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Shift Left: Value Creation in Scrum

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-21 Featured Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL; DR: Value Creation in Scrum

As a tactical framework, Scrum is good at delivering Increments into customers’ hands. As we work in iterations, we probably do that several times per month, mitigating risk by closing feedback loops. Nevertheless, there is a potentially hazardous void in the framework that successful Scrum teams start plugging early: how to figure out what is worth building—product discovery—in the first place. As a result, value creation in Scrum is not as straightforward as you might have thought.

Value Creation in Scrum — Shift Left — Age-of-Product.com

Join the Anonymous Scrum Master (and Agile Coach) Salary Report 2023

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-09-26 Featured Agile and ScrumNews

TL;DR: Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 — An Anonymous Poll by the Community for the Community

The purpose of this anonymous Scrum Master salary report 2023 is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the agile community to understand whether their compensation is adequate. (And yes, the report will cover Scrum Masters as well as Agile Coaches, both employed and freelancing.)

The goal is to have a sufficient number of replies – that would be at least 1,000 – by the end of November 2022 to create the report in time for January 2023. Of course, the report will be available for free.

Join the Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 — Age-of-Product.com

👉 📈 Join the Anonymous Poll for the Upcoming Free Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 Now!

Free Ebook: 73 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates

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

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 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.

73 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates — Age-of-Product.com

27 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-04-09 Featured Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL; DR: 27 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out. The following article points to 27 common Product Backlog anti-patterns – including the Product Backlog refinement process – limiting your Scrum team’s success.

Scrum Product Backlog Anti-Patterns from the Scrum Anti-Patterns-Guide — Age-of-Product.com

The Scrum Master Salary Report 2022

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-01-24 Featured Agile and Scrum

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

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

Cargo Cult Agile — A Checklist to Open the Discussion

by Stefan Wolpers | 2020-10-24 Featured Agile and Scrum

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

📅 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

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

by Stefan Wolpers | 2020-08-23 Featured Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

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.

Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results)

by Stefan Wolpers | 2018-07-17 Featured Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL;DR: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team

Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great scrum master serves only one scrum team — that’s at least a popular narrative in the scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day – with a single team? Aren’t they supposed to become self-organizing over time? And if so, does the scrum then need a scrum master 24/7?

As I worked for years as a product owner on scrum teams without a dedicated scrum master-which was working well-I was curious to learn more about that question, too. Hence I ran a survey in late June and early July 2018, the results of which are presented here.

In total, 261 scrum masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses.

Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results) — Age of Product

Food for Agile Thought #370: Calm Innovation, Delivery Dates, Participatory Decisions, Bad Bosses

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-25 News

TL; DR: Calm Innovation, Delivery Dates — Food for Agile Thought #370

Welcome to the 370th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,317 peers. This week, Shane Parrish interviews Tobi Lütke of Shopify about calm innovation, fighting bureaucracy, and scaling Shopify. Also, we reflect on facilitation and decision-making, including the opportunity costs of premature convergence, and learn more about the “Technology, Organization, and Product (TOP)” approach to agility. Moreover, we dissect the background of bad bosses.

Also, we learn from Ian McAllister about essential PM skills, broadening your horizon, and the importance of diversifying your skills as you move up the ladder. Speaking of which, we also share ten real-life examples of mistakes with long-term career-limiting effects for product managers, and we analyze three, unfortunately, prominent ways to trigger waste and frustration in product management.

Finally, we play our favorite broken record again: hands-off the deliberately abstract concept of story points. Moreover, we detail why teams underestimate work—learn more about hubris, dominant voices, and lacking the big picture—and advocate reducing cycle time to improve throughput and predictability. Lastly, Ken Norton shares his approach to what to do “when it’s time for some tough talk.”

Food for Agile Thought #370: Calm Innovation, Delivery Dates, Participatory Decisions, Good People to Bad Bosses — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #369: Joy of Agility, CEOs and Product Leaders, Team Change is Inevitable, Product Data Mistakes

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-18 News

TL; DR: Joy of Agility — Food for Agile Thought #369

Welcome to the 369th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,291 peers. This week, we delve into the Joy of Agility and learn about the inevitability of team change and how dynamic reteaming may support dealing with it. Then we consider whether how decisions are made is more important than who makes them and why startups should have a risk roadmap, a plan for what they need to learn, from de-risking their organization to techniques used.

Also, we notice that ‘strong alignment and candid communication between a CEO and CPO’ are prerequisites for an organization’s product success. However, they can slowly dissipate when the organization is on a growth trajectory. Marty Cagan delves into multiple product management topics, from strategy, vision, and ethics, to the ways of working on a recent podcast. Additionally, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Alex Hardiman, the Chief Product Officer at the New York Times, for example, about the background of the Wordle acquisition.

Finally, we use a well-known Indian parable to point at three anti-patterns when using data, from rejecting ‘unfitting’ data to not turning disagreements into learnings. Moreover, we highlight the criticality of developing ‘inclusive mindsets to understand your own perspectives, the perspectives of others, and how they influence collaboration in design.’ Lastly, W.B. explores fundamental limitations to A/B tests that many businesses fail to consider—with possibly grave consequences.

Food for Agile Thought #369: Joy of Agility, CEOs and Product Leaders, Team Change is Inevitable, Product Data Mistakes — Age-of-Product.com

Scrum Tools and Practices to Enhance an Incomplete Framework, Part 1

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-14 Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL; DR: Scrum Tools, Part 1

“The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, […].” (Source.) This half-sentence is probably one of the more often misinterpreted statements of the Scrum Guide. On the one side, it defines the necessity to enhance Scrum with other practices and tools. On the other side, it is the reason that so many attempts to practice Scrum are simply botched, resulting in ScrumBut versions of epic diversity. So, let’s look at proven Scrum tools and practices enhancing a purposefully incomplete framework without defying or negating its first principles.

Please note that the following Scrum tools and practices list is not complete. Please feel free to add more suggestions by commenting.

Scrum Tools and Practices to Enhance an Incomplete Framework — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #368: Successful Product Development, Gracefully Firing People, Mental Models to Help Kill Projects, Dysfunction Mapping

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-11 News

TL; DR: Successful Product Development — Food for Agile Thought #368

Welcome to the 368th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,252 peers. This week, we delve into the importance of opportunity, output, outcome, and impact for successful product development. Moreover, we describe a step-by-step process on how to identify and subsequently also rectify dysfunctions within organizations. Then, Farnam Street points at essential leadership lessons from Michael Abrashoff’s book ‘It’s Your Ship,’ from rewarding risk-takers to skipping commend-and-control to letting go of your ego.

Also, referring to Astro Teller, CEO of Google’s moonshot factory, Annie Duke describes ways that help to kill innovation projects responsibly, and Marty Cagan defines the foundation of empowered product teams concerning customers, stakeholders, and engineers. Additionally, we advocate that using Gherkin as a notation for user stories will significantly improve communication with engineers.

Finally, Julie Zhuo lists five values of being data-informed, from accepting probabilities to setting verifiable goals, and we share an approach to answering a classic leadership question on the nature of a metric’s plunge. Also, given the turbulent week at Twitter, Lenny Rachitsky interviews Matt Mochary on how to best approach layoffs without botching the process and killing culture and innovation with one stone.

Food for Agile Thought #368: Successful Product Development, Gracefully Firing People, Mental Models to Help Kill Projects, Dysfunction Mapping — Age-of-Product.com

Product Owner & Product Manager Salary Report 2022

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-11-07 Agile and Scrum

TL; DR: Product Owner & Product Manager Salary Report 2022

How do you compare? The Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022 is based on 500-plus replies from practitioners gathered globally during the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2022. Learn more about your Product Owner or Product Manager career opportunities for free.

By the way, the average salary of our participants is $91,000, with a standard deviation of roughly $49,400. In the complete report, you will find more detailed information; download your copy below.