Scrum Values for Product Teams
Product teams are under increasing pressure to deliver value that delight their customers, and proactively respond to changing market conditions. However, this will only be achieved when teams work effectively together toward common goals within a culture of trust and collaboration. While I wouldn’t recommend the Scrum Framework for all teams; I believe that the Scrum Value lays a solid foundation for building the required culture of trust and collaboration.
Why Values Matter for Every Product Team
Values play a foundational role in shaping the dynamics of any group and with the global adoption of remote working and increased global mobility, product teams are often diverse and cross-functional by nature. When these teams lack an explicit set of shared values, each member is left to operate based on their own personal values and assumptions about “what’s right.” This can lead to misunderstandings, misaligned priorities, and leading to conflicts.
For instance, one team member might prioritize churning stuff out over maintaining product quality, while another might focus on innovation at the cost of speed. Without an agreed-upon framework, these differing values can cause friction and impact team effectiveness. As you already guessed, this leads to - Miscommunication, reduced trust, and ineffective team.
This is where the Scrum Values can serve as a guiding light, ensuring that every team member—regardless of their individual inclinations—aligns towards a common set of principles that support effective collaboration and the delivery of high-quality products for their customers.
The Scrum Values
The Scrum Values - Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage could serve as the ethical framework for product teams, fostering an environment of collaboration, transparency, and respect. Let’s dive deeper into these values and explore how they can enhance the performance of any product team:
Commitment: The product team commits themselves to their goals and are accountable for contributing to the shared outcomes. When teams embody commitment, they build a sense of reliability and trust. Even when the going gets tough, team members self-manage to work through and around the challenges, ensuring that goals are met. The team should educate and make transparent commitments to their stakeholders as this can be used as a lever in the future. Commitment is crucial to adoption of any iterative process that is expected to provide consistent delivery of value to the customers.
Focus: The value of focus compliments Commitment and enables teams to concentrate their efforts on the most important priorities i.e. goals. Product teams get distracted by the multitude of demands and ad-hoc requests that come from stakeholders. Yet, by embodying a shared value of focus, teams can minimize disruptions and ensure they are channeling their energy and resources towards achieving the most impactful outcomes for the customers. Teams without a shared understanding of focus spread themselves thin across multiple tasks/projects, leading to burnout and lower-quality work.
Openness: Openness fosters a culture of transparency and honesty, where team members feel safe to express their thoughts, share concerns, and voice innovative ideas. Teams that embody openness are more likely to communicate challenges, impediment and collaborate to proactively address them before it affects their ability to deliver on their commitment.Teams that embody openness actively participate in knowledge sharing and continuous learning, which are critical for the long-term success of product teams. On the other hand, teams lacking openness will become siloed, with individuals withholding information, which will impede collaboration and reduce the effectiveness of the team to deliver value.
Respect: Respect ensures that every team member’s voice is heard and valued; It creates a culture where differences in opinion are seen as a strength and teams are able engage in healthy debates, challenge assumptions, and collaborate to make better decisions. The product team must respect each other as professionals, respect their stakeholders and respect their customers. Respect for stakeholders will ensure that the team is open about their outcomes, learning and commits to the goals that have been agreed with the stakeholders. Respect for customers ensures that the product team is committed to delivering a usable, useful and valuable product to their customers.
Courage: Courage empowers teams to take risks, embrace change, and hold each other accountable. Courage enables the teams to reinforce their commitments and tackle tough problems. Whether it’s challenging the ways of working that have for long stopped serving the team, voicing a dissenting opinion, or experimenting with a new approach, courage is necessary for driving innovation and continuous improvement. Without courage, teams may avoid difficult conversations, settle for mediocrity, or resist necessary changes—all of which can hinder progress.
Integrating Scrum Values into Any Product Team
Here are some practical ways for any product team to adopt Scrum Values:
1. Create a Values Charter: Organize a workshop to define and agree on a set of shared values. Use the Scrum Values as a starting point, and discuss what each value means in the context of your team’s set up, the nature of the work, the shared goal and dynamics within the team.
2. Leaders Model the Values in Behavior: Team leaders and managers should embody the values in their own actions. When leaders demonstrate commitment, openness, respect, courage, and focus, it sets a great example for the rest of the team.
3. Encourage Regular Reflection: Make it a habit to reflect on how well the team is embodying these values. Use retrospectives or similar ceremonies to discuss where the team is excelling and where it can improve in alignment with these values.Share stories that reinforce the presence or absence of the Scrum Values.
4. Celebrate Behaviors that Reflect the Scrum Values: Recognize and celebrate when team members demonstrate these values. This reinforcement helps to embed the values into the team’s culture.
The Scrum Values are more than just a list of words; they are a philosophy that fosters a collaborative, high-performing and effective team culture. Whether or not a product team has adopted the Scrum framework, embodying these values can be transformative. They provide a shared foundation that reduces conflicts, enhances trust, and drives effectiveness. By embracing Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage, a product team will unlock its full potential and deliver greater value to its stakeholders and customers.
To learn about the Scrum Framework and its associated principles, join one or our Scrum workshops in the coming weeks.