While Scrum excels at building and releasing Increments, it does not guarantee that those are valuable—garbage in, garbage out. Scrum teams can equally make things no one is interested in using at all. The critical artifact to create value is the Product Backlog, “an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product.” (Source.) However, Scrum does not elaborate on how the Product Owner identifies Product Backlog-worthy work items. That would be the job of the process that feeds into the Product Backlog: product discovery.
Learn more about which frameworks have proven useful to augment Scrum with product discovery practices.
TL; DR: Evidence-guided Product Discovery Using Itamar Gilad’s Confidence Meter
How much product discovery is enough? Figuring out what is worth building often feels valuable in and of itself. The problem is that becoming stuck in an endless discovery cycle neither solves your customers’ issues nor contributes to your organization’s sustainability. Don’t worry; help is on the way in the form of Itamar Gilad’s Confidence Meter!
As a tactical framework, Scrum is good at delivering Increments into customers’ hands. As we work in iterations, we probably do that several times per month, mitigating risk by closing feedback loops. Nevertheless, there is a potentially hazardous void in the framework that successful Scrum teams start plugging early: how to figure out what is worth building—product discovery—in the first place. As a result, value creation in Scrum is not as straightforward as you might have thought.
Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns that easily impede any agile transformation to a product-led organization.
by Stefan Wolpers|Agile and ScrumWebinarsWorkshops
TL; DR: The Zones of Value Framework w/ Valerio Zanini & Zeina Zeitouni
During this workshop, Valerio Zanini and Zeina Zeitouni explored the Zones of Value Framework that Agile and Product teams can use to build better products. We recorded this video at the 31st Hands-on Agile meetup of April 20, 2021.
Yes, even absolute beginners can prototype an app. And learn a lot about agile product management, Scrum, empiricism, product design, and user experience along the way.
If you intend to live up to Scrum and agile product development’s full potential, creating a shared understanding of how empiricism works among all co-workers in your organization is essential. This low-cost exercise of creating clickable prototypes will significantly improve your organization’s agile transformation.
