Have you ever tried fitting a square peg into a round hole? That's what implementing Scrum for hardware engineering teams often sounds like.
We recently faced this exact challenge: helping two teams of brilliant mechanical engineers and robotics specialists embrace Agile practices without crushing their creativity or disrupting their workflow.
The Initial Challenge: where do we even start?
When we arrived, these were the three main obstacles we found:
- They were not familiar with Scrum. One of the teams had zero exposure to agile practices. Daily stand-ups? Backlogs? Sprint planning? Nada.
- Task tracking was not going very well. Everything was either scribbled down in notebooks, stored in someone's brain, or lost in the abyss of Jira.
- No regular meetings among the teams. There were no structured check-ins or processes to ensure alignment.
Notion to the Rescue
Both companies initially struggled heavily with Jira's complicated UX, leading to low engagement and inefficient task tracking.
One company fully transitioned to Notion, while the other opted for a hybrid solution — software development tasks moved to GitHub Projects, and hardware production tasks migrated entirely to Notion.
For the hardware teams, Notion allowed us to:
- Create customized pipelines and production calendars
- Clearly visualize whether machines being produced were already sold
- Automate task creation whenever a new machine serial number is created
- Build a customized board that actually made sense for these teams
Organizing things with a board that makes sense
We tailored a custom workflow in Notion to fit the teams' needs:
- Needs Refinement: Ideas and tasks that weren't quite ready yet
- Next Up: Prioritized tasks, ready to go
- In Progress: Actively being worked on
- In Review: Engineers checking each other's work
- Completed: Done and dusted
- On Hold: Because hardware isn't software — sometimes things have to wait
Priorities matter
To help them focus, we introduced priority levels:
- Critical: The sky is falling. Do this NOW.
- High: This needs to happen soon, but nobody's panicking (yet).
- Medium: Important but not urgent — won't cause a meltdown if delayed.
- Low: Nice to have.
Making agile work for Engineers, not against them
Scrum for a hardware team isn't about forcing them into a rigid framework — it's about giving them the right tools and flexibility to stay organized and efficient.
At Avanti Studio, we believe in adapting Scrum to the team, not the other way around.