Why Zombie Scrum Teams Don't Ship Fast: Become Stronger By Doing It More Often

"That doesn't work in the real world", "Our product is too complex" and "That works only for hip startups" are some of the reasons that people offer when we ask them why they don't ship faster.

In environments with Zombie Scrum, people don't understand why it's important to ship fast. When you ask them, they respond with a shrug. Or with a dismissive smile, because "that can't possibly work for a product or organization as complex as ours". For them, shipping fast is only possible for small and inconsequential products or for huge tech companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Etsy. Even if they'd want to, the investment would simply be too large. It's more convenient to keep batching many updates into large, infrequent releases. Honestly, this is not very different from seeing the appeal in a healthy lifestyle but refusing to do the frequent workouts to get there.

But ironically, the more complex the product or its environment is, the more important it is to use release small increments to reduce the risks that are inherent to that. The reasons that people often give why they can't ship faster are ironically *exactly* the reasons why they should.

In this episode, which is an excerpt from our book "The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide", we share one of the reasons why teams that suffer from Zombie Scrum often can't release as fast as they want.

The blog-version is available here:
 https://bit.ly/2BBNV0x

Sign up to be notified when the book becomes available:
http://bit.ly/2zrdywv

Follow us on Medium:
https://medium.com/the-liberators

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.