Scrum is about well-defined as Object-Oriented Programming, and people have strong and incompatible opinions about it. Discussing whether something is Scrum on the internet is pointless.

In my experience, scrum isn't used to focus on milestones. The focus has always been on "how long is this going to take?" and just uses supposedly well-defined, small tasks as pawns to get there. There may be milestones implicit there, but the entire focus is totally on when features will be done.

Came here to say that. The author spends a lot of effort to basically describe working in sprints.

It's very similar to Scrum, with some nuanced differences. He mentions "do not work on incremental changes" and "do not focus on user stories", and instead "do construct small goals that achieve more general yet still concrete outcomes", and "do prioritize those goals".

I think his advice suffers from the same problem Scrum does, which is that it's simultaneously too generic and too constricting for anyone to perform it correctly and get good value out of it unless they just happen to be really excellent at their jobs or have a great team leader.

Seems like this field is very preoccupied with attempts to distill excellence into a formula. But the skill you need to do this approach well is "identifying doable tasks that make meaningful progress towards the overall goal", which basically just the entire skill of project management.

Hi, I'm the author. I'm not intending to describe working in sprints. You can implement the ideas behind this article with sprints, kanban, or something else entirely. Using sprints doesn't do what using milestones does.

So what I'm hearing is that that wasn't clear. Since a few people said that here, I'll make some edits to clarify. If you have any suggestions as to where the confusion is, I'd love to hear it. Thank you!

"Sprint" is a label. Someone needs to put a lot o effort into describing what a sprint actually is, or people will use the label on things that are not sprints.

It can not be Scrum. For instance if each milestone is a different length of time.

This is a good point. Scrum's sprint length inflexibility frequently means over or under-allocating time on projects, which messes up metrics (e.g., ticket completion per sprint) ... but is otherwise irrelevant to the work itself. This leads to organizations making sub-optimal choices that help with scrum, but don't help with work.

Yes from experience over the past year working in PM, the sprint and milestones are very different things. Sprints are predictable and pre-scheduled. Milestones have an estimate but may easily slip from one sprint to another.