So when I started in the current startup I am in, we did the anarchy approach of just give a feature to work on and a tool to track tickets for 3 years. Eventually as team leader we migrated to scrum development. And as the team has expanded I’ve actually gotten stricter about it.

The rituals of scrum seem pointless when you start out and with a team of less than 4 people but at 4+ people it’s important just to keep track of what on earth is happening in the team. Like end of sprint allows us to work out if things are vaguely on track. If they are not we can identify where the weaknesses are. Someone took on a task estimated at 8 story points and it took 2 weeks to do, need to find out what the issue is (usually because either because there is a knowledge gap in that aspect of the system or because the task just simply hasn’t been defined clearly enough and needs the product owner to give more details).

I never thought I’d be that guy who defends the scrum process but 5 years of being a team lead changes you.

Though because this system was one that evolved naturally as we grew and realised what we were doing as a company wasn’t working we largely avoided the corporate bullshittery version of scrum. We don’t have a scrum master, I’m the guy who is like “oi I need you in this meeting” to the product owners.