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.
Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.
Read on and learn in this post what opportunities you have to advance your career as a Scrum Master or agile coach in the next year.
Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.
Read on and learn in this post on Scrum anti-patterns how you can identify if your Scrum Master needs support from the team.
The Agile Camp Berlin 2020 will happen from April 17-18, 2020, at the Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum right in the center of Berlin.
Join the Agile Camp Berlin and experience two energizing days with 200 agile peers focusing on community, sharing, and learning. We will practice games and exercises—from Liberating Structures to paper snowflakes and airplanes to building castles with 50 other folks you have never met in your life. We will share tips & tricks, lessons learned, war stories from the agile trenches, and enjoy the company of 200 like-minded people at a perfect venue for our purpose: the Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum, one of twelve organizations that Frédéric Laloux describes in his book “Reinventing Organizations.”
The #ACB2020 tickets are available now!
What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all. Moreover, there is always room for improvement. Hence, learn more about 21 common Sprint Retrospective anti-patterns.
Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now.
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Are we still on the right track? Answering this question in a collaborative effort of the Scrum Team as well as internal (and external) stakeholders is the purpose of the Sprint Review. Given its importance, it is worthwhile to tackle the most common Sprint Review anti-patterns.
Update 2019-11-10: I re-edited text, added new graphics as well as an excerpt from the Scrum Guide to clarify the purpose of the Sprint Review.
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During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.
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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 38+9 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my thirteen 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 15,000 times.
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This second publication in the Hands-on Agile Fieldnotes series provides 42+5 questions and answers for the Scrum Product Owner interview.
Co-authored with Andreea Tomoiaga, 42+5 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.
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This Liberating Structures for Scrum meetup addressed the Daily Scrum, particularly the notion that it is barely possible to create a Liberating Structure Daily Scrum string that fits into the 15-minutes time-box of the Daily Scrum. Learn more on how to bust that myth.
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The Scrum Guide Reordered is based on about 90 percent of the text of the 2017 Scrum Guide, extending its original structure by adding additional categories. For example, you will find all quotes that can be attributed to the role of the Scrum Master in one place. While the Scrum Guide is mainly focused on the three roles, five events, and three artifacts, I aggregated quotes on specific topics as well, for example, on self-organization, finance or technical debt.
The Scrum Guide–Reordered allows you to get a first understanding of Scrum-related questions quickly. For example, it is good at relating a specific topis — say “stakeholder” — with Scrum first principles such as Scrum Values, or empiricism.
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Back in 2017, we started the Scrum Master Salary Report 2017—the first industry report that covered in-depth the educational background, working experience, industries, and organizational details of the companies Scrum Masters or agile coaches work for. For its 2019 edition—the Scrum Master Trends Report 2019—, we partnered with Scrum.org—the leading Scrum training and certification institution founded by Scrum co-founder Ken Schwaber—to improve the underlying data set.
Learn more about the state of the industry and download for free the Scrum Master Trends Report 2019. (Scroll down for the sign-up form.)
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Agile failure seems to be increasingly more prominent nowadays despite all the efforts undertaken by numerous organization embarking on their journeys to become agile.
The funny thing is: Who would disagree that the four core principles of the Agile Manifesto —
— are derived from applying common sense to a challenging problem? Moreover, the application of those principles might be suited to fix numerous organizational dysfunctions and reduce an error-prone and complex social setting to maybe just a complicated one?
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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.
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Food for Agile Thought’s issue #221—shared with 24,597 peers—addresses agile coaching Spotify style; we come back to technical debt—a never-ending story—, and we listen to a take on what high-performing engineering teams need.
We also learn how to empathize with engineers as a product manager; we pick up a formula on how to measure product/market fit, and we dive into seven likely cases of internal (product) politics.
Lastly, we dare to ask: what is sociocracy, and what is it good for?
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #221?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #221—shared with 24,513 peers—addresses the evolution of flow thinking; we delve into visualizing of forecasts, OKR, and non-static roadmaps, and we learn how to build professional trust in the workspace.
We also appreciate a new guide on north star metrics; we face our industry’s dismal track record regarding dealing with uncertainty, and we agree on that product strategies shouldn’t be executed blindly, but inspected and adapted like all the rest.
Lastly, we thank Allan Holub for voicing the obvious: when teamwork becomes the new standard, HR techniques from the Roaring Twenties need to be ditched.
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #220?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #220—shared with 24,421 peers—asks whether Taylorism is probably less of a villain than often believed; we get back to the agile-industrial complex, and we appreciate a simple introduction on how to kick-start self-organization.
We then learn more about value propositions in niche markets; we can compare our activities as product managers with the results of a recent study, and we listen to a discussion on six critical ingredients for a great product strategy.
Lastly, we consider a heretic thought: might the benefit of team longevity be overrated?
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #219?
