Join more than 22,000 professionals who subscribe to Food for Agile Thought
and be better informed about what’s happening in agile development!
Our posts by Stefan Wolpers
Stefan—based in Berlin, Germany—has been working for 13-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.
Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12 hours per week.
This result immediately prompted two additional questions: What are Scrum Masters doing during the rest of the week, and in what way does a Scrum Master’s work manifest itself over time? While answering the above question requires additional research and data collection, the latter can be answered to a certain grade by focusing on a few common scenarios.
The first article of this series will address the Scrum Master engagement with the Development Team.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #210—shared with 23,637 peers—analyzes why customer journey teams may be superior to cross-functional teams; we enjoy a list of anti -agile personality types, and we listen to Mr. DevOps on how to build high-performance organizations.
We also help product managers to understand user research better; we delve into the most annoying collaboration mistakes of product teams, and we grasp the prerequisites of product-market fit.
Lastly, we thank Andy Cleff for compiling a list of approaches to measure team health and morale.
TL; DR: 42+5 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions That Will Benefit Your Organization
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.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #209—shared with 23,558 peers—delves into Design Thinking habits; we consider how to turn dark ‘agile’ into a value-driven approach again, and we go back once again to antipatterns of organizational agility.
We also address validating hypotheses beyond an ordinary A/B-test; we learn how to orchestrate continuous experimentation for fun and profit, and we applaud Jeff Gothelf for sharing the second version of the Lean UX canvas with the community.
Lastly, we put ‘bugs’ into an agile context, starting with a moth in 1946.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #208—shared with 23,551 peers—sheds light on the fate of Six Sigma; we introduce the free Zombie Scrum Checker for your Scrum Team, and we address once again the cycle-time/velocity prediction issue.
We also delve into Booking.com’s experimentation culture; we learn which traps to avoid when handling payment in a B2C application, and we enjoy a Twitter rant on the uselessness of timeline roadmaps.
Lastly, we thank Ron Jeffries for pointing at the obvious: you get paid for shipping valuable software every single Sprint. Period.
‘Autonomy without accountability equals anarchy’ summarizes an essential design element of any agile organization. Without these checks and balances in place any aspiration to transform an organization is likely to fail. (Or at best level out at a mechanistic level.) Learn more about how Scrum deals with accountability.
We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.
You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in settings.
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
Google Analytics
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Google AdSense
This website uses Google AdSense, a service for including advertisements from Google Inc. (“Google”).
AdSense cookies are stored based on Art. 6 (1) (f) DSGVO. The website operator has a legitimate interest in analyzing user behavior to optimize both its website and its advertising.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
This website uses cookies, which may include third party cookies, to improve your browsing experience and deliver personalized marketing content. To find out more, including how to disable the cookies, read our Cookie Policy. By continuing to browse this website, you agree to our use of cookies.Got it!
