The following 70 scrum master theses describe the role of the scrum master from a holistic product creation perspective.
The scrum master theses cover the role of the scrum master from product discovery to product delivery in hands-on practical manner. On the one side, they address typical scrum ceremonies such as sprint planning, sprint review, and the retrospective. On the other hand, the scrum master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the product owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original scrum guide.
Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring agile manager should avoid during the organization’s transition. From stage-gate through the back door to the ‘where is my report’ attitude.
The following 56 scrum product owner theses describe the role of the PO from a holistic product creation perspective.
The 56 product owner theses cover the concept of the product owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product roadmap planning, as well as the product backlog refinement. The theses also address the product owner’s part in scrum ceremonies such as sprint planning, sprint review, and the sprint retrospective.
TL;DR: 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
Scrum is a practical framework to build products, provided you identified 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.
TL;DR: 42 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions That Will Benefit Your Organization
This second publication in the Hands-on Agile Fieldnotes series provides 42 questions and answers for the Scrum Product Owner interview.
Co-authored with Andreea Tomoiaga, 42 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Hiring Agile Imposters represents the most important learnings of our more than 20 years combined hands-on experience with Kanban, Scrum, XP, and several product discovery frameworks. We have worked as Scrum Product Owners, Scrum Masters, agile coaches, and developers in agile teams and organizations of all sizes and levels of maturity.
We have each participated in interviewing dozens of Scrum Product Owner candidates on behalf of our clients or employers. The questions and answers herein are what we have learned.
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 typically work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
TL;DR: The Cargo Cult Agile Checklist for Download
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 run an analysis on their feedback. If the average number of checkboxes marked is higher than nine, then you are probably practicing cargo cult agile. Consider changing it. Or abandon your agile experiment all together. But don’t refer to it as “agile” any longer.
Everyday Failures in Applying Agile
Agile methodologies, like Scrum, have been on the rise across organizations of all kind and sizes for some years by now. Many consultants responded to the increasing demand for agile practitioners, particularly from corporate organizations, with rebranding themselves.
Scrum Master Hiring: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception
Maybe, “Agile” in general is a management fad and not trend at the moment. But what we can say for sure is that Scrum has become very popular for software development purposes. 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.
If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 38 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my ten years of practical experience with XP as well as Scrum, serving both as Product owner and Scrum master as well as interviewing dozens of Scrum master candidates on behalf of my clients.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #109—shared with 11,473 peers—reveals agile metrics secrets, how to avoiding strangling innovation in your organization and asks: “Is Agile Doomed” as more agile tribes and factions appear.
We also share the best learnings from Mind the Product London 2017, how any organization can ‘speed up’ in the race of delivering value, and why falling in love with your ideas is not helpful in that respect.
Lastly, we understand how scaling Agile can work without sacrificing everything it stands for along the way — there is a short new introduction to Large-Scale Scrum available. (Thanks to Craig and Bas for organizing the LeSS Conference 2017 last week!)
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #108—shared with 11,308 peers—covers once again what is agile’s heart: from Deming’s lean production principles to jobs-to-be-done.
We also gain insight into the advantages of radical transparency leading the competition of ideas to new levels. We learn new entrepreneurial mental models from the one who coined product-market fit and embrace 12 certain innovation techniques.
Lastly, we understand that product management is just another sales job, and how we can use guerrilla testing to understand better what to build.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #107—shared with 11,115 peers—covers the change of mind of a design thinking skeptic, quick fix agile, and high-performance Agile.
We gain insight into why agile and DevOps are made for each other, and we get a fascinating report on Facebook’s continuous delivery practices.
Lastly, we turn again to product discovery and its various traps: from leading questions in user interviews to chasing the wrong product metrics.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #106—shared with 10,783 peers—focuses on agile maturity and transition issues, escaping the feature factory, and asks whether sprints have become a burden.
We learn that the product people of WP Engine hate MVPs. Instead, they support SLC. (Which isn’t just another abbreviation but a sound product creation concept.) We also learn why management techniques of the 19th century will not deliver disruptive products today, and how to integrate UX with your agile practices.
Lastly, after months in the making, the Scrum Master Salary Report 2017 is available for download.
