Gold-Plating Beyond Done — Making Your Scrum Work #7

TL; DR: Gold-Plating Beyond Done

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. However, creating Product Increments that “over-deliver” in scope or quality — also known as gold-plating — with regard to the previous refinement agreement demonstrates that the Developers need to acquire a more entrepreneurial mindset and embrace their responsibility.

Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint anti-pattern in 109 seconds.

Gold-Plating Beyond Done — Making Your Scrum Work #7 — Age-of-Product.com
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Four Scrum Master Success Principles

TL; DR: Four Scrum Master Success Principles

Contrary to popular belief, the Scrum Master success principles are tangible, when we guide the analysis with an outside perspective.

Read on and discover four Scrum Master success principles: From when not to use Scrum to product quality to supporting the Product Owner to putting self-management at the center.

Four Scrum Master Success Principles — Age-of-Product.com
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Hiring: 71 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters

TL; DR: 71 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 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen 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 8,000 times.

Hiring: 71 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters — Age-of-Product.com
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Free Ebook: 47 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.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 47 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen 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.

So far, this Scrum Master interview guide has been downloaded more than 19,000 times.

47 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates — Age-of-Product.com
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📅 🖥 Virtual Agile Camp Berlin 2021 — May 27-29, 2021

TL; DR: The vACB21’s Schedule, Session Proposals, Technology, and Workshops

The Agile Camp Berlin 2021 will be a virtual event from May 27-29, 2021.

We will spend three energizing days from 1 pm to 7 pm CEST at a live virtual Barcamp using open space technology principles and practices. The general conference language is English; sessions in other languages are welcome!

📅 🖥 Virtual Agile Camp Berlin 2021 — May 27-29, 2021 — vACB21 — Hosted by Berlin Product People GmbH

Read on and learn about the organization of the virtual Agile Camp Berlin 2021, its preliminary schedule, from your session proposals to session planning to the essential technology to enjoy the best possible experience.

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Scrum Guide 2020 — The Development Team Is Dead; Long Live the Scrum Team!

TL; DR: The Scrum Guide 2020

The Scrum Guide 2020 is available now: Change is coming to make Scrum more accessible and inclusive beyond software development. Learn more about the changes, download the brand new and free Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered to spot patterns quickly, and join the Scrum community discussion.

Scrum Guide 2020 — The new edition of the Scrum Guide Reordered — 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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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.

Product Backlog Anti-Patterns — Age-of-Product.com
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Food for Agile Thought #291: Hypotheses Validation, Authentic Feedback, Measuring Productivity, The Art of Removing Features

TL; DR: Hypotheses Validation, Measuring Productivity—Food for Agile Thought #291

Welcome to the 291st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 31,152 peers. This week, we delve into hypotheses validation, and we shine a light on why it is often hard to have an authentic conversation and what you can do about it. We also stress the importance of modeling and measuring culture and analyze critical problems at the leadership level of organizations that result in a 70 % failure rate of transformations.

We then wonder why so many product managers want to create strategies while we derive all the signals for further product growth from the operational work in the trenches. We appreciate a new ebook on dealing with difficult stakeholders and critical situations, and we learn a simple approach to measuring team productivity: Don’t touch velocity!

Lastly, we learn that Gitlab identified a new DevOps maturity model.

Food for Agile Thought #291: Hypotheses Validation, Authentic Feedback, Measuring Productivity, The Art of Removing Features — Age-of-Product.com
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The Blame Game Retrospective — Making Your Scrum Work #6

TL; DR: The Blame Game Retrospective

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. Turning the Sprint Retrospective into a Blame Game Retrospective demonstrates a Scrum team’s lack of skills and professionalism.

Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint Retrospective anti-pattern in 83 seconds.

The Blame Game Retrospective — Making Your Scrum Work #6 – Age-of-Product.com
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Three Wide-Spread Product Owner Failures in 6:09 Minutes—Making Your Scrum Work #5

TL; DR: Three Wide-Spread Product Owner Failures

There are plenty of Product Owner failures. Given that Scrum is a framework with a precise and concise yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

Explore with me three widespread examples of how Product Owners fail their team in three short video clips, totaling 6 minutes and 9 seconds.

Three Wide-Spread Product Owner Failures in 6:09 Minutes—Making Your Scrum Work #5 — Age-of-Product.com
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Food for Agile Thought #290: Design Thinking Scrum, Product vs. Project Teams, Agile Leadership Practice Library, Disrupting Disrupters

TL; DR: Design Thinking Scrum—Food for Agile Thought #290

Welcome to the 290th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 31,083 peers. This week, we delve into Design Thinking Scrum, and we note that most frameworks pay a lot of attention to decision making, less, though, to understanding decisions. We also share the agile leadership practice library, and we point at the12th principle of the Agile Manifesto: A self-managing team also needs to be a self-learning team.

We then point at the advantages of product teams over project teams, and we learn when and how to get involved with Lean, Agile, and Design Thinking regarding your product lifecycle. Moreover, we enjoy describing a hiring process based on auditioning, not interviewing, the best candidates.

Lastly, we appreciate ThoughtWork’s latest version of its tech radar, and we ask: Who Disrupts the Disrupters?

Food for Agile Thought #290: Design Thinking Scrum, Product vs. Project Teams, Agile Leadership Practice Library, Disrupting Disrupters — Age-of-Product.com
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