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Nine Proven Ways to Make Your Scrum Team Hyper-productive

What can you learn from Scrum’s origins to shift into overdrive?

Scrum is not a silver bullet. It does not provide solutions. Rather, it can only reveal problems. To modify your behavior and adapt to the obstacles Scrum reveals takes grit.

Scrum is lightweight, simple to understand, and difficult to master.

— The Scrum Guide

Many teams start on the journey without much guidance and hit issues fast. In the product development world, issues encountered are typically commonplace, with responses stemming from old behavioral habits.

To name a few:

• Forcing an unrealistic date to motivate performance
• Using stretch goals to increase throughput
• Using unsustainable, heroic effort to reach goals
• Seeing functional specialization as efficient
• Deferring defects
• Keeping people busy
• Treating change and improvement as a cost
• Prioritizing work over people
• Elevating partial completion as progress
• Allowing interrupts to overrule your goals