Great to hear a new Scrum convert and the difference it can make in a team! (startup or otherwise)<p>Couple of notes from an old Agile guy:<p>1) The Product Owner goes away with a startup. Everybody is representing the business. The P.O. idea was always an oversimplification anyway. In reality you have to adapt. (This is true of all of this)<p>2) You don't have to plan every task. Some teams do, some teams don't. Stories are hunks of business value that you can deliver inside a sprint. Tasks are what you do to make stories happen. If you can grab a story and deliver it, tested and approved, without decomposing your story into tasks? Good for you. I say go for it. But it's a team decision. Some folks are just more detail-oriented than I am. All I care about is getting the value to the customers.<p>3) It's a framework, not a methodology. Scrum is a PM framework around Agile principles. It doesn't tell you <i>how</i> to do things, simply the process for keeping track of your team's to-do list and executing on that list. It's all goodness and wondefulness, sure. But it's not the end of world hunger. Just some nice rituals to keep the team on-track.<p>4) The most important part of Scrum, or of agile for that matter, is to adapt. It's okay to totally screw-up. What I want to see is a team that is constantly improving their ability to deliver value. Whatever you read in a book or see in a seminar, you have to own and adapt it for your use. I've found that many folks get the idea of "process is evil" and then start to use cookie-cutter processes for their agile teams. Ouch. All of those rituals like stand-ups, showcases, retros and such? They're there because <i>over time we believe that most software development teams will adapt to use some form of them</i>. So start with them for a few cycles, then change it up.<p>5) Because of all of this, there is no conflict between Agile principles and startups. In fact, every startup I've seen that was successful was in some fashion agile. Startups are about providing perceived value to the customer quickly. Agile is about providing value to the Product Owner quickly. Unless you screw it up, it's the same difference.<p>If you haven't looked into it, I'd give some agile concepts a look-see. Even when I sole-developing I use a backlog, sprint, "done", etc. Not because I'm a fan, but because it is just the best way of working.