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Our posts by Stefan Wolpers
Stefan—based in Berlin, Germany—has been working for 14-plus years as an agile coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Agile Camp Berlin, a Barcamp for coaches and other agile practitioners.
TL; DR: Enabling Great Work, The Better Listener — Food for Agile Thought #326
Welcome to the 326th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,017 peers. This week, we point out the patterns enabling great work. We also reflect on the essential pre-requisite of a high-performing team: Team members ‘feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes,’ and we suggest building our listening mindset to escape the ‘surface listening’ trap.
We then delve into the need to balance discovery & delivery while establishing strong ethics of testing business ideas and share an approach to creating an experimentation mindset when the target organization values structure and process. Moreover, we have an interesting look at the top-down world of product management, where the team is just executing what’s put in front of them.
Lastly, we explain why product roadmaps may be roads; however, they are no road maps, and we try a simple quiz to get the self-management discussion going: Where do we stand as a team?
TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions: The Product Mindset
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. This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the product mindset.
The questions 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.
TL; DR: Influencing Without Authority, Leaps of Product Faith — Food for Agile Thought #325
Welcome to the 325th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,942 peers. This week, we delve into influencing without authority, from framing to social proof to inception to storytelling. We also suggest that engineers also need to improve strategic decision-making skills instead of only focusing on technical execution skills, and we shed light on structural and instantiated dependencies and how they impede flow in an organization that scales agile practices.
We then reflect on a recent statement of a CPO: ‘I wouldn’t call it blind faith, but more like informed faith. […] But, really, there’s a leap of faith involved.’ We believe that DoorDash’s recent decision to have everyone ‘eat DoorDash’s own dog food’ once a month is merely empathy theater. Also, we point at the benefits of formalizing learning plans to keep your skills as a product person competitive and share how to do so.
Lastly, we explore the 9th principle of the Agile Manifesto: ‘Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.’ Moreover, we point out four beneficial leadership coaching techniques, from outcome shift to uncovering limiting beliefs.
TL; DR: Scrum Master Interview Questions on How to Make Your Scrum Master Fail
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. A good starting point, though, is to ask a candidate to walk in the shoes of an imaginary opponent trying to make the Scrum Master fail by culturally accepted means.
Suppose you are looking to fill a Scrum Master (or agile coach) position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following 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 22,000 times.
I know, creating original content consumes a lot of time, resulting in massive opportunity costs, so why not take a shortcut and copy it?
Just let me mention that I file a takedown notice with Google whenever you do this because of copyright infringement.
Why would you care about this process, namely ITSkillsYouNeed.com?
Because approved takedown notices result in real trouble for your domain authority. Every time you copy my content, it will be harder to find your site via Google. In other words: It is a pretty effective way of shooting yourself in the foot digitally. Just saying, don’t complain later, okay?
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