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I've seen Kanban work well on smaller scales, and Scrum work well on larger scales.

I cannot for the life of me work in the churn and development pace of a Scrum team, so Kanban (and the culture around it) is best fit for me.

I think it also depends upon the type and culture of people working in the team as well. Some teams work really, really well with the predictable cadence, others do not.

It's a case by case kind of situation, I think.

That said I highly prefer Kanban personally for an number of reasons.



The commitment to sprints was literally the first thing that got dropped in our company. It's so nonsensical to create completely arbitrary deadlines without any real urgency.

We now have long sprints (~1 months) for reviews and retrospectives. Which are usually well received. You get to see what all the other teams have been doing, and you also get a formal chance to talk about any problems.


Sprints and timeboxing more generally is not about enforcing deadlines. That's such a common misconception and I wish it would die.

Timeboxing is about committing only a small amount of time and money at a time, so you can choose to double down on winners and stop investing in losers, rather than suddenly finding yourself having sunk 3 months of time into something that turns out wasn't that good after all.

The question is not "How much can we definitely complete in two weeks?"; it's "What things are promising enough that we are willing to dump two weeks into them, with no promise of ever making a profit?"

If one month counts as a small amount of time and money for your organisation, then you're doing it right!


It's not a misconception when it's what many organizations are actually doing. Any that implement SAFe, for instance.




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