The Demotion of Scrum Into Waterfall

Companies compound methods and frameworks, and another waterfall is born.

Originally published in GoRetro

We cannot deny how popular Scrum has become. It’s often the first choice of companies when they want to work with agile frameworks. Almost everyone knows the Scrum Events and roles by heart. On top of that, there are more than a million Scrum certified professionals; 684K+ from Scrum.org and 400K+ from Scrum Alliance. With such an abundance of certified people worldwide, Scrum is an obvious choice. Curiously, we still struggle to benefit from true agility.

How often do you observe the following?

• Scrum teams focus solely on implementation and nothing else.
• Product Managers define the right thing to do, and Product Owners ensure the thing is done right.
• Developers aren’t involved in any step of discovery. They focus exclusively on the execution.
• Developers long for well-defined requirements and high-fidelity prototypes.
• Product Managers define what to do, UX researches, UI designs, and Devs code. As in a factory, everyone is responsible for a small part of the product, and nobody cares about the whole.

Although many companies strive to do Scrum, some things derail pretty fast. And instead of improving collaboration and benefiting from Scrum, teams fall back to a waterfall working mode. The result…