Lessons from a ScrumMom

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The most important team in my life was falling apart. We struggled to communicate, to prioritize, and to adapt to change. We felt disconnected.

In this team, I wasn’t called a Scrummaster. I was called Mom.

It wasn't until I merged those roles together (ScrumMom) that our family transformed.

I have an Agile Family.

Spending much of my career studying and applying leadership lessons, I’ve considered my family fair game for trying out approaches. If I can enable high performing teams in my workplace, why not enable them in my home?

And with backgrounds in software development, my husband and I took Agile, particularly the Scrum Framework, as a way of working and turned it into a way of living. We both saw the advantages while building product, from increased adaptability to organizational synergy to faster time to market. Our needs for Agile were like the challenges in any family, perhaps your family:

• ??We needed to improve our communication
• ??We needed to prioritize what’s important and make decisions together around where we focus
• ??We needed to learn to give rapid, candid feedback
• ??We needed to help each other fail, learn, and come back strong (e.g., persevere)

And being a fan of TED, I came across Bruce Feiler’s 2013 talk: Agile programming – for your family . At the time, my kids were a bit too young for it, but I bookmarked the idea and came back to it once the youngest had (somewhat) legible writing.

We started simply by utilizing concepts from Scrum. One wall. A pack of sticky notes. Poster-sized paper.

Step 1: Write User Stories.

As a _______, I want to _______, so that _______.

My kids now write user stories at will.?

Our user stories become a family backlog. We select the ones we want to complete over the course of our next Sprint (3 weeks). We then move our stories through the Sprint from “To Do” to “In Progress” to “Done.”

This is NOT a chore chart. It’s how we plan our lives. It’s how we reach for big goals, supporting each other in the process. It’s how we try new things, and how we learn.

And just like a work team getting through a backlog isn’t about task management, our Scrum wasn’t about the ‘what.’ It was the ‘how’ and the ‘why.’?

From our Family Manifesto (similar to the Agile Manifesto) to our Scrum Retrospective (What went well? What didn’t go well? What do we want to incorporate into the next Sprint?) we make Agile work for our family – just like any team knows they need to make Agile work for them.

Ultimately, our why was wanting our children to express desires and learn how to achieve goals. We wanted them to try new things and be adventurous. To be comfortable with change. To fail fast, and learn from mistakes, and ultimately, have fun as a family.

It was Agile that led us to a 3-month road trip to visit the National Parks. It was Agile that got my son, at age 11, to purchase his own electric guitar and perform in a Led Zeppelin tribute band. It was Agile that showed me that mindfulness may not come from an app. For the last four years it’s been Agile that made my most important team work well together.

Would you like to learn more about Agile as a strategy, in your family or organization? Let's connect! Click on the link below to schedule.

LoyaltyCraft was built out of a passion for helping companies create meaningful customer experiences. Founded in 2016 by Lauren Feehrer CCXP, we focus on strategy, qualitative research, customer design, and employee engagement to help mid-market companies open the door to new customers and keep existing ones from leaving out the backdoor.??