TL; DR: Scrum Mastery
How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.
Our posts by Stefan Wolpers
1
Food for Agile Thought #225: Pair Programming, Probabilistic Forecasting, HiPPO Training, Idea Generation 3.0
TL; DR: Probabilistic Forecasting, HiPPO Training—Food for Agile Thought #225
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #225—shared with 24,837 peers—addresses the importance of pair programming; we seek to excel at predicting the future with probabilistic forecasting, and we appreciate an outsight view on Scrum by following sticky notes.
We also point at a crucial stakeholder management competence of Product Owners and Scrum Masters; we enjoy new games and exercises for ideation purposes, and we consider making our product worse for the sake of improving it.
Lastly, we embrace the coining of decaf resistance—it is good to know that a habitual behavior in so many organizations now has a name.
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #224?
Product Mindset: Encouraging Ownership in a Scrum Team
TL; DR: Product Mindset and Ownership in Scrum Teams
There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning the Product Owner into the Scrum team’s bottleneck, impeding value creation rather than spearheading it? Well, cargo cult Scrum might end up in that dead-end. The trick to avoiding this fate is to start including the Development Team as early as possible in Product Backlog management which requires a product mindset.
Learn more about how to kick-off this process with an initial day-long product mindset workshop for your Scrum team.
Food for Agile Thought #224: Descaling Manifesto, Cultivating Ownership, Release Planning, 5th Product Manager Report
TL; DR: Descaling Manifesto, Cultivating Ownership, Release Planning, 5th Product Manager Report—Food for Agile Thought #224
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #224—shared with 24,821 peers—introduces the Descaling Manifesto; we address why great teams have the habit of ‘rule-breaking,’ and we analyze why great Scrum Masters are CEO-material.
We also revisit product releases; we download the 5th Product Manager Report, and we get back to output, outcome, input, effort, and how they are all related to each other.
Lastly, we enjoy a look behind the scenes at Netflix and talk about five levels of ownership.
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #223?
Agile Movers & Shakers (3): Ben Linders
TL; DR: The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview with Ben Linders
Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders:
“As an independent advisor, trainer, and coach, I help organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices to deliver business value to customers. My strengths are continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development. I’m a one-person company doing many different things to help people, teams, and companies become better in developing and delivering software products and services.
I’m a practical person who wants to have a real impact and make the world a little bit better. I look for ways to apply things, share, and help people experiment and learn. In my books, workshops, advice, and coaching sessions, I focus on adopting agile, increasing agility, dealing with impediments, collaboration and communication, continuous improvement, and making retrospectives valuable.
A couple of years ago, I started my own ‘agile scaling and digitalization’ journey. I’m making my books, games, exercises, workshops and remote training, and other agile coaching tools that I use myself in my workshops and advice work available to the world as digital downloads at benlinders.com/shop. And they come with free lifetime support personally by me. Examples of the products and services that I provide are the Agile Self-assessment Game (close to 2000 downloads!), Impediments Cards and Games, Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards. People can use them to self-improve their way of working, or coach professionals, teams, and organizations in improving their performance and increasing the value that they deliver.”
Food for Agile Thought #223: Innovation Failure, Distributed Teams, PMs to CEOs, Keeping Track of Hypotheses
TL; DR: Innovation Failure, Distributed Teams, PMs to CEOs, Keeping Track of Hypotheses—Food for Agile Thought #223
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #223—shared with 24,653 peers—addresses innovation failure; we revisit standups and what makes them successful, and we learn more about the magic stance of actively doing nothing.
We also delve into the ‘2019 Annual Product Management and Product Marketing Survey’ results; we pick up a few useful visualizations to explain product management to outsiders, and we consider bringing order to our user-related questions, hypotheses, and assumptions to prevent user research from turning ugly.
Lastly, we thank both VPs of Engineering from Buffer and Splice for sharing a guide on how to make distributed teams successful with us.
On our own account: Issue 224 will be delivered on January 12th, 2020. Enjoy a chillaxing Holiday season… 🎉
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #222?
