I’ve walked into far too many teams where Scrum is happening on the surface—events, boards, standups, even clean burndowns. But when I ask a simple question:
“When was the last time you delivered something meaningful to an actual user?”
Silence.
And that silence says it all.
Scrum was never meant to be a beautifully coordinated dance of rituals. It was built to drive value—to help teams inspect, adapt, and deliver working product every Sprint. But somewhere along the way, many teams turned it into a simulation. A safe loop of polish and planning with no real release.
Scrum Without Delivery Is Just a Simulation
Scrum is a delivery framework. It’s about inspecting progress, adapting quickly, and delivering increments of real value at least once every Sprint.
Once, while heading Agility at a big gaming company, I got a chance to work with a team that hadn’t released anything to users in over four months. They were “doing Scrum” perfectly on paper: Sprint Planning, Dailies, Reviews, even nice clean Jira workflows. But the Definition of Done ended at testing—no real user ever saw what they built.
When I asked, “What feedback have you gotten from players?”
They laughed.
There was none. Because nothing had shipped.
That’s not agility. That’s a tightly managed illusion.
If your team ends a Sprint with zero usable product, you’re not “doing Scrum.” You’re doing ceremonies. And that difference matters more than many are willing to admit.
Product Owners sign off work that hasn’t reached a single user. Scrum Masters chase team velocity, not feedback. Leaders celebrate burnups, not outcomes.
The problem Is that no one outside the team sees or benefits from any of it.
That’s not agility. That’s a tightly managed illusion.
Why This Happens (And Why It Persists)
Scrum, when done right, is uncomfortable.
Shipping exposes things—real user feedback, buggy features, hard prioritization calls, and sometimes, poor leadership decisions. And many orgs aren’t ready for that kind of truth.
So they create layers of insulation:
- Demos to stakeholders, not users
- Done = QA passed, not released
- Velocity > feedback
- Output > adoption
- Finishing the plan = success
I’ve seen this first-hand working at a large healthcare, where initial team structures favored project-style delivery over incremental value. Teams were “completing work,” but nothing moved forward in the eyes of the business or the citizens they served. We had to bring real users and POs together and shift the focus to actual outcomes before we saw true Scrum emerge.
Leadership should not be Off the Hook, either
If your teams aren’t delivering to users regularly, don’t look at Scrum. Look at how leadership is enabling or constraining agility.
Are delivery pipelines held up by bureaucracy?
Are risk-averse product managers hoarding releases for quarterly showcases?
Are security and compliance treated as blockers instead of collaborators?
These are systemic blockers. And unless leaders dismantle them, no amount of Agile coaching or team reorgs will make delivery happen.
Scrum needs air to breathe. If your systems choke it, don’t blame the team for gasping.
What Practicing Scrum Actually Looks Like
Scrum is not about being perfect. It’s about being useful—fast. The goal is always a usable increment. Not a blueprint. Not a prototype. Something the user can click, try, benefit from, or complain about.
Great Scrum teams:
- Reprioritize based on feedback, not gut feel
- Ship small, often
- Talk to real users, not personas
- Cut scope before cutting delivery
- Treat the Sprint Goal as a value commitment, not a task quota
And when delivery slows, they don’t patch the board—they ask harder questions:
What’s in the way? Who needs to move? What can we release today?
Call It What It Is
If you’re using the events but not delivering value—call it something else.
Internal Agile? Project Lite? Just don’t call it Scrum.
Scrum has teeth. It’s meant to expose friction between intention and execution.
If you’re not willing to act on that tension—Scrum will hurt. That’s by design.
But if you’re ready to deliver—not plan, not polish, not rehearse—Scrum becomes something else entirely:
A relentless engine for value.