Scrum Guide 2020 - Product Goal in, Estimates Out

The Scrum Guide is 25 years old and to mark this occasion, it's had something of a makeover, a fairly radical makeover. But did they make things better? Or did they just break it? Welcome to Development That Pays. My name is Gary Straughan and a wise man once said, "Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add but when there's nothing more to take away." And I have a feeling that Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the originators of Scrum, would agree with that sentiment. Certainly it is reflected in this version of the Scrum Guide, Scrum Guide 2020 is down now to 13 pages. I think that's three fewer than the previous version. But this is more than just a stiff edit. There's been a whole raft of changes, many of which I'm still getting my head around. To give you an idea, here are the notes I took during yesterday's Scrum Guide 2020 launch event. So loads of things I could talk about. What I've decided to do for this video is to cut things down to just two. One major addition and one, for me anyway, major removal. So something that's been taken away from the Scrum Guide that most people are not talking about but I think is a huge deal. But let's start with the headline addition and this, of course, is what everyone's talking about and I probably put it in the title of this video. So you already know that I'm gonna be talking about the Product Goal. What exactly is the Product Goal? Well, let's have a look at the brand new shiny edition of Scrum Guide 2020 to find out. The Product Goal describes the future state of the product, which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define what will fulfill the Product Goal. And there's some clarification about exactly is a product in the context of Scrum. A product is a vehicle to deliver value. It has a clear boundary, known stakeholders, well-defined users or customers. A product could be a service, a physical product, or something more abstract. The Product Goal is the long-term objects for the Scrum Team. They must fulfill, or abandon, one objective before taking on the next. The Product Goal then is intended to make sure that we keep our eyes on the prize. In previous versions of the Scrum Guide, the word used was vision. The Product Goal kind of replaces vision and at the same time, strengthens it by making it a commitment. And actually, by making it a commitment, they've pulled off a pretty clever trick I think of making the Product Goal look like it should have been in the Scrum Guide all along. And here's what I mean by that. The Scrum artifacts, as I'm sure you know are the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog and the Increment. The Increment has its own commitment. That's the Definition of Done. The Sprint Backlog has its own commitment. That is the Sprint Goal. And now the Product Backlog joins the club with its very own commitment. You're right, the Product Goal. Let's move on now and talk about something that has been completely removed from the latest version of the Scrum Guide and I have to say, this one really caught me by surprise. You see, Scrum and I have been going through something of a rough patch, partly my fault. I've been dabbling with other frameworks, a little bit of Kanban here, a little bit of Scrumban there, but there is blame on both sides and over time, there was something in Scrum that I could just, well, I could really no longer live with it, and that thing was estimates. I really hate estimates. So I couldn't be more pleased that the words estimates, estimating anything like that, no longer appear in the Scrum Guide. Ken and Jeff, very, very impressed that you took that step. I for one did not see that coming. Product Goal in, estimates out. Those are the two things that caught my attention but now I'd like to hear from you. What's the one thing that caught your eye in the new version of the Scrum Guide? Let me know in the comments below. Cheers for now.