Scrum Was Written for the Average Team. It Is Time to Aim Higher.

Article 9 of 9 in the series.

Most teams, when asked how they work, say some version of “we do Scrum.” What they usually mean is that they hold a Sprint Planning, a Daily Scrum, a Sprint Review, and a Retrospective. They maintain a Product Backlog. They ship a Sprint’s worth of work every two weeks. They perform some rituals that seem similar to what the Scrum Guide describes, and stop there.

Although most teams have never experienced true Professional Scrum, for most this was acceptable, because the aim (for many organizations) was simply to deliver software more predictably; and that goal was, in many cases, achieved. For thirty years, reliably shipping high-quality, working software every Sprint was quite the achievement. Most teams achieved predictability over the years; consistently shipping high-quality, working software, however, eluded most of them. The teams that achieved both, rightly, called the minimum a success.

AI is moving the bar. The minimum is no longer enough. What does it look like when teams stop aiming for average, and start aiming higher than the Scrum Guide?

This is the final article in a series on the future of AI-powered Product Development. In the first, I proposed a team-owned Definition of Value. In the second, I argued accountability concentrates, rather than dissolves, as agents enter the team. In the third, I reframed refinement as option framing. In the fourth, I raised the Increment bar to require adoption, not just usability. In the fifth, I replaced the demo-style Sprint Review with an Evidence Review. In the sixth, I named the Tacit Knowledge Tax AI-powered teams pay, often without noticing. In the seventh, I proposed the Context Lake as Product Management’s new core artifact. In the eighth, I argued that transparency and the Scrum values need active defending when the most active member of the team is a measurably biased agent. This ninth piece pulls the eight threads together.

This is a visionary piece, not a predictive one. I cannot tell you what product development will look like in five years. I can share how a room full of experienced Professional Scrum Trainers thinks it must evolve, and why your team has more room to aim higher, this Sprint, than you probably believe. The full list of contributors from the Amsterdam Face-to-Face Event sits at the foot of the article. The arguments here are mine. The thinking is ours.

The Scrum Guide Has Always Said It Is the Floor

The 2020 Scrum Guide includes a sentence most practitioners have read and moved past without absorbing:

“Scrum’s framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory.”

Purposefully. Incomplete. Those are load-bearing words. The Guide has always been, by design, a floor. A minimum. A set of parts required, nothing more. Teams were always expected to add their own practices, disciplines, and rituals above it. Many have pointed out ‘Scrum’s flaws’ over the years, with criticisms like “it doesn’t even talk about product management” or “it doesn’t acknowledge continuous integration and delivery.” Those criticisms are fair, but Scrum was also never against any of these. In fact, I believe all of my fellow Professional Scrum Trainers have always encouraged students to go beyond the Scrum Guide.

So, make no mistake; the Guide got this right. A framework trying to cover every industry, product, and team had to stay minimal. The problem is not in the document. The problem is that the community, over thirty years, has frequently treated the floor as the ceiling. “We do Scrum” became a compliance statement rather than an aspiration.

Why the Floor Was (Challenging) Enough, Until Now

For most of the history of this framework, the floor was challenging enough, because reaching it was hard. Teams that reliably shipped working, high-quality, usable software at a Sprint cadence, without melting down, were genuinely rare and valuable. Clearing the floor was a competitive advantage.

AI has, in the span of two years, made the floor trivial to reach. An AI-assisted team can hit a Sprint cadence, pass a Definition of Done, and ship a usable Increment with less of the effort, skill, and craft that used to set professional teams apart. That is good news, and it is a problem. Good news, because more teams can now clear the floor. A problem, because clearing the floor is no longer a signal of anything meaningful.

The teams that are going to pull away, in the next five years, are the ones that stop treating the Guide as their aspiration and start treating it as a baseline. The teams that do not are going to become slower, not faster, as their agents outrun their practice.

What Aiming Higher Looks Like, Concretely

The eight articles before this one are, read together, a picture of what aiming higher looks like. Not a new framework. Not a rewrite. A set of concrete, stackable practices that sit above the Scrum Guide’s minimum.

A Definition of Value on the wall (Article 1). Not left implicit in a vision document. Stated, measurable, argued about, and revisited. The team’s answer to what counts as value on this product.

The Accountability Test running on every agent-produced artifact (Article 2). Explain, Defend, Redo. A named human owns the outcome. The three Scrum accountabilities concentrate, sharpened by AI, not diluted by it.

The Option Frame in every refinement (Article 3). Outcome, Options, Bet, Evidence. Refinement stops being task decomposition and becomes bet framing. Agents generate the options; humans frame the outcome and hold the bet.

Moving from ‘Usable’ Increment to ‘Used and Adopted’ (Article 4). An Increment is only real when a named cohort has used it for its intended purpose inside a defined feedback window. Usable is no longer enough. Used and adopted is the new done.

The Evidence Review replacing the demo (Article 5). Four questions: what did we bet, what did we ship, what did users do with it, what is the next bet? A working session that produces decisions, not applause.

The Tacit Knowledge Tax priced and protected against (Article 6). Human-only hours. Apprenticeship order. A deliberate refusal to hand the expensive taxes to agents. The team keeps the option of learning.

The Context Lake as Product Management’s core artifact (Article 7). The curated, traceable, queryable place where direction, constraints, and learning live for every human and every agent on the team. The evolved Product Wall for a team with agents in the room.

Transparency and the Agent Profile (Article 8). Direction, decisions, and the agent itself all made legible. Known biases documented. The five Scrum values re-read, sharpened, and actively defended with a biased teammate in the room.

Put all eight on the team’s wall, in view during every Sprint, and the practice is unrecognizable from ceremony-only Scrum. That is the point.

What This Means for the Three Accountabilities

The Product Owner’s job changes a lot. Freed from backlog-detail-maximizing and utilization-policing, the Product Owner finally has space to do the work the role was always intended for: maximize value. The job shifts from operational execution to strategic thinking, deep problem and user understanding, and context management. That is a harder, more exposed, and more consequential job than the one most Product Owners are doing today; and it is also the one worth doing.

The Scrum Master’s job changes in kind, not in degree. Same accountability, team effectiveness, with a broader set of levers. The Scrum Master protects the Option Frame, the Evidence Review, the Tacit Knowledge Tax discipline, the human-only hours, the Context Lake, and the transparency practices that keep the pillars alive. Effectiveness, in an AI-powered world, is not the same as efficiency. The Scrum Master is the person who holds that distinction. I do expect, in addition, that over time the Scrum Master might be repositioned more as a ‘Performance Coach’ than as a ‘Process Master.’

The Developers’ job changes shape. Less typing. More judgment. More option generation. More evidence design. The Accountability Test, Explain, Defend, Redo, becomes a personal standard, not just a team one. Developers who can do all three, in an AI-augmented context, are going to be the most valuable professionals of the next decade.

What Is Not Changing

I want to be direct about this, because the rest of the series has argued for a lot of change. The five Scrum values, courage, focus, commitment, respect, and openness, are not negotiable, not dated, and not up for revision. The pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation are the empirical foundation on which everything in this series rests. Self-management is not something AI makes obsolete. It is something AI makes more consequential.

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None of the eight practices above work without the values and the pillars underneath them. Aiming higher is not abandoning Scrum. It is finally using Scrum the way it was designed to be used.

The Role of Scrum.org and the Community

I want to thank Scrum.org publicly for giving this conversation a home. The Amsterdam Face-to-Face Event that seeded this series was a working session, not a photo opportunity. Trainers argued, disagreed, revised, and left with more questions than they arrived with. That is the community working as it should.

Scrum.org has already begun publishing work that aims higher, including the recent piece on Evidence-Based Management for the AI Era. I expect more of that. I hope this series adds to it.

Four Things You Can Do, This Sprint

Not four new things. This is the series closer. I want you to pick one of the eight practices from articles 1 through 8, and start on it.

Closing Reflection

I wrote this series because I believe we are at the most consequential moment in the history of professional product work. For thirty years, the bottleneck was delivery. That era is ending. The bottleneck is becoming judgment, value, and learning. The Scrum Guide gave the community a floor to stand on while it figured out how to deliver reliably. The community now has the chance to build, on top of that floor, something far more ambitious.

I am not arguing that Scrum is broken. I am arguing the opposite. The framework is finally about to be used for what it was always designed for: creating valuable, useful, adopted product outcomes, continuously, with self-managing teams who learn every Sprint.

Over to You

Pick one practice from this series. Run it for a month. Tell me what happened. If it worked, I want to hear. If it did not, I want to hear even more. The writing in this series is the end of my side of the conversation. Your team’s next Sprint is where the argument lives or dies.

Thank you for reading. Thank you, most of all, to the people whose thinking made this possible, named below.

Contributors

This article, and the entire series, was created based on the Scrum.org PST Face-to-Face Event #137 in Amsterdam. It would not have been possible without the discussions with: Dave West, Merel van de Wiel-Riedeman, Tommi Kemppi, Sjoerd Nijland, Jesse Houwing, Robbin Schuurman, Martijn Magermans, Guus Verweij, Steven Deneir, Gregor Stuhldreier, Paul Kuijten, Mehdi Hoseini, Simon Kneafsy, Vivien Colas, Jeroen de Jong, Kate Hobler, Olivier Ledru, Roderick Schoon, Stephan Vlieland, Tiffanie Newton, and Karel Smutný. The arguments here are mine. The thinking is ours.

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Sources

The Scrum Guide, Schwaber and Sutherland

Professional Scrum Competencies, Scrum.org

From Velocity to “Agent Efficiency”: EBM for the AI Era, Scrum.org

Empowered, Marty Cagan

Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri (summary)

The Definition of Value Takes Center Stage, Article 1 of this series

You Can’t Delegate Accountability to an Agent, Article 2 of this series

Refinement Is Not Solution Design, Article 3 of this series

From ‘Usable Increment’ to ‘Used and Adopted Solution’, Article 4 of this series

The Sprint Review Is Broken, Article 5 of this series

The Knowledge Your Team Is Losing, Article 6 of this series

The Context Lake Is Product Management’s New Core Artifact, Article 7 of this series

Transparency and the Biased Teammate, Article 8 of this series