More structure than a board. Less ceremony than Scrum.
Over the years I’ve worked in startups, larger companies, and public sector projects. Different scales, different structures — but one thing tends to repeat.
As teams grow, process is introduced to create alignment. It often helps at first.
Over time though, the ceremony can start costing more energy than it returns.
So I built Grunnaro around a simple idea:
More structure than a board. Less ceremony than Scrum.
The method is intentionally simple:
- Progress means finished work
- Planning is ordering, not estimating
- Once something is started, it’s protected
- Ownership is explicit (who decides what’s next vs who executes how)
- Bugs are handled before piling on new planned work
It’s built with small product teams in mind (1–10 people to start), but the principles are meant to hold as teams grow.
It’s in beta but fully usable:
https://ro.grunna.com
I build this in the evenings outside of work, so I might not reply immediately — but I read everything carefully, and thoughtful feedback genuinely means a lot.
The sweet spot between kanban and scrum is where most small teams should live. Full scrum is overhead theater for teams under 5 people. Pure kanban lacks enough structure to prevent drift.
What I've settled on for solo/small team work: weekly goals (not sprints), a single prioritized list (not a board with 6 columns), and a 15-minute Friday review where I compare what I planned vs what I shipped. That's it.
The key insight for me was that process should scale with team size. Solo founders need almost no process. 2-3 person teams need a shared list and a weekly sync. You don't need story points until you have enough people that coordination costs exceed execution costs.
Really well put. I like the idea that process should scale with team size — that’s a framing more people need to hear.
The “coordination cost vs execution cost” insight especially resonates. It’s easy to over-engineer process before it’s actually needed.
Thanks for sharing this — thoughtful perspective.