How Scrum Teams Fail Stakeholders and What You Can Do About It

TL; DR: How Scrum Teams Fail Stakeholders

In this article, we uncover typical ways in which Scrum teams fail stakeholders, from overpromising results to poor risk communication to neglecting feedback. Moreover, we will also explore actionable strategies to overcome these anti-patterns by building trust, aligning priorities, and enhancing collaboration for successful product development.

How Scrum Teams Fail Stakeholders and What You Can Do About It — Age-of-Product.com
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The Top Ten Continuous Improvement Actions for Teams

TL; DR: Continuous Improvement for Teams

Cultivating a culture of continuous improvement within Scrum teams or Agile teams is pivotal for personal well-being, enhancing effectiveness, building trust with stakeholders, and delivering products that genuinely enhance customers’ lives.

This post dives into the top ten actionable strategies derived from the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide book, providing a roadmap for teams eager to embrace Kaizen practices. From embracing Scrum values and fostering psychological safety to prioritizing customer feedback and continuous learning, these strategies offer a comprehensive approach to fostering innovation, collaboration, and sustained improvement.

The Top Ten Continuous Improvement Actions for Teams — Age-of-Product.com
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Scrum Team Failure — Scrum Anti-Patterns Taxonomy (3)

TL; DR: Scrum Team Failure

This post on Scrum team failure addresses three categories from the Scrum anti-patterns taxonomy that are closely aligned: Planning and process breakdown, conflict avoidance and miscommunication, and inattention to quality and commitment, often resulting in a Scrum team performing significantly below its potential.

Learn how these Scrum anti-patterns categories manifest themselves and how they affect value creation for customers and the organization’s long-term sustainability.

This is the third of three articles analyzing the 183 anti-patterns from the upcoming Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide book. The other two articles, see below, address adhering to legacy systems, processes, practices, and communication and collaboration issues.

Scrum Team Failure — Scrum Anti-Patterns Taxonomy (3)
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Product Discovery for Scrum Teams — Scrum Tools, Part 2

TL; DR: Product Discovery for Scrum Teams

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.

Product Discovery for Scrum Teams — Scrum Tools, Part 2 — Age-of-Product.com
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Health Checks for Agile Teams — From Spotify to The Liberators to Self-Made

TL; DR: Health Checks for Agile Teams

Agile teams thrive on continuous improvement and adaptability. Self-assessment isn’t just a health check measuring tool but a compass guiding teams toward their potential. It enables teams to understand their strengths, identify areas of improvement, and delve deeper into work dynamics beyond mere output.

The true essence of self-assessment in Agile is fostering transparency, collaboration, and relentless improvement. It’s not an audit; it’s a mirror reflecting a better version of your Agile team.

This article comprises a few well-known self-assessment tools; use them or have them inspire you to create your own assessment.

Health Checks for Agile Teams — Age-of-Product.com
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Creating a Personal Readme for Scrum Masters with ChatGPT

TL; DR: Creating a Personal Readme for Scrum Masters with ChatGPT

Providing a personal readme to your new teammates and stakeholders as a Scrum Master is a great way to build trust and rapport while managing expectations at the same time. I do so regularly and having a template for that purpose comes in handy.

Therefore, I thought it also might be an excellent exercise to test ChatGPT on more practical aspects of a Scrum Master’s work. So please follow the complete path to having ChatGPT create a decent personal readme template for Scrum Masters—which took me less than 20 minutes.

Creating a Personal Readme for Scrum Masters with ChatGPT — Age-of-Product.com
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