The magic technique to turn a boring Retrospective into an outstanding Retrospective is the rotation of the facilitator role equally among all team members. Check out the following ten benefits of this Retrospective facilitation practice, from boosting learning and skill development to ensuring continuity to encouraging ownership.
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:
The Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 is the fourth edition of the industry survey after 2017, 2019, and 2022. This free report is based on the answers of 1,143 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 US-$80,995, with a standard deviation of about US-$53,700. In the complete report, you will find more detailed information; download your copy below.
Last week, I ran an “interview” with ChatGPT as an applicant for a fictitious Scrum Master position based on questions from Scrum Master Interview Guide. (See below.) While the overall results were broadly acceptable, I thought that changing the ChatGPT prompts might deliver better results. So, this time, I chose to present ChatGPT with three everyday scenarios based on more comprehensive prompts. Lo and behold, it worked very well.
Think twice if you still believe this technology is a fad or a toy. Instead, grab a cup of coffee and read for yourself.
Can a large language model, not specializing in anything “agile,” pass a screening interview for a Scrum Master position? In this ChatGPT job interview, I put OpenAI’s latest generative AI to the test. I took several questions from the 73 Scrum Master Interview Questions guide, see below, covering the whole spectrum from the broad picture to more specific questions, only answerable with hands-on experience on the interviewee’s side.
So, read on and learn whether Scrum Masters will soon be replaced with a chatbot.
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 position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following Scrum Master 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 25,000 times.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the 394th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,957 peers. This week, we start with exploring the Amazon product management framework, a 10-step process. Moreover, we assess the state of ethics in agile coaching and apply Goldratt’s idea that a business aims to make money now and in the future to Scrum. Moreover, Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson interviewed Jim Highsmith, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, and we explore a magic technique to turn a boring Retrospective into an outstanding one.
Then, we reflect on the trend in product development of dropping the dogma and seeking what works, sharing an excellent primer on a problematic strategic decision with an often underestimated importance for your business to get you going. Speaking of what works for you: Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Gustav Söderström, Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify, on what has worked for them.
Finally, we attempt to debunk the original findings of Dunning and Kruger, claiming that the actual effect is that “everyone thinks they are better than average.” We also dip into the meaning of IKIGAI and share a comprehensive essay mapping the similarities and differences between Sociocracy and Holacracy. Lastly, we point to research by the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, shedding “light on what it takes for people to get comfortable with machine learning.”
Welcome to the 393rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,731 peers. This week, Jason Godesky takes a deep dive into the well-established design process, pointing to the Double Diamond problem. Also, we reflect on the hype the agile coaching industry is experiencing, causing the market entry of less qualified players, and we listen to Dave Farley interviewing Kent Beck on a classic topic of the agile community: Is Waterfall experiencing a comeback? Moreover, we offer a primer to creating ChatGPT prompts for Scrum practitioners to get you started running.
Then, John Cutler states that the (product) world does not need yet another prioritization framework. Instead, he suggests prioritizing a focus area. We share insights and examples on dealing with PMF’s evolving, fluctuating, and changing nature, and Lenny Rachitsky interviews Ayo Omojola on the aspects of creating outstanding products. Also, we point to the importance of inspecting and adapting OKRs regularly and provide a guide on how to do this.
Finally, we appreciate Mark Graban interviewing Joshua Kerievsky, discussing how ‘agility’ doesn’t strictly mean ‘Agile’ in software, and Gergely Orosz shares an “interview with the four researchers behind a new developer productivity framework: The three dimensions of DevEx.” Lastly, we close this week’s edition with a simple question: Should we be polite to chatbots?
Welcome to the 392nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,619 peers. This week, we delve into the origin of ideas, sharing the results of seven research studies and revealing the people, incentives, and environments that create innovation. Also, we address misconceptions leaders harbor about agility; we examine the habits of high-performing teams and offer some guidance for adopting these habits on your team, and we share a primer on facilitation, answering a vital question: “What is a facilitator?” (The guide pairs well with this week’s blog post on: Agile Negotiations — Life Is a Negotiation; Why Would Scrum Be Different?)
Then, we share Jason Godesky’s belief that design and development are the two sides of the same medal when he explores a contested area: agility. Moreover, Alex Osterwalder dives into the art of testing and developing hypotheses, from desirability over feasibility to leveraging AI to testing in corporate or B2B environments, and Daniel Stillman points to the crucial role of conversations in product management: types, designing techniques, empathy’s significance, and facilitation’s role.
Finally, we introduce Kim Scott’s Get Stuff Done (GSD) wheel, where she clarifies that you must first establish the groundwork for collaboration through a listening culture for GSD to succeed. Additionally, we address statistics on change fatigue: In 2022, employees faced ten enterprise changes on average, up from two in 2016. However, support for change dropped to 43% due to change fatigue. Lastly, we ponder whether AI is comparable to a management-consulting firm like McKinsey. The parallels between the pervasive use of consulting firms and AI are apparent.
Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad.
Read more to learn how to get your agile community going even without a dedicated budget and how to make it work with distributed teams.
📺 Update 2023-05-11: Recently, Petra Wille published the findings of her study on how to establish and grow a product community of practice based on interviewing 100-plus practitioners. Watch her talk now!
