Series: Kanban to Scrum Transition | Part 1 of 4 | Documenting our team’s structured evolution from Kanban to Scrum
Introduction
By late 2022, our team had been using a well-structured Kanban system for over a year. We had weekly planning, defined WIP limits, a solid cumulative flow analysis practice, and well-managed pull-based delivery. It worked — until it didn’t.
This post kicks off a four-part series documenting our transition from Kanban to Scrum. It’s a reflection on what wasn’t working, why we decided to change, and how we brought the team along in an intentional, structured, and empowering transformation process.
The Pandemic Context and “Keep the Lights On”
Our Kanban approach had emerged during the pandemic, when long-term planning felt almost irrelevant. Everything was uncertain — market demand, feature scope, even team availability. So we focused on flow, prioritizing just-in-time decisions and reactive prioritization. It helped us stay afloat during ambiguity.
As the company entered a phase of financial prudence — a mode we called “keep the lights on” — we reduced experimentation and focused on stability and cross-team efficiency. This shift amplified our dependencies and exposed coordination gaps that Kanban alone couldn’t cover well.
The Signs of Inefficiency
In our retrospectives, we started to see post-its like:
- “We keep picking stories without full scope — refinement is happening too late.”
- “We’re working on too many things at once, and nothing is finishing.”
- “It’s hard to align across teams — meetings always feel reactive.”
- “Not sure who’s owning the delivery of this initiative.”
- “We don’t really know what’s DONE — DoD is just informal.”
These aren’t signs of people underperforming — they’re symptoms of process mismatches. Kanban gave us flexibility, but it lacked the rhythm and ritual we needed for shared learning and ownership.
What Kanban Gave Us (and Where It Fell Short)
Kanban gave us a great base:
- A culture of visualizing work.
- Flow-based thinking and reduction of context switching.
- Comfort with slack communication and async progress.
- Tech debt rituals like the tech wall, with effort/impact matrices.
- Collaborative brainstorming and Lean Inception on FigJam.
- Thoughtful planning through OKRs and biweekly syncs.
- A steady agile retrospective practice and monthly team health radar.
But we lacked cadence. We lacked checkpoints that forced alignment before starting work. And we lacked a shared language around how we deliver — especially when priorities came from outside our team.
The Push Toward Scrum
Scrum offered what we were missing:
- Planning as a ceremony, not just an async doc.
- Sprint goals to focus our energy.
- Definition of Ready and Definition of Done to clarify handovers.
- Sprint reviews to reflect, celebrate, and engage stakeholders.
- A shared model of continuous improvement via fixed retros.
- Clear accountability on who facilitates and owns ceremonies.
These weren’t just rituals. They were boundaries — spaces where clarity is built. Where leadership is distributed. Where teams pause, reflect, and recalibrate.
A Call to Change
So we made a decision. Not out of frustration, but out of maturity. We weren’t abandoning Kanban. We were evolving toward a structure that could help us collaborate better, manage dependencies, and build autonomy with stronger alignment.
Our next steps were clear: define our goals, align our metrics, build a shared understanding of Scrum, and coach each other into new roles.
And that’s exactly what Part 2 is about.
# Retro Insight
echo "Is our current process helping or blocking our goals?" >> retro_notes_oct2022.txt
Next in the series: Part 2 - Aligning Goals, Metrics, and Shared Understanding
Kanban to Scrum Transition Series:
- Part 1: Recognizing the Need for Change (This post)
- Part 2: Aligning Goals, Metrics, and Shared Understanding (Nov 3, 2022)
- Part 3: Implementation and Early Challenges (Nov 10, 2022)
- Part 4: Lessons Learned and Continuous Improvement (Nov 17, 2022)