Scrum
An agile framework that organizes work into fixed-length sprints, typically two weeks, with defined roles, ceremonies, and artifacts. Scrum provides structure through sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
Scrum prescribes a lightweight but specific process for managing complex work. The product owner prioritizes the backlog, the development team self-organizes to deliver sprint goals, and the scrum master removes impediments and facilitates ceremonies. Each sprint produces a potentially shippable increment, and the retrospective ensures the process continuously improves.
For AI-focused product teams, Scrum's fixed-length sprints can create tension with research-oriented work that resists time-boxing. Successful teams handle this by treating model development as a series of time-boxed experiments rather than open-ended research. Each sprint commits to a specific experiment: test whether fine-tuning improves accuracy by 10%, evaluate a new embedding model, or A/B test a prompt variant. Growth teams often run Scrum alongside experimentation frameworks, using sprint ceremonies to review experiment results, plan the next round of tests, and coordinate between feature development and growth optimization work.
Related Terms
Product-Market Fit
The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Achieving product-market fit means customers are actively seeking, using, and recommending your product because it solves a real and pressing problem for them.
Jobs to Be Done
A framework that defines customer needs as functional, emotional, and social jobs people hire products to accomplish. It shifts focus from demographic segments to the underlying progress customers are trying to make in specific circumstances.
Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of a product that can be released to test a core hypothesis with real users. An MVP delivers just enough functionality to gather validated learning while minimizing development time and cost.
Minimum Lovable Product
An evolution of the MVP concept that emphasizes delivering enough quality and delight that early users genuinely love the product. It balances speed-to-market with the emotional engagement needed to drive organic word-of-mouth growth.
Design Sprint
A five-day structured process for rapidly prototyping and testing ideas with real users. Developed at Google Ventures, it compresses months of debate into a focused week of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing.
Lean Startup
A methodology for developing businesses and products through validated learning, rapid experimentation, and iterative releases. It emphasizes reducing waste by testing assumptions before building fully-featured solutions.