Even in 2025, the difference between the Product Owner and Product Manager is misunderstood. Is it a career path? Is the PM a step up from the PO? Are they the same? This article puts this discussion to bed in an easy and straightforward way.

Pricing is a hypothesis about value, willingness-to-pay, and customer behavior. In this blog, we explore TAP’s pricing formula and show how Scrum Teams can run lightweight experiments, fake doors, A/B tests, and packaging trials, to validate pricing early. Treating pricing like backlog items ensures empiricism guides not only what we build, but also how we sustain value.

Every product begins with a spark: a frustration, a market gap, or even an accident. But sparks aren’t finished products; they’re hypotheses waiting to be tested. In The Anatomy of a Product, we call this the Spark of Life: the messy, human moment that reveals a problem worth exploring. Scrum gives us the perfect framework to nurture sparks responsibly: observe before you build, frame the problem clearly, and prototype to learn. Not every spark will grow into a product, but every product begins with one.

Stuck in a product discovery rut? PST Sander Dur presents the 72 Discovery Tactics Card Deck and why it should be your go-to tool for sparking fresh ideas and breaking through stale thinking. Draw from six creative themes to challenge assumptions, prototype boldly, and inspire action—whether you're solo or in a team workshop. Ready to energize your next Sprint? Use it solo or in team workshops to spark fresh ideas, remix multiple cards for even wilder insights, and bust through stale thinking whenever you need a creative jolt.

Personas help us understand who we’re building for, but access to real users isn’t always easy. The Airport Persona Interviewer GPT lets you simulate live interviews with realistic personas based on your input, like age, role, goals, and pain points. Instead of filling out static templates, you have a conversation, uncovering motivations, frustrations, and behavior. It’s great for early-stage ideas, UX prep, or improving your questioning skills. While it’s not a replacement for real research, it helps teams explore and align quickly. Use it to generate, refine, and stress-test personas, then validate what matters with actual users.

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.

The biggest competitive edge your team can get is learning as fast as possible. Not the biggest feature, expendable budget, or exposure, but learning. The Learning Loop helps to shorten your learning time.

Eat your own dog food - that is what we (tried to) apply in our first-ever journey of writing a book. It was challenging, sometimes frustrating, but very much rewarding!

Patricia Kong, a seasoned expert, guides listeners through the intricacies of EBM, emphasizing its role in data-driven insights. Todd Miller and Kurt Bittner share firsthand experiences, providing tangible examples of how EBM has revolutionized organizations. This episode transcends borders, offering a global perspective on EBM's universal applicability across industries. Whether you're a seasoned professional or an aspiring entrepreneur, the hosts deliver key takeaways for leveraging EBM to thrive in today's dynamic business landscape.

Personas are powerful tools to create an understanding of what your ideal users look like and what they would need or like from your product. In this article, Ryan Brook and Sander Dur share how to create a high-level Persona map.

If there is anything we would absolutely love to see more often, it would be active market and domain assessment by Product Owners. Product Owners are accountable for maximizing the value that is generated by the product the Scrum Team creates. Knowing where your product stands relative to the competition, or how many of your products have been sold is essential information to decide on the next steps to take. It can balance out conundrums like "can we build this product, and should we do it?".

One of the elements of the Product Wall is the Roadmap. Often misused to create a yearly plan to stick to, Roadmaps are pretty different. Let's dive in!

When facing challenges in team composition or skills, the answer is not always to upskill or improve cross-functionality. Sometimes the answer is to reteam. But what if the Scrum Team doesn't see those options themselves yet?

Product Walls are great tools that radiate information and support informed decision-making in the empirical world. Equally, it can be pretty tricky to build them. In this series, Ryan Brook and Sander Dur talk you through an example Product Wall and its components.

We teach the most awesome courses, but is a certification really needed to be a great Scrum Master?

Just finishing several Product Backlog Items, without any clear reason why, is not a usable goal. Then what is? Find out in this video!

Watermelon metrics - reported green but in reality totally red. We've all seen them. But can we prevent them?

Working virtually can be challenging when it comes to feeling you truly working as a team. This guest asked us what you could do or try to create a team feeling in a remote environment.

This must be one of the most asked questions that we get; what books do we recommend.

Organizations don't change overnight. Going from for instance waterfall to Scrum is a complicated process, with lots of people involved. Scrum Masters can be the right people to support this transition.

What if management has something important to share with the Scrum Team that they should improve? Or what if the Scrum Team wants to discuss something with management during the Sprint Retrospective? Evelien Roos and Sander Dur discuss this question right here.

The essence of a team is that people collaborate. Else it's incredibly hard to perform as an actual team, rather they just happen to work simultaneously and not together. What to do in such a case?

Part of the Scrum Master's job is to work with the Product Owner. This specific person has tried OKRs, but asked us what else is available to work with. There are many things and areas that you could try! In this video, Evelien and I dive into this question.

Another question we frequently get is whether Scrum Masters are truly needed. We can do the work without the Scrum Master, right? In this week's video, Evelien Acun-Roos and I address this question. To give you a quick answer; no, we don't think there's ever a point where you can do without the Scrum Master.

Earlier this year I was in an Ask a PST session with Scrum.org hosted by Lindsay Velecina. It was awesome, with hundreds of people attending the event. With so many people joining, it was impossible to answer every single question on the spot. So I invited Evelien Acun-Roos to answer these questions together in our tv studio at Xebia with the support of the Xebia Academy and producer Roald Willemsen. The result is a series of short videos, which will be released weekly. We'd love to hear/read what you think, so feel free to let us know! #scrum #agile #ama #pst #professionalscrum #videos #questions #qanda Mastering Agility

Product Ownership is not a straightforward job. Accountable for maximizing the value derived from the product, Product Owners have to balance their options continuously, decide what to do, and maybe even more importantly, what not to do.

Because let's face it, they don't.

Somewhere along the line, people and organizations seem to have lost a certain sense of pragmatism. Job requirements are more focused on theoretical knowledge, rather than certain (work)life skills. In other words, we need to focus more on solving challenges, and less on flashing around theoretical achievements.

Stakeholders want to know when things will be done, and rightfully so. But what if they demand their features to be delivered on scope, on time, and on budget? The tried-and-tested iron triangle might not be the best approach...

Is your organization having trouble instilling self-management? Then this is the article for you!

Have you ever come across a Product Owner that has been fully empowered to make all the decisions needed for the product, without any constraints? It's pretty rare. A donut can help your Product Owner in gaining more decision-making power.

There are eight hours available for Sprint Planning. In those eight hours, a lot can be done. Too often this event is rushed, limiting the ability to maximize the possible achievements. In this article, I share nine things to do to make the most of your Sprint Planning.

There are many great reasons to use Scrum. Focus on quality, frequent delivery of value, and limitation of risk, to name a few. Saving money is not one of them...

The Scrum Events are in place to support empiricism and the delivery of value. You need to run them at least once per Sprint. But could we do them multiple times in the same Sprint? Find out in this article!

Backlog refinement is still a vastly misunderstood activity. There is no single approach to it and no time-boxed event. But why is that? And how to handle it? More on that in this article.

As this article hopefully makes clear, the mental well-being of the workforce is important. Being transparent about what happens after someone shares what they feel could improve is needed to ensure proper follow-up.

What would happen if Superman wasn't around to save the earth? We, as mere mortals, would perish quickly, and the superhero movies would be super short. Wouldn't it be more helpful if the flying solver-of-all would teach out to save ourselves?

Why a good strategy is still needed with a good product.

Liberate your Sprint Review from being just a demo. There is much more to it than that! I'm sharing eight things you should do in the Sprint Review

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Scrum is by far the most popular framework these days. In fact, the 15th Annual State of Agile shows that 66% of respondees use this particular framework.

Agile implementations shift culture, yet many organizations limit themselves to the bare minimal execution of a framework and call that Agile.

I made it. Over the last years, I have spent some amount of time obtaining the highest of Agile Pokemon badges: the Professional Scrum Trainer. I have to admit this is one of the best moments in my career so far.