3 min read  ·  Monday, August 11, 2025

Agile - Scrum or Kanban: How to choose?

"Picking the Right Development Symphony Without Making Everyone's Ears Bleed"

As a product leader, your job is basically to keep your engineering team from turning into a garage band that just discovered the electric guitar. You are the conductor — minus the tuxedo, plus a questionable amount of caffeine. Your team members are brilliant musicians in their own right, but without rhythm and structure, you’ll end up with a free jazz nightmare that only your mom will pretend to like. Think a Sydney Opera but instead of singers you’ve got a dozen dementors scratching their fingernails on a chalkboard. Yikes!

Enter development methodologies: the sheet music of product building. Picking the right one — whether it’s the marching-band precision of Scrum or the smooth jazz flow of Kanban — is your ticket to harmony.

The Agile Umbrella: The Philosophy Behind the Music

Agile is not a method; it’s a guiding philosophy. It’s a commitment to:

• Iterative Progress: Small, manageable cycles (because Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your dev team sure isn’t either).
• Collaboration: Talk to your team and stakeholders like they’re actual humans.
• Responding to Change: Plans are nice, but reality will sucker punch them in the face.

Scrum and Kanban both live under the Agile umbrella, sipping lattes and arguing over whose favorite football team is better.

Scrum: The Structured Symphony

Scrum is like classical music — structured, predictable, and occasionally a little dramatic. Work is divided into sprints which is like a symphony with distinct movements, each with a clear beginning and end. Scrum has defined roles and a series of meetings, or ceremonies, that keep the orchestra in sync.

Your main gigs as the Product Owner:

• Sprint Planning: This is where you, as the Product Owner, present the highest priority items from the product backlog to the team. The team then decides how much they can commit to delivering in the upcoming sprint. Your role is to provide clarity on the “what” and “why” so the team can determine the “how.”
• Daily Stand-ups: A 15-minute group therapy session to sync up on progress and identify any blockers.
• Sprint Review: The team shows off what they’ve built. This is your chance to see the product increment live and provide feedback, ensuring it meets the acceptance criteria. It’s a celebration of what was accomplished.
• Retrospective: This is a crucial meeting where the team reflects on the past sprint, where the team gently roasts their own process and occasionally you.