Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product Goals

Hier mein bewährtes Rezept, wie Product Owner das Sprint Review zu einem gemeinschaftlichen Arbeitstermin machen können und nicht zu einer Demonstration, Präsentation oder Feature-Abnahme verkommen lassen.

In my recent post, I told the story of the time I was fired as a Scrum Master. This time I will tell you about a time I decided to quit (probably shortly before I would have been fired!).

TL; DR: Ignoring the Capacity Check during Sprint Planning There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum.

Many self-managing teams struggle to reach a truly high-performing state. When an organisation moves to a self-management model, a key service centralised management traditionally played – giving feedback – is often ignored, leaving teams struggling to truly grow. In this article, we share how to give effective feedback to improve both team and individual performance.

A culture of feedback is a critical element of an adaptive organisation. While people have talked about how to give effective feedback, little has been said on how to receive it, until now.

It might surprise you that even those with years of Scrum practice sometimes make statements about the framework that are, well, inaccurate. The Scrum Guide outlines how teams can learn to work together to deliver complex work. It’s not a how-to list of instructions, and perhaps that’s what leads to misinterpretation.  Last week, we discussed some of the most common, if well-meaning, misconceptions about Scrum in general.  Today, we’ll dive further into this topic with a focus on the Daily Scrum event.

The Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) course has evolved over the years and the PSPO I assessment has become even more difficult! I consider this assessment the most difficult of all the Scrum.org entry level assessments and it pays to be prepared. Here then, is my updated guide on how to pass the PSPO I assessment.

Want fabulous teams that build great products? Great teams don’t happen by accident. And they don’t have to take a long time to build. Learn more from Richard Kasperowski on employing core protocols for psychological safety and emotional intelligence from this Hands-on Agile session.

Eine bewährte Anleitung, wie Du als angehender Product Owner ein Sprint Planning in Jira durchführst

​​​​​​​According to the 15th annual State of Agile Report, there has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of agile frameworks this year.  Within software teams, agile adoption grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.  This rapid growth undoubtedly means many individuals working within agile frameworks have not undertaken formal training in it.  It’s the perfect environment for misinformation to spread.  Below are a few of the most common misconceptions about Scrum.  

German blog on 5 lessons that I learned in the first year as a product owner that can save you a lot of time and frustration

TL; DR: The Agile Metrics Survey 2021 If you value agile practices, it is crucial to know if a job offering or a prospective business partner that claims to be “agile” really keeps its promises.

Is your preferred approach to starting an Agile "Transformation" sending a bunch of worker-bees to Agile Training and then waiting for the magic to happen?

As long as the Scrum team has the drive to learn and to run experiments to figure out what works for them, Zombie Scrum (or fake Agile) won’t find futile ground and can’t take root!

In this vlog, PST Joshua Partogi shares how Sprint Review is often misunderstood as a demo or showcasing or an acceptance testing session. In this vlog, he busts myths around Sprint Review and how a Sprint Review should look like according to Scrum Guide 2020.

One of the most common reasons for organizations to adopt Agile is to improve quality.

You may have heard of the phrase 'Scrum ceremony'. Which is odd because it's never appeared in the Scrum Guide. But clearly it exists and it's in common use. So, where did it come from? What does it mean? Let's find out.

10+ years of helping organizations scale Scrum from one team to 500+ teams has taught me one thing - most practitioners abandon the scientific principles and core values of Scrum in their pursuit of scaling Scrum. To many of these practitioners, Scaling Scrum is a whole another ball-game to which Scrum principles and values do not apply.

As we head toward the five year anniversary of announcing the Scrum.org Global Professional Training Network (PTN) program read a reflection on the value that this group of partner organizations has brought to Scrum.org, the Professional Scrum Trainer community and most importantly the students who have taken Professional Scrum classes from these partners.  

Troverete qui di seguito una serie di articoli, le basi di Scrum, che approfondiscono i concetti che potete ritrovare nello Scrum Guide 2020 (

Hochperformante Teams, die vorhersagbar liefern, tragen maßgeblich zum Erfolg von Unternehmen bei.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores one of the challenges that many servant leaders face.

Hace unos días tuvimos un intento de interrumpir un evento virtual que realizamos en Zoom. Se filtraron aparentemente varias personas que impidieron el normal desarrollo de nuestro evento ya que tomaron el control del contenido a proyectar y de la voz. Estas cosas suelen suceder y es parte del aprendizaje sobre todo si el evento abierto, gratuito y en vivo.

Iterative, incremental delivery is critical to a successful Agile team.  Without it, Agile is really just window dressing.  Here are five examples that attempt to illustrate the concept of iterative, incremental delivery in a single image.  No example is perfect.  Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have another way to explain these concepts.

10+ years of helping thousands of practitioners with implementation of Professional Scrum has taught me one thing - most practitioners have a very superficial understanding of Scrum. To most, Scrum is nothing more than "Daily Standup" and "Sprint Demo".

Supposedly, Confucius said once: "Let’s start fixing the nation with fixing the concepts first". Whether he really said it or not, nobody can be sure. But what is important, I would like to specify the meaning of Kanban. Very often people understand it in their own way and when two people talk to each other about it, they mean two different things.

TL; DR: Maximizing Utilization as a Relic from the Industrial Management Past There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum.

Leaders use the Scrum Artifacts as a window into the work of the Scrum Team. This transparency enables inspection and adaptation at the appropriate level while enabling the team to self-manage. 

​​​​​​​As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I love working from home, but engaging with others in a remote environment can be challenging. If you’re using Scrum remotely and need stakeholder feedback to order your Product Backlog, here are a few ideas for how to gather it virtually.

La agilidad no ha parado de extenderse en los última década e incluso las organizaciones que miraban con recelo todo este movimiento están dando sus primeros pasos y viendo cómo pueden sumarse aumentando así su competitividad. ¿Cómo está conviviendo en estas compañías mentalidades tan diferentes? ¿Cómo están respondiendo los Product Owners a las necesidades? 

The Sprint Review is one of the most crucial events that can help your organization maximize the value of the work done by the Scrum Team. However, in 10+ years of helping clients implement Scrum, we have discovered that the Sprint Review can be a massive waste of time because of two big mistakes. In this video, we explain what these two biggest mistakes are and how our clients have learned to avoid them.

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley address a general question in Scrum circles: What Does a Scrum Product Owner Do All Day?

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley teach you the Scrum Framework in 7 minutes!

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley debunk a general myth in Scrum circles: Creating a High Performing Scrum Team is NOT the Goal!

It's time to look at the Scrum Events

In today's vlog, PST Joshua Partogi will show you how your Scrum Team can save time and make a forecast during Sprint Planning with #NoEstimates & Kanban metrics.

Scrum celebrated its 25 year anniversary last year with an update to the Scrum Guide and lots of socially distanced parties. Over that quarter of a century, Scrum has gone from a niche method used by software developers to mainstream adoption with many millions of people using Scrum or at least parts of Scrum every day. Now Scrum is not just a smart way of delivering software, it is a fundamental part of any enterprise agility transformation. 

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

Die Firma Skype hat in den frühen 2010er Jahren Scrum eingesetzt, und alle zwei bis vier Wochen Releases rausgebracht. Dennoch hat WhatsApp sie völlig abgehängt, wie wir heute wissen.

All teams have leaders. They're re accountable, amongst other things, for their team’s effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to enable this effectiveness is to empower the team. But how to empower the team? This article covers three easy tips to do just that.

Das Problem mit Features ist, dass sie fertiggestellt und ausgeliefert werden sowie perfekt funktionieren, aber dennoch keinen Wert liefern können.

Alguna vez te has preguntado: ¿Cuáles son los beneficios de usar Scrum y trabajar en equipo con el marco?

Being a Scrum Master can be tough. You are accountable for helping organisations change the way they approach complex work. If you upset enough of the wrong people you may end up “changing” yourself out of a job.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I help an unmotivated team?"

A lot of talk in the Agile space centres on breaking down silos, and yet it appears that in practice it is one of the things that is met with the most inertia.

We started the Scrum Guide for Leaders series with a discussion of what Scrum means for you as a Leader. Next, we discussed the conditions where Scrum's Empiricism, Self-Management, and Continuous Improvement can thrive. We then explored some concrete examples of how adopting the Scrum Values as a Leader can help you create these conditions.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

As mentioned earlier, Scrum is founded on empiricism - transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Empiricism is only possible in certain cultures and contexts. Leaders have the role of creating and nurturing the culture and shaping the context.

The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide dropped the classic “three questions” of the Daily Scrum. Yet many teams stick with the practice, even when it doesn’t produce the collaboration that is the hallmark of a valuable Daily Scrum. When a Scrum Team I worked with said that their Daily Scrum was lackluster and unproductive, I challenged them to design a better one. The new pattern we created shifted the focus from individual action to team collaboration toward the Sprint Goal.