TL; DR: Mastering Work Intake: The Key to Sustainability and Flow — Hands-on Agile #64
How do you deal with prioritization of the flood of new requirements, requests, and ideas? Let’s talk about the challenges of mastering work intake to achieve sustainable productivity and flow. Expect new ideas from authors Jeremy Willets and Tom Cagley on a classic challenge for every team in this fantastic recording of the 64th Hands-on Agile Meetup. (The video was recorded in English.)
No other role in Scrum can contribute to mediocre outcomes like the Product Owner—garbage in, garbage out—and it does not matter whether that’s due to incompetence, neglect, disinterest, or failure to collaborate. Moreover, no Product Owner is the “Mini-CEO” of the product, entitled to make lone decisions. Scrum is a team sport; there are no loners in a successful Scrum Team where collaboration and alignment are prerequisites for success.
A Product Owner prone to making lone decisions is in danger of loving their solution over the customers’ problems. Consequently, collaborating and aligning with their teammates on the Product Goal and the Product Backlog is a proven risk-mitigation strategy for Product Owners. This is a testament to Scrum’s built-in checks and balances, particularly now that the product operating model receives more attention.
TL;DR: Scrum Master Salary Report 2025 — An Anonymous Poll by the Community for the Community
The purpose of this anonymous Scrum Master salary report is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the Agile community to understand whether their compensation is adequate. The report will cover Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, both employed and freelancing.
The goal is to have at least 1,000 replies by the end of December 2024 to create the report in time for February 2025. The report will be available for free.
Hands-on Agile 2025 is Here: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility
We’re thrilled to announce that the virtual Hands-on Agile 2025 is officially on the horizon and will be free to attend from February 4-6, 2025. This time, we will focus on how Agile needs to evolve from concept-based agility to context-based agility.
But before we discuss what that means, let’s take a step back and consider why Hands-on Agile 2025 is going to be a can’t-miss event for everyone in the agile community.
For those unfamiliar, Hands-on Agile isn’t just another conference. It’s an event built around the Barcamp model, meaning it’s a self-organized, community-driven gathering with one goal: Sharing knowledge and experiences.
From February 4 to 6, 2025, we will spend three energizing days engaging in sessions, practicing agile games, sharing war stories, and learning directly from each other. Hands-on Agile is all about creating a space for practitioners, coaches, leaders, and newcomers to connect in a truly hands-on way.
by Stefan Wolpers|FeaturedAgile and ScrumResourcesVideos
Transform Your Skills and Career with the Advanced Product Backlog Management Course
Are you facing challenges in aligning vision, stakeholders, and your team and delivering real value? Then, prepare to transform your career with my comprehensive, self-paced online class: The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course.
Dive deep into professional Product Backlog management techniques supported by videos, exercises, and an engaging online community of like-minded peers supporting each other:
👉 Transform Your Skills, Transform Your Career — all for an Introductory Price of $99!
Please note:
The course includes membership in the brand-new Hands-on Agile community of my former professional students.
The course will only be available until February 3, 2025, for sign-up!
by Stefan Wolpers|FeaturedAgile and ScrumAgile Transition
TL; DR: Getting Hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach
Are you considering a new Scrum Master or Agile Coach job? However, you are not sure that it is the right organization? Don’t worry; there are four steps of proactive research to identify suitable employers or clients for getting hired as a Scrum Master and avoid disappointment later.
I have used those four steps for years to identify organizations I would like to work with, and they never failed me. Read on and learn how to employ search engines, LinkedIn’s people search, reach out to peers in the agile community, and analyze the event markets in the quest for your next Scrum Master job.
TL; DR: 60 ChatGPT Prompts for Agile Practitioners
ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for those who know how to create prompts. The simplest form of prompting ChatGPT is to feed it the task and ask for results. However, this approach is unlikely to trigger the best response from the model.
Instead, invest more time in prompt engineering, and provide ChatGPT with a better context of the situation, desired outcomes, data, constraints, etc. The following article offers a primer to creating ChatGPT prompts for Scrum practitioners to get you started running. You will learn:
Prompt engineering basics
Prompt engineering with services like PromptPerfect
Using ChatGPT for prompt engineering. (Yub, that works, too.)
TL; DR: The Scrum Master Interview Guide to Identify Genuine Scrum Masters
In this comprehensive Scrum Master Interview guide, we delve into 83 critical questions that can help distinguish genuine Scrum Masters from pretenders during interviews. We designed this selection to evaluate the candidates’ theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and ability to apply general Scrum and “Agile “principles effectively in real-world scenarios—as outlined in the Scrum Guide or the Agile Manifesto. Ideal for hiring managers, HR professionals, and future Scrum teammates, this guide provides a toolkit to ensure that your next Scrum Master hire is truly qualified, enhancing your team’s agility and productivity.
If you are a Scrum Master currently looking for a new position, please check out the “Preparing for Your Scrum Master Interview as a Candidate” section below.
So far, this Scrum Master interview guide has been downloaded more than 25,000 times.
TL; DR: 82 Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Imposters
If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 82 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients.
So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
TL; DR: Scrum Training Classes, Liberating Structures Workshops, and Events
Age-of-Product.com’s parent company — Berlin Product People GmbH — offers Scrum training classes authorized by Scrum.org, Liberating Structures workshops, and hybrid training of Professional Scrum and Liberating Structures. The training classes are offered both in English and German.
Check out the upcoming timetable of training classes, workshops, meetups, and other events below and join your peers.
TL; DR: Messy Product Management — Food for Agile Thought #467
Welcome to the 467th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,944 peers. This week, John Cutler explores the adaptive nature of messy product management, emphasizing real-world learning over fixed roles, while Scott Ambler critiques Agile’s “gold rush,” urging a move away from certifications and frameworks toward genuine improvement. Allan Kelly reflects on Art Kleiner’s Age of Heretics, highlighting Agile’s enduring influence despite early transformation failures. Research from Aaron De Smet, Gemma D’Auria, et al. underscores the value of trust and collaboration over “superstar” individuals for team success, and Andy Cleff shares Bob Anderson’s insights on advancing leadership beyond reactive mindsets as essential for true Agile transformation.
Next, Joe Procopio cautions against AI-driven standardization, arguing that real product managers are needed to revive customer-centered innovation, and Noa Ganot offers a three-step approach for maintaining strategic alignment in bottom-up planning, ensuring initiatives align with larger goals. In a podcast, Jason Knight and Jas Shah challenge the “CEO of the product” myth, describing product management as unglamorous and marked by coordination challenges and limited authority. Also, Thijs Morlion and Bart Schroyen introduce a seven-layer model to bridge silos, promoting a collaborative, purpose-driven approach to product development.
Lastly, Jonatan Kruszewski debunks the myth of “zero tech debt,” advocating for manageable debt to enhance delivery and business alignment. Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick delve into Toyota Kata, illustrating how Improvement and Coaching Kata elevate team quality and delivery. Paul Grew introduces a Monte Carlo tool to refine Scrum forecasting, though he emphasizes that data quality and judgment are key. Moreover, Deirdre Cerminaro unpacks systems thinking, presenting mindsets for reframing complex problems. Finally, Dan Shipper suggests that product creation thrives on dynamic, sequence-based thinking over fixed needs, fostering genuine customer engagement through experimentation.
TL; DR: Product Discovery Guide — Food for Agile Thought #466
Welcome to the 466th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,928 peers. This week’s issue features Afonso Franco in a masterclass with Teresa Torres and Petra Wille, sharing a great product discovery guide, while James Morgan dissects Agile’s limitations, promoting critical thinking over rigidity. John Cutler and Tom Kerwin satirically tackle extreme leadership in “Ultra Founder Mode,” and Lisa Gill highlights self-managing teams’ struggles with autonomy. Also, Wes Kao delves into understanding bureaucrats’ mindsets to foster better collaboration.
Next, David Pereira advocates using AI as a co-pilot to elevate PM effectiveness, while Aatir Abdul Rauf offers a detailed guide to competitive research for B2B SaaS. In an interview with Aakash Gupta, George Harter shares his approach to understanding users, and Melissa Perri provides strategies for achieving clarity amid ambiguous company visions.
Lastly, Itamar Gilad shares practical techniques for fostering a strong decision-making culture using clear roles and evidence-based approaches. Moreover, Ant Murphy shares his observations about John Cutler’s prioritization course, which is focused on urgency. Gregor Ojstersek discusses the importance of metrics like DORA and SPACE, and Evan Armstrong emphasizes storytelling and psychology in influencing leadership. Finally, Cedric Chin explores how business frameworks intersect with human nature through lessons from Sam Zemurray’s banana trade success.
TL; DR: Unfinished Action Items: How to Make Retrospectives Useful
If your team consistently creates action items during Retrospectives but rarely completes them, you’re not alone. Unfinished action items are a major productivity killer and lead to stalled progress. This article highlights five actionable practices to ensure Retrospective tasks get done, including limiting action items in progress, assigning clear ownership, and adding a review of the progress in every Retrospective.
The key to real improvement isn’t in creating long lists—it’s in following through. By treating Retrospective action items with the same importance as other Sprint tasks, your team can finally break the cycle of unfinished improvements and see real, beneficial change, individually and at the team level.
TL; DR: Reverse Product Roadmap — Food for Agile Thought #465
Welcome to the 465th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,913 peers. This week, John Utz promotes a “reverse product roadmap” approach, focusing on feature elimination to simplify products. Mark Graban critiques command-and-control leadership for sabotaging Lean transformations by prioritizing cost-cutting, while Maarten Dalmijn warns against blindly adopting frameworks like SAFe without context. Also, Pim de Morree shares lessons from transforming Indaero into a bossless organization, and Ula Ojiaku highlights the dangers of “framework fever,” advocating for tailored, context-aware methodologies to prevent costly misalignments.
Next, Paolo Lacche introduces “product washing,” where companies falsely claim to implement product management, reducing PMs to powerless roles. Todd Lankford emphasizes delivering value over managing backlogs, offering actionable tips for Product Owners, and Warren Schirtzinger demystifies the misunderstood “crossing the chasm” concept, highlighting critical misapplications. Moreover, Aakash Gupta and Gagan Biyani delve into Maven’s cohort-based learning model, its scalability, the value of Product Management in startups, and long-term career strategies for job seekers.
Lastly, Viktor Cessan outlines how Viafree leveraged a remote Self-Selection process to transition disbanded teams, ensuring smooth integration and maintaining motivation, and Jock Busuttil addresses the backlash against the Spotify Model, emphasizing its evolution and enduring lessons. Eric Brechner shares strategies to avoid knowledge loss when key employees leave, while Soren Kaplan offers actionable steps to manage team conflict. Finally, Jerry Neumann challenges the belief in accelerating technology adoption, exploring the factors that truly influence adoption speed and societal impact.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
