Food for Agile Thought #200: Fixed Agile, Scrum Master Qualification, What Is Your Product, Uncertainty & Product

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #200—shared with 22,519 peers—delves into fixed agile, we learn about how large organizations assess a Scrum Master’s qualification, and why ‘agile transformation’ is not ideal as a story to tell.

We also ask whether all of your organization’s members can answer the “what is your product” question consistently, we gain a better understanding how uncertainty will influence product discovery and delivery, respectively, and brush up our understanding of effective Product Backlog refinement techniques.

Lastly, we like to thank Basecamp for providing another free webbook on software project management Basecamp-style. (#NoAgile, #NoScrum, #NoWaterfall, #NoPostits, #NoSprints, #NoStandups — just saying.)

Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #199?

Food for Agile Thought #200: Fixed Agile, Scrum Master Qualification, What Is Your Product, Uncertainty & Product

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Scrum Guide 2020 — Download the new edition of the Scrum Guide Reordered — Age-of-Product.com

🏆 The Essential Read

Sachin Rekhi: 3 Compelling Concepts from Basecamp's Shape Up

Sachin Rekhi critiques the latest (free) Basecamp book by Ryan Singer on how to manage software projects.

Fixed Agile & Scrum

Ron Jeffries: Fixed-Everything: Agile?

Fixed Agile: Ron Jeffries shares his take on the question of whether ‘agile’ is suited to deliver on fixed scope, budget, and timeline projects.

(via Agile Alliance): How Do We Know if a Scrum Master is “Good Enough” for Our Teams?

Sarah Baca reports on how Express Scripts is trying to determine the qualification of Scrum Masters and how the approach is developing.

Yuri Malishenko (via Medium): Agile transformation is a bad story and here is why

Yuri Malishenko shares his thoughts about why ‘agile transformation’ is genuinely a bad story.

📅 Liberating Structures Scrum Workshop — From Product Strategy to Roadmap to Sprint Review

Join us for another exciting LS Scrum workshop on September 7th, 2019, in Berlin. Following up on our first workshop, We will continue exploring LS microstructures, weave them into strings and apply those to Scrum’s soft underbelly — the product side, or figuring out what is worth building. Please note that this class is an advanced Liberating Structures Scrum workshop. The class is not suited for beginners to Liberating Structures. Also, you need to have a good understanding of both Scrum as well as product management in general. The workshop language is English.

Learn more: 📅 Liberating Structures Scrum Workshop — From Product Strategy to Roadmap to Sprint Review — Berlin, September 7, 2019.

Product & Lean

Ellen Gottesdiener: What Is Your Product?

Ellen Gottesdiener reflects on the importance of having a clear and consistent answer to this fundamental question.

Philipp Krehl (via Mind The Product): Product Discovery or Product Delivery: How do you Decide?

Philipp Krehl analyzes the fundamental difference between product discovery and delivery: the degree of uncertainty.

Ilia Pavlichenko (via Scrum.org): Effective Refinement, Part I

Ilia Pavlichenko suggests how to split stories, take on refinements, and why developers need to communicate directly with the stakeholders.

📯 Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop

Why running a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum. Beyond the basics, we have addressed the Sprint Retrospective, the Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog as well as the Daily Scrum.

So, I thought it might be a worthwhile experiment to aggregate the previous meetups into a one-day immersive workshop on Liberating Structures for Scrum, built around climate change and MegaBrain.io, a struggling startup with little runway left and in desperate need of two successful Sprints. We ran that workshop last week, and this is what we learned.

Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop — Age-of-Product.com

Read More: Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop.

📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule

You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:

Date Class and Language City Price
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 December 10-11, 2024 GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇩🇪 December 12, 2024 GUARANTEED: Professional Product Discovery and Validation Class (PPDV; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €749 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 December 18-19, 2024 GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Feburary 4-6, 2025 GUARANTEED: Hands-on Agile 2025: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility (English) Live Virtual Conference FREE
🖥 🇩🇪 January 28-31, 2025 Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇬🇧 February 12-13, 2025 Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇬🇧 February 27, 2025 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €749 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 6-April3, 2025 GUARANTEED: Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class (English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Cohort €499 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇩🇪 March 11-12, 2025 Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇬🇧 March 26-27, 2025 Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇩🇪 April 10, 2025 Professional Product Discovery and Validation Class (PPDV; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €749 incl. 19% VAT
Professional Scrum Training by PST Stefan Wolpers, Berlin  Product People

You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.


Scrum Guide Reordered Free Download Age-of-Product.com

📺 Join 1,500-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel:

✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn about Fixed Agile : Join the 5,675-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

Large scale agile: Join the Hands-on Agile Slack Group

If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.

Scrum Master Interview Question: free download of the most popular ebook on Scrum Master job interviews — by Age-of-Product

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #199: Fixing Scrum, Mob Programming Patterns, #NoCode, 737 MAX Revisited.

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2 thoughts on “Food for Agile Thought #200: Fixed Agile, Scrum Master Qualification, What Is Your Product, Uncertainty & Product”

  1. Unfortunately it looks like Sarah Bacca’s report on the Agile Alliance website cannot be found. The link doesn’t work and a direct Google search gets to the same page, which still doesn’t work 🙁

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