😱 The SEO Scrum Survival Guide
😱 The SEO Scrum Survival Guide
How SEOs professionals can work in Scrum teams (and live to tell the tale)
A weekly newsletter that provides practical advice for SEOs on how to work with product and development teams.
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I’ve been working with Scrum since I started working product.
Scrum is a lightweight and simplified agile framework, that product and engineering teams use to break down work and execute projects.
Although it is simplified it isn’t simple.
If you’re new to working in a product and engineering team that uses Scrum it can be daunting to get your head around.
That’s why I’ve created this “survival guide to Scrum” for those SEOs working in teams that are using it.
In this newsletter, we are going to cover the following:
📈 Why is Scrum important?
🔄 What is Scrum?
🎓 The Goal of Scrum
⚙️ Scrum Framework: Three Components
⚖️ Advantages vs Disadvantages of Scrum
🏥 How to Survive Scrum as an SEO
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🌀 Agile Frameworks
In my What is Agile newsletter, I outline that agile is a mindset, not a process.
However, to practice agile a team needs a structured process and set of practices to help teams learn how to be flexible and release iteratively (e.g. being agile).
This is where agile frameworks come in.
An agile framework contains practices, roles and ceremonies that teams can use to start their agile journey.
There are numerous different agile frameworks in the wild, including Scrum, Kanban and Lean.
In this newsletter, I want to focus on surviving Scrum as an SEO.
📈 Why is Scrum important?
If you work with a product and engineering team, there is a high probability that they will be using the Scrum framework.
According to the State of Agile report in 2022, which surveyed 3,000 IT and business professionals, Scrum is the most popular agile framework used by IT and engineering teams practising agile.
Scrum is also becoming a more searched-for agile framework globally based on Google Trend data for the last 5 years.
🔄 What is Scrum?
The definition of Scrum based on the Scrum Guide:
“Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.”
- The Scrum Guide
It is a systematic process that is simple and lightweight that product and engineering teams use to get technical projects executed.
The framework processes encourage teams to do the following on repeat:
🗓️ Planning - The team focus on identifying priority tickets that need to be worked on by the development team, which are pulled from the product backlog.
🎟️ Backlog management - The team agree on which tickets need to be worked on based on priority and estimation, as well as the “acceptance criteria” for each ticket.
📦 Increment - The developers work on completing the tickets in an agreed fixed time box (known as a sprint); the code or items they are working on is called an increment.
🔎 Review - The teams inspect the work at the end of the fixed time box, and either releases the increment to production or adjust the work based on feedback in the next sprint.
🗣️ Retrospective - The team reflect on how they’ve worked during the sprint and creates some specific actions on how the team can work better together.
🔄 Repeat - The whole process repeats again for the next sprint (which starts just after the last sprint).
All of this happens in a fixed-time box called a sprint (see Scrum Ceremonies).
🎓 The Goal of Scrum
Scrum is about the incremental, iterative approach to delivering work that helps to reduce risk and create predictability within the team.
This allows teams to create releasable pieces of work that add up to creating useful products and features of websites that drive results.
For example, at DeepCrawl, we used the Scrum framework to rebuild the app from the ground up. In each release, we added a filter, button or graph to enhance the customer's experience and add value (whilst inspecting, reflecting and learning along the way).
⚙️ Scrum Framework: Three Components
To better understand how to survive Scrum, it is important you understand the three core components that make up the framework:
🥅 Scrum Artifacts
👥 Scrum Team
📆 Scrum Events
👥 Scrum Team
The Scrum Team must be made up of specialists who can complete the work within a Sprint.
A Scrum team is usually made up of 3-10 individuals but in my experience the fewer the better (usually 3-5 people).
A Scrum team consists of:
🛠️ Developers - The people in the team that create the increment in a Sprint.
🗂️ Product Owner - A PO is accountable for maximising the value of the product from the work of the team and managing the product backlog.
💡 Scrum Master - The facilitator of the Scrum Team and are accountable for the team’s effectiveness by improving how the team works together.
📆 Scrum Ceremonies
The Scrum framework is made up of specific ceremonies or meetings which must be attended by each team member.
The most important, and famous, event is The Sprint.
👟 The Sprint 👟
A fixed time-boxed length of time that a Scrum team agree on to work on increment items in the backlog.
Once a sprint is over, the team review the work by the developers and decide if it has met the agreed criteria and then release to production. As soon as the Sprint is over a new Sprint immediately starts and the cycle repeats.
Many teams will use the default 2 week sprint but others will use 1 week or 4 week sprints. It all depends on how your tech team operates.
Remember: The release cadence can impact on your SEO strategy.
In each sprint there are official ceremonies or meetings that the team will attend:
🗓️ Sprint Planning - The planning session lays out the work to be completed in the Sprint. It requires input from the entire Sprint team.
🗣️ Product Daily Scrum - A 15-minute event for developers to inspect the progress of work.
Sprint Review - The Sprint review is where the Scrum Team review the result of the Sprint work and demos what has been completed by the development team.
🔍 Sprint Retrospective - A meeting for the Scrum team to inspect and improve the effectiveness of the team's work as well as the quality of the work.
🔨 Sprint Refinement (not official) - Not officially part of the Scrum framework but many teams do backlog refinement to make sure items are ready for the next Sprint.
🥅 Scrum Artifacts
The Scrum Artifacts are a way for the Scrum team to manage their workload, and at the same time maximise transparency throughout the process.
There are three artifacts that each have a goal:
🎟️ Product Backlog - An single source of work in an ordered list of what will be needed to improve the product (what) and a clear goal (why).
🔄 Sprint Backlog - Is made up of a Sprint Goal (why) and set of Product Backlog items (what) and an action increment plan (how).
📦 Product Increments - A potentially releasable and useable piece of work at the end of a Sprint if the item meets the agreed definition of done.
⚖️ Advantages vs Disadvantages of Scrum
When working in Scrum teams you need to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the framework.
👍 Advantages
The advantages of Scrum are:
🌀 Iterative Releases - The framework can help your team reduce risk by breaking down complex ideas and learning by releasing small and frequent releases.
🧠 Encourages Agile Mindset - Actually releasing code and being agile can be scary for teams, so Scrum helps them learn these habits.
🥁 Consistent Releases - The sprint allows teams to consistently release pieces of work which means you can have a better understanding of how long things are going to take.
👎 Disadvantages
The disadvantages of using Scrum:
📥 Output Focused - As the team is working on small releases they can easily become output-focused (features), instead of outcome-focused (changing user behaviour to drive business results).
🧟 Zombie Scrum - When teams start to use Scrum they stop adapting and just stick to the official lightweight processes, roles and ceremonies (a state known as zombie scrum in the industry).
➡️ Sprinting - Teams that use Scrum constantly feel the need to fill up the backlog with items, regardless if they are valuable or not, to give the development team something to do.
🏥 How to Survive Scrum as an SEO
Now that we’ve better understood the Scrum framework, why it is important and its disadvantages it is time to give you some tips to survive.
As an SEO there are three core survival tips:
🧠 Brainless Process
🌀 Backlog Management
💃 Events Tango
🧠 Brainless Process
It is important to understand that Scrum does not have a brain.
What does that mean? Well, the official Scrum Guide says it best:
“Scrum is built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it”
- The Scrum Guide
To put it plainly, the Scrum framework is only as smart as the team that uses it.
Scrum is a framework made up of roles, ceremonies and artifacts which can help teams systematically break down complex ideas.
But that’s it.
It still requires the team to create a product backlog, goals and a clear strategy to actually drive value.
As an SEO it’s critical to create an SEO strategy and set clear goals before moving on to planning and delivering initiatives.
However, your SEO strategy work requires discovery work to build empathy and walk in the shoes of the business.
This allows you to define opportunities by understanding the business, target audience and SEO data, and then define a clearly prioritised set of initiatives and opportunities.
I use The SEO Strategy Stack framework to help me identify and outline a prioritised plan, set clear goals and connect product backlog to the wider business strategy.
Example
I’ve helped a SaaS team use the Scrum framework to bring some stability and consistence to their way of working between business and developmen teams.
However, a key part of that relationship is that the busines team need to align on a clear SEO/business strategy (problem → guiding policy → coherent actions), prioritised roadmap and clear goals to measure the success.
This creates a product backlog that is grouped into key themes that help solve a particular outcome that is connected to the wider business strategy.
The Scrum framework is used as a systamtic delivery process to pull initiatives/stories from the product backlog, break them down into realistic tickets, and deliver value to the companies target audience.
Rather than just a series of “ideas” that are hurridley released after every sprint.
🌀 Backlog Management
There is a perception from non-technical team members that creating tickets is a linear process.
The idea is taken from the roadmap, added to the backlog and then worked on by the development team to be released.
In reality, the process of creating tickets is much more strategic when working in Scrum.
This means that product managers/owners need to take the following into account when doing backlog management:
☑️ Getting tickets ready
🪟 Just In Time (JIT) Window
☑️ Getting tickets ready
You see many tickets/stores/tasks in a backlog that are not ready to be immediately worked on by a development team. I’ve found that there are four states of a ticket.
Raw → Refined → Reviewed → Ready.
A product owner (or SEO professional) needs to work with a development, design or product team to make sure the ticket is turned from raw → ready.
In practice, this means using shared understanding, specification by example and backlog management techniques to make sure the technical team understand the ticket and why it is important.
While at the same time work with them to estimate the ticket, and if too big, break it down into smaller tickets that can be added to the sprint backlog.
🪟 Just In Time (JIT) Window
Turning ideas/tickets/stories from raw to ready is only half the problem.
You also need to work just in time to make sure you start working on a ticket/story/task just about when the development team need to work on it.
🙈 Planning too early
If you work on the ticket too soon, then the development team won’t work on the ticket for weeks or months. This means that the content of the ticket becomes out of date or everyone forgets what they talked about months ago.
😱 Planning too late
In contrast, if you work on tickets too late, then developers don’t have enough time to properly understand the ask within the ticket. This can result in rushed estimation or a lack of shared understanding around a ticket (creating defects which get rejected and pushed to the next sprint).
I’ve found the JIT window for breaking down tickets is between 2-5 weeks before the team needs to work on it.
💃 Events Tango
At its core Scrum is made up of five key events that SEOs need to be aware of:
🗓️ Sprint Planning
🧾 Sprint Review
🗳️ Sprint Retrospective
⏲️ Daily Standup
🗂️ Backlog Refinement
🗓️ Sprint Planning
The Sprint planning event is where the team decide what work the development team are working on during the Sprint.
It’s in this meeting that SEO tickets are either rejected or accepted.
For example, in Jira, the team will pull ready tickets from the backlog of items and into the Sprint backlog at the top of the board. The priority tickets are always usually at the top of the backlog, and deprioritised tickets are found at the bottom.
Although planning might seem simple, the reality is that as an SEO you can set yourself up for failure before you even join the meeting.
Why?
Well, the product and engineering team don’t have a lot of time (or patience) to figure out the requests in your tickets. I didn’t when I was at DeepCrawl.
If the SEO tickets you want to get into a sprint are:
❌ Unclear and difficult to read
❌ A literal book packed full of unnecessary information
❌ The first time you’re mentioning the ticket
Then this will result in the same thing: your SEO tickets being deprioritised.
How can you overcome SEO tickets being deprioritised in Sprint planning?
Simple. You need to get SEO tickets into a “Ready” state and have the developers understand the tickets before you even join Sprint planning (see backlog management tips above).
Then the meeting is just about making sure the agreed-upon ticket criteria are still understood and answering any last-minute questions. I’ve found aligning developers and designers before a planning meeting before planning helps to get tickets pulled into the sprint a lot faster.
🧾 Sprint Review
The Sprint review is the meeting that happens at the end of the sprint and it’s where the whole team reviews the work done by the developers.
It is in this meeting that a developer will demo their work for the whole team to inspect and make sure it meets the definition of done.
Then the work is either:
✅ Accepted: The tickets are marked as closed and the developers push the changes to production (the live environment) from staging.
❌ Rejected: The work the developer has done does not meet the acceptance criteria of the ticket and will need to be pulled into the next sprint.
If you were in teams that use Sprints, and you have tickets being worked on, it is critical that you join the Sprint review.
This is the place to raise red flags and let developers know if anything hasn’t met the criteria. These feedback loops are critical because the longer it takes to raise an issue with the developers the harder it will take them to fix it.
A few other tips for SEOs who join the review meeting:
🎟️ Close SEO Tickets: As the SEO specialist is the one who submits the ticket, ideally they should be the one who reviews the ticket (and accepts or rejects the ticket).
🤷♀️ Understand Devs: The demos are also a great way to better understand the development team and how they work.
💬 Difficult Conversations - If work is not completed a great place to ask a simple and powerful question: “Why hasn’t it been completed?”
🗳️ Sprint Retrospective
A retrospective is an important meeting for the team to understand:
✅ What went well: Highlight what did go well
🔄 How to improve: Where we can improve
🧾 Actions: Choose 1-3 actions to work on as a team
The goal of this meeting is to only have 1-3 clear actions for the team to work on and reflect on in the next meeting the result of those actions.
For example, I’ve been a part of retrospectives for development teams which highlighted some ways I needed to improve.
A few tips for SEO professionals:
🤷♀️ Check retrospectives exist: Ask your project or product manager if retrospectives are held in your organisation for developers.
🎯 SEO Improvements: It should be clear but it is an event to discuss what went wrong or well with the developers (highlight if things are great!).
👌 SEO Code Quality: If development teams’ releases are reducing the quality of code quality, this is a place to raise problems and potential solutions.
🚫 SEO and Dev: The meeting can help you understand the dev team and the blockers/issues causing them to not get things done.
⏲️ Daily Standup
A daily standup is usually a max 15-minute meeting for developers to inspect the progress of the work in the sprint. Where they can raise issues or blockers.
I see many recommending SEOs should join daily standups to better understand the development team.
I’m going to go against the grain on this and say: This is a very bad idea.
The reality is that daily standups are:
🚫 NOT for non-dev stakeholders to discuss new tickets.
🚫 NOT a non-dev meeting to discuss planning tickets.
🚫 NOT a non-dev meeting to discover tickets.
An SEO professional should only be joining stand-ups to answer any questions about tickets if needed or if they are part of the product squad.
🗂️ Backlog Refinement
A backlog refinement meeting is not technically an official ceremony of Scrum. However, many teams use this event to refactor tickets in the backlog.
The refinement meeting is used to:
Review and remove tickets
Review and update acceptance criteria
Review and prioritise tickets
It’s important that SEO professionals are part of this meeting because:
Tickets are deprioritised and pushed further down the backlog in this meeting
Tickets are deleted if the team are handling a bloated backlog
Tickets can become out of date as new information or data becomes available
As an SEO professional, you can find that your tickets are slowly being pushed further and further down the backlog (priority tickets are at the top). So, it’s important you are part of these meetings and conversations to fight for your SEO tickets (because nobody else will).
A few other tips for backlog refinement meetings:
📞 Check refinement event exists: Ask your product management or product management if there is a backlog refinement event.
🔍 Review SEO tickets: The refinement meeting is a great place to better understand why tickets are deprioritised (usually down to other projects having more value).
✅ Review SEO acceptance criteria: Things change rapidly in an engineering team, so it is important to make sure your SEO tickets and their acceptance criteria are still relevant.
📌 Summary
Phew! That was a lot so let’s quickly recap what we learned in this newsletter:
Agile frameworks - Product and engineering teams use agile frameworks to help them become agile.
Scrum is popular - The most popular of these agile frameworks is Scrum based on industry data and Google trends.
What is Scrum - It is a systematic process that is simple and lightweight that product and engineering teams use to get technical projects executed.
The goal of Scrum - Scrum is about the incremental, iterative approach to delivering work that helps to reduce risk and create predictability.
The three components - There are three core components that make up the framework: Scrum Artifacts, Scrum Team and Scrum Ceremonies.
Advantages and disadvantages - There are many disadvantages and advantages to using the Scrum framework - it isn’t for every team.
Surviving Scrum - As an SEO you need to survive Scrum by taking into account: it is a brainless process, managing the backlog and joining meetings.
📚 Further Reading
🎯 Think Like an SEO Product Manager Course
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