If you are a Product Owner (PO), you are essentially the owner of the product and most POs I come across know what that entails. However, I also meet POs who determine during the Sprint which items from the Sprint Backlog the Development Team should work on, or what the solution should be, or even perform code reviews and evaluate work this way.

As Agile practitioners, we know the importance of being adaptable and embracing change. Yet, we’re all creatures of habit, and breaking free from our habitual behaviours can be challenging. While habits can provide comfort and predictability, they can also hinder our growth and limit our ability to embrace Agile principles.

Many people choose to do things efficiently, because they probably assume that it is the best way to be successful and that it is the best way to get the highest value with the least amount of effort. But substituting efficiency for effectiveness makes things worse instead of better. The fact is that efficiency and effectiveness are two different things.

The Project Mindset approach, in which success is defined upfront based on Scope, Time and Budget, will (based on experiences) lead to less business involvement and more task management. The Product Mindset approach, in which success is continuously driven by business metrics like User adaption/retention, revenue cost saving per feature, will (based on experiences) lead to less waste, more creativity and more releases.

The future is unknown and although some people claim to be able to predict the future, most people can't. But to look a little ahead, into the future, to have a sense of when certain items on the Product Backlog are finished, predictability would be very useful. Although we can't be completely predictable, it is helpful if we are a little more predictable than we are now. And therefore we need some measurement results from the near past.

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.

The Sprint Review is not just a "Demo" or a presentation, it is a collaboration of the Scrum Team with the stakeholders from the business.

Are you a Business Analyst and do you currently fulfill the role of the Product Owner? Or otherwise the Product Owner may have delegated some tasks to you, for lack of time to deal with those themselves.

Recently I ran into a beautiful piece of text, written by Rachel Naomi Remin. In this text I read the following phrase:"Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company"

In organizations in which agile transitions take place, the ancient English proverb Blood is thicker than water is frequently appropriate. It is decided to adopt agile working, there is talk of Scrum, self-organizing teams, Sprints, standing meetings, sticky notes on the wall, etc. etc.