welzel

As a founder i can give you one advice you did not ask for:

Stick to one market and one solution. do Enterprise, do Schools. Don´t do both. It takes an insane amount of capacity and resources to penetrate a market, and it really does not matter how much you have - trying to be in two places at the same time will fail. If you care for both, start with one and get it done.

Also: i strongly suggest to stay away from a marketsplace. Pulling off a working marketplace is unicorn-level hard. Spend a day to research how many successful marketplaces exist and then another day to find for every successful marketplace the failed ones - getting a startup right might be 1:100 chances, getting a marketplace right is more like 1:10.000.

It is the same as with YT anti-adblock: all it does is move people away from Chrome.

Chrome had a good run, but it is time again to help family members and organisations to migrate to ... firefox and never look back. Google has lost its ways and i am sure that "don´t do evil" was just replaced by "do evil stuff in a sneaky way".

I don´t want to hate on the opinion of people, but "X is better then Y" is a pretty useless type of article.

I have used AWS, GCP and Azure + some more that offer AWS style of services. In the end the question is "what is best for my organisation?" It really really really does not matter if a developer finds GCP more easy to use or if AWS is way better at feature X.

The service has to fit the requirements.

And even worse, sometimes the requirements do not care for usability, cost or features.

At my startup (https://polifinity.com) we do allmost everything manually first and only build when we have "proof" that an idea works.

Examples: - we do not have onboarding automation, instead a simple make.com trigger is send and then we do onboarding from a team member - we have not build all parts of the product, but instead use very simple manual processes to simulate a LOT of the more expensive features - only after feedback we actually invest development time - we have an intelligent reminder feature, that is done using a google sheet + make.com and manual mail; building the feature is not cost efficient anytime soon - the core of our product is about product strategy. Instead of building a complex interface in the app, we offer (free) workshops that are more effective, but absolutely do not scale at all...

In my past startups we sometimes did even more extreme "do things that don´t scale" stuff:

- giving you personalized recommendations generated within 30 min. from a human

- B2B matching from a web-page, where actually a mail was send and we generated the matches dynamically from different sources => this worked out AMAZINGLY well

- complex reporting from a huge database -> report was generated by a data scientist within 2-3 business days and then based on feedback the feature was never implemented, as every report was different and lots of time required data not actually in the database

I feel very sorry for Santiago.

His pain seems to be real, even if it is not even connected with scrum.

What makes it really sad: all of this can be fixed very easy - the company "just" need to hire somebody who is able to address the underlaying root cause of this anti-pattern.

1) "1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game." Planing poker has nothing to do with scrum. It is an estimation technique. Just do "no estimation" and if it works for the team, everything is fine. Also it is a planning tool - if you didn´t understand how it works, maybe a quick google search could be helpful.

2) Scrum does not have "ceremonies". They are called "events" and can be extremely efficient - so if you spend more times in those meetings than actually working, something is very very wrong. Maybe get some outside help, have a retrospective that is done properly and understand the root cause?

2) "Scrum of Scrums" is not part of scrum - this is some scaled approach. Based on what he described it is most likely the anti-agile SAFe frankenstein of frameworks.

3) "We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention." -> WEIRD. People should pay attention to the actual meeting? Also none of this is part of scrum.

4) "We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit in a sprint." -> this is not scrum. This is whatever the team came up with.

5) "I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software." -> this is not scrum. It is estimation techniques.

6+7 "story points" are not a part of scrum. Agile contracts are a common practices however, but contracts based on story points are weird, because story points are a relative measurement that cannot be compared (same as velocity)

8. "Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously." - Scrum does not have the role of "manager" or "tech lead". So obviously you are not doing scrum.

don´t use 1Password - they are not trustworthy as an organisation.

Go with https://www.enpass.io/ lifetime instead and safe a LOT of money.