In this energizing 42nd Hands-on Agile Lean Roadmapping session, Janna Bastow, the go-to-authority on product roadmaps, talked about being lean while creating and maintaining your roadmap and how objectives and key results (OKR) may help meet that challenge.
📺 Watch the video now: Janna Bastow: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs — Hands-on-Agile #42.
The purpose of this anonymous Product Owner and Product Manager salary report 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 Product Owners as well as Product Managers, both employed and freelancing. Obviously, a successful Product Owner is an agile Product Manager at heart.)
The goal is to have a sufficient number of replies – that would be at least 500 – by the end of September 2022 to create the report in time for November 2022. Of course, the report will be available for free.
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 23,000 times.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the 349th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,462 peers. This week, we share the impact of a 2014 change in engineering culture at Uber by ‘creating cross-functional program teams and introducing platform teams.’ Moreover, we reflect on why your little, happy Scrum island isn’t enough to achieve business agility, and we combine two powerful coaching tools for agile practitioners to learn from each other. Also, Adam Grant interviews Jenny Chatman on the effects of toxicity, mediocracy, bureaucracy, and anarchy.
Then, we detail how to address the leadership’s need for more predictability by ‘right-sizing’ work items to one- or two-day stories; we delve into the details of product-centric companies, and we listen to Lenny Rachitsky interviewing Teresa Torres on ‘automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making a case for user research, [and] common interviewing mistakes.’
Finally, we refer to the many advantages of using our own products internally, pointing to examples from Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Also, we explain how the ‘5 Whys’ practice works and its benefits, and we enjoy a hearty laugh when Yuri Malishenko applies the IKEA metaphor to Scrum.
Welcome to the 348th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,438 peers. This week, we share lessons learned from ditching Spotify (the “model”) for autonomous Scrum teams while pointing to an inherent problem when a technique like coaching is treated like a panacea: There are notable side effects. Also, we notice patterns accompanying change and point at leverage points to intervene in a system, and we delve into the benefits of remote work.
Then, Ely Lerner believes that ‘product leaders need a framework to ensure they’re spending the right amount of time and effort on the right priorities.’ Learn more about his framework. Also, we suggest Karin Dames’ ‘recipe for an integrated development process.’ Moreover, we outline an approach to how product teams can create a product a customer will consider unique, and we recommend augmenting merely ‘predictable’ roadmaps for the senior leadership.
Finally, Tim Harford compares today’s change aversion in many corporations with a disaster from 1346, and Mark Graban and Rich Sheridan discuss various lessons learned on improving the conditions for creating outstanding products in a complex environment.
Scrum has repeatedly proven 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. A good starting point, though, is to ask a candidate about the intricacies of a Scrum event that puts the Increment, the Stakeholders, the Developers, and the Product Owner at heart, thus providing an excellent opportunity to reflect on the big picture. It is the Sprint Review.
Suppose you want to fill a Scrum Master (or agile coach) position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate. They are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, as a Product Owner and Scrum Master, and my 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 23,000 times.
