Age-of-Product.com

Product Owner Anti-Patterns — 33 Ways to Improve as a PO

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-26 Featured Agile and Scrum

TL; DR: Product Owner Anti-Patterns

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.

Product Owner Anti-Patterns — 33 Ways to Improve as a PO — Age-of-Product.com

Join the Scrum Master Salary Report 2025 — Let Us Create Transparency

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-13 Featured Agile and ScrumNews

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.

Join the Scrum Master Salary Report 2025 — Let Us Create Transparency — Age-of-Product.com

📈 Join the Anonymous Poll for the Upcoming Free Scrum Master Salary Report 2025.

Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-09-23 Featured Agile and ScrumNews

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.

Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility — Berlin-Product-People.com

Hands-on Agile’s Upcoming Transformation

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-08-12 Featured Agile and ScrumNews

TL; DR: Reinventing Hands-on Agile

For years, I have supported the Agile community with a wealth of free resources and opportunities for growth. From the Food for Agile Thought newsletter to the Scrum Master Salary Report to tools like the Scrum Master Job GPT, and from ebooks like the Scrum Master Interview Questions Guide to the Hands-on Agile Slack and Meetup groups, I’ve consistently provided value without asking for anything in return than your support and participation. As for all communities, there is a simple rule: the more, the merrier; the benefit of being a member increases with the size of the community and those who contribute themselves. Giving back to the community is a win-win proposition.

However, the landscape is changing. The recent economic downturn and a noticeable backlash against Scrum have presented new challenges. As a result, the business model that has sustained these efforts—financing by subsidies through my Professional Scrum classes—has become increasingly unsustainable. Consequently, my approach to continuing to support this incredible community will need to evolve, too.

The Upcoming Transformation of Hands-on Agile: Embracing change by creating a new community and relaunching BarCamps — Age-of-Product.com

The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course — Release Date: January 27, 2025

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-03-21 Featured Agile 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!

Advanced Product Backlog Management Online Course — January 2025, by Stefan Wolpers

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!

The Scrum Master Salary Report 2024

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-02-18 Featured Agile and Scrum

TL; DR: The Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 — How Do You Compare?

The Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 is the fifth edition of the industry survey after 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023. This free report is based on the answers of 1,114 participants globally. If you are considering a career decision this year, maybe whether you should join the industry as a junior Scrum Master, move to a new organization, or go independent, you will find the report’s information beneficial.

By the way, the average salary of the participants in the survey is $87,800, with a standard deviation of about $46,400. In the complete report, you will find more detailed information; see for yourself by downloading your copy of the Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 below.

Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 — Age-of-Product.com

Getting Hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-02-05 Featured Agile 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.

Getting Hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach — Age-of-Product.com

60 ChatGPT Prompts Plus Prompt Engineering Guide for Scrum Practitioners

by Stefan Wolpers | 2023-05-15 Featured Agile and Scrum

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.)

Free Download 60 ChatGPT Prompts for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Product Managers — Age-of-Product.com

Free Ebook: 83 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-17 Featured Agile and Scrum

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.

Scrum Master Interview — How to Prepare Yourself to Stand Out — Age-of-Product.com

Hiring: 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-09-26 Featured Agile and Scrum

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.

82 Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Imposters — Age-of-Product.com

📅 Upcoming Scrum Training Classes, Liberating Structures Workshops, and Events

by Stefan Wolpers | 2020-10-10 Featured Workshops

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.

Upcoming Scrum and Liberating Stuctures training classes and workshops — Berlin Product People GmbH

Food for Agile Thought #466: Product Discovery Guide, Competitive Research Guide, Agile Fatigue, Fuzzy Product Strategy

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-25 News

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.

Food for Agile Thought #466: Product Discovery Guide, Competitive Research Guide, Agile Fatigue, Fuzzy Product Strategy - Age-of-Product.com

Ditch the Unfinished Action Items: How to Make Retrospectives Lead to Real Change

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-21 Agile and Scrum

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.

Ditch the Unfinished Action Items: How to Make Retrospectives Lead to Real Change and Stop Spinning Wheels — Age-of-Product.com.

Food for Agile Thought #465: Reverse Product Roadmap, Productwashing, Bossless Organizations, Framework Fever

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-18 News

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.

Food for Agile Thought #465: Reverse Product Roadmap, Productwashing, Bossless Organizations, Framework Fever — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #464: Rapid Prototyping with Claude, Ignoring Feature Requests, Sabotating Innovation, Bayer’s Radical Transformation

by Stefan Wolpers | 2024-10-11 News

TL; DR: Rapid Prototyping with Claude — Food for Agile Thought #464

Welcome to the 464th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,881 peers. This week, Henrik Kniberg showcases rapid prototyping with Claude, transforming sketches into fully functional apps in minutes, while Steve Blank outlines how innovators can defend against incumbent sabotage. John Cutler discusses using enabling constraints to manage rapid growth, and Adam Ard critiques the overuse of ‘Agile,’ advocating core practices to enhance agility. Also, Bob Galen addresses Agile coach burnout, emphasizing resilience and proactive leadership.

Next, Avi Siegel advises product managers to ignore most feature requests to prevent feature bloat and maintain focus on long-term value. Maarten Dalmijn critiques the unnecessary complexity that can arise with both Product Owners and Product Managers, urging a more streamlined approach, and Martin Eriksson explains why many company visions fail, offering tips to craft a vision that motivates teams and drives results. Moreover, Melissa Suzuno identifies 12 common challenges product trios face, providing solutions to improve collaboration and decision-making.

Lastly, Charles Lambdin delves into estimating the cost of delay, focusing on confidence intervals and structured conversations to prioritize work. Linus Dahlander and Francis de Véricourt explore how Lean Startup methods can be adapted for deep-tech ventures to mitigate technological uncertainty. Then, Gustavo Razzetti advocates for expanding your circle of influence by focusing on what you can control, and Diana Stepner encourages product leaders to adopt a “learn-it-all” mindset, using smart questioning to drive innovation. Finally, Corporate Rebels will feature Bayer’s transformation to self-management and Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO).