Scrum Fundamentals Training: What a Founder Should Learn Before Hiring a Scrum Team

If you are about to hire a team that works in Scrum, you need about an hour of Scrum fundamentals training, not a certificate. The official Scrum Guide is under 13 pages. What makes it hard is that every part depends on the others, and the parts a founder skips are usually the ones that would have shown the problem early.

Our own team went through this. We once ran a two-day Scrum Fundamentals training in-house, with exercises in small groups, because reading the Guide and following it are different skills. This page is the short version we would give a client before the first Sprint.

What Scrum is, in one paragraph

The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, last revised in November 2020, defines Scrum as “a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.” In practice, a small team builds the product in fixed cycles called Sprints, one month or shorter. At the end of each Sprint you look at working software, decide what to change, and plan the next one. The Guide calls the idea behind this empiricism, and it rests on three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation.

The parts of Scrum: 3 accountabilities, 5 events, 3 artifacts

Scrum has few parts. Each one exists so that a problem shows up while it’s still cheap to fix.

Part	What the Scrum Guide says	Your part as a founder
Product Owner	Accountable for maximizing the value of the product; “one person, not a committee”	Usually you, or one person you trust with priorities
Scrum Master	Accountable for establishing Scrum as the Guide defines it	Expect them to coach you too, not only the developers
Developers	Create the plan for the Sprint, keep to the Definition of Done, adapt the plan daily	Let them decide how to build; you decide what matters first
Sprint	One month or less, fixed length	Agree on the length once; don’t stretch it to fit a feature
Sprint Planning	Up to 8 hours for a one-month Sprint; answers why, what and how	Bring the “why”: the one goal this Sprint serves
Daily Scrum	15 minutes, for the Developers	You don’t need to attend
Sprint Review	Up to 4 hours for a one-month Sprint; a working session, not a presentation	Attend every time and try the software yourself
Sprint Retrospective	Up to 3 hours for a one-month Sprint	Join when invited; act on what comes out
Product Backlog	Ordered list of what the product needs; its commitment is the Product Goal	You own the order
Sprint Backlog	The Sprint Goal, the chosen items and the plan	Don’t add work mid-Sprint without talking to the team
Increment	Work that meets the Definition of Done	Accept only work that is Done

The Guide says events are usually shorter when Sprints are shorter, so a two-week Sprint rarely needs a full day of planning. That matters if you are the one clearing your calendar for it.

What changed in the 2020 Scrum Guide, and why you should care

If you learned Scrum before 2020, some of it has changed. The revisions page lists what changed in 2020, and three changes matter to a founder:

• There is now one Scrum Team focused on one product. The old “Development Team” inside the team is gone, so the Product Owner and the Scrum Master are part of the team, not managers above it.
• The Guide added the Product Goal, a future state of the product the team plans against. If you can’t write one in two sentences, the backlog will drift.
• Each artifact now has a commitment: the Product Goal for the Product Backlog, the Sprint Goal for the Sprint Backlog and the Definition of Done for the Increment.

The Guide also dropped most IT-specific language, so the same rules read naturally outside software.

Five fundamentals founders get wrong

1. Priorities nobody owns. The Guide says the Product Owner is one person and the whole organization must respect their decisions. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026, unclear priorities or requirements was the most common answer to “which factor has done the most to make your job harder”, at 16.6% of 18,214 developers. That is the Product Owner’s job, and in a startup it lands on the founder. Our guide to the Product Owner’s responsibilities covers it in detail.
2. “Done” that isn’t done. Work that doesn’t meet the Definition of Done can’t be released or even shown at the Sprint Review. A Sprint that ends with “90% finished” items gives you nothing to test.
3. Meetings that grow. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report from June 2025 found that the average worker gets 117 emails a day and 153 Teams messages a weekday. Scrum’s timeboxes are there to keep its own meetings from adding to that pile. A 15-minute Daily Scrum that runs 45 minutes is an early sign the process is slipping.
4. Big batches. The 2025 DORA report, based on nearly 5,000 technology professionals, found that 90% use AI at work and summed it up in one line: “AI doesn’t fix a team; it amplifies what’s already there.” A team that ships small, finished Increments every Sprint is set up to gain from AI tools. A team that piles up half-finished work gets more of it, faster.
5. Changing Scrum to hide a problem. Skipping retrospectives because they “take too long” is the classic case. We wrote a separate post on ScrumBut and how to avoid it.

A one-hour Scrum fundamentals training for you and your co-founder

You don’t need a course to start. Block one hour and do this together:

• 15 minutes: read the Scrum Guide sections on the Scrum Team, the events and the artifacts.
• 15 minutes: write your Product Goal in two sentences. Name who it serves and what changes for them.
• 15 minutes: list the first ten things the product must do, as short user stories, and put them in order. Only one item can be first.
• 10 minutes: write a first Definition of Done. For example: code reviewed, tested on the target devices, deployed to a test environment, and accepted by the Product Owner.
• 5 minutes: decide who is the Product Owner and how fast they answer questions. Within a day is a good rule.

Then check yourself. Can you say who cancels a Sprint? The Guide answers: only the Product Owner. Who sizes the work? “The Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing.” If both answers came easily, you’re ready for the first Sprint Planning. To see how a team sizes your stories, read our guide to planning poker.

Where Scrum certificates fit

A certificate such as PSM, CSM or PSPO shows that your Scrum Master or Product Owner studied the Guide and passed a test. It doesn’t show that they have run a Sprint Review with an unhappy client. When you hire, ask how many Sprints they have run, what their last Retrospective changed, and how they handle a stakeholder who goes around the Product Owner. The answers tell you more than the badge.

For a founder, a certificate is optional. What you do need is enough knowledge of the Guide to notice when a team skips a part of it.

How we would estimate the work before the first Sprint

Scrum plans one Sprint at a time, but you still need a budget before you start. Our project estimate turns your brief into user stories. You confirm what is in scope, and every hour in the budget traces back to a story you kept. Uncheck a story and its hours come off.

We check the hours the model suggests against what our team actually books on finished projects, then multiply by our published rate of $39-55 an hour. It’s a planning range, not a fixed quote. The stories you confirm become your first Product Backlog, so the estimate doubles as the starting point for Sprint Planning. You can see what your idea costs to build in about four minutes.

What we would do

1. Do the one-hour training above before you sign with any team.
2. Name one Product Owner on your side and give them the final word on priorities.
3. Start with two-week Sprints. They give you a review every 14 days without much planning overhead.
4. Attend every Sprint Review and use the software, not slides. On HealthyNikah every Sprint ended with a live demo, so the client watched the app grow and changed priorities as we went.
5. Keep the cycle short when the plan is uncertain. For Traza we worked in weekly cycles on the client’s Jira, and the client could change priorities every week.
6. If nobody on your side can run the process, hire it: our dedicated teams come with a Scrum Master and a business analyst, and you keep the product decisions.

FAQ

What does Scrum fundamentals training cover?

The three accountabilities (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers), the five events (Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective), the three artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment) and their commitments, and the empirical idea behind them: transparency, inspection and adaptation.

How long is a Sprint in Scrum?

One month or less, and the length stays fixed. Our teams usually run Sprints of one to two weeks. Shorter Sprints mean more chances to inspect and adapt and limit the cost of a wrong turn.

Does a founder need a Scrum certification?

No. A founder needs to know the Scrum Guide well enough to own priorities and spot shortcuts. Certificates matter more for the person who runs the process, and even then experience counts for more than the badge.

Which Scrum events should a founder attend?

Sprint Planning, to explain why the Sprint matters, and every Sprint Review, to try the Increment and give feedback. The Daily Scrum is for the Developers. Join the Retrospective when the team invites you.

What changed in the 2020 Scrum Guide?

It made Scrum less prescriptive, merged everyone into one Scrum Team, added the Product Goal, gave each artifact a commitment, replaced self-organizing with self-managing and removed most IT-specific language.