Extreme Value-driven Coaching
/evidence/An Agile training and coaching framework based on fast paced Scrum, used by Agile Coaches to boost their work with one to three teams at a time within the organization. This is a 2026 re-reading, in which generative AI is already the default way of working and the bottleneck has shifted from execution to the quality of the daily decision.
EVDnC (Extreme Value-driven Coaching, pronounced “evidence”) is an Agile training and coaching framework based on fast paced Scrum, used by Agile Coaches to boost their work with one to three teams at a time within the organization.
The EVDnC framework consists of roles, events, artifacts, techniques, and rules. Scrum Teams, formed by a Product Owner, the Development Team members, and a Scrum Master, run one-day development cycles (“One-Day Sprints”) in a single week of intensive and focused work, aimed to produce high quality, visible and usable value every day. The rapid feedback cycles allow teams to decide well and learn fast, speeding up the team’s learning process and bringing long-term benefits. By 2026, with AI executing in seconds, the thesis is no longer “fail fast and cheap” but to protect the quality of the daily decision, since execution has become a commodity and being wrong now amplifies at scale. Each team releases a high-value product or product increment by the end of the week.
The accelerated pace stimulates existing dysfunctions to emerge. The EVDnC Coaches deal with the dysfunctions as they appear or put the necessary improvements on a backlog to be worked on afterward, at the Post-EVDnC.
Facilitated by EVDnC Coaches, stakeholders and Scrum Team members collaborate very closely. They quickly learn, feel and become able to show the benefits of Agile approaches.
EVDnC remains time boxed in a single week as the canonical unit of intensive training and experiment. By 2026, however, its principles (short one-day cycles, extreme focus, daily decisions validated by real usage) describe the default mode of mature AI-enabled teams. The EVDnC week continues to be a powerful catalyst to surface that culture, build buy-in from those involved and grant freedom of action to the EVDnC Coaches, even when the team already lives part of these principles day to day.
EVDnC was created by Marcos Garrido, with contributions from Carlos Felippe Cardoso, Rafael Sabbagh and Rodrigo de Toledo, the founders of K21 (https://br.k21.global). EVDnC was run by K21, Nower and its coaches on more than 500 teams in the last few years, usually as part of Agile Transformation efforts.
EVDnC can bring significant results in a single week of intensive work. It also helps raise a backlog of improvements to the work of the teams and the organization around it, which includes the upstream and the downstream work. EVDnC Coaches work with the team and the organization to address this backlog at the Post-EVDnC.
The participants are coached on how to be more effective and deliver high value in a minimal amount of time. The Development Team members learn how to be more efficient by using good product development techniques and being fluent with AI. The Product Owner, the Development Team, the Scrum Master, and relevant stakeholders understand the importance of working side by side. This very intensive process imposes severe time constraints, helping all involved to focus on what matters: deciding well and delivering high value, validated by real usage.
EVDnC can help teams in their different stages and scenarios:
Newly formed teams are often not cohesive and Agile is not understood nor internalized yet. EVDnC’s rapid inspection and adaptation help these teams achieve the first results sooner, aiding the team formation process to flow more smoothly and shortening the path to a higher maturity level. EVDnC also teaches those teams several Agile practices that they can use in their day-to-day work.
Traditional teams willing to adopt Agile tend to keep old habits, sometimes incompatible with Agile values and principles. With its hands-on approach and fast results, EVDnC can quickly prove the value of the Agile practices and mindset to those team members and help shift the necessary paradigms.
Even teams that had been using Agile for some time may face a number of problems in delivering a working product frequently. Those teams may lack focus on customer value, work under high pressure, on extra hours and with low quality. Management can often see them as inefficient and ineffective. EVDnC can help these teams learn how to prioritize, use good product development practices and use facilitation techniques to work as a true team and achieve an optimal delivery pace.
The evolution of experienced Agile teams sometimes can run flat. When this happens, it is necessary to review and refresh concepts and learn new techniques. EVDnC helps those teams by allowing them to find the motivation and energy needed to get back on track again and keep the continuous improvement, aiming to achieve a high-performing state.
Teams that are bringing generative AI and agents into their workflow face a new bottleneck: the quality of the daily decision, since execution has become instantaneous and being wrong at scale is expensive. EVDnC offers these teams a safe space to practice Decision Driven Development, validate by real usage, calibrate decision WIP and build fluency in prompting, tool selection and agent supervision.
As time passes, the team changes, the organization changes and the product evolves. By 2026, with AI accelerating the environment even more, EVDnC is very useful when ran from time to time as a recalibration rhythm, not as an exception to the norm.
The Scrum Team is a cross-functional, self-organized team of people formed by one Product Owner, Development Team members, and one Scrum Master. All Scrum Team members must be entirely dedicated to the EVDnC work during the week, avoiding any distractions.
The Product Owner holds the authority to define and prioritize the work of the Scrum Team, The Product Owner writes, slices, prioritizes and discards User Stories in collaboration with the team. EVDnC aims to empower the Product Owner, so no one else is allowed to change team’s priorities. Through this work, the Product Owner is responsible and accountable for maximizing the return on the investment of the product and for showing the results quickly.
The Product Owner in only one person for the Scrum Team. It is not a committee or a split role. However, the Product Owner can be shared amongst the different Scrum Teams in the same EVDnC week.
EVDnC may start with a non-ideal Product Owner configuration. In this case, the EVDnC Coaches work with the team and the appropriate stakeholders to find a suitable Product Owner throughout the week.
The Development Team is a small group of skilled people (usually, up to nine). This group must have all the knowledge and skills needed to create the end-to-end product, including technical but, ideally, user-focused and business-focused knowledge as well.
Development Team members work together, on the same item. They use the best of their abilities and knowledge to do the work, but also recognize that they must collaborate intensively, providing help to each other in whatever is needed in every moment to get the top priority done, instead of just working in their own silos. This way, they get work done faster, and they learn from each other, growing as a team.
The Development Team members strongly collaborate with the Product Owner and, together, they self-organize to do the work within the One-Day Sprint.
By 2026, AI fluency is part of the expected skill set: effective prompting, conscious tool selection for each task, agent supervision and judgment to intervene manually whenever the cost of being wrong is high. AI accelerates execution but does not replace the team’s judgment about what is worth being built.
The Scrum Master is a team facilitator and supports the work of the EVDnC Coaches, facilitating every Scrum Team’s interaction, helping them keep the focus on the EVDnC work and removing any impediments on their way.
On the other hand, the EVDnC Coaches should direct a part of their efforts to train and coach the Scrum Master and reinforce that role with the teams. Therefore, the Scrum Master also learns new techniques and evolves with the team during the week.
The Scrum Master is neutral and as much as possible works on the process level, not on contents level. The effects of the Team Facilitator’s work is leverage for the Scrum Team’s results.
The EVDnC Coaches work full time to coach and mentor Scrum Team members throughout the EVDnC week. They are empowered to make sure all team members understand the EVDnC rules and adhere to them. They identify opportunities for improvements and work with the teams and stakeholders to address them. They work to remove impediments and fix dysfunctions as they emerge. They add whatever they cannot fix during the EVDnC week to a backlog they will use after the week is over, at the Post-EVDnC.
The EVDnC Coaches can focus on any learning topics that prove needed for the EVDnC work. For instance, those can be technical, business or any team matters. The coaches can even pair with Development Team members, the Scrum Master or the Product Owner if that proves to be educational.
The EVDnC Coaches identify one or more stakeholders needed to support and protect the work of the teams during the week. They reach to those stakeholders whenever necessary.
The minimum recommended ratio between EVDnC Coaches and Scrum Teams is two coaches for one team, two coaches for two teams and three coaches for three teams.
If there is more than one team, The EVDnC Coaches should not work alone or split by team. They should collaborate intensively with each other throughout the day, creating visibility among them and making quick but, mostly, shared decisions on what to do next.
By 2026, coaching naturally expands into three complementary fronts: decision coaching (helping the team decide well before executing with AI), real product management (problem, metrics and usage validity) and AI platform strategy (model selection, agents, guardrails and costs). The scope stays within the framework; what changes is the depth of what is observed during the week.
EVDnC runs in a full week, within the regular working hours, preferably from Monday to Friday. All EVDnC events are time-boxed, which means they can be shorter, but not longer than a maximum predefined amount of time.
Before the EVDnC week, the EVDnC Coaches collaborate with management or with the leadership team to seek the necessary alignment for the work to come.
The EVDnC Coaches help identify the people who will participate in the process and, whenever possible, quickly brief them about EVDnC and what is needed from them. Those include one or more Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Development Team members and relevant stakeholders who are critical to support the work. The EVDnC Coaches understand who those people are and how they work today. Forming new Scrum Teams might be necessary if there are no previously established cross-functional teams.
The EVDnC Coaches and stakeholders work to identify and select high-value product ideas to transform them into a working product, at most one per team. The best choice is a new product, not part of an existing one, but it could instead be a product increment. The skills needed to create the product must be totally within the team’s technical and business knowledge.
By 2026, a mini 3DD (Decision Driven Development) with AI is recommended together with stakeholders already in the Pre-EVDnC: explore three to nine possible paths for each idea, with quick prototypes generated by AI, so the week starts with strong hypotheses rather than already committed solutions.
The Product Goal is an objective of value that will be incrementally achieved and enhanced within the EVDnC week through the implementation of User Stories. It guides the Development Teams on what is the problem they are working to solve by building the Product and aims to bring alignment between all stakeholders involved.
By 2026, with AI capable of generating solutions in seconds, the Product Goal must be radically problem first: it describes the user problem and the expected usage signal, not a pre-committed solution. It is what gives the team the criterion to discard paths that are cheap to build but poor in value.
The Product Goal must be crafted before any of the One-Day Sprints. Very often it is crafted even before the Preparation, within the previous weeks.
There could be one Product Goal per Scrum Team, or a single Product Goal for more than one team if they are working on the same product.
The Product Goal preferably addresses a new product, not part of an existing one. If that is not possible, it could refer to a product increment, but with a good level of independence of previous increments, to reduce unpredictable risks that may pose a threat to the work of the week.
It is also possible to run EVDnC without a clear Product Goal, as part of ticket-oriented maintenance work, though this could be less effective.
The Definition of Done in EVDnC is very similar to the Scrum term. It is a shared understanding of what it means when the team declares a User Story is done, and it is the same for each and every User Story.
Each Scrum Team has its own Definition of Done, or more than one team can share the same Definition of Done if they are working on the same product or product increment. The Definition of Done is shared between all involved in the EVDnC work, including Development Team, Product Owner, EVDnC Coaches, and stakeholders.
The Definition of Done is used to help define what is the work needed to transform a User Story into a potential part of the product. It is also used to assess when this work is complete. Therefore, a User Story that is done, according to the Definition of Done, has everything that is required to be put in the hands of users, including sufficient quality.
The Definition of Done is created at the Preparation but is adapted as needed along the way.
The taskboard is a highly visible board each Scrum Team uses to represent the work to be done in the One-Day Sprint. It shows the User Stories selected for the day and the corresponding tasks for the User Story currently being worked on. It also indicates the status of each task.
The taskboard is a Scrum To Do/Doing/Done board or a Lean Kanban board, in this case reflecting every stage of the work.
The User Story format is a representation of the work to be done to create functionality for the user, from the user’s perspective. The usual pattern states (1) who the user is, (2) what does he/she need, i. e., the functionality to be developed and (3) why does he/she need it, i. e., what is the immediate value the user gets from it.
One of the most important aspects of User Stories is that conversations must take place between the Product Owner and the Development Team to define and detail the functionality to be developed. Therefore, Product Owner and Development Team members should meet during the day to have the conversations necessary to write, slice and prepare User Stories for the next day of work.
Each User Story is a very thin slice of a user need. Each User Story must be completed in at most one day of work. If the User Story is too big to fit on that timeframe, it must be sliced down, keeping the focus on the problem to be solved. The User Stories must be prioritized to deliver end-to-end value to the user as quickly as possible. Usually, a Scrum Team completes from one to three User Stories every day.
By 2026, each User Story also carries a usage validation criterion (how we will know, by real user behavior, that this story delivered value) defined before being built. Without that criterion, the team risks using AI to deliver very, very fast while learning nothing.
EVDnC is a free framework created and offered by K21 in this guide. EVDnC is defined by its roles, events, artifacts, techniques, and rules. You are allowed to introduce and use any additional techniques or tools to help teams achieve their goals, and you can keep calling it “EVDnC,” as long the basic structure is not compromised.
By 2026, the framework remains fully valid. What has changed is what it protects. EVDnC used to protect execution speed in a world where executing was expensive. Today, with AI executing in seconds, EVDnC protects the quality of the daily decision, extreme focus and validation by real usage, precisely what becomes scarce when everything becomes easy to build.
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