and dedicating your efforts to fulfilling it.
This is also true of the teams I coach. Growth is greatest when we embrace or exploit uncertainty. We must move towards uncertainty rather than trying to avoid it, reduce it, or remove it. This is how we learn.
Is your interest piqued? Are you wondering, “What does this look like?” Let’s dive deeper through a few stories.
I remember a time early in my career. I was at a startup. I had left a large consultancy to start a venture with several colleagues. We were out to change the world. We had a purpose. But we were also on our own. There was no safety net of a big consulting firm to catch us if we fell.
We landed a client—a non-profit. Our composition was lean and mean—a team of seven. My small team set out to deliver a world-class web experience supporting HIV+ women.
We all wore every hat possible and embodied the concept of a cross-functional feature team. We stood up the infrastructure. We bought the domain name. We built the front, middle, and back-end systems. We created the content. We designed and built the visual composition of the website. We formulated the information architecture. We crafted the content management system templates and workflows.
And I supplied the coffee. I bought a big, industrial-sized coffee pot. We took turns making runs to Starbucks once a week to get the beans. I can still smell the coffee brewing. It was ready before the Daily Scrum, and it brewed all day long to fuel our passion.
To make a long story short, we worked hard. The team worked long days and plenty of nights. We had a determination and were tireless. And we delivered. The website won the 2003 InfoWorld 100 award for the best Enterprise Content Management System. We were exhausted, proud, and we had a blast.
I remember a time when I coached a team in their fifth year of Sprinting on their Scrum journey. This team was not co-located. They were in different geographies from New York to DC to California. This was a team of data scientists. Out of habit and data scientist preference, each team member worked on their own each Sprint.
When I started coaching, they informed me they had never met a Sprint goal—never—in five years. I admit I had to do a double-take when I heard this. As it turns out, each team member worked on a single feature for a different customer. There was no teamwork and high work-in-progress. The lead time was four, long months to deliver a feature to one of their customers.
The team seemed in good spirits, but they were going through the motions. They had reached a plateau. As my first act as their coach, I held an Agile Mindset session with them. I aimed to reacquaint them with the origins and the core of Scrum and to light a spark for something new. One topic caught their attention—the power of the small, cross-functional feature team. We discussed how the Swarming pattern could help them focus on a feature together. This intrigued the team. And to my delight as a coach, they decided to try it.
They formed their swarming experiment. The team focused on one feature for one customer in the upcoming Sprint. They worked as a team on one thing. What had eluded them in the past became a reality. By swarming as a team, they met their Sprint Goal with ease. They delivered a shippable feature to their customer in one Sprint. What took four months before, took two weeks. This is what it is all about.
And they raved about the experience. They learned from each other. The quality was higher. More heads thinking about the problem allowed more innovative results. The customer was ecstatic.
On a whim, I asked the team if they would like to make a video about the experience. Every team member signed up with enthusiasm to make the video. And all of a sudden, I had eight hours of video footage to edit. As a coach, this was a proud moment.
This team found their passion. They chose an experiment to improve their situation. And it paid off in spades. The power of teamwork washed over them. It reenergized them. They were having fun!
I remember another time when I coached a Scrum team to engage with their customer and build empathy. This team had never interacted with their customer. All feature requests came from the User Experience team, the Product Owner, or stakeholders.
Even these external parties did not engage with the customer. Nobody was learning the validity of feature ideas.
The grand experiment was to have the whole team engage with their customer. This engagement would be direct between team and customer—no proxy involved. The team would gain insights through small, lightweight experiments. This facilitated rapid learning of customer needs.
Those who were outside of the team met this idea with some resistance at first. Customer engagement by the team was not common. It is normal for a separate group to own this interaction. Some felt it would overwhelm or bother the customer.
But the Scrum team was enthusiastic to try it. And the management demonstrated their Agile Leadership by supporting the team‘s experiment.
During their next Sprint, the team selected an uncertain feature off the backlog. They formed an experiment to test their hypothesis. The experiment was low fidelity to allow rapid learning for a low investment.
They engaged with a member of the User Experience team to learn user research techniques. They scripted their research protocol. Then, with the help of their Product Owner, they recruited five users to engage in the experiment.
Each team member played a part in executing the user sessions. There was a moderator, a user experience designer, observers, and a recorder. Right after each user session, the team assessed the findings while they were fresh.
After all sessions, the team reflected on all the findings across all users. Their significant insight was that the feature was not a user need. In fact, the users needed something completely different than conceived at first.
This created a surge of excitement in the team. They had eliminated an entire feature off of the backlog. If they had delivered the feature, customer adoption would have suffered. They would have wasted their effort.
To top it all off, the customer enthusiasm was high. They relished being part of the process and helping to shape the product to their needs. And they signed up to continue to provide input.
The experiment was a success. And it energized the team. Their engagement was higher than ever. They developed empathy for their customer and gained an understanding of their needs. The experiment became their normal mode of operation. The team never looked back to the old way of working. And their enthusiasm and energy around their work soared.
Recounting these stories reminded me of how fun Scrum can be. A small, determined team, in control of its destiny, striving to master its craft towards a common purpose can’t be beat. There are other stories I could have told, but these are some of my favorites.
It is time to get back to the simple things that make Scrum great, to drive to a purpose, to be in control, and be part of a team seeking continuous improvement. We need to make Scrum fun again.
To do this, you will have to break out of whatever uninspired routine in which you find yourself. You may need to lobby for a new experiment. Or instead of selling a new approach, try something new. Try it in a small way to show new results fast, forge your better future, and increase your engagement. Embrace uncertainty, and embrace change. Making a brighter and more engaging, fun future is possible. It is up to you.
Also published in Serious Scrum on Medium.
Read more in these related posts:
- Nine Proven Ways to Make Your Scrum Team Hyper-productive
- Agile Leaders Must Build a Problem-Solving Culture
- Out With the Old, in With the New
- Let’s Put the “Continuous” in Continuous Improvement
- Don’t Forget the Customer of Your Change Initiative
- Customizing Coaching to a Team’s Product Context—New Products
References
- “The measurement of engagement and burnout and: A confirmative analytic approach.ˮ Journal of Happiness Studies,W. B. Schaufeli, M. Salanova, V. Gonzalez-Roma and A. B. Bakker, 2002 ↩
- “The Happiness Metric” Scrum Published Library of Patterns ↩
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.