If you’ve learned Scrum and tried to apply it in a large organization, you’ve probably hit some roadblocks. Getting dedicated people for your team is hard. Building a true cross-functional team is harder. Breaking work into small, valuable problems customers actually care about? That’s the hardest.
After advising many Scrum teams, I see the same three Scrum team mistakes show up again and again. If you recognize them, you’ll likely see the symptoms right away.
1. Your Product Backlog is just a list of “hamburger orders”
Look at your Product Backlog. Are items titled with technical jargon and little else? If so, you’ve got hamburger orders—requests to build something exactly as specified, no questions asked. In fast food, the customer dictates the order. In knowledge work, it’s your job to understand the real problem to solve. This is one of the most important Scrum Team Mistakes to fix.
When teams act like short-order cooks, creativity disappears. Developers blindly build requirements, delivery slows, quality drops, and innovation stalls.
What to do:
Frame Product Backlog items as business problems, not technical tasks. Order them by importance. Make sure anyone can read the Product Backlog and understand the value behind it. You hired smart people—let them create solutions instead of just filling orders.
2. Your “team” isn’t really a team
Well, your team is more like a football team that has a subteam of quarterbacks, another subteam of linebackers, and another for kickers that gather every Sunday to play, but your team doesn’t always get the same players.
What’s the problem?
Another one of the common Scrum team mistakes is that the Scrum team looks more like loose collections of specialists than they do a real goal-focused team: one group of developers, another of testers, maybe a designer floating in occasionally. They gather, but they don’t function as a cohesive unit.
Here’s an analogy: bowling vs. American football. A bowling team adds up each individual’s scores at the end, but every bowler plays their own game. That’s how many Scrum teams operate—separate people doing separate work, tallied together later. A football team, by contrast, must work together on the same plays to move the ball down the field. Everyone’s role is interdependent. That’s what a true Scrum team should look like.
Without that alignment, your group isn’t thinking, working, or winning like a team. They chase different goals, and progress against business problems is fragmented at best.
What to do:
Start by checking alignment. Do they share the same goals? Do they act and work like a team? If not, fix that first. Limit work in progress by funneling requests into a single ordered Product Backlog with a strong Product Owner at the helm.
Then invest in the people side. Guide the team through Tuckman’s stages of development (forming, storming, norming, performing). A skilled Scrum Master is critical to help the group gel into a real team—one that plays football, not bowling.
3. Your team has no way to know if it’s on track
When teams don’t properly refine their Product Backlog during a Sprint, they only end up with a few Sprints’ worth of estimates. That makes it very difficult to know if they’re on track to hit important milestones. Without that visibility, you’re back to guessing—and I can guarantee people in your organization want to know how things are progressing.
I often hear, “We’re doing Scrum, so we don’t do dates.” That answer doesn’t fly with the people writing the checks. Unless you want to keep attending endless status meetings, you need another approach. Don’t continue living with the 3rd of the Scrum Team Mistakes.
What can I do?
You can release a plan if you regularly refine your backlog. Build domain knowledge, write clear descriptions, and track your team’s velocity. A good place to start is writing backlog items as user stories with strong acceptance criteria and applying the INVEST model.
When the team understands the problems they’re solving, they can estimate them and deliver solutions in order of importance. Many Scrum teams use story points for estimation. That gives you effort on the Y-axis and time in Sprints on the X-axis—perfect for a simple release burndown chart. (see graph below)
A release plan graph (like the above) will help give your organization visibility into your progress over time.
Showing this chart in every Sprint Review gives stakeholders visibility into actual progress. If they don’t like what they see, informed business decisions can be made earlier regarding tradeoffs instead of waiting until it’s too late.
Conclusion
These three mistakes are common, but they’re not permanent. By treating Product Backlog items as problems to solve, building real cross-functional teams that actually play together, and refining Product Backlogs to enable forecasting, you’ll set your Scrum team on a path to delivering real value.
Is Your Scrum Broken?
If defining your product feels more like mapping technical components than solving customer problems, you’re not alone—and it’s likely slowing your teams down. Download our FREE eBook, Why Scrum Isn’t Working: A Manager’s Field Guide to Organizational Misfires, for actionable insights into how poor product definition, fragmented team structures, and misaligned goals can derail Scrum—and what you can do to fix it.
