Community Blog

Hey! What's good this week awesome people? As for me, I have been meeting people in physical space and have started facilitating and training in person again. Still in Australia at the moment though.

In this video, I'm talking about what to look out for when talking about customer needs and how to help your team truly understand their customers.

Since this question keeps on coming up and seeing how Product Owner is misunderstood as a new name for business analysts, in this video I elaborate on three things that Product Owners must own to succeed in fulfilling his or her accountability.

Have you ever noticed people keep talking about things, but they've not aligned with what their words mean? I have seen agility measured as the number of "agile teams" and the "number of training attendees" more often than I like to admit.

When (Patricia Kong - Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions at Scrum.org) taught me how to combine the chocolatey-goodness of Evidence Based Management with the hazelnutty-goodness of Hypothesis Driven Delivery, I was ecstatic! "AHA!", I says to myself.

In the Peoples And Teams section of the Professional Scrum Master course, we discuss the impact of Task Switching. We discuss that task switching destroys efficiency and quality. 

In the The Evidence-Based Management Guide we talk about the Intermediate Strategic Goal and I likened that to the Product Goal in the 2020 Scrum Guide.

Most Scrum Teams that I encounter don’t do refinement of their Product Backlog and try to work on things that they don’t understand correctly.

 

If you’ve used agile, you’ve heard of creating the minimum viable product (MVP).  MVP has been thrown around so much and for so long that the term’s original power is lost.

"How do you get an inexperienced Product Owner to concentrate on the why's and the value delivered by a feature/requirement, rather than a list of what's e.g we must gather a,b,c... x,y,z info from our users"

Four PST's (Andy Hiles, Steve Trapps, Sjoerd Kranendonk and Jasper Alblas) discuss the changes in the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide. You can watch the video above.

The following are the changes that struck me the most in the 2020 Scrum Guide...

This blog post talks about the addition of Commitments to each Artifact in the updated Scrum Guide.

One of the more challenging aspects of Product Management is to create a tangible relationship between the work we do today and the business strategy. Product Goals are an often overlooked mechanism that can help you in this area.

The 2017 version of the Scrum Guide states, "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team." But what does value mean anyway?

The days are getting shorter and colder. Summer is over and winter is coming. Some people are already thinking about the holidays and the preparations for it. Soon children will have their Christmas wish list ready. The wish lists my children created were always a combination of text and pictures; every item on the list contained a name, a picture, information where to buy it and how much it costs. They did everything to increase the chance of getting these presents and especially getting the right presents.

Brief about me before you read this post so you can understand my perspective better. I am a software developer and Scrum Teacher...

Aunque la lista de competencias puede ser amplia y variar según el tipo de producto y el escenario a enfrentar las siguientes áreas de competencia pueden ser tomadas en cuenta para ser un gran Product Owner.

What are the Scrum Product Owner's Accountabilities & Responsibilities? Are they just Business Analysts who detailed User Stories in JIRA?

Inspirado en la estructura liberadora TRIZ. Ser un buen Product Owner es un desafío que puede iniciar entendiendo su rol como promotor de la transparencia y del trabajo en equipo respetando los límites de la autoorganización.

Para ser exitoso con Scrum un Product Owner debe complementar sus competencias con prácticas y herramientas...

What is up awesome people? I hope you are having a great weekend.

In today's vlog I discuss five indicators to identify whether someone is the Product Owner.

In May 2019, I spoke at the Agile Manchester conference, where I presented my talk "The Product Owner's Toolbox".

What is up awesome people! In this vlog I will be sharing why the Product Backlog in Scrum is not only consists of User Stories and why it is not prioritised.

I've been using a visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship between the various Lean/Agile requirement containers. Some people call the full model a dinosaur. Others are reminded of the snake who ate an elephant from "The Little Prince". (I'm sure there is a good connection to elephant carpaccio somewhere in here ...). In this article I'll explore this model and connect it to the stances of the Scrum Product Owner. 

A Sprint Review is perhaps one of the most difficult elements in the product development with Scrum.

What's up awesome people. I hope you are all having a great week.

How much have you scored this year? My parents asked this question twice a year throughout my schooling. I was well prepared to ask the same questions to my son, but school cheated me. Have you had a similar past? If yes, then you will understand why I call it a generation gap issue.

This blog post uses a metaphor to illustrate the potential impact of having more than one product owner per product.

In today's vlog, I discuss about the differences between the Scrum Master and the Product Owner role.

What is a Product Owner? What are the differences between a Product Owner and Project Manager? Isn’t a Product Owner some kind of an Agile Project Manager? These are some of the questions we often get from people in our Scrum.org classes.

When we talk about Scrum for complex Product Development, it starts from Vision and Product Backlog.

Technical debt seems like a topic that resides completely in the domain of a Development Team. They are responsible for delivering a potentially releasable Increment after all. But might there be more to it for a Product Owner?

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

I've learned and experienced that most symptoms can be traced back to not adhering to the Scrum Roles. Let's start with the Product Owner role.

Should the PO really balance the level of technical debt? I just had this conversation yesterday at Sweden's "big" agile conference, Agila Sverige.

Fighting organizational impediments as a Product Owner? Combine powers and utilize the Product Owner and Scrum Master symbiosis. And create more focus at the same time.

Earlier this year, I released the complimentary Scrum Poster with the goal to give Scrum Teams around the world a medium to see the Scrum Guide in visual form.

The other day, I picked up my son from soccer and he had a huge smile on his face. I asked him how it was and he answered with an even bigger smile “Awesome!”.

Earlier this year, we had released the complimentary Scrum Poster and the response was way beyond positive. We love that teams around the world use the poster to make Scrum transparent.

The Clerk is your personal waiter for all your user story serving. Gathering all the wishes, user stories and demands is what The Clerk does.

Some of the most famous and influential leaders of all times include people like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

I will make a case why the Sprint Goal should take center stage in any Sprint. If it seems difficult, it is an opportunity to improve.

The Project Manager is typically concerned with day-to-day progress of the Development Team.

The Customer Representative Product Owner is the go-to person for people in the organization who want to gain a understanding of what customers (and/or users) are looking for in the product or service which the Product Owner is responsible for.

The Subject Matter Expert or SME is the expert in telling you how stuff works. Product Owners that favor this stance are a blessing and a curse.

Visionary Product Owners are people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill.

While working with plenty of Scrum Teams and teaching Professional Scrum Product Owner classes, I observed a similar anti-pattern regarding Product Owners, which resembles anti-patterns of Scrum Masters who are not empowered.