Scrum Master vs Project Manager. They are two very different roles/accountabilities. How do we reconcile or differentiate the two? Find out in this blog with PST Robert Pieper.

Organizations define Product Manager and Product Owner roles differently. Company size, industry, and structure all play a role. Scrum makes the Product Owner accountable for maximizing value, but many companies add a Product Manager alongside—or instead of—a Product Owner. This creates variations in how the roles function.

What’s the real challenge in Scrum? Not velocity. Not tools. It’s how people relate, decide, and collaborate under pressure. Scrum guides that—not with instructions, but with structure. Here's how.

Erfahren Sie, warum viele Product Owner und Manager sich um das Falsche sorgen: Nein zu sagen, anstatt zu allem Ja zu sagen. Dieser Artikel zeigt drei systematische Ablehnungstechniken auf, die die Beziehungen zu den Stakeholdern stärken und gleichzeitig die Produktstrategie schützen, um zu vermeiden, dass organisatorische Anreize die Produktstrategie sabotieren.

As a Product Owner, one has to dive deep into Product Management in order to create Valuable and Useful products. One of the key aspects in Product Management is to “know thy customer”. Knowing, understanding the behaviours, attributes and traits of the customer can help the Product Owner greatly to know how a customer would respond to a product within a specific market segment.

In knowledge work, backwards movement on the Kanban board often signals confusion or rework. Please don't confuse yourself anymore and find out whether moving cards backwards on a Kanban board aligns with practical knowledge work. Learn what Toyota can teach us about doing it right in Kanban. This article will be relevant for anyone working with a Kanban board and a Kanban System.

Two topics that keep crossing my path these days are trust and resilience. Trust as the foundation for collaboration, and resilience as the ability to deal with challenges, stress, and setbacks—and to emerge stronger. In this blog post, I want to share some first-aid interventions that can help build more trust and resilience in teams—especially when emotions run high and things get heated.

Many Scrum Teams still use velocity, but often in ways that create false certainty. This post explores how combining velocity with uncertainty can lead to better forecasting, greater transparency, and more meaningful conversations about value and risk.

The blog post, titled "The Art of the Sound Decision: Jonathan Gowens' Framework," outlines six key components for making high-quality decisions, drawing parallels with samurai philosophy. The core idea is that effective decisions are not just intellectual exercises but commitments to action. The six components are: Well-Framed: Clearly defining the decision, its context, and constraints. Clearly Understand the Problem: Thoroughly analyzing the root cause before seeking solutions. Explore Options: Generating a diverse range of potential solutions beyond the obvious. Gather Relevant Information (Evidence-Informed): Utilizing intuition, data, and feedback to inform the choice. Consider All Trade-offs: Evaluating the pros and cons of each option and transparently communicating the rationale. Take Action: Implementing the decision with clarity and alignment, as a decision without action is meaningless, and action without decision leads to chaos. The post emphasizes that following this structured process increases the likelihood of favorable outcomes and builds trust within an organization.

Most product teams are great at delivering, less so at discovering. This playful problem discovery game helps teams break out of assumption-mode and ask smarter questions. Inspired by real-world failures, it sharpens your instincts, challenges confirmation bias, and helps uncover what actually needs solving before you build the wrong thing.

Scrum Teams must deliver working software to real users every Sprint; true progress is measured by delivery to production, not just by completing internal work.

To increase transparency (first pillar of Empiricism), Scrum Teams, as self-managing teams, can make a decision to broadcast all the information that middle managers and stakeholders need to be aware of. Leverage AI to create eye-catching Sprint Reports.

The purpose of the Scrum Master is to improve the adoption of Scrum. So, it makes sense that the Scrum Master should ask the question What does a high-performing Scrum Team look like

In diesem Aritkel beschreibt PST Simon Flossmann die Psychologie guter Entscheidungen.

Learn why many Product Owners and Managers worry about the wrong thing: saying no instead of saying yes to everything.

Scrum Bingo is a fun way to reflect and sometimes laugh at our routines. But it also reminds us to be intentional with our words, honest with our blockers, and respectful of the team's time.

Use Scrum only when transformative disruption is required. Or use ‘parts’ of Scrum if those parts prove to be better than previous ways-of-working.

This week we had a great Q&A on Forecasting and Release Planning. During the "Ask a PST" session, we answered many questions. We got so many questions, that we could not answer all of them. This blog post tries to remedy that and answers most of these from my (Dominik Maximini) perspective.

Scrum isn’t a detailed manual—it’s a simple game with a few clear rules. These rules don’t tell you how to win, but they create the boundaries for meaningful collaboration. This post explores what the rules are, why they matter, and what happens when we ignore them.

Ever get the feeling you’re the “agile person” in the room—brought in to run ceremonies, fix Jira boards, or play Scrum cop, but never actually invited to shape real strategy? If that hits close to home, you’ll want to listen in on my latest conversation with Michael Gerharz.

Most large organizations already have product teams, platform services, and customer-facing solutions, but they often work in isolation, creating delays, duplicated work, and poor customer outcomes. The real problem isn’t in the technology but how the organization is structured. This article breaks down a clear pattern for aligning these three layers: Platform provides shared, enabling services without becoming a bottleneck. Product groups own strategy, delivery, and performance of their products end-to-end. Customer solution teams take full responsibility for delivering integrated offerings that solve real customer problems. By separating concerns and assigning clear ownership, organizations can move faster, reduce friction, and deliver value without falling into silo traps.

Uncover hidden team dynamics, emotional burnout signals, and contradiction patterns that manual analysis misses—in real-time.

This blog explores how product definitions evolve in large companies, the debate around "sub-products," and the importance of empowering teams with a clear problem and the ability to release value. It suggests that "product-ness" might be a scale rather than binary, and that the key question is whether a product structure improves or reduces the team's ability to deliver value. The blog also acknowledges the impact of politics and the need for continuous product definition and adaptation.

There are a bunch of AI keywords that create your foundational knowledge of AI. You should know and understand them.

Explains how the Scrum Master is accountable for enabling effective product delivery, fostering team success, and ensuring each sprint produces a usable, valuable increment.

Scrum actually has very few rules. It’s a simple framework with just enough—but not too much—structure to help teams work together. It’s flexible. It’s lightweight. And it gives teams the space to learn, adapt, and improve continuously.

Not long ago, a product manager asked me, “What’s the one thing most PMs get wrong?” Now, there are plenty of easy answers—ignoring data, neglecting stakeholders, frameworks, . But let’s go deeper. Here’s the truth: Many product managers love their product too much.

En este artículo, el PST Alex Ballarín te explica qué son los autodiagnósticos para Product Owners y como pueden ayudarte a avanzar en el camino que necesitas para llegar a ser un product owner más estratégico.

Practical alignment tools empower Scrum Teams by strengthening stakeholder relationships, maintaining user focus, and building trust to deliver products that meet organizational goals.

In diesem Artikel beschreibt PST Simon Flossmann 3 Hebel für bessere Teamleistung.

Is the outcome of your meeting to schedule another meeting? In this short video, I identify three deeper challenges behind this frustrating dynamic and walk you through how to shift the pattern, starting with what’s in your control.

How often do you have to escalate? In this short video, I identify three common causes behind this frustrating dynamic and walk you through how to shift the pattern, starting with what’s in your control.

Maximizar la entrega de valor con Scrum sigue siendo una tarea difícil y compleja cuando no se considera el valor a entregar. Para mejorar este objetivo se necesita partir desde el entendimiento de las necesidades del cliente. Se pueden usar muchas herramientas o técnicas para este propósito. Algunas de las que mencionamos pueden ser: El Lienzo de propuesta de valor, El viaje del cliente que ayuda a identificar sus dolores, mapa de empatía, Persona o Protopersona, etc. En el siguiente post se describe algunos beneficios que mejoran el uso de Scrum.

Scrum depends on the intelligence of the people using it. That means learning, understanding, and making reasoned decisions. Is your team thinking—or just doing?

Agilität nach Vorschrift hat ausgedient, da KI reine Routinetätigkeiten automatisiert und Produktbetriebsmodelle ergebnisorientierte Teams erfordern.

In diesem Artikel teilt PST Simon Flossmann 3 Wahrheiten über Scrum, die er gerne am Anfang seiner Scrum-Master-Karriere gewusst hätte

A product without a vision is like a ship without a compass—it might move, but it won’t reach the right destination. Through a sample, see how we can leverage AI to create an inspiring Product Vision video.

According to the Scrum Guide, a Sprint can be cancelled—but only by the Product Owner, and only if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. But what does that even mean?

Across organizations of all sizes, I hear the same concerns. They are all expressed different but the common theme is: “Won’t embedded specialists be underutilized?” “Isn’t decentralization too costly or inconsistent?” “Shouldn’t we have one standard way of working?” These aren’t complaints, they’re tradeoffs. And tradeoffs only make sense when you’re clear on what you’re optimizing for.

Explains the difference between subjective goals and the objective Definition of Done in Scrum, highlighting how clear, measurable criteria ensure consistent product quality.

Velocity is one of the most misunderstood ideas in Agile teams. This post explains what it really is. A result, not a target. Something to notice, not something to hit. We break down how velocity often gets misused, share a travel analogy that makes it real, and show how teams can use it to have better conversations. This is not about speed or precision. It is about mindset. And it is a first step toward more honest, value focused planning.

Scrum, como marco ágil, promueve la autoorganización, la mejora continua y la entrega de valor incremental. Sin embargo, muchas organizaciones intentan escalarlo desde la jerarquía, obviando el poder real de su red informal. ¿Qué ocurre cuando reconocemos que el cambio cultural profundo —como adoptar Scrum genuinamente— no se decreta desde arriba, sino que se propaga entre pares?

If your teams are busy “doing Agile” or writing OKRs but the business results aren’t showing up, you’re probably stuck in Process Theater—lots of activity, not much real progress. This happens when people focus on following the process instead of connecting it to actual outcomes, missing the crucial middle step of changing behaviors and delivering impact. The fix? Use outcome mapping: clarify the real behaviors and results you want, then set objectives and key results around those—not just process compliance. Build trust by empowering teams to make decisions and measure progress by tangible change, not vanity metrics. That’s how you move from theater to real traction.

“Good Enough Agile” is ending as AI automates mere ceremonial tasks and Product Operating Models demand outcome-focused teams. Agile professionals must evolve from process facilitators to strategic product thinkers or risk obsolescence.

Scrum Events nerven Entwickler? In diesem Artikel erklärt PST Simon Flossmann, was Scrum Master dagegen unternehmen können.

In this blog, Ryan Brook examines why many Product Owners fail to fulfil their accountability, acting as requirement managers rather than value maximisers. He explores the impact of missing product strategy, emphasising that true Product Ownership requires strategic clarity and a focus on outcomes instead of output.

Most teams plan a Sprint with one question in mind: "What can we deliver this Sprint?" But here's a different take. What if, within every Sprint, we planned across all three horizons of innovation?

Scrum isn’t a finished product—it’s a starting point. What completes it? The collective intelligence of your team. This post explores what that really means, what gets in the way, and how you can unlock it in your day-to-day Scrum practice.

Sprint capacity planning is one of the most often used complementary practices by Scrum Teams. This article from PST Dr. Pawel Rola provides all the basic information and practical examples to help you plan your next Sprint capacity.

In diesem Artikel erklärt PST Simon Flossmann die 3 unsichtbare Hindernisse, die Scrum Teams langsam machen.