My marriage was in trouble. I’ve heard that having your first child can really put stress on the relationship, but I had no idea just how much.
At one point, after having a really bad fight with my wife, I realized that I couldn’t take it any more. There had to be a better way.
Then it came to me: what if I used Scrum in our marriage? After all, what is Scrum if not a framework to solve complex problems, in a transparent, inspective, and adaptive way?
The Family Scrum Master
The first order of the day: big kickoff meeting. We set our intentions to get back to the team mindset, or “the fun & love path” as we like to call it.
We then took turns speaking and listening to surface major pain points. We discussed it together, keeping a constructive mindset to focus on the issue rather than blaming the other person, and came up with effective solutions.
This was an excellent start. We were both fighting less, felt like we were being seen, and that the workload was finally fairly distributed. Nonetheless, how would we make sure to stay on the fun & love path instead of regressing to the fighting & bickering path?
Enter Scrum:
- Since there was so much going on, we initiated one week Sprints
- To get a grip on todos, we created a ticket backlog
- We scheduled regular Retros on Sundays to inspect and adapt
- We set up Sprint Planning following the retros to plan the upcoming week
Scrum or ScrumBut?
What about Dailies and Sprint Reviews? Wasn’t this yet another good old case of the ScrumButs?
From a dry perspective, yes, it was. However, while Scrum was very helpful, it didn’t fully translate to my marriage. We were having dailies over breakfast anyway, even talking too much as my wife once humorously said. Sprint reviews were irrelevant since we are both the Scrum Team and stakeholders.
The goal is not to be a stickler to the Scrum Guide, but to use it as a starting point. I made adjustments depending on the situation, and did so consciously while inspecting and iterating over the results. To me, at least, that’s the spirit of Scrum.
The Product Goal
Of course, Scrum alone can't save an entire marriage—we also started going to couple’s therapy, improving our communication, and working on our personal issues, amongst many other things. Yet Scrum has really helped us reach closer to our Product Goal: to save our marriage and get back to the fun & love path.
(Photo by Alysa Bajenaru on Unsplash)
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