How Scrum saved my relationship

In a long relationship there is always the time where the rose-colored glasses are gone. In the beginning, everything is shiny, beautiful and harmonic. After the first burst times are changing, communication, compliments and time for each other decrease. 

This also happened to us. It’s a silent process that is often noticed too late. But I didn’t want to give up my relationship, so I thought about how we can improve it. 

I am a Product Manager and grew up with agile software development. Every company I worked for used agile methodologies. For me agile is a mindset and it has to be lived and can be applied to a lot of situations in our life. In the following, I want to guide you through some initiatives I invented for our relationship. The framework I oriented myself was Scrum.

If something is bad it’s time for improvements. It does not matter if it is a software product or a relationship. The improvement should be an ongoing and not a one time thing. Scrum has a meeting for this — the retrospective.

Retrospective in software development

In Scrum, a good retrospective consists of five phases. Thereby, regularly, the team looks back at the last iteration and decides on what they want to improve. Continuous improvement is one of the key factors in agile software development. This is similar to my relationship scrum model. 

In the following, I give a summary of the five phases of a retrospective.

1. Set the stage: Give people time to warm up to get into the right mood 
2. Gather data: Everyone has a different view on the past. Collect the different views and help everyone to remember on them.
3. Generate insight: Why did things happen the way they did? Identify patterns. See the big picture
4. Decide what to do: Cluster the insights and create concrete actions on how you will improve your issues. 
5. Close the retrospective: Ask the team how you could improve the retrospective. 

This procedure makes absolutely sense for a software development process, however, in a relationship it does not need to be so detailed. Regularly, only two people are involved what makes it much less complicated :).

Retrospective in a relationship

For our retrospective we planned a walk every Sunday to talk about our current feelings. As a simple version of the retrospective in software development, everyone had the chance to talk about three positive things that happened last week and three things which could be improved. Avoid discussions at this point, it should be only factual descriptions.

After we spoke our thoughts out load we clustered related topics and voted for the most important ones. Everyone had two imaginary dots. Thereupon, we discussed the two most voted topics. Therefore, it’s important to ask the right questions to find out the root cause of the problem. My girlfriend has a PHD in user research, so she knows how to ask the right questions :D

In my case, I usually asked the “five whys” to find the root cause of our problem. It’s a technique where the interviewer asks five times “why” after the statement of the opposite.The result is the root cause.

After the origin of our problem was clear and possible solutions were discussed, we committed us to a specific action which should solve the problem in the next week. In total, we did not commit us to more than two actions. If there are too many, it’s no longer possible to take all actions. Issues without a solution proposal will be discussed in the next retrospective again if it’s important enough. 

Key take away

• Go for a walk to have a relaxed atmosphere
• Everyone talks about three positive and three things which should be improved from last week
• Use dot voting to find the two most important topics
• Try to find the root cause with interview techniques like the “five whys”
• Take one or two actions for the next week

This worked pretty well for us. We talked regularly about our problems and also about positive feelings. Don’t forget to rethink positive situations and also appreciate them. This is another key factor for a healthy relationship.

After we realised that a retrospective works very well for our relationship, I thought about how to improve it even more. I realized that we do not spend enough time together during the week. Thus, I introduced a planning meeting.

Planning in software development

In software development, planning a new sprint is more complex than in a relationship. You review the backlog and the team picks as much stories as they think they can do and commits to it. 

1. The team picks the estimated and prioritised issues from the backlog.
2. The team commits to it.
3. In the second part of the sprint planning meeting the team breaks down the stories in subtasks. So everyone has a plan how to solve the problem.
4. The sprint starts.

Planning in a relationship

Talking about future helps every relationship to gain stability. You talk about things you would like to experience together and you are already looking forward to.

So we planned topics like: “On Wednesday we will go out for dinner. At the weekend we make a trip to the mountains. I will go to the gym this week. One film evening.” This reminds us to plan some time for joint activities. In addition, it is also important to tell our partners about our personal plans for the week. Transparency is another key factor of every relationship.

To make everything transparent to each other we introduced a board in the kitchen which showed all activities for the week. Every activity was represented by a sticky note. The board consisted of two columns: “This is what we want to do.” and “It was nice.” Basically two of the columns that also exist in the Scrum framework (todo, done). 

After we finished an activity we moved the note to the completion (“It was nice.”) column. 

Key take away

• Plan time together
• Plan your personal events
• Make activities for the week transparent (with sticky notes)

It must not be forgotten to regularly track the progress in order to know which issues are done and which are still open. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to plan the week. If nothing is completed at the end of the week, there is a further problem in the relationship. That’s why we talked about progress on a regular basis.

Sprint Review in software development

In software development the sprint review is for all stakeholders and everyone who is interested in the progress of the product. The team presents the outcome of the last iteration. Everyone who participates can give feedback and accept a user story. The final word obligates to the product owner. Thus, at the end of the meeting everyone is on the same level and up to date.

Sprint Review in a relationship

The sprint review for us was part of the retrospective. We talked about the things which we set ourselves in the planning, the activities we managed to do and others we did not. This was manly done to understand WHY we didn’t do it. In contrast of Scrum no other stakeholders participated :) 

• Combine your review with the retrospective
• Talk about open and closed issues (activities)

We updated our board every day, so we do not talk only about the progress of the issues at the end of the week.

Daily in software development

All team members give an update about the current status of the issue they work on and answer following questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?

2. What will I do today?

3. Do I have any blockers/impediments?

Daily in a relationship

This doesn’t need to be a formal meeting to a specific time. In our case we spoke about our day during dinner. It’s the typical “How was your day?”- question which is perfect to start a communication. In addition we had a look at our board to check the activities that are still open. We answered questions like: “Do we still want to do it? Do we want to drop it? Do we need to change something?”. 

• How was your day?
• What is the status on our board?

Summary

If you want to learn more about the Scrum framework, please read other articles that dive deeper into it. In this article I just want to confront the scrum framework with a relationship.

Why did I write in the past?

In the meantime we adapted the process to our needs. Also your process will change over time. Also in software development every company/department/ team has to find its own process.

However, in a relationship as well as in software development, the framework is good starting point.

Please try it yourself and tell me about your experience. Happy to hear from every lovely couple.

And YES we are still a couple ?

“Make love not war”