Scrum gone wild in 15 cartoons

Scrum is a method that has helped to split down large and inflexible product development processes and open them for feedback. It introduced faster evaluation cycles for product teams.

However, every team can sometimes stray off the road, no matter how good it is in following the Scrum framework. In the end, we are all people with our biases and imperfections. Being unaware of our anti-patterns, can unleash a waterfall wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing.

I drew 15 cartoons that mock false Scrum implementations. Through the cartoons, we recreate bumpy situations in a funny way. Becoming aware of imperfections in a team’s behavior is a key to understanding what we can improve.

The Daily stand-up

The key is in sharing the right information with your team. And yourself.

I’m sure you will.

You know those daily meetings that last longer than eternity. Here is a tip how to keep your stand-up within the 15 minutes time frame.

We’ll untie him later.

Sprint review

When stakeholder is not happy.

Turn the light switch off and there it is.

Sprint retrospective

When you have nothing to say.

I was time pressured.

When you don’t communicate openly on a daily basis with your team and save all your frustrations for the retrospective.

Scrum master gets to be a boxing match judge.

And then pour it all out.

When someone asks why did the project fail.

Sprint planning

When product owner prepares your backlog. Everything that needs to be done, right?

That’s one way to test it.

When developers accurately estimate the size of the task.

Luckily, we’re still alive.

When stories expand across multiple sprints.

Split or suffer

Requirements

When product owner writes requirements and pours her heart, soul and PhD dissertation in them.

Dostoyevsky in Jira.

Or product owner just ignores the writing and goes back to the traditional oral communication. Human species have survived long time with just verbal storytelling, right?

Why don’t you remember?

Interruptions

But we’ve just had our Sprint planning!

Just this one urgent thing.

When something is urgent, but lacks material.

Such a useful tool.

Product hygiene

When things become too cluttered it’s useful to turn on the Marie Kondo’s mindset and clear your product opus.

It doesn’t spark joy.

This is it for now.

I you want to see more Productmare comics, see my first story “Product nightmares in 15 comics”. I was very inspired to hear that one team printed out comics from this post and put it on their wall as a reminder.

Thank you for reading. I think that developing digital products deserves more funny cartoons, so this is my contribution. Help me in this mission, share some feedback and I would be very grateful for it.

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