Jeff Sutherland is a co-creator of Scrum, the agile framework that organizes software work into fixed-length sprints. By his own account on the Scrum Guides site, he developed the method in 1993 and “formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber,” after which it spread widely across the software industry.
With Schwaber, Sutherland co-authors and maintains the Scrum Guide, the official definition of the framework. He has also extended Scrum beyond software, adapting it for industries “including: finance, healthcare, higher education and telecom,” and created the scaled approach known as Scrum@Scale.
Sutherland founded Scrum Inc., where its own site identifies him as “the father of Scrum and creator of Scrum@Scale” and as Founder and Board Member. His career background includes serving as CTO or CEO of multiple software companies before and during the rise of Scrum.
He was also one of the seventeen practitioners who met at Snowbird, Utah, in 2001 and signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, placing him among the founders of the broader agile movement.