Glossary

Banana Concept

A BananaBananaA task without context — no "why", no link to a real outcome. The thing the method exists to eliminate. is a task thrown over the wall without context: no why, no visible link to a real business outcome, no influence over it. Backlogs full of bananas are the natural output of organisations that throw work between sales, product, engineering, and customer success.

The slogan is “stop throwing bananas, start collaborating.” The method’s answer is to keep context in shared documents and daily conversation rather than in a backlog of disconnected tickets.

Daily Check-in Ritual

The Daily Check-inDaily Check-inA 15-minute daily ritual where the team surfaces reality and unknowns rather than reporting status. is the smallest ritual in the method. Held daily for about fifteen minutes, it exists to make the day’s reality and the day’s unknownsUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates. visible to the whole Team — not to report progress to a manager.

New unknowns surfaced in the Check-in are pushed to the Uncertainty ListUncertainty ListThe team's living list of open unknowns — sized 1/3/5, phrased as questions, reviewed daily and in planning, chipped away each week. rather than solved in the room.

Initiative Author Role

The Initiative AuthorInitiative AuthorThe person accountable for an initiative's context — they write and keep the Initiative Document honest. is the role accountable for an initiative’s context. They write the Initiative DocumentInitiative DocumentThe PR/FAQ-shaped document where an initiative's context lives — customer, solution, plan, business case, and success metrics. and keep it true as reality changes. The Initiative Author is not necessarily the most senior person — it is whoever can best hold the why of the work and defend its success metrics.

Roles are not titles: a person can be the Initiative Author on one initiative and an ordinary member of the Team on another.

Initiative Document Artifact

The Initiative DocumentInitiative DocumentThe PR/FAQ-shaped document where an initiative's context lives — customer, solution, plan, business case, and success metrics. is the home of an initiative’s context. Shaped like a PR/FAQ, it is written before the work begins so the team can argue about the idea while it is still cheap to change. It carries the customer and problem, a solution sketch, the plan and team, the business case, and the success metrics.

It is owned in practice by the Initiative AuthorInitiative AuthorThe person accountable for an initiative's context — they write and keep the Initiative Document honest., and it is the artifact the weekly rituals revolve around.

Initiative Owner Role

The Initiative OwnerInitiative OwnerThe role accountable for keeping an initiative on track — owns the Initiative Document, the Approach, the team, and the board. takes an initiative once it’s funded and shaped, and keeps it alive: maintaining the Initiative DocumentInitiative DocumentThe PR/FAQ-shaped document where an initiative's context lives — customer, solution, plan, business case, and success metrics. and the ApproachThe ApproachThe multi-week narrative roadmap — titled weekly outcomes ("The one where…"), each with a demo, planned backwards from success., sourcing the team, adjusting the Product BoardProduct BoardTwo or more stakeholders who see the team's weekly demo and coach it — the human in the loop, with no single lead., owning central communication, and raising the alarm early when things go off the rails.

Where the Initiative AuthorInitiative AuthorThe person accountable for an initiative's context — they write and keep the Initiative Document honest. gets an initiative started, the Initiative Owner keeps it true as reality changes. On smaller efforts the two can be the same person.

Learning rate Concept

Learning rateLearning rateThe speed at which a team turns uncertainty into knowledge — the method's true KPI, driven by the expectation→change→review loop. is the speed at which a team turns uncertaintyUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates. into knowledge. Scaleflow treats it as the real KPI — not velocity, story points, or throughput — because even an underperforming team can rise to greatness if it out-learns its competition.

It’s driven by a weekly loop: make expectations explicit, document changes in those expectations (your Lessons Learned), and review them to adjust planning. The #10percent heuristic anchors it — seven lessons that each make the team 10% better compound to roughly double the productivity (1.1⁷ ≈ 2).

Product Board Role

The Product BoardProduct BoardTwo or more stakeholders who see the team's weekly demo and coach it — the human in the loop, with no single lead. is a small group — two or more people — who hold a stake in an initiative or can supply the context and experience it needs. They see the team’s weekly work and give feedback, but they don’t own the initiative.

A healthy board mixes four contributions: the Specialist (has built something like this), the Critic (challenges the work and guards company values), the Decision Enabler (breaks ties on budget or stopping), and the Customer Connection (brings the customer’s voice). There is deliberately no single lead — the board is the human in the loop that keeps teams delivering to people, not to ticketing systems. Each member gives at least an hour a week of high-quality attention.

The Approach Artifact

The ApproachThe ApproachThe multi-week narrative roadmap — titled weekly outcomes ("The one where…"), each with a demo, planned backwards from success. is an initiative’s plan: a multi-week narrative roadmap with a sliding window of detail (6–12 weeks sharp, then quarters, then halves), revised weekly.

It’s planned backwards — the last week’s outcome is success from the Initiative Document — and every week gets a “The one where…” title plus a demo definition. Read end to end, the titles should tell a coherent story. Uncertainties are assigned to specific weeks, which is what makes discovery and delivery run in parallel. Optional Tracks (Design, Frontend, Backend, Research) group the work within it.

Things to Figure Out Concept

Things to Figure OutThings to Figure OutEach person's one thing to figure out today, framed as a Why/How/What/When question that resolves into a Lesson Learned. (TFO) is the daily commitment in the Check-inDaily Check-inA 15-minute daily ritual where the team surfaces reality and unknowns rather than reporting status.: exactly one thing each person will figure out today, scoped to a single day.

A TFO is phrased as a Why / How / What / When question, not a task — “Why do our estimates keep missing the mark?” rather than “review estimates.” Every completed TFO produces a Lesson Learned; that feedback loop is how the team turns uncertaintyUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates. into knowledge.

Uncertainty Concept

UncertaintyUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates. is what the team does not yet know. Scaleflow treats it as a first-class thing to be named, sized, and tracked — most visibly on the Uncertainty ListUncertainty ListThe team's living list of open unknowns — sized 1/3/5, phrased as questions, reviewed daily and in planning, chipped away each week. — rather than buried inside an estimate.

Sizing uncertainty (often 1 / 3 / 5) and phrasing unknowns as If/Then or Will/When turns vague anxiety into work the team can actually schedule.

Uncertainty List Artifact

The Uncertainty ListUncertainty ListThe team's living list of open unknowns — sized 1/3/5, phrased as questions, reviewed daily and in planning, chipped away each week. turns the team’s unknownsUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates. into work. Where the Initiative Document captures what and the ApproachThe ApproachThe multi-week narrative roadmap — titled weekly outcomes ("The one where…"), each with a demo, planned backwards from success. captures when, the Uncertainty List captures what we don’t know yet — and makes sure the team chips away at it.

It’s owned by the team and sized by project: small projects name one key uncertainty, medium three, large five. Items are phrased as questions (If/Then or Will/When), reviewed daily in the Check-inDaily Check-inA 15-minute daily ritual where the team surfaces reality and unknowns rather than reporting status. (“what’s your biggest uncertainty right now?”), turned into Things to Figure OutThings to Figure OutEach person's one thing to figure out today, framed as a Why/How/What/When question that resolves into a Lesson Learned. or demo objectives during Week Planning, and scanned for recurring themes in retrospectives.

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