23 Quotes by Jeff Sutherland

Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems – ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.

Never do betas. Never do work that you don’t think is good. You either give your customer something good, or you don’t. There is no ‘try’.

Embrace the unknown! That’s where learning lies! If you’re too afraid to learn, you will never get any better. This is the key to being successful at Scrum: embrace change.

The thing that cripples communication saturation is specialization – the number of roles and titles in a group. If people have a special title, they tend to do only things that seem a match for that title. And to protect the power of that role, they tend to hold on to specific knowledge.

Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose. But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool. Just as critical, but perhaps less celebrated, is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best – to have autonomy. On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.