👩💻 A Day in the Life of Harper — Where Scrum Actually Works
Harper always arrived at her desk with a ritual: laptop open, mug of ginger tea, and ten quiet minutes to stare at her calendar before the chaos began.
Today’s calendar was full. Not the soul-crushing, back-to-back Zoom blocks kind of full — but the kind that meant there was real work to be done. Good work.
She took a sip and opened the pull request.
☕ 8:54 AM — Courage
The refactor had lived in her drafts folder for over a week. It touched a lot of sensitive places — session auth, redirect rules, and the dreaded mobile edge case that only broke things on Safari. Harper had tested it. Twice. And still, her finger hovered over the “Create PR” button like it might explode.
Click.
The Slack notification came five minutes later. Code review.
Yvette, their API lead, was fast. And blunt.
But the first line of her comment surprised Harper:
“This is gutsy. I have a few thoughts, but I’m glad you took the swing.”
Harper let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
Courage didn’t mean certainty. It meant trusting your team not to tear you down for trying.
🧍 10:00 AM — Focus
Standup was short, as it should be.
“I’m still on the session flow changes,” Harper said. “Got a weird loop that might be cache, might be me.”
“Nope, I had that too,” said Jules, their designer. “Let’s look together after this.”
No one read off Jira tickets. No one grandstanded.
Every person spoke, made eye contact, and moved on. Fifteen minutes. Clean.
Back in the day, Harper had been on a team where standup was a daily performance. She preferred this version — the one where people listened.
🤝 11:30 AM — Respect
“Okay,” Harper said, scooting her chair toward the intern’s screen. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Madison, fresh out of a bootcamp and still nervous around Git, turned her laptop so Harper could see.
They were pairing on some test coverage, and Madison was over-explaining everything — as if she expected to be corrected every other sentence.
But Harper let her finish, then smiled. “This is solid. The way you handled the async flow? That’s clean. One thing we might tweak is this test. It doesn’t quite cover…”
By the end of the hour, Madison had caught a small bug in Harper’s setup script — something that would have gone live otherwise.
Respect wasn’t just nodding politely. It was assuming the person across from you could surprise you.
📦 2:00 PM — Commitment
The Sprint Goal was clear: deliver the new dashboard UI.
Harper had been assigned to the backend for most of it, but when Miles got pulled into a customer support fire drill, the routing layer fell behind.
Harper pinged the frontend channel:
“I can hop in and help if someone wants to mob for a bit?”
Within ten minutes, three engineers were on a call, mapping out fallback routes and animating transitions. They shipped the last piece before 4.
She wasn’t the dashboard dev. It wasn’t “her” task. But it was their goal.
That mattered more.
✨ 4:45 PM — Openness
The retro started with one of Jenna’s classic icebreakers:
“What surprised you this Sprint?”
Harper thought for a second.
“The dashboard integration went smoother than I expected,” she offered. “Also — I kind of panicked about that refactor PR, but it turned out fine.”
Jules added, “I was surprised by how fast the QA turnarounds were this time. We’re getting better.”
And then Harper brought up a small tension.
“During planning, I felt like we breezed past the session edge cases. I wish we had paused a little longer there.”
There were nods. No one got defensive. No one said “we’ll take that offline.”
Openness wasn’t just vulnerability. It was making room for things to be said.
🌙 5:22 PM — Done (And Done-Done)
Her PR was merged. The dashboard was live. The Sprint Goal was hit.
There was a little string of fire emojis in Slack — nothing fancy, just quiet acknowledgment that something real had been built.
Harper closed her laptop and stretched.
She’d worked at places that talked about agile.
This team practiced it — not with rigid ceremonies or forced “fun,” but by actually living the values:
- Courage to try something bold
- Focus on what matters, not what looks busy
- Respect for every voice, even the newest
- Commitment to shared outcomes
- Openness in conversation and in process
She walked to the kitchen, mug in hand, already thinking about tomorrow’s backlog refinement — and the weird little bug she wanted to bring up before it got lost.
This was what good Scrum looked like.
And more importantly?
This was what good teams looked like.
P.S. I work at SEP, and it really is like this. Check it out sep.com