UDG’s Denis Zelchenok invited my for an interview to his YouTube channel zFace.
He sent some questions beforehand, here are my notes.

For the full interview, head over to YouTube.

Is scrum a recipe for success for everyone?

No. Scrum focuses on the product and the customer, so if you have other things in mind that are more important than that, Scrum isn’t for you.
However, if you have a product, if you have a vision and if you are willing to be influenced by market realities instead of sticking to a project plan that is growing more outdated every day, Scrum is right up your alley.
So, for a small startup with a dedication to satisfying customers with a fresh product or new service, Scrum is quite great.

What size of products and companies is Scrum good for?

Scrum works with all sizes of products, despite rumors to the contrary. Or rather, there are extensions of Scrum that work for all sizes while standard Scrum is designed for a single team. Incidentally, that is where I would recommend everyone to start – take one team, get Scrum right, and scale from there.

In what cases did Scrum fail?

Sure. As I’ve said, Scrum is about product and about customer focus, and some organizations expect to reap the rewards without changing anything – keeping hierarchies in power and politics in play, mostly. Unfortunately, you don’t always recognize setups like this beforehand, especially since the people you talk to first are usually quite enthusiastic about agile.

Do we need to customize Scrum?

Indeed. Scrum is a framework, and as such, it is underspecified on purpose. It’s about doing the right thing, after all, and nobody but you knows what exactly is right for your product, your customer and your organization. So, there is a need to customize, but for beginners, this is as easy as filling in some numbers.
Continuous Improvement is one of the pillars of Scrum, so people will tinker with the components quite extensively: I vividly remember one organization in particular, where I thought to myself that their setup was far from Scrum, and yet: It worked for them, and keeps working and changing to this day.

How to get going? Per department or x-functional?

Well, that’s actually of the more complex points of customization.
I recommend cross-functional teams to get all Scrum can give - speedy delivery of fully implemented valuable products. For a cross-functional team to work, people have to open up to what the people next to them are doing and have to accept that their area of expertise is of equal importance to all the others, and that might take a while.
So, I strongly recommend setting up the first team in a way that the front of the value chain knows what the back is doing and vice versa.
Start there, and expand, growing ever further along the chain – like a startup would, starting with two guys and a great idea to five people of similar skills, to 20 with some different but overlapping areas of expertise and finally to a hundred, with vastly different specializations.

How long does it take to move to Scrum?

Guess what: it depends on your organization, your people, your product - and on how lofty your aims are.
A scrum team usually gets in good shape in less than half a year, considerably less in a small organization like a startup.
However, the journey only starts there, as a truly agile organization has more in mind than just a single team: It’s an organism bred to optimize the products value for the customer and depending on your starting point, getting there can take several years.
Some organizations even take it beyond that, adopting a systemic view of the market as a whole. With companies like that, what they do now may be a whole different beast from what they did 10 years ago – all the while delighting customers and earning truckloads of money.