On 20/09/2025 I posted on Bluesky:

Friendly reminder that scrum is bad, and that if you’re forcing scrum on your team you should feel bad.

I was then (rightfully) asked for what would be a more sensible approach:

Curious to hear about friendly approaches to leading teams that should make us feel good.

My answer:

I don’t lead teams, but I can tell you what worked for me as a dev: no estimates, no ceremonies, no sprints, tasks as small as possible, async written comms, thorough code reviews, changes shipped right after merge. Assume good faith when people struggle to deliver (slackers will be slackers).

The conversation went on:

Sounds good. Who writes the tasks and when? How do they decide if a task will be worth the time it takes build?

Absolutely reasonable (and important) questions!

This was my reply, which I think is the core takeaway from this blog post, and probably a hill I will die on:

Q1: Everybody does, all the time. Product folks (if they’re technical enough), devs, or both. But I think we have better tools than ceremonies for this. My preference goes to long form write-ups for discussion/decision making, followed by the actual breakdown of tasks into cards. The analysis process makes sense even as a meta-task on its own.

Q2: I think this is not a good question we should ask ourselves, the reason being: product development should follow a roadmap. It should not be led by opportunity. It should be led by a vision.
So, a better approach would be asking Product: “what are the non-negotiable items devs must implement at this point in time?” The ball is in their court now. It’s Product’s actual job to define priorities depending on what they believe delivers the best value to users.
What the dev team should get from them is work that must be done no matter what. No need to weigh it against how much time it will take: it will be worth doing *by definition*. Devs of course can be flexible and give some sort of hints in terms of “it’s little work”/”it’s a lot of work”.
But that should not be necessary.

Until next time!