Do you remember the good old days when the organization started with its first Scrum team? And the new engineering kid on the block was “merely” supposed to deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of a sprint? When no one thought about how to align scrum teams?
The first team was to sound the bell for the upcoming change towards a learning organization. Little did we know back then about the challenges along that route. When teams 2, 3 and 4 joined, shipping a product increment at the end of a sprint became first complicated, and then complex.
It turns out that becoming agile does not only required to create (Scrum) teams. Reaping the full benefits of becoming agile, of becoming a learning organization built around software also requires changing engineering practices. Nowadays, it is all about continuous value delivery.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 29th, 2017—shared with 6,369 peers—uncovers the Zombie Scrum apocalypse, and other anti-patterns of organizations stuck in their transformation process.
We advocate self-organization by asking questions and thus resisting the urge to ‘fix’ an urgent problem. Also, we revisit the ‘done’-question with Wally: bugs or no bugs?
David Cancel claims: Agile is dead, long live customer-centricity! And he provides a free ebook to prove his point. Speaking of customer-centricity: feature flags can come quite handy to achieve this objective. Learn how to apply them. And while you’re at it, build more trust with your stakeholders, and assess yourself as a Product Owner.
Last but not least: We follow Uber and Airbnb on their way to disrupt the taxi and hotel industry — in less than a decade. (Schumpeter would have been fascinated.)
TL;DR: How to Get Hired as Scrum Master or Agile Coach
A few days ago, LinkedIn published the LinkedIn Data Reveals the Most Promising Jobs of 2017 report. The report lists the Scrum Master position among the “most promising jobs in America based on the potential for career advancement, job growth, and salary.”
The number of downloads of the “38 Scrum Master Interview Questions” book which already have exceeded 7,000 copies also reflect this positive trend. Hence, I thought it a good idea to write a new guide from a candidate’s perspective: “How to get hired as Scrum Master or Agile Coach.”
From the identification of a suitable agile organization via the interview process to preparing for trial day—everything will be created with the candidate’s goal in mind. However, to do so, I need feedback from you.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 22nd, 2017—shared with 6,173 peers—wants you to free your mind (and the agile rest will follow): Efficiency and creativity don’t make good companions, particularly if you have to resort to guerrilla innovation.
We also bust the myth that there are too many meetings in Scrum—the so familiar post-Scrum-honeymoon whining from developers.
We then dive deep into how to turn ideas into validated learnings and those into actionable user stories for the product backlog. By the way, given the abundance of ideas, you may consider learning how to say ‘no’ to create an outstanding product. Find out how to do so without burning bridges.
Last but not least: Learn how to intelligently fail while hacking the innovation culture of your organization—which is particularly useful if you are not working for Google, for example.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 15th, 2017—shared with 5,934 peers—celebrates 21 years of Scrum with Ken Schwaber and covers Product Owner patterns such as the part-time PO, or how to embed the PO more effectively into the Scrum team’s daily work.
We also learn that Holacracy can add purpose to organizations that use Scrum, and that Scrum even works well at home with four Lil’ Rascals.
We then dive deep into risk-mitigation and how to avoid product failure, and ask ourselves: “Is there a plural of priority?” (Yes, I know, a lot of product roadmaps pretend there is one…) So, why not learn storytelling with Christina Wodtke, and turn ‘priorities’ into ‘priority’ again?
Last but not least: A brand new, free ebook from Hands-on Agile covering 42 interview questions for the Product Owner role is available. You can download it right here.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 8th, 2017—shared with 5,703 peers—looks into agile transitions at scale: hybrid patterns, success stories, and principles of organizational design.
We learn that the Jira people discovered eight traits of successful teams and that getting to done requires a team to accept ownership and accountability.
We also revisit the product manager v. Product Owner debate and have a look at 2016 from the product management community perspective. Also, we learn about the hard-wired cave-man inside of us and what implications this has for product design.
Last but not least, Erin Griffith reports on the growing list of startup scandals, bordering on fraud. (Yub, my beloved Theranos is part of that article, too.)
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