During the 19th Hands-on Agile meetup, 30-plus people addressed the path to becoming a successful Scrum Master or agile coach, following up on the “Scrum Master Career 2020 — Using Ecocycle Planning to Identify Opportunities” meetup we had in December 2019.
We used two Liberating Structures microstructures — Appreciative Interviews and Superpower Cakewalk — to delve into what lets us grow as professionals as well as individuals.
Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Dave West.
Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at Scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote speaker and is a widely published author of articles, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and then worked with Ivar Jacobson running the North American business for IJI. Then Dave managed the software delivery practice at Forrester research where he was VP and research director. Prior to joining Scrum.org, Dave West was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering, and architecture.
How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.
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.
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.”
While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup that is intended to help agile coaches grow and strengthen their practices with the Agile Fluency Suite of materials and the Agile Fluency Game.
