The Scrum Master Salary Report 2022

TL; DR: The Scrum Master Salary Report 2022 — How Do You Compare?

The Scrum Master Salary Report 2022 is the third edition of the industry survey after 2017 and 2019. This free report is based on the answers of 1,113 participants globally. If you are considering a career decision this year, maybe, whether you should join the industry as a junior Scrum Master or 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 $83,687, with a standard deviation of about $48,700. In the complete report, you will find more detailed information; download your copy below.

Moreover, we are considering creating a statistical model to suggest further career steps: The “Scrum Master Salary Toolkit.”

Scrum Master Salary Report 2022 — Free Download from Age-of-Product.com
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Free Ebook: 60 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates

Scrum Master Interview: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market-entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient. Which makes any Scrum Master interview a challenging task.

Suppose you are looking to fill a Scrum Master (or agile coach) position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following interview questions helpful 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 my training experience as a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. Also, I have interviewed dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients.

So far, this Scrum Master interview guide has been downloaded more than 22,000 times.

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

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
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Cargo Cult Agile — A Checklist to Open the Discussion

TL; DR: The Cargo Cult Agile Checklist for Download

Do you want to know the state of agility in your organization? Here we go: Download the checklist, distribute it generously among your colleagues, and run a quick poll. It will only take 5 minutes of their time–and then analyze their feedback. If the average number of checkboxes marked is higher than nine, then you are probably practicing cargo cult agile in one form or another.

If running the cargo cult agile survey is the ‘inspection,’ then consider adapting your approach to being agile by kicking-off a discussion among the stakeholders of your organization’s endeavor.

The State of Agile: the cargo cult agile checklist for your organization by Age of Product
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📅 Upcoming Scrum Training Classes, Liberating Structures Workshops, and Events

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
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Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

TL; DR: Agile Metrics

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.

Agile Metrics — Age-of-Product.com
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28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns

TL; DR: 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns

Scrum is a practical framework to build products, provided you identify in advance what to build. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing in the right way if your product backlog is not up to the job. Garbage in, garbage out – as the saying goes. The following article points at 28 of the most common product backlog anti-patterns – including the product backlog refinement process – that limit your Scrum team’s success.

28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns — Age-of-Product.com
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The Meta-Retrospective — How To Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard

TL; DR: The Meta-Retrospective

A meta-retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action-items. It comprises of the team members of one or several product teams—or a representative from those—and stakeholders. Participants from the stakeholder side are people from the business as well as customers.

Meta-retrospectives are useful both as a regular event, say once a quarter, or after achieving a particular milestone, for example, a specific release of the product. Read more on how to organize such a meta-retrospective.

Meta-Retrospective — Age-of-Product.com
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Food for Agile Thought #327: Improve Learning and Maximize Retention, Failing Innovation Experiments, Value of an Agile Coach, PMs Don‘t Need Domain Knowledge?

TL; DR: Improve Learning, Failing Experiments — Food for Agile Thought #327

Welcome to the 327th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,305 peers. This week, we explore the most critical meta-skill a knowledge worker can acquire: Learning how to learn by improving learning itself. Also, we ask: How do you assess the value of an agile coach, and we delve into the first principles of leadership in complex environments.

We then pursue the thought that a lack of domain knowledge forces a product manager to improve product discovery to compensate, thus contributing to value creation, or not? Moreover, we detail seven pitfalls of experimentation and validation and how to avoid them, and we explore UX designers’ many difficulties and challenges in SAFe®-driven organizations.

Lastly, we appreciate Jeff Gothelf sharing a ‘box-by-box breakdown of how to use the [Business Model Canvas and Lean UX Canvas ] as complementary tools in your business and product development process,’ and we suggest a formula to help you account for your team’s innovation efforts.

Food for Agile Thought #327: Improve Learning and Maximize Retention, Failing Innovation Experiments, Value of an Agile Coach, PMs Don‘t Need Domain Knowledge? — Age-of-Product.com
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Food for Agile Thought #326: Enabling Great Work, Experimenting w/ Customers, The Better Listener, The Experimentation Mindset

TL; DR: Enabling Great Work, The Better Listener — Food for Agile Thought #326

Welcome to the 326th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,017 peers. This week, we point out the patterns enabling great work. We also reflect on the essential pre-requisite of a high-performing team: Team members ‘feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes,’ and we suggest building our listening mindset to escape the ‘surface listening’ trap.

We then delve into the need to balance discovery & delivery while establishing strong ethics of testing business ideas and share an approach to creating an experimentation mindset when the target organization values structure and process. Moreover, we have an interesting look at the top-down world of product management, where the team is just executing what’s put in front of them.

Lastly, we explain why product roadmaps may be roads; however, they are no road maps, and we try a simple quiz to get the self-management discussion going: Where do we stand as a team?

Food for Agile Thought #326: Patterns Enabling Great Work, Experimenting w/ Customers, The Better Listener, The Experimentation Mindset — Age-of-Product.com
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Hands-on-Agile #40: Best Team Ever w/ David Burkus — March 23, 2022

TL; DR: HoA #40: Best Team Ever w/ David Burkus

Join us for an exciting session with David Burkus on the surprising science of high-performing teams.

Hands-on Agile #40, March 23, 2022: Best Team Ever—David Burkus — Berlin Product People GmbH

🎟 RSVP now on Meetup.com — Seats are limited!

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Product Owner Interview Guide: The Product Mindset

TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions: The Product Mindset

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. This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the product mindset.

The questions 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 — Age-of-Product.com
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Food for Agile Thought #325: Influencing w/o Authority, Leaps of Product Faith, DoorDash’s Dog Food, Coach—Don’t Fix

TL; DR: Influencing Without Authority, Leaps of Product Faith — Food for Agile Thought #325

Welcome to the 325th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,942 peers. This week, we delve into influencing without authority, from framing to social proof to inception to storytelling. We also suggest that engineers also need to improve strategic decision-making skills instead of only focusing on technical execution skills, and we shed light on structural and instantiated dependencies and how they impede flow in an organization that scales agile practices.

We then reflect on a recent statement of a CPO: ‘I wouldn’t call it blind faith, but more like informed faith. […] But, really, there’s a leap of faith involved.’ We believe that DoorDash’s recent decision to have everyone ‘eat DoorDash’s own dog food’ once a month is merely empathy theater. Also, we point at the benefits of formalizing learning plans to keep your skills as a product person competitive and share how to do so.

Lastly, we explore the 9th principle of the Agile Manifesto: ‘Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.’ Moreover, we point out four beneficial leadership coaching techniques, from outcome shift to uncovering limiting beliefs.

Food for Agile Thought #325: Influencing w/o Authority, Leaps of Product Faith, DoorDash’s Dog Food, Coach, Don’t Fix — Age-of-Product.com
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