Thanks Tobias. Regardless of Jeff and Ken’s intent or involvement in crafting the Agile Manifesto, it explicitly prioritises continuous delivery of valuable software for the customer, collaboration with the customer in preference to contract negotiations, and harnessing change for the customer’s competitive advantage. It also doesn’t mention “business value”, or “products”.

In contrast, Scrum (at least in the official Scrum Guide) is specifically a product development framework, and does not mention the word “customer” once. Its explicit focus is on “delivering products of the highest possible value” and “Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs”.

While one may infer customer value as part of this focus, it is not explicit, and as such is open for interpretation. The word “value” is used in a broader sense, and I would argue the stronger message which comes across from the SG is one of developing products which generate and maximise value for the business, rather than one of “harnessing change for the customer’s competitive advantage” or the other explicit customer-focused values and principles found in the Agile Manifesto.

Sure, one could argue it is impossible to develop products which drive business value without them being valuable for the customer, and I’d largely agree. It’s safe to assume both Scrum and Agile point us towards delivering valuable outcomes for the people involved, including our customers.

The key difference IMO is that the philosophy of Scrum comes across (from the SG, and in its incarnation in the wild) more as a call to focus our development endeavours on THE PRODUCT (154 mentions) or project (7 mentions) and THE PROCESS (20 mentions), whereas Agile (Manifesto) centres our attention on THE CUSTOMER.

Regardless, I didn’t go into this detail in the article because the difference between Scrum and Agile isn’t the main thrust of the post, rather it is about product vs project driven approaches.