Stop 07 · Agile, Execution & DeliveryTopics · 2/12

Scrum vs Kanban

In short

Scrum and Kanban are the two most common ways agile teams organise work. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one causes daily friction.

Scrum organizes work into fixed-length sprints with defined roles and ceremonies; Kanban is a continuous-flow system visualized on a board with work-in-progress limits — pick based on how predictable your work is.

The purple blob cooks three dosas on a tawa with order slips clipped on a string above.

Think of it like this

The dosa counter

A dosa counter has room for only three dosas on the tawa. New orders wait on the slip line until a spot frees up. That's Kanban: continuous flow with a limit. Scrum is more like a fixed weekly tiffin menu planned every Sunday.

Watch it happen

Two ways to run the work

Scrum

Fixed sprints, often two weeks
Roles: PO, Scrum Master, devs
Planning, review and retro each sprint

Kanban

Continuous flow, no sprints
Work-in-progress limits per column
Measures cycle time and flow

Scrum suits planned feature work. Kanban suits unpredictable streams like support or ops. Many teams blend both.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Scrum uses timeboxes

Work is committed sprint by sprint. Changing scope mid-sprint is discouraged.

Kanban limits WIP

A WIP limit caps how many items sit in a column, which exposes bottlenecks fast.

Different metrics

Scrum teams often track velocity. Kanban teams track cycle time: how long one item takes.

Hybrids are common

Plenty of teams run sprints with a Kanban board. Choose what fits your work.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Using Kanban without WIP limits.

Do this instead

Without limits it's just a to-do board. Set limits and respect them.

Oops

Forcing support tickets into two-week sprints.

Do this instead

Urgent, unpredictable work flows better in Kanban, or a separate lane.

Your mission

Build a Kanban board

~25 min

Quick check

A support team gets urgent tickets at random times every day. Which approach usually fits better?

Go deeper

1Compare a Scrum board and a Kanban board for the same hypothetical project.
2Learn which teams tend to prefer Kanban (support, ops) vs Scrum (feature teams).
3Understand that many real teams run a hybrid of the two.