18 Signs of a Systemic Toxic Team Culture

TL; DR: 18 Signs of a Systemic Toxic Team Culture

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.

18 Signs of a Systemic Toxic Team Culture — Age-of-Product.com
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Technical Debt & Scrum: Who Is Responsible?

TL; DR: Technical Debt & Scrum

If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it? To make things worse, if the Product Owner’s responsibility is to maximize the value customers derive from the Development Team’s work, and the Development Team’s responsibility is to deliver a product Increment (at least) at the end of the sprint adhering to the definition of “Done,” aren’t those two responsibilities possibly causing a conflict of interest?

This post analyzes the situation by going back to first principles, as laid out in the Scrum Guide to answer a simple question: Who is responsible for keeping technical debt at bay in a Scrum Team?

Technical Debt & Scrum: Who Is Responsible?
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Team Building Mental Models

TL;DR: Team Building Mental Models

Team building has always been a challenge, not just since the advent of agile frameworks and the resulting emphasis on self-organization, engagement, and achieving a valuable objective. This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.

Team Building Mental Models — Age of Product
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Webinar #7: Scrum Sprint Anti-Patterns [Video]

TL;DR: Webinar #7: Scrum Sprint Anti-Patterns

The seventh Hands-on Agile webinar Scrum Sprint Anti-Patterns analyzed 12 ways a Scrum team can improve its effectiveness by avoiding typical sprint anti-patterns. Learn more about gold-plating, delivering Y instead of X, absenteeism, side-gigs, and organizing people instead of the flow of work.

Scrum Sprint Anti-Patterns Hands-on-Agile Webinar #7
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Solving Impediments as a Team

TL;DR: Solving Impediments as a Team

The main message of the retrospective was clear: there are too many interruptions by stakeholders and senior management. The interruptions impeded the flow of work through the team. Consequently, achieving the sprint goal had been at risk several times in the past. Moreover, the team missed the sprint goal twice recently. Solving impediments as a team has become a necessity.

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments and iterating on the solution.

Solving Impediments as a Scrum Team Interruption Buckets v2 — Age of Product Retrospectives
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