Ambitious Thirst for Change Yields Surprisingly Sweet Return

Marcos Garrido has many accomplishments on the books. He's a Certified Scrum Trainer®, a prolific conference speaker, and a serial entrepreneur who launched the companies K21, Nower, and WBrain. 

He brings his passion for scrum and agile into every aspect of his work, even writing books with agile themes for companies and kids. He has lots of stories that we could share, but it's his story of helping a leading global soft drink manufacturer drastically cut the planning time for a new product launch that we are sharing with you now!

Through the power of scrum, Marcos and his team were able to help the company deliver a new hard seltzer beverage to market in record time. It was a combination of team effort and a radical approach to scrum. Says Marcos, "We had an extremely motivated cross-functional team working in extremely short cycles." As a result, Marcos—and anyone else in Miami—was able to purchase the new beverage mere weeks after planning wrapped up!

Slow and steady is the industry way

Few people know how long it takes to launch a new product. When Marcos and his team asked, their beverage client said it takes nine months just to plan it.

Nine months was the industry standard. All of the client's competitors also took that amount of time to plan a new product launch. This organization wanted to push themselves to see if they could go faster and gain a competitive advantage. 

They brought on Marcos and his team and asked how fast he thought they could go with scrum. They were flabbergasted when he answered, "One week." The client immediately came back with, "But what if we fail?" A great question—but the answer is really great: If you fail in that one week, you've only added one week to nine months. Better: If you discover something in that one week that shaves a month off the timeline, now you're at eight months and a week. In other words, still under nine months. 

Though they still had some doubts, the client decided to proceed. If they failed, they would fail fast. It helped that Marcos and his team had experience coaching 400 teams on how to run daily—that's right, daily—sprints. 

An accelerated timeline to get to market fast: 16 sprints in 4 days

While a day-long sprint is not typical, Marcos knew from experience that there was a way to accelerate sprints this way when the conditions called for it.

Given the meteoric rise of sparkling water and hard seltzer options in the market over the last decade, the beverage company the team was hired to help didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to capture their own share of the market with a non-alcoholic seltzer. The first order of business was creating a backlog of questions needing answers.

The questions included things like:

• What's the difference between hard seltzer and beer?
• Which flavor should we offer first?
• Which social media influencer should we invite to promote the new product?
• What's the price point for it?

The product manager then prioritized these questions.

Next: putting together the team to chip away at the backlog. They would need a cross-functional team, with representatives from IT, marketing, sales, an influencer agency, the brand department, and more. There were vendors, too, brought on to help. Even MTV was involved in the end. But of the 50 members on the full team, few even knew what scrum was. "I think 85% of the people there never heard about scrum before," said Marcos.

So he explained it to them—but with a twist: Each sprint would be just two hours long.

What can you possibly accomplish in two hours? Turns out, a pretty good deal of value. The scrum team would review the highest-priority question together and decide which stakeholders, resources, and people were needed to solve it. 

This subset of people would then meet in a Zoom breakout to work for a little under two hours on the solution (this whole project took place virtually at the height of the COVID pandemic). Then the next question would receive consideration and a new group of volunteers would form to answer it. So on and so on until all the teams had been assigned questions. 

At the end of the two hours, everyone reconvened for a sprint review and, crucially, a sprint retrospective.

After the first two hours, they took a break to restore and refresh. Then the next two-hour sprint started. The curiosity about the process—it was new to most, and some had doubts—quickly turned into aha moments: "Some teams came up with a very good answer," Marcos said. "Some teams not only brought answers but also new questions, so the product owner could add those questions to the backlog." 

Sprint planning, sprint to the goal, sprint review, sprint retrospective. Rinse, repeat. Fifteen more times, for a total of sixteen sprints over four days.

From plan to product in weeks, not months

Thursday, the product owner came to Marcos with a problem. "Marcos, there's something wrong: the backlog is empty. What happens now?" Marcos must have been smiling when he said, "It's over."

Planning was over. What typically took the industry nine months was over in less than a week.

The plan worked so well that Marcos was able to purchase a bottle of the brand-spanking new beverage at a Total Wine in Miami just a few weeks later. "The company actually saved eight months and 26 days because they were 100% focused on one question only, because the sprint backlog had only one question."

Having the product in his hand was a source of pride all on its own, but Marcos was really touched by something one of the program leaders said: "The director that was attending the whole experience there with us, he said one thing that made me really happy: 'I knew something about sprints before. I never actually had a chance to do it, but I cannot live without it anymore.'"

Adapt and fail fast

Some people might look at this story and say, "He did it wrong. He broke too many of the scrum rules." But the spirit of scrum and agility is alive and well in this approach: bringing the right people together to form a team, focusing on delivering increments of value every single sprint, ruthlessly prioritizing the work. That is what makes scrum so revolutionary.

For leaders and companies who think scrum and agile can't be for them, Marcos says start small. "You want to learn how to drive? You're not going to start with a Ferrari." The important thing is to learn as fast as possible.

--

Want to learn more about the basics of the scrum framework? Scrum Essentials is a microcredential course available in both an on-demand and live, trainer-led version. You'll discover the elements that make scrum work and how it can help teams increase customer satisfaction and enhance adaptability to changes.

Discover Scrum Essentials