Member-only story

Is Agile Scrum all that great?

Dr Bart PM
3 min readNov 15, 2024

--

Is Agile development as good as advertised? Let’s play the devil’s advocate and look at the ugly sides of Agile development:

You probably heard the leading narration:

Agile — Good ✅
Waterfall — Bad ❌

Don’t even get me started on the abomination that is SAFE…

Back to the topic: is really that black and white?

We’ve all been there? In theory, Agile Scrum seems perfectly reasonable and allows you to focus on your goal rather than a predefined outcome. Thus:

• You perform detailed research to establish a vision, strategy, and roadmap.
• Based on that workshop and prioritize projects in the backlog.
• You agree on details with your and the road forward.
• You create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test.
• You test and analyze to understand the results.
• You start again based on the learnings.

And you know what? This will work, but…

…only when developers create something barely commercial within a group of enthusiasts, say early Facebook.

However, what happens when a drug called “actual business” kicks in?

--

--

Dr Bart PM
Dr Bart PM

Written by Dr Bart PM

I am a senior Product Manager at Microsoft. My online courses have helped thousands to develop their Product Management careers. I would like to help you too!

Responses (1)