Agile
Post #3757 · source on Telegram
Startups Skip Scrum Roles
Description
The meme asks in large text, "Who is the product owner and who is the scrum master??" Below it is a reaction still of T'Challa from Black Panther holding up a hand, with "Startup companies" overlaid on his chest and the subtitle-style quote "We don't do that here." The joke is that early-stage startups often ignore formal Scrum role definitions and collapse product ownership, delivery coordination, and engineering execution into whoever is available. It contrasts Agile process orthodoxy with the informal, resource-constrained operating style common in startups.
More like this
More like this in Agile →
Use J and K for navigation
Comments
3Comment deleted
In a startup, the product owner is whoever got the customer call, and the scrum master is whoever still remembers the standup link.
And I think it's beautiful. Comment deleted
I have yet to encounter firsthand a single _company_, let alone a _team_ doing Scrum proper! Every single team or company "doing Scrum" that I have have encountered so far is doing some badly disfigured form that could be best described as "Scrum" (emphasis on the quotes) or Bastardized Scrum™ 😁. Once you inquire more closely about the aspects from The Scrum Guide they'll usually just tell you why this or that part didn't work for them. And so in essence they aren't doing Scrum, even though they claim so. I heard a credible oral account from a trusted dev that he did _actual_ Scrum at a previous company, though. But to this day in several years and peeking into a number of different companies and teams I have not found a single one where Scrum proper is practiced. So maybe it's not a bad thing that they aren't doing that in those stereotypical startups? Certainly this wouldn't be the one aspect that would prevent me from working for a startup company. There are others that weigh heavier. And _if_ the timeboxing of Scrum would be taken seriously, then that'd be a good thing in my book. Usually startup atmosphere means something along the lines of overtime without end etc. So timeboxing would be a good thing, if it were used in the spirit of The Scrum Guide. Comment deleted