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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.

Hey everyone. First of all I would like to thank you for your support spreading out my last week's vlog on the differences between Project Manager and Scrum Master.

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.

User stories are business needs, not requirements in the traditional sense. They are oriented toward the user and a business need. The big difference between a user story and other types of requirements is that a story describes a business need, not the system’s functionality.

A User Story is the most widely used Agile Practice for capturing needs and requirements and describing Product Backlog Items. To get the most of any technique it is good to understand the why behind it not just the what. Let’s discuss how to write better User Stories in Scrum.

Teams often run through the motions of Scrum and get very hung up on story points, velocity, committed percentages and as a result struggle to deliver value. But what I’ll share today is what unlocks the value of Scrum;

Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.

How common misunderstandings about the Scrum Roles prevent Scrum Teams to become effective

Scrum is a goal driven framework. And that is what I really like about Scrum. If I can summarize Scrum Guide into one sentence, it is about delivering an increment that meets the Sprint Goal.

The Scrummer'19 quiz is slowly coming to an end. Today we are kicking off the 5th and last iteration of the Scrum Summer Quiz. There are still two copies of the book Software in 30 Days, authored and autographed by Ken Schwaber, to be raffled off. 

How effectively are you maximizing value when dependencies tell you what to do first? Dependencies impact the core of the role of Product Owner.

Saying no is an integral part of any Product Owner's job. In this short video, I explore the reasons why we might be saying yes when no is a more appropriate answer (these reasons are from a great book by Dominica DeGrandis Make Work Visible) and how to say No when you need to.

The Scrum Team consists of three roles. The only three roles needed in Scrum. But all needed! And all equally important to be successful. This first sentence is all there is to it. And if we would practice Scrum within our companies the way described in this first sentence we can all be successful in delivering incremental value to our customers each Sprint.

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology.

Impact Mapping is a powerful technique that helps teams understand how to link the work that they do with results that their organizations would like them to achieve. We’ve been using this technique for a while in our Scaled Professional Scrum and Professional Scrum Product Owner courses.

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it.

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. However, if you get to the Sprint Planning Event and your backlog is not ready, then you are doing it wrong.

Let’s start with a question. When is the Sprint Planning over? Usually, the first answer that comes to mind is “when the time-box expires”. It is a good answer. However, Sprint Planning is a maximal time-box.

The Scrum Team consists of 3 distinct Scrum roles that promote self-organization: the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the Development Team. The accountability of each role complements the accountability of the other roles.

One of the arguments used against Scrum and a common misconception at the same time is the idea that quality is traded for speed in Scrum. As a PST with years of experience in Quality Assurance I decided to challenge this myth.

In the Professional Scrum Product Owner course, we teach that high performing Product Owners are entrepreneurial. They not only act with the business in mind, they have the authority to make important decisions. What should we do now versus later?

What is a good Product Owner and am I the right person to fill in this role? If you have ever struggled with this question, you should propably keep reading.

The Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) is an Entrepreneur - a value Maximizer & Optimizer

At a recent course, one of my attendees talked about his use of a "to delete" status for items in his Product Backlog. Where items had been in his Product Backlog for more than 3 months he tagged them as "to delete".

How to facilitate a Product Backlog Refinement meeting? What do you do as a Scrum Master to keep the item under refinement on track? When do you estimate and what do you do when you need more time for discussion?

Last week I participated in a Product Owner course facilitated by Gunther Verheyen. What triggered me was the part where we discussed the difference between having a project-

What do you do during Product Backlog refinement? How do you prevent discussions going off track or in too much detail? Who should be there? When do you estimate?

One of the most challenging activities in Scrum is Product Backlog Refinement. During training courses I get many questions on this activity. What do you do during Product Backlog refinement?

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex problems, and productively and creatively develop products of the highest possible value. It's tool organizations can use to increase their agility.

During a recent Product Owner training I gave the participants the assignment to complete the sentence "A great Product Owner..." The result was a nice overview of characteristics, skills and conditions necessary to fulfill this role in a great manner. In this blog post I'll share the result, completed with a short explanation and some more ideas of my own.

This is a list of 10 questions a Scrum Master may ask a Product Owner, in order to help coach them in their role. Of course, not all questions may apply based on your specific context.

This blog post talks about the issues caused by unlimited budgets.