Success can be an entrepreneur's most formidable enemy. Almost every successful, growing startup hits the point where it outruns the founder's managerial capability. In the usual case, the founders sell out just as the first whiff of trouble floats by. Alternately, the founder brings in a strong executive and continues playing on the Board. A third case I have witnessed, the founder swaps out nearly his entire management team for players who can operate at the new level of business. This is both painful and tricky, but I have seen it work, helped make it work. Scrum offers another path if the founder wants to keep spearheading his growing company. Nothing wrong with taking the money and moving on, mind you. Scrum just presents a new solution set to this old problem.
My entire four-decade career has been in startup companies. I often joined, somewhat coincidently, around the time they were having real difficulty scaling management systems. During the last 20 years I usually hired on with a high tech company to help fix some broken function like sales, marketing, quality, products or engineering. I materially participated in two successful turnarounds of roughly $25 million corporations. Most of the rest were sold off without my assistance. This gave me a season pass to a long run of the entrepreneurial startup show. I was late for the real money, but there before the final curtain. So I've been thinking about this problem for a while. How would I do it now if I wanted to? Now that I know about Scrum.
Scrum teams, not just Scrum software teams, can be amazingly creative and productive. They are not free of overhead, but they can really pay off on their investment, which is mostly in human capital. In addition to setting a few boundaries and standards, you must pay close attention to fixing stuff they say is broken. You must help each team improve their process with enough specialized coaching and give them direction with good Product Owners. Scrum teams are self-organizing complex systems. If you stay out of their way, rather than try to control what they do, the teams will surface and solve the issues in their chartered area. They will even solve problems no one knew about. Think about it. Product innovation, engineering, marketing, manufacturing management; Scrum teams can be designed for any kind of knowledge work. Point them in the right direction and things just get handled. Senior staff runs like a Scrum team, collaborating to devour problems, create solutions and focus the Product Owner teams. There's a lot of trivia you will not have to deal with. If you get the organization to this point where does that leave you as head honcho?
Well, you get to be something like Chief Product Owner. Your team helps you formulate a good vision and you communicate that vision everywhere. It is the same message, tailored a bit for employee teams, customers or suppliers. “This is where we are going. We all focus in the same direction, on the same business targets.” You defend this odd, new organizational system from the ignorant. You model the values and principles. Your team scouts the horizon and figures out exactly where to go. You just point. You are the office of final alignment and instigator of diversity.
Come to think of it, that is a pretty good description of what an entrepreneur spends a lot of time doing naturally. Scrum gets the organization aligned with you, not fighting you. You are leading, not commanding. A number of management functions will have to be re-conceived. Your team can solve most of those problems, many in ways that never occurred to you. If you do not understand Scrum, none of this will make sense to you. This will sound hopelessly naïve and idealistic. That is just fine. Enough people who do understand Scrum will try this and you can watch in your well-deserved ease.
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