For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing startup. Also, let me introduce you to the anti-patterns agile startups shall avoid at all costs.
Job ads for Scrum Master positions reveal great insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile. I analyzed more than 50 job ads for Scrum Master positions to gain these. Learn more about what makes job ads such a treasure trove with the following 22 Scrum Master anti-patterns derived from job ads.
The following 58 Product Owner theses describe the PO role from a holistic product creation perspective.
They cover the concept of the Product Owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product portfolio and product roadmap planning, and the Product Backlog refinement. The Product Owner theses also address the Product Owner’s part in Scrum events from Sprint Planning to Sprint Review to Sprint Retrospective, and the Daily Scrum.
A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes?
Well, it always depends on the purpose of a tool’s application. Read more about why Scrum checklists are a handy tool if applied at an operational, hands-on level, reduce your cognitive load, and free up time for more relevant things.
Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork. It would help if you also talked about it, particularly at the beginning of your endeavor to becoming a learning organization. Marketing your journey to the rest of the organization—and thus securing their support, collaboration, and buy-in—is a critical success factor to step up the transformation game: You want to become agile, not “do agile.”
Learn more about eleven proven stakeholder communications tactics that contribute to making this happen.
Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring servant leader should avoid during the organization’s transition: From applying the Stage-Gate® approach through the back door to the ‘where is my report’ attitude to other beloved signs of applied Taylorism.
