I'm not a hardcore scrum proponent, but "Scrum compensates for lack of X, and hence works less well for people who have X" is not necessarily true. Being able t

I'm not a hardcore scrum proponent, but "Scrum compensates for lack of X, and hence works less well for people who have X" is not necessarily true. Being able to swap the product backlog can help correct planning errors, but it doesn't make planning skills obsolete. What it does, though, is to assign an exact responsability for planning errors (sunken costs through unneeded functionality are the product owner's fault, changes in plans that are not realized yet are not realized). Many important things in a Scrum process can be achieved through the definition of what is "done". If you know for sure what parts need to be optimized, then optimizing them may be part of getting them "done". If you don't, then there is no point in pointlessly optimizing the whole system where only a fraction of these optimizations will be useful and the rest of them just make the code less readable.