Scrum Guide 2020 vs the Expansion Pack: what changed for your team
The Scrum Guide Expansion Pack adds outcomes, new roles and complexity thinking to Scrum. Here's what changed, what didn't, and what your team should actually do.
For years, Scrum had one short reference: the Scrum Guide. The 2020 edition is famously lean, around a dozen pages, and deliberately says what Scrum is without telling you how to run it.
In June 2025, a new document appeared next to it: the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack. It's longer, more opinionated and much more practical. Since then, Scrum Masters keep asking the same questions. Is it a new version of Scrum? Do we have to change how we work? And which document do we follow now?
Here's a clear answer to each of them.
What the Expansion Pack is
The Expansion Pack was published on June 11, 2025, by Ralph Jocham, John Coleman and Jeff Sutherland, Scrum's co-creator. It's released under a Creative Commons licence and maintained at scrumexpansion.org, where it has continued to evolve. The latest version, v2026.1, was updated in January 2026.
It's important to be precise about its status: the Expansion Pack is a supplement, not a replacement. The 2020 Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland remains the official definition of Scrum. The Expansion Pack builds on it with context, theory and patterns for teams that find the minimal guide too thin.
What didn't change
If your team follows the 2020 Guide today, you're still doing Scrum. The core structure is unchanged:
- Three accountabilities: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developers.
- Five events: the Sprint, Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective.
- Three artifacts: the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog and the Increment.
- Three commitments: the Product Goal, the Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done.
Empiricism (transparency, inspection and adaptation) is still the foundation.
What's new in the Expansion Pack
1. From "immutable" to "evolving"
The 2020 Guide describes Scrum as immutable: change its rules and the result isn't Scrum. The Expansion Pack takes a softer stance. It treats Scrum as something that keeps evolving as practitioners learn, and it accepts that not every context fits a clean definition.
This is a change in tone, not permission to drop the parts you don't like. It's an invitation to adapt deliberately and to inspect the results.
2. Complexity theory comes to the front
The 2020 Guide explains why Scrum works through empiricism and lean thinking. The Expansion Pack goes deeper into complexity, drawing on models such as Cynefin to explain when Scrum fits and why it works in uncertain, complex work. It also brings in systems thinking and adaptive leadership.
For Scrum Masters, this gives you better language for a common conversation: why a fixed plan fails for complex product work, and why short feedback loops beat detailed upfront specifications.
3. More people are named
The Scrum Team's structure stays the same, but the Expansion Pack sharpens the vocabulary. Developers become Product Developers, and two groups outside the team are named explicitly:
- Stakeholders: people with an interest in the product and its outcomes.
- Supporters: people who help or enable the work without being part of the Scrum Team.
It also discusses AI as part of how modern teams work. Naming these groups matters because many Scrum problems live outside the team: unclear decision rights, missing stakeholders at Reviews, or support functions that block progress.
4. Outcomes, not just output
This is probably the most practical change. The 2020 Guide gives you the Definition of Done: the quality standard an Increment must meet. The Expansion Pack adds outcome thinking on top of it, with the idea of a Definition of Outcome Done.
Finishing the work is no longer the end of the story. The question becomes: did it make a real difference? That means measuring value after delivery, not only counting completed items.
5. Leadership everywhere
In the Expansion Pack, leadership isn't reserved for the Scrum Master. Everyone on the team is expected to take responsibility, and professionalism is emphasised throughout. The Scrum Master's role leans further toward coach and change agent for the whole system, not a meeting organiser or task manager.
What this means for your team
Nothing in the Expansion Pack is mandatory. You don't need to rename roles, rewrite your working agreement or retrain the organisation. Treat it as a library of good ideas, and adopt them one at a time.
A practical way to do that:
- Keep the 2020 Guide as your baseline. It's still the shared definition across the industry, in certifications, and in conversations with other teams.
- Read the Expansion Pack as a team. Pick the section that matches your current pain: outcomes, stakeholders or complexity.
- Choose one idea per quarter. For example, add an outcome check to your Sprint Review: "What changed for users because of the last Increment?"
- Make it visible. Write the change into your working agreement so it doesn't fade after two Sprints.
- Inspect the result in a Retrospective. If it helped, keep it. If not, drop it. That's empiricism applied to your own process.
A word of caution
The Expansion Pack is much longer than the Guide, and some practitioners find its depth overwhelming. There's also healthy debate in the community about whether a longer document helps or hurts a framework that was built on being minimal. Both points are fair. The safest approach is the one above: take what solves a real problem, and leave the rest.
Empiricism needs evidence
Both documents agree on one thing: Scrum runs on inspection and adaptation. And you can only inspect what you can see. That's where many teams struggle in practice. Planning decisions disappear after the meeting, daily progress isn't compared to the plan, and sprint history is hard to reconstruct.
This is the gap LazyScrum is built for. It sits on top of Jira and keeps the evidence your team needs: a Master Plan from Sprint Planning, a Daily Standup that shows whether you're on track, capacity and utilization history from every sprint, and reports you can bring to a Review or Retrospective. Measuring outcomes, the heart of the Expansion Pack, starts with data you trust.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Expansion Pack the new Scrum Guide?
No. It's a supplement to the 2020 Scrum Guide, not a new edition. The 2020 Guide is still the official definition of Scrum, and the Expansion Pack builds on it.
Do certifications and assessments use the Expansion Pack?
Scrum certifications have been built on the 2020 Guide. If you're preparing for an assessment, study the 2020 Guide first and check the certifying body's current reading list before you sit the exam.
Do we have to rename Developers to Product Developers?
No. Nothing in the Expansion Pack is mandatory. Use whichever term helps your organisation. What matters is that everyone understands who is accountable for creating a usable Increment each Sprint.
Who are Supporters, in practice?
Anyone who enables the team's work without being part of the Scrum Team: platform and infrastructure teams, security reviewers, legal, finance, or an architecture group. Naming them helps you plan around their availability instead of discovering them as blockers mid-Sprint.
What's the simplest way to start measuring outcomes?
Add one question to every Sprint Review: "What changed for users or the business because of the last Increment?" If nobody can answer it, that's your first outcome to measure.
Does the Expansion Pack change the Daily Scrum or Sprint length?
No. The events stay the same. The Daily Scrum is still for inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal, and Sprints are still fixed-length, one month or less.
The takeaway
The Scrum Guide 2020 is still the rulebook. The Expansion Pack is the coaching manual that sits next to it. You don't have to change anything, but if you adopt one idea from it, make it this one: don't stop at "done." Ask whether the work made a difference.
LazyScrum is coming soon to the Atlassian Marketplace. Until then, you can try it with your team at lazyscrum.com and help shape the version we publish.
