You’re in a meeting this week, and someone suggested you should try Scrum. Or maybe you’re searching through jobs in your area, and Scrum Master keeps coming up.

In any of these situations, you’re likely wondering, “What is Scrum?” 

If you really want to dig into the answer, check my What is Scrum Guide. But for now, let’s just begin with some definitions.

My Working Definition of Scrum

Scrum is a team-based framework to increase work visibility allowing for regular evaluation and timely adjustments.

Scrum is founded on three essential pillars:

1. Transparency
2. Inspection
3. Adaptation

As you learn Scrum, you’ll want to ask these three questions each time you encounter a new element of Scrum.

1. How does this make things more visible? (Transparency)
2. Where does this create space to evaluate? (Inspection)
3. When does this encourage growth? (Adaptation)

Understanding the answers to these questions will help you learn the heart of Scrum and apply it more intuitively in new contexts. I explore this in-depth in my What is Scrum Guide.

A More Technical Definition of Scrum

Scrum.org is a great resource. Let’s look at their definition.

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest. possible value.​”
- scrum.org

There’s a lot in that definition, so let’s break it down into a few key elements.

• People
• Complex adaptive problems
• Creatively
• Delivering products
• Highest possible value

People

People are central to the Scrum framework. There are three clearly defined roles in Scrum:

1. Product Owner​
2. Scrum Master​
3. Development Team​

Together these three roles make up the Scrum team. Each plays a part in making things visible, creating space for evaluation, and encouraging growth. Follow the links for a deeper dive into roles in Scrum.

• What are the roles in Scrum?
• What is a Scrum Master?
• What does the Scrum Master do each day?
• What is a Product Owner?
• What does a Product Owner do each day?
• Can the Scrum Master and Product Owner be the same person?
• What makes a team a “Development Team” in Scrum?
• What if I don't have all the roles?

Complex adaptive problems

Problem-solving lives at the heart of the most meaningful work. With the speed of change today, the complexity of the issues we need to solve seems to be growing at an exponential rate. 

Have you ever started a project to solve one problem, but a third of the way in, through new information or a change in circumstances, you are now addressing a different issue? It’s easy to get lost in the complexity that is now becoming the norm. Scrum helps make the right things visible, bringing clarity to the current reality.

We face problems that are neither simple nor static. Scrum is oriented around the rhythm of sprints, lasting anywhere from one to four weeks. These short rhythms of time allow the team to adapt and are key tools for moving forward and making progress even in uncertainty. 

When complexity or volatility is high, the sprint should be shorter. If you find yourself facing complex problems where the scope, requirements, or environment have a tendency to change, then Scrum is likely a powerful tool for you and your team.

Creatively​

The flexibility and freedom of Scrum allow the team to solve the correct problems and to do so more creatively. The right mixture of constraints and flexibility are great ingredients for solving problems in creative and novel ways.

Delivering Products

Product development has been the dominant implementation of Scrum, though, in recent years, Scrum has extended into marketing, content creation and even creative design. Two characteristics make Scrum well suited for developing products:

1. Scrum delivers core features quickly, allowing early user feedback to be visible to the development team and stakeholders.
2. Scrum is agile enough to adapt as product requirements shift based on feedback or changes in priorities.

At the end of every sprint, the Scrum team should deliver a new increment of a working product. In app development, this could be the ability to log in or a basic details screen. The expectation is for each sprint to have a releasable increment. This cadence pushes clarity around features and requirements to achieve a satisfactory state of completeness.

Highest Possible Value

Providing value is why great teams go to work. But have you ever produced something the client didn’t use because, in the end, it didn’t solve the right problem? It doesn’t feel good, but sadly it’s familiar for many of us. Often clients or sponsors can’t precisely identify what they need, or their needs change. By delivering value a little at a time, Scrum invites earlier visibility and evaluation. So if the team is not producing the right, highest value, there is still an opportunity for change.

All requirements, features, and work to be done by the Scrum team is organized into a backlog. The backlog is ordered based on priority. The product owner role is responsible for ordering the backlog to create the most value for users based on the priorities of the stakeholders. 

The backlog is visible to everyone, and there’s no ambiguity about what is important and what is getting done. This prioritization is continually reviewed and updated during backlog refinement to ensure the team’s work and output maximize value.

Start Learning Scrum

Even after covering two definitions of Scrum, we’re just scratching the surface. 

If you want to learn how you can focus and consistently deliver value, then I encourage you to explore my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. It will walk you through the core concepts of Scrum, teach you how to get set up and provide examples to follow. If you have more specific questions. Look at my Scrum FAQ or Scrum Glossary.

If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.