Killing the iPod(and Scrum)
Yes, I am biased, but I really do mean it. Agile’s most successful product is holding it back.
Yes, I am going to receive a lot of angry comments, but if I convince even a handful of folks, it is likely worth it.
Apple’s iPod
Apple took a giant leap towards becoming a household name in the early 2000s. It did this through one major release: the iPod in 2001. The iPod was the big breakthrough that provided a huge share of Apple’s revenues in the 2000s. New iPod versions came out every year, sometimes multiple in the same year. Then, right when iPod accounted for more than 30% of Apple’s total revenue, when the number of iPods being sold was at an all-time high, Apple did something interesting.
Apple stopped making new iPod versions. It stopped almost all innovation in its best-selling and most revenue-generating product. The last versions of iPod Classic, iPod Mini, and iPod Shuffle were all released by 2010. The iPod Nano got its last version in 2012, and iPod Touch got its last release in 2019(only two updates between 2014 and 2019).
Most readers know the reason for this. With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the iPod started becoming redundant. Sure, it was the best-selling product, but the future was clear; it wasn't the product that would propel Apple forward. The iPhone could do everything the iPod could and more. Both as a consumer and as a company, why carry the extra baggage? In order for Apple to thrive, the iPod had to die.
Quick shout out to Alex Priestley for introducing me to the iPod story.
Kodak’s Camera Films
Around the time that Apple was discontinuing investment in iPods, Kodak was filing for bankruptcy. An engineer at Kodak, Steve Sasson, invented the first digital camera in 1975. About 37 years later, in 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
According to Forbes, Kodak management’s reaction to Steve Sasson’s creation was ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ Kodak’s bread and butter was camera film. The one-time-use films developed into physical photographs. The digital camera was an obvious threat to this business. Kodak was aware of this as well. They conducted a study in 1981 which pointed out that in 10 years, the film business will start to go bust. The signs were everywhere, but Kodak did nothing of substance.
Kodak doubled down on the Film and Photography Chemicals business. Ignoring the evidence all around them, as multiple people started saying, ‘Film-based photography is dead,’ Kodak persisted with, ‘It is not dead; we will show you.’ All the signs were there; they even had foresight available, but they decided to stick with what had worked for them. Even in later years, as the revenues started to drop, Kodak did not focus on responding to change.
As a result of not keeping up with technical advancements, Kodak went bankrupt.
Agile’s Scrum
Scrum occupies the same position for Agile as the iPod did for Apple. It has been Agile's most popular and best-selling product. Of course, Scrum existed before Agile, but for years, Scrum has been the face of Agile. It is not uncommon to hear people using the terms Agile and Scrum interchangeably.
Scrum, with its shorter fixed timeboxes and emphasis on teams, changed the way a lot of people thought about product development. It made working in teams a norm. There were roles that embodied the needs of the customer and process improvement. The events within Scrum provided multiple opportunities to inspect and adapt. Scrum presented a set of simple rules that could be applied to see immediate results.
And a lot of folks did… Scrum was the iPod of our times. They both started getting adopted around the same time and spread like wildfire. Scrum became the face of Agile, just as iPod became the face of Apple. Then, the state of the art started shifting. Apple adjusted, but Agile didn't.
Times, They Are A-Changin’
Over the years, we started practicing continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring. We made it possible to get continuous feedback. DevOps as a movement was miles ahead. In the face of all this, Scrum, which remained supremely popular, stuck to the ‘Sprint’ — a fixed-length, usually multi-week timebox. More on continuous processes here —
We started to figure out how to achieve the base tenants of agility by looking at flow and lean. We started using metrics of flow. These approaches were closer to Agile's core and could be utilized without the roles(you can call them accountabilities, but they are roles) and rituals(you can call them events, but they are rituals). These were not “new technology” but applying old knowledge in a new context. Still, Scrum, for the most part, ignored the basic tenets of flow. Still, a vast majority of Agile implementors favoured rolling out Scrum instead of observing and improving flow without Scrum.
The latest of these changes is AI. It is helping developers create features and deploy them in the order of minutes. They can set up monitoring, collect feedback and react to it in the order of minutes as well. All without the need of a Sprint Review or a Daily Scrum. We can observe customer behaviour and test out features continuously. We can accomplish goals, sometimes in hours, other times in a couple of days, and do not need to set one for a set-length “sprint”. It seems most of Agile, despite this advancement, keeps pushing Scrum as its default implementation.
Economic conditions changed. The times of free money made way for high interest rates. Agile still kept pushing the roles within Scrum. Now, alongside managers, you also need Scrum Masters. For some reason, Product Managers and Product Owners are different things as well. So now, when interest rates are high, I need to hire more people to make this Agile thing work. Thanks, but no thanks.
‘Agile is dead’ posts are everywhere. Many of these might be clickbaity noise, but they are all signs. People have taken Scrum and made it a checklist. Say Zombie Scrum to anyone familiar with Agile, and they immediately know what it means. Further, they have personal stories to tell that exemplify it. Of course, this is not Agile’s fault. It is a data point, though. A great way to no longer create Zombie Scrum implementations is to no longer do Scrum implementations.
Do Kodak Things, Get Kodak Results
If Agile continues to behave Kodak-like and we keep defaulting to Scrum, we should expect Kodak-like results. Scrum has served us really well. Camera films served Kodak very well, too. At some point, Kodak had 90% of the photography market. That was the point in time Kodak should have started moving away from films and chemicals. Scrum is not bad, it is outdated.
This Kodak-like behaviour has encouraged the creation of SAFe, which takes every Scrum concept to its worst possible implementation at Scale. Most Scrum fans bristle at SAFe, but it is the same thing at a larger timescale. Plan, regularly inspect, demo, retrospect. All over fixed time-boxes with new specialized roles and defined events.
The Way of The iPod
For Apple to thrive, the iPod had to die.
For Agile to thrive, Scrum has to die.
Of course, people still listen to music. Of course, people will still need agility. The default for the former is no longer the iPod. The default for the latter should no longer be Scrum. Agile is at a big inspect-and-adapt moment. We can ignore the signs and continue to argue over every line in the Scrum Guide(or this post). Or become anti-fragile and evolve into something better by removing Scrum(or, for that matter, any other method/framework/strategy) from being the default.
What matters is implementing processes that improve the Return on Investment for organizations responsibly and sustainably. Processes that recognize the fact that we have continuous delivery and feedback capabilities. That variability should not be constrained using fixed timeboxes. That technological enhancements like AI are changing both the way we develop products and how we monitor them for feedback.
I know no ‘Central Chief Agile Committee’ exists to make this happen. That is not how this works. We, as a community, have to realize that Scrum is outdated. It has served its purpose and served it really well. It is time for it to fade so we can achieve true agility in a changed world. It is no longer about finding ways to fit Scrum into every context. It is about using our basic understanding of agility to help create efficient and effective processes. If we keep doing the former, we should expect to become Kodak.
So the next time you hear ‘Agile is Dead’, hopefully, you will think about this post. Hopefully, it reminds you of Apple and Kodak. Only one of those companies is dead. It is the one that did not kill its best-selling product when conditions demanded it to.
