How to 10X Value with this FREE Practical Scrum Guide

How to 10X Value with this FREE Practical Scrum Guide can help you break free from the cycle of endless sprints and unlock exponential value for your Agile team. By asking the 10x question, you can shift your team’s focus from small optimizations to big-picture transformations.

Delivering consistent value in an Agile environment can be daunting. Sprint after sprint, the grind of backlog grooming, task prioritization, and delivery can make it feel like your team is stuck in a cycle of incremental improvements. While these tweaks are essential, they often fall short of driving transformative outcomes.

It’s time to break the cycle and think bigger!

In this post, I’ll introduce you to The 10x Question: How to Think Bigger in Scrum and Agile Teams. This simple yet powerful mindset shift can help your team achieve exponential results without falling into the traps of burnout or endless sprint loops.

Why Incremental Gains Aren’t Enough?

Scrum teams are often laser-focused on optimization. For example:

• Incremental Improvement: Reducing a sprint backlog by 5%.
• 10x Thinking: Implementing a new framework that accelerates delivery by 10x.

Both approaches have their merits. Incremental improvements refine your processes, but they rarely create the transformative leaps that elevate your team’s impact. That’s where 10x thinking comes in.

The 10x Question

Here’s the game-changing question every Scrum team should ask:

“What would it take for us to 10x our value delivery to the customer?”

This question reframes the team’s focus from small, manageable tweaks to bold, innovative opportunities. It challenges everyone to think beyond their current limitations and explore new ways to maximize value.

Unlocking 10x Value

So, how do you apply the 10x mindset in practice? Start by focusing on three key areas:

Rethink What Matters Most

• Are your team’s efforts aligned with the highest-value priorities?
• Are you solving the most impactful problems for your customers?
• Eliminate or delegate tasks that don’t contribute significantly to the end goal.

Try New Ways of Working Together

Explore innovative collaboration methods, like team swarming or pair programming, to reduce bottlenecks.
The shift from siloed work to a more integrated approach where everyone contributes to key tasks in real time.

Leverage Smart Tools

• Automate repetitive tasks with tools that free up your team to focus on creative problem-solving.
• Adopt technologies like AI, DevOps, or advanced analytics to streamline workflows and reduce cycle times.

From Tweaks to Transformation

Here’s an example of the difference between incremental thinking and 10x thinking:

• Incremental Thinking: Your team improves story estimation accuracy by 10%, saving a few hours per sprint.
• 10x Thinking: Your team adopts DevOps practices, cutting deployment times from weeks to minutes. This enables real-time customer feedback, faster iterations, and reduced time-to-market.

The first approach is a minor improvement. The second revolutionizes how your team delivers value.

The Challenges of 10x Thinking (How to 10X Value?)

Let’s be honest: thinking at a 10x scale isn’t easy. The answers to the 10x question might seem:

• Expensive or resource-intensive at first glance.
• Longer-term in focus, requiring patience and vision.
• Bold and unconventional, demanding buy-in from stakeholders.

But the returns on investment are worth it. Instead of doing what you already do a little better, you’re now doing better things—the kind of work that moves the needle for your organization and your customers.

Ready to Think Bigger?

The next time your team feels stuck in incremental improvement mode, take a step back and ask:

• Are we solving the most impactful problem?
• What bold actions could deliver significantly more value?
• Is there something else we could do for the same effort that creates a bigger impact?