Scrum: the sequel

Subtitle: Strenths and less-strengths.

The scene: So you are well down the path, your MVP comes into focus here and there, like an oasis over the next dune. Your sprints are moving from “in-progress” to “completed”, user stories guiding your flow, and your sketches, wires are filling out, making the whole process whir like the nice buzz of a happy machine.

But suddenly there is a metaphorical screeching of brakes. A big, confirmed idea suddenly lost its foundation. While pouring over our “Wall of Wires” our team realized that each of us had an entirely different idea about a particular function of our site. Without upending a happy team, we realized it needed to pause work, and get addressed immediately.

For our goal, and most specifically for our deadline, we needed to reprioritize our sprints. In the luxury of letting every team member dip their toes in many pools (we are students after all, everyone had taken a bit of research, a bit of design, a bit of competitor analysis) we’d lost some precious time and a realized we’d need to commit to some distinct tasks.

In the moment, this restructuring didn’t look so orderly, but looking back I realized our team, in declaring our strengths and weaknesses, commited to roles. Division of labor, if you will. As a seasoned visual designer, I took on the getting some of our composition elements in order: finish the wires, make sure the design would be bootstrap ready, and get the logo cleaned up. (Just get that sprint over and done with, it was so close). Phil, our analytic thinker, took the overwhelming task of cementing the site map, and became our editor extraordinaire. While Natalie tied up our profile research, creating our various personas and each individual flow.

In the moment it was more knee-jerk than this orderly description. But in the end, this decisive path-taking took us the the scrum finish.
End scene. Sunset, roll the credits.