The Scrum Is Dead

Picture this: it's 9:15 AM on a Monday. Fourteen people are standing in a semicircle, each waiting their turn to recite a liturgy they've memorized: what I did yesterday, what I'm doing today, any blockers. The Scrum Master nods sagely. The Product Owner checks Slack under the table. A developer who was in flow state forty-five minutes ago has now completely lost their thread.

This is the daily standup. This is Scrum. And it's dying.

The Promise vs. The Reality

Scrum promised us agility. It promised iterative delivery, close collaboration, and freedom from the waterfall death march. And for a while, in certain contexts, it delivered.

But somewhere along the way, Scrum became the very thing it sought to destroy: a rigid process imposed from above, optimized for the comfort of management rather than the productivity of makers.

The ceremonies multiplied. Sprint planning. Sprint review. Sprint retrospective. Backlog refinement. The calendar filled up with meetings about work instead of time for work. Teams began to measure velocity instead of value. Story points became a currency for negotiation rather than a tool for estimation.

The Certification Industrial Complex

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: the Scrum certification industry. A two-day course and $1,000 gets you a "Certified Scrum Master" credential. No coding required. No product management experience needed. Just the ability to memorize the Scrum Guide and facilitate meetings.

This created a perverse incentive. An entire class of professionals emerged whose job security depended on Scrum's continued dominance — regardless of whether it was actually helping teams ship better software.

What We Actually Need

We don't need more frameworks. We don't need more certifications. We don't need to rename "Scrum Master" to "Agile Coach" and call it innovation.

We need to go back to first principles:

• Trust makers to manage their own work. The people closest to the code know best how to organize around it.
• Minimize coordination overhead. Every meeting is a tax on maker time. Pay it only when the return is clear.
• Measure outcomes, not rituals. Did we ship something users love? That's the only metric that matters.
• Embrace asynchronous communication. Not everything needs a synchronous ceremony.

What Comes Next?

If Scrum is the rugby metaphor — everyone packed together, pushing in the same direction through sheer collective force — then we need a different sport entirely.

We need something that values precision over brute force. Something where a small team executes with strategy, communication, and finesse. Something where the path to the goal isn't a straight line but a carefully planned curve.

We need Curling.

Next post: Introducing Curling: A New Paradigm