SCRUM EVENTS & ACCOUNTABILITY
The fixed-length cycle, often a week to a month, is this event.
What is a Sprint?
The first implementation step the book names is creating this ordered list of everything you might do for the product or project.
What is the Backlog? (Product Backlog)
Ohno’s mindset strips out anything that does not advance what a customer would pay for; English speakers later labeled that approach with this short adjective also meaning “without fat.”
What is Lean?
A chapter takeaway: Secrecy is this; open books on work and even finances beat hiding truth for political cover.
What is poison?
The comforting master schedule almost always cracks once work starts; Scrum assumes this will keep arriving and builds review into every loop instead of denial.
What is surprise? (change; discovery)
The brief daily meeting aligns on yesterday, today, and anything slowing the team that leadership should clear.
What are impediments?
A Venn diagram warns: build-only, sell-only, or passion-only each fails; greatness sits in the this where all three overlap.
What is the center? (the overlap; sweet spot)
Fixing quality only at the end, patching defects after the line, often costs more effort than building this way the first time.
What is right? (correctly; quality at the source)
Show all work waiting, in progress, and finished on this shared artifact everyone updates daily.
What is a board? (Scrum board; task board)
Finish-date bands are enormous at kickoff and shrink only after real increments exist; risk texts give this three-word name to that narrowing fan of guesses.
What is the Cone of Uncertainty?
After several Sprints the team learns sustainable throughput, commonly called this.
What is velocity?
Backlog items are often written as this pattern: “As a … I want … so that …” to keep user value explicit.
What is a user story?
Palm’s story: delay discovering a bug and the repair cost explodes because you must rebuild mental this about the code.
What is context?
The team agrees on one shared bar; until a backlog item clears that bar, it is not treated as finished no matter how “close” it feels; that bar is the agreed meaning of this word.
What is Done?
When the wedding or launch date is fixed, order the list by what matters most so if you must cut, you trim these items first.
What are the lowest priorities? (the bottom of the list)
This servant-leader clears outside obstacles and shields the team’s cadence instead of parceling out tasks like a traditional project manager.
What is the Scrum Master?
OpenView-style investors care that Scrum produces not just speed but this outcome; otherwise the venture is only a hobby.
What is revenue? (making money)
Doing several chores partly done leaves this: spent energy with no finished value, like half-painted rooms and unmailed checks.
What is waste? (WIP)
Half-finished tasks multiply this Lean concept: effort tied up with nothing shippable yet.
What is work in process? (WIP)
Cold War Delphi rounds hid who said what so rank could not steamroll juniors; Planning Poker’s facedown flip tries to copy this shield against loud voices.
What is anonymity?
What is release? (ship; shipping)
Pet.com and Zappos both saw online retail; the book says one lacked this sense of what to do next, and collapsed.
What are priorities? (a clear order)
Toyota-style thinking: stop the line and fix a defect now instead of shipping many units that all need this later.
What is rework? (repair; patching)
Transparency lets inspection mean something; without it, this third pillar cannot fix reality because nobody sees truth.
What is adaptation?
“Genius” estimators who never touched the code wrecked timelines at GSI; only this group’s cards belong in the deck for real delivery work.
What is the team? (the builders)