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. They 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.
The “97 Scrum Master Interview Questions” guide is available in its seventh edition. Learn about 14 topical areas essential for an assessment of candidates for Scrum Master positions.
Congratulations on your new Scrum Master position! Now what?
What has served me well over the years is a combination of observation and asking questions. The following 60 Questions for a New Scrum Master may support you in learning more about the Scrum team’s way of working and the organization’s culture.
The following set of questions is intended as a starter to get a new Scrum Master airborne in a short period. Depending on how familiar your team is with Scrum, the kind of the team’s organization and its culture, and the market your Scrum team is serving, this set of questions may require change.
The questions have proven helpful in 1-on-1 conversation, in group discussion, and the form of an anonymous survey. But, no matter the format, the questions pave the way for a new Scrum Master to gather insight into the Scrum team’s way of working and the organization’s culture they need to start to support the team.
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60 Questions for the New Scrum Master
20 Questions a New Scrum Master Should Ask Her Team to Get up to Speed
The Scrum Guide Reordered audiobook is based on about 95 percent of the text of the Scrum Guide 2020, extending its original structure by adding additional categories, for example, on self-management, commitments, or accountability. The audiobook of the Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered is a 22-minute long MP3 file. We are planning to make it available on other platforms, too.
The audio version of the SG 2020 Reordered allows you to get a first understanding of Scrum-related questions in a convenient manner—by listening to the content. For example, SG 2020 Reordered audiobook is good at relating specific topics—say “stakeholder”—with Scrum first principles such as Scrum Values, or empiricism.
From Scrum Master to Development Team members, this set of questions addresses the foundations of a Scrum Team capability to build valuable products: technical excellence and what it takes to achieve this proficiency level. The questions have been modeled after some basic principles that high performing teams have in common. Download a printable template for your convenience.
You want to know the state of agility in your organization? Here we go: Download the checklist, distribute it generously among your colleagues, and run a quick poll. It will only take 5 minutes of their time–and then analyze their feedback. If the average number of checkboxes marked is higher than nine, then you are probably practicing cargo cult agile in one form or another.
If running the cargo cult agile survey is the ‘inspection,’ then consider adapting your approach to being agile by kicking-off a discussion among the stakeholders of your organization’s endeavor.
