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Food for Agile Thought #349: 4 Deadly Sins of Work Culture, Right-Sizing Your Stories, Engineering Culture at Uber, Little Scrum Islands

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-07-01 News

TL; DR: Engineering Culture, Little Scrum Islands — Food for Agile Thought #349

Welcome to the 349th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,462 peers. This week, we share the impact of a 2014 change in engineering culture at Uber by ‘creating cross-functional program teams and introducing platform teams.’ Moreover, we reflect on why your little, happy Scrum island isn’t enough to achieve business agility, and we combine two powerful coaching tools for agile practitioners to learn from each other. Also, Adam Grant interviews Jenny Chatman on the effects of toxicity, mediocracy, bureaucracy, and anarchy.

Then, we detail how to address the leadership’s need for more predictability by ‘right-sizing’ work items to one- or two-day stories; we delve into the details of product-centric companies, and we listen to Lenny Rachitsky interviewing Teresa Torres on ‘automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making a case for user research, [and] common interviewing mistakes.’

Finally, we refer to the many advantages of using our own products internally, pointing to examples from Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Also, we explain how the ‘5 Whys’ practice works and its benefits, and we enjoy a hearty laugh when Yuri Malishenko applies the IKEA metaphor to Scrum.

Food for Agile Thought #349: 4 Deadly Sins of Work Culture, Right-Sizing Your Stories, Engineering Culture at Uber, Little Scrum Islands — Age-of-Product.com

Join the Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022 — Let Us Create Transparency

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-26 Agile and Scrum

TL;DR: Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022 — An Anonymous Poll by the Community for the Community

The purpose of this anonymous Product Owner and Product Manager salary report is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the agile community to understand whether their compensation is adequate. (And yes, the report will cover Product Owners as well as Product Managers, both employed and freelancing. Obviously, a successful Product Owner is an agile Product Manager at heart.)

The goal is to have a sufficient number of replies – that would be at least 500 – by the end of September 2022 to create the report in time for November 2022. Of course, the report will be available for free.

Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022 — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #348: Ditching Spotify for Scrum, New Product Strategy Framework, Coaching Ain’t a Panacea, Predictability & Options

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-24 News

TL; DR: Ditching Spotify for Scrum — Food for Agile Thought #348

Welcome to the 348th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,438 peers. This week, we share lessons learned from ditching Spotify (the “model”) for autonomous Scrum teams while pointing to an inherent problem when a technique like coaching is treated like a panacea: There are notable side effects. Also, we notice patterns accompanying change and point at leverage points to intervene in a system, and we delve into the benefits of remote work.

Then, Ely Lerner believes that ‘product leaders need a framework to ensure they’re spending the right amount of time and effort on the right priorities.’ Learn more about his framework. Also, we suggest Karin Dames’ ‘recipe for an integrated development process.’ Moreover, we outline an approach to how product teams can create a product a customer will consider unique, and we recommend augmenting merely ‘predictable’ roadmaps for the senior leadership.

Finally, Tim Harford compares today’s change aversion in many corporations with a disaster from 1346, and Mark Graban and Rich Sheridan discuss various lessons learned on improving the conditions for creating outstanding products in a complex environment.

Food for Agile Thought #348: Ditching Spotify for Scrum, New Product Strategy Framework, Coaching Ain’t a Panacea, Predictability & Options — Age-of-Product.com

Scrum Master Interview Questions: The Sprint Review

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-19 Agile and Scrum

TL; DR: Scrum Master Interview Questions on the Sprint Review

Scrum has repeatedly proven to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient. Which makes any Scrum Master interview a challenging task. A good starting point, though, is to ask a candidate about the intricacies of a Scrum event that puts the Increment, the Stakeholders, the Developers, and the Product Owner at heart, thus providing an excellent opportunity to reflect on the big picture. It is the Sprint Review.

Suppose you want to fill a Scrum Master (or agile coach) position in your organization. In that case, you may find the following interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate. They are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, as a Product Owner and Scrum Master, and my experience as a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. Also, I have interviewed dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients.

So far, this Scrum Master interview guide has been downloaded more than 23,000 times.

Scrum Master Interview Questions: The Sprint Review — Age-of-Product.com

Free Ebook: 97 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-17 Featured Agile and Scrum

TL; DR: The Scrum Master Interview Guide to Identify Genuine Scrum Masters

In this comprehensive Scrum Master Interview guide, we delve into 97 critical questions that can help distinguish genuine Scrum Masters from pretenders during interviews. We designed this selection to evaluate the candidates’ theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and ability to apply general Scrum and “Agile “principles effectively in real-world scenarios—as outlined in the Scrum Guide or the Agile Manifesto. Ideal for hiring managers, HR professionals, and future Scrum teammates, this guide provides a toolkit to ensure that your next Scrum Master hire is truly qualified, enhancing your team’s agility and productivity.

If you are a Scrum Master currently looking for a new position, please check out the “Preparing for Your Scrum Master Interview as a Candidate” section below.

So far, this Scrum Master interview guide has been downloaded more than 25,000 times.

Scrum Master Interview — How to Prepare Yourself to Stand Out — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #347: Beneficial Pre-Mortems, Agility Follows Structure, Scaled Feature Factories, Understanding Refactoring

by Stefan Wolpers | News

TL; DR: Beneficial Pre-Mortems, Scaled Feature Factories — Food for Agile Thought #347

Welcome to the 347th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,417 peers. This week, we delve into five success-critical topics for every product manager, from the benefits of pre-mortems to prioritizing your time to ROI and opportunity-cost thinking. Also, we explain code cruft in a metaphor for non-technical people to help the looming conflict between developers and management, and we share learnings from supporting agile transformations at three companies in the insurance and automation industries.

Then, we detail a pattern of non-tech companies heavily investing in digitalization: Despite good intentions, they end up as big feature factories. Moreover, we point out a) how iterating behavioral changes and applying experiments help build the right products and b) the often overlooked signal-to-noise ratio critical for innovation, or: asking for ideas is a bad idea.

Finally, we embrace a simple process that allows everyone on a team to start writing user stories: the Product Backlog Building Canvas. Also, the folks at ProductLed asked 600-plus SaaS businesses about their paths to product-led growth and core metrics such as free to paid accounts conversion rates.