The value of incremental delivery in Scrum
When I first started practicing Scrum, I thought that delivering a done, usable increment each Sprint was the least important part of the framework (spoiler alert: delivering a done, usable increment at least once per Sprint is critically important for reducing risk, enabling faster delivery of business value, reducing the accumulation of technical debt, and facilitating empiricism.) At the time, I was the Scrum Master for a team that was building an online application, and the Product Owner did not intend to release the new application to production until it was complete. What did it matter how we sliced up the work when a certain amount of work had to get done either way? How wrong I was.