“No One Cares How Hard You Work”

“No one cares about how hard you work. They care about what value you delivered.” – JJ Sutherland

In May of 2019 I had the chance to interview JJ Sutherland for a podcast. JJ is the CEO of Scrum Inc. and the son of Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum. During that interview I asked him “what do you know today that you wish you would have known 10 years ago?” His answer was pretty profound. “No cares how hard your work. They care about what value you deliver.” That statement can sound pretty harsh at first but think on that for a second…it’s true…whether we want to admit it or not.

At that point in the interview we were talking specifically about sprint demos. If you are unfamiliar with what that is, a sprint demo is when a team shows off the work they completed at the end of their work cycle, called a sprint. A lot of teams can easily slip into a cycle of only demoing how many story points or units of work they completed, or just talk about the obstacles they faced, or only talk about how the team worked late several nights in a row. To be fair, I do believe all of those things are valid and should be recognized. They represent effort and commitment which should be appreciated. However, I like to think of those things as the story line that leads to the value. At the end of the day, whatever you do needs to deliver value. Take farmers for example. They work long, hard hours. While we all know and appreciate that their work isn’t easy, what we ultimately want is the result of their hard work…on our dinner plates. No matter what your job title is, no matter what your role is, your goal should be to deliver value. To put it another way, results matter.

I’ll leave you with some tough questions and hope you challenge yourself to answer honestly. What story does your work tell? Are you delivering value or just the appearance of value? Do you make a difference at your job or do you just try to look busy?