Every new hire at one company I worked for got a copy of Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. The red cover. Hard to miss.

Due to my role, people would find me and ask what I thought of it. They expected enthusiasm. What they got was: “There’s a bunch of good points in that book. But I hate the gratuitous title and cover.”

Twice the work in half the time. That’s the promise on the label. What about twice the quality? What about delivering twice the value? Speed and volume are the wrong things to optimize for, and stamping them on the cover of the movement’s de facto onboarding text sets the wrong expectation from page one.

The conversation led somewhere useful.

I’d explain that when the Manifesto was signed in Snowbird in 2001, the 17 signers weren’t a Scrum delegation. XP had the largest contingent. Crystal was in the room. The Manifesto itself doesn’t mention Scrum at all.

Treating Scrum as the destination misses what the movement was pointing at. It’s a good place to start. Prescriptive enough to teach, concrete enough to get traction. But the path doesn’t end there. Kanban and XP each offer something Scrum alone doesn’t. A fit-for-purpose approach looks different for a 6-person startup than a 200-person engineering org, and no single framework covers both well.

There are high-holiday agilists: people who know the vocabulary and can name Scrum ceremonies. And then there are practitioners who’ve wrestled with the ideas, hit the edges of the frameworks, and kept going.

That said, handing everyone the same book does something real. A shared experience creates a common vocabulary and a reference point people can actually baseline and grow from. That alignment has value, especially early.

A Scrum book is a decent starting point. Just don’t stop there.