In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Viktor Cessan shares lessons learned as an agile coach when working with systems, resulting in evidence-based interventions.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Probably, we have all heard that piece of wisdom before. In my experience, having some — even rudimentary — sketching or drawing capabilities is an essential Scrum Master skill. Visualizing a tricky issue while explaining the background to a stakeholder, someone from the management or a teammate helps to pave the way to have a meaningful discussion.
Let me introduce you to an example sketch based on the Tuckman model of group dynamics I use in my Professional Scrum Master training classes to make the effort and cost of creating a Scrum team easier understandable.
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.
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. One failure symptom of a botched agile transformation is the frustrated Scrum Master.
📺 Join me and explore the consequences of a Scrum Master who has thrown in the towel in 92 seconds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the 297th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 31,817 peers. This week, we point at data and case studies, providing insights into how to narrow in on your organization’s North Star Metric. Also, we advocate that technical debt is rather a strategic lever for your organization’s success than a liability, and we analyze the invisible undercurrents that determine your team’s culture.
We then continue reading Marty Cagan’s pathology series with a deep dive into the well-known problems with MBA programs. Moreover, we share six common product discovery anti-patterns and what you can do about them, and we introduce fundamental principles behind designing and maintaining a product roadmap tailored to the needs of agile teams.
Lastly, we enjoy listening to Richard Kasperowski and Seb Rose talking about how to help create a good team with less seasoned professionals.
In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Jutta Eckstein and Maryse Meinen point out the advantages of creating diverse, cross-functional teams to benefit your customers and your organization.
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. While it is common to first look outside our team for impediments, such as dysfunctional processes or other systemic issues, I would advise starting with the Scrum team’s way of collaboration: Are we aligned on the why, what, and how? Otherwise, the three following Developer blunders may diminish the team effectiveness.
📺 Join me and explore the consequences of these Scrum Developer blunders and what you can do about them in a little more than five minutes.
Update: I am running a poll on LinkedIn—join the voting: “What common ways have you observed how Developers diminish the value creation of their own work?”
Welcome to the 296th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 31,704 peers. This week, we acknowledge that rebels spark ideas, and we consider whether OKRs can restore purpose to agile teams and free them from the tyranny of the Product Backlog. Moreover, we get an inside view of how Youtube managed its early hyper-growth, and we point at the advantages of using low-code tooling to build software: Iterating faster.
We then address why the tech industry has such a high proportion of weak product managers and product leaders. We pitch the advantages of collaborative decision-making, leveraging both stakeholders’ and developers’ expertise while creating a shared understanding. Also, we share three tactics that have proven to impact getting buy-in from team members significantly.
Lastly, we enjoy an interview with Christina Wodtke on how OKR can help product managers accomplish more, and we get curious about a new Scrum software: “HappyStack is a Scrum project software tool for developers: Backlog, Sprint Planning, Standups, Reviews, and Retros done the right way.”
