Jeff Sutherland is co-creator of scrum (with ken-schwaber) and a signatory of the agile-manifesto. He ran the first Scrum team at Easel Corporation in 1993, directly inspired by Takeuchi and Nonaka's 1986 Harvard Business Review paper new-new-product-development-game.
The First Scrum Team
In 1993 at Easel Corporation (Cambridge, MA), Sutherland formed what he considers the first Scrum team, working with John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna (approximate team composition). This was before the methodology had a name or formal definition — Sutherland was drawing on Takeuchi and Nonaka's rugby metaphor and the systems thinking of the time to structure a software development team differently.
The direct inspiration from new-new-product-development-game is central to Scrum's intellectual genealogy. Takeuchi and Nonaka described how high-performing product development teams at companies like Honda and Canon operated in a "rugby" style — a cross-functional team moving together through stages, rather than a relay race of specialists handing off work. Sutherland took this metaphor seriously enough to name the framework after the rugby formation.
John Boyd and the OODA Loop
Sutherland explicitly cites John Boyd's OODA loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) as an influence on Scrum's iterative decision cycle. Boyd was a U.S. Air Force colonel whose theories of maneuver warfare and fast decision-making cycles influenced military strategy and later entered management and agile thinking. Sutherland's use of Boyd connects Scrum to a broader tradition of thinking about how speed of adaptation creates competitive advantage — the faster you can cycle through OODA, the more effective you are against a slower-cycling opponent. In software, the "opponent" is market uncertainty and changing requirements.
Collaboration with Schwaber
Sutherland and Schwaber came to their Scrum formulations independently before collaborating to document and present the methodology together. Schwaber presented at oopsla-scrum-presentation-1995, and the two co-authored agile-software-development-with-scrum and later the scrum-guide.
Key Works
Movement Role
Sutherland is the other half of the Scrum origin story. Where Schwaber built the institutional infrastructure of the Scrum world, Sutherland's contribution is more narrative and evangelical — he is the primary storyteller of Scrum's origin and the author of its most accessible popular account. His explicit connections to new-new-product-development-game, Boyd, and systems thinking give Scrum a richer intellectual genealogy than it is sometimes given credit for. He remained aligned with scrum-org after schwaber-leaves-scrum-alliance-2009, co-authoring the scrum-guide revisions.