Waterfall to Scrum at Yahoo

I tend to follow Yahoo pretty closely since my brother and a few friends worked there. (At one point my brother was the product manager for Yahoo Messenger) To a tee all of them got very frustrated with the corporate situation after Yahoo grew up and eventually left. I still get flak about not switching to Gmail from Yahoo mail, but heck I’ve had the same account for at least 8 years.

Anyway Yahoo has been heavily promoting Scrum internally. I found a quote from Pete Deemer, the VP of product development for Yahoo, explaining how they went from a pretty agile, slightly chaotic development environment in their earlier days:

How did Yahoo! get bamboozled by waterfall?

Accenture as experts in a time of trouble.

So for 4 years they did straight waterfall which corresponds to when my brother ranted that Yahoo was losing it’s vision. Probably just a coincidence though.

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