Food For Thought #83: Agile Coach or Scrum Master, Scrum Master Hacks, PM v. PO, Radical Candor

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 19th, 2017—shared with 6,872 peers—answers the question whether you’re a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or both. We like Mike Cohn’s free user story training class to avoid user story smells. And if you have no clue how to pull off a sticky without making it curl, we can help with that, too.

On the product side, Des Traynor of Intercom provides hands-on advice where to allocate blood, sweat, and tears. And, by the way, you’re not the CEO of the product. Sorry. But probably you’re a Product Owner and not a product manager. Roman Pichler provides some insight on this discussion.

Lastly: How radical candor builds kick-ass teams, and what superstars and rock stars have got to do with it.

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Agile Coach & Scrum

Lyssa Adkins: What is an Agile Coach?

Lyssa Adkins and Simon Powers ask: What is an agile coach if everyone is a coach today?

Mike Cohn: Time Sensitive: Free Access to The Better User Stories Mini-Course

Mike Cohn provides free access to a new mini-course he created to help overcome some of the common and challenging problems with user stories.

Ryan Thomas Hewitt: User Story Smells

Ryan Thomas Hewitt shares his top ten user story anti-patterns.

Karen Greaves (via Growing Agile): Assess your Kanban Knowledge

Karen Greaves asks you to put your Kanban knowledge to the test: Pretend that you are walking through an organization and you see the boards below. What comes to your mind?

Philiy Lander: 17 Essential Hacks Every Scrum Master Should Know

Adventure with Agile provides a list of cool tips and tricks for all the tools we love to use as Scrum Masters and facilitators.

Join 270 Peers And Contribute to the Anonymous Poll ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’

The purpose of this anonymous poll is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the agile community to get an understanding whether her or his compensation is adequate.

The report will cover Scrum Master as well as Agile Coaches, both employed and freelancing.

To generate an acceptable first report, we will need at least 300 answers. A larger sample would allow providing more detailed insights, though. At the moment, we already have 270 of 300 replies.

Participate in the ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’ survey now…

Product & Lean

Barry Overeem (via Scrum.org): A Product Owner Self-Assessment

Barry Overeem merges Roman Pichler’s Product Management Framework with Geoff Watts’ DRIVEN idea in a workshop to uncover the traits of a great Product Owner.

Des Traynor and Jason Calacanis (via This Week In Startups): Alignment, building product first, hiring by values, scaling & avoiding churn

Intercom co-founder Des Traynor shares the three ingredients to any successful company: people, product, and profit.

Martin Eriksson (via Mind The Product): Product Managers – You Are Not the CEO of Anything

Martin Eriksson breaks with Ben Horowitz’s idea of the product manager being the CEO of the product.

Roman Pichler: Product Manager vs. Product Owner

Roman Pichler shares his thoughts on the product manager v. the product owner role: Can the roles coexist or not, and which one should be used.

Dalan Mendonca (via Investopad): SEPTEMBER: A product management framework for fast learning teams

Dalan Mendonca introduces his product management framework: September addresses teams that are in the process of finding their product-market fit.

The Essential Read

Kim Scott (via First Round Capital): Warning: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Talent Planning

At First Round’s CEO Summit, Kim Scott shared her epiphany about management — and the mindset and framework it takes to build a kick-ass team.

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