Micro-Scrum

Published on Apr 1, 2025, filed under management. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

Imagine you worked like this:

At the start of the week: Get together with the team to decide what to ship—bring live—at the end of the week. Ideally, everyone contributes, but this is intentionally not a requirement.
At the end of the week: Get together and look at what was shipped. Everyone high-fives or, together, lands on one lesson to learn.

Of course, this resembles—for it’s inspired by—Scrum and XP. It reflects some key events and values of agile methodologies, from focusing on continuously shipping value to working as a team to learning together from the results.

This sort of micro-scrum can start out independent or complementary to other processes (unless it duplicates them, as would be the case with a functioning sprint goal, review, and retro process), which makes it easy to test and try.

You can even work like this without a team, when defining and reviewing your increments alone. (I’m working like this in my projects, though I’ve arrived at that mode of working in inspiration by Jake Knapp’s and John Zeratsky’s Make Time, setting highlights for each day as well.)

Is this new? Yes and no—“micro-scrum” is being mentioned here and there; but some of the associated ideas, as with sprints, stand-ups, reviews, and retros seem less micro. But newness is not my point—the point is to share and validate ideas. What do you think? What type of micro-scrum have you observed to work well? (Responses are best served on Mastodon.)

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, Frontend Dogma).

I love trying things—in web development and engineering management, but also in politics and philosophy, where I hold to one idea in particular: that we can only be well if we take good care of everyone. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my perspectives and experiences. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, keep it friendly, but do be critical.)