Scrum Sprints Are the New Deadline Whip: How to Avoid This Bad Belief Trap

Deadlines just won’t die in the corporate pressure cooker.

“Aren’t Sprints simply another deadline? The goal of Scrum is to finish the Sprint Backlog by the Sprint deadline.”

With this one statement, incorrect and said with conviction, I knew we had a problem.

I was having a debate with a product manager on the nature of Scrum. Actually, we were going in circles on the widespread misapplication of Scrum today. The conventional management methods of motivation through manufactured urgency are a stubborn foe.

Output fixation is like a deadly jellyfish. And its tentacles had wrapped around Scrum again.

This all started when a Scrum Team was unable to reach its Sprint Goal within the Sprint boundary.

Like an explosion had gone off, the head of every manager in the office turned in unison. And they rushed to the scene of the crime.

• “Did they estimate story points incorrectly?”
• “Are they using Jira to track their work progress?”
• “What is their average velocity? Did they hit that?”
• “Why did they not say there was a problem sooner?”
• “Why are they setting such aggressive Sprint Goals?”
• “Is everyone doing their part? Who dropped the ball?”
• “Are they committing to deliver when the Sprint starts?”

I noticed my mouth was ajar.

Once I composed myself, I said, “The goal is not to deliver everything within the Sprint boundary. It’s not a deadline. The goal is to learn.”

Now, it was the managers’ turn to gape in astonishment back at me.

Why do managers fall into this trap?

Managers have a tough job.

I remember when I was a newly minted manager many years ago. The pull to manage and appear in control is difficult to escape. It stood in the way of me becoming a good leader.

Managers see it as their duty to manage. After all, it’s in the job title. They see it as their responsibility to keep things in control.

And inconsistent Sprint execution does not scream control.

This is especially problematic because deadlines run rampant through most organizations. We set rigid yearly budgets, make promises, create rigid plans, and lock-in targets. Bonuses up and down the chain hang in the balance based on hitting these fake dates.

The threat of missing a Sprint “deadline” strikes the fear of a domino effect that knocks everyone over.

So, the drum beat of standardization begins.

• Individual tracking of person-by-person job efficiency.
• Measurement of committed points versus actual points.
• Execution playbooks for standardizing Scrum on every team.
• Formal job descriptions for each role to maximize conformance.
• RACI charts to ensure everyone has a job and is accountable for it.

The unfortunate goal becomes an army of factory line workers who don’t deviate from the standard.

The desire for standards is based on a faulty assumption: one of certainty.

Standards work in cookie-cutter environments.

Simple, straightforward, repetitive work can benefit from standards. You know the recipe that works. The goal: get better at execution and minimize variance.

It’s like baking a cake. Practice, get the proportions right, and time the cooking perfectly. You will get a great, tasty dessert, guaranteed.

Similarly, a team going by the book in a simple context produces reliable output and gets results.

But, Houston, we have a problem.

Like a launch to the moon, product is not a walk in the park. It’s fraught with complexity and uncertainty.

• Teams whose members have never worked together.
• Emerging technology, growing fast with AI leading the fray.
• Users and competitive business climates with novel challenges.
• Unclear effort and duration due to dependencies and unknowns.

Using a standardized approach in this context will result in a moon impact, not a soft touch-down.

We can’t know what will work amidst our complexity and uncertainty until it does. So, this is why a learning-forward approach is non-negotiable.

We are wrong far more often than we are right in product.

This is why the speed of our learning is so important. We must learn we are wrong, faster. This is how we emerge the right path to take—by eliminating the ways that won’t work.

I had this experience on a team.

We had a Sprint Goal to improve a customer’s logging of their monthly consumption of a medication for a drug trial. On the first Sprint, we improved the user experience of the medication entry. We saw no improvement.

The next Sprint, we added a pop-up on login.

Again, no improvement.

Finally, we noticed, most users only logged in once at the beginning of the trial, never to return.

So, on the third Sprint, we contacted all our users. We ensured they knew they needed to log in monthly and record their intake. A phone call solved the problem, and we met our Sprint Goal.

We spent three Sprints meeting our goal. Were we a Scrum failure?

No, we were a success. This is how Scrum should work.

We didn’t understand why the monthly logging was not happening. You could argue that we could have done better research. But nonetheless, we learned after three tries how to fix the problem.

Framing Scrum as a learning tool will put you in the right frame of mind.

The mental shift you need to make: Scrum is nothing more than a learning container.

Scrum stands on the three pillars of empiricism—transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

This is just a fancy way of saying Scrum’s foundation is learning.

Scrum can’t help you predict exactly what you will do, how long you will take to do it, and if it will achieve results. Predictive thinking in this way is incompatible with product. It’s a mismatch with learning.

But Scrum can provide a framework for learning your way to your desired outcome.

Every Event in Scrum is for learning.

• The Daily Scrum helps you adapt daily based on evidence.
• The Retrospective helps you improve your system to work better.
• The Sprint is a container for Increment learning and iteration loops.
• Sprint Planning helps to plan continuously, based on fresh evidence.
• The Sprint Review helps you adapt the product based on new insight.

This should be no surprise since Scrum has a foundation of learning.

Here are the things you might be doing today that you should stop:

• Assuming a team can get better at estimation up front.
• Measuring a team based on its ability to deliver upfront plans.
• Driving a team to commit and deliver everything by the Sprint end.

These don’t mix with learning. They cause it to sink to the bottom, never to surface.

And the only Scrum failure is no learning.

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That’s it.

Scrum is learning. You can’t separate the two without destroying Scrum’s soul. And treating a Sprint like a deadline is a soul-sucking move.

Ultimately, teams, customers, and stakeholders suffer when we treat Sprints as deadlines.

Deadlines are the death of learning.

So, instead, treat Scrum as a transparency, inspection, and adaptation container.

Use it to emerge the right path. Embrace when you get it wrong. That’s what learning is about—finding what doesn’t work so you can eventually discover what does.

Good luck out there. Embrace learning, and you will get the most out of Scrum.

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