The other day I had a conversation with a colleague. He was looking for an opener for a talk - something catchy to illustrate to his audience (mostly finance and banking) that there could well be a need to change their current ways of working.

Software and online-services companies are undergoing quick implementation of the Scrum framework in their Products. Scrum is a process framework that enables deliver complex products iteratively and incrementally while controlling the risk.

This blog post gives you an overview of the paper "Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum". It describes what Zombie Scrum is about and offers tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Pawel Mysliwiec answered questions about story points, estimating, the Scrum Roles, the Scrum events, scaling, using Scrum with Kanban and more!

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called 'The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery'. In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations.

Outcome mapping enhances Product Backlog transparency by making transparent the relationships between goals, stakeholders, outcomes and outputs created by a Scrum Team

I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

This article describes what Zombie Scrum is about and gives you tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; this woman and these gentlemen are considered to be some of the greatest scientists of all time.

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.

If Scrum were to be reduced to one purpose and one only, it would be the creation of a "Done" increment. Although the DoD serves as a crucial part of Scrum, it is also often neglected by many Scrum teams. Try out the DoD EvoCycle, a simple technique to effectively manage your Definition of Done.

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.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

The Manager is concerned with the wellbeing of the Scrum Team. The Manager loves to see happy, engaged and motivated people. (S)he loves it when people are developing themselves, learning new skills, obtaining new knowledge and making mistakes.

How to use "Visible Status" with the information radiator to help the call to action? How to use explicit indicators to make decisions?

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.

This webinar, a follow up to June's Scrum Pulse Webinar - An Introduction to Evidence-Based Management and a part of our Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer series, gave the audience the opportunity to ask any EBM or agile measurement questions to Professional Scrum Trainers Ty Crockett , Todd Miller, ...

We all know them; Tiger Woods, Christiano Ronaldo, Rafael Nadal, and LeBron James. Some of the best sports players in the world and they are all recognized for their great individual performance as an athlete.

Lucas Smith is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and the head of Agile Practice at Toyota Connected...(1:03:43 hours)

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

Decision Maker, which helps the stakeholders and Scrum Team to keep time-to-market short, by keeping decision-making time short.

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 Gatekeeper is the single point of contact between the Scrum Team and the outside world. The Gatekeeper tends to block all connections between the Scrum Team and its stakeholders; all communication goes through him/her.

Is Product Owner accountable for Return on Investment (ROI)? The answer is YES, The Product Owner is accountable for ROI.

 This video talks about the experience of a Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced training class hosted by Prowareness and Rabobank. Note: This video is in Dutch with English subtitles. (2:57 Minutes)

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.

All jokes aside...could your enthusiasm for Scrum be frustrating your team members? Don McGreal is Vice President of Learning Solutions at Improving. He is also a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer and serves as co-steward of the Professional Scrum Product Owner course. (3:14 Minutes)

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

You’ve met them: slightly curved back, eyes glued to the screen, minimized font size and a 14 step template in Jira. Story, check. Acceptance criteria check. Examples, check. Logfiles, hmm still have to run that query.

This week we witnessed the launch event of the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced class, and we could not be more excited about it. Finally, we are free to tell everyone about the best training we’ve ever created. Oh well, as freshly minted stewards we might be biased, but based on ...

With the launch of a brand-new Product Owner-Advanced class (including certification) coming up, we want to introduce you to some new and unpublished content: The Stances of the Product Owner. In this article, we’ll share an overview of both the preferred and the misunderstood Stances of the Product...

Download this datasheet to learn more about the Professional Scrum Product Owner training.

Finally, it’s here! An advanced and certified Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced class, with PSPO-II certification! After months working in secret, we can now share the journey that Chris Lukassen and I had in creating this advanced Product Owner class.

Scrum.org offers different courses to provide you the best learning experience based on your focus of Scrum. The variety of courses makes choosing the best course difficult sometimes. This blog post provides guidelines to help you choose between the Applying Professional Scrum (APS) course and the P...

Scrum requires a self-organized team to deliver "done" increments at the end of each Sprint. This peculiarity sometimes raises criticisms and questions when it is discussed in trainings or when coaching the clients: how can a team work without a leader? How are we going to do our job, if no one tell...

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element.

In this vlog, I also share some of my observations on how companies structure the relationship between Product Owner and Product Manager in a scaled Scrum environment.

This is a common question in my Professional Scrum classes.  It often comes up early when we are still learning the basics of the Scrum Framework.  And it comes up because people are already splitting their time between multiple Scrum Teams or are being told by their organizations that they will be.

I believe there are three things you need to do regardless of the framework, methodology or program you are embracing with your organization.

Erik Weber is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and a Managing Partner with HealthChampion, and shares his experiences and expertise. (1:06:17 Minutes)

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.

Scrum uses a concept called a “Sprint” to eliminate the risk of complex product development and deliver value sooner to stakeholders. These Sprints are no longer than 30 days in length.

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.

Julee Everett is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and won the Lean In Agile 100. In this episode of the Agile Wire Podcast, Julee chats with Jeff Maleski and Jeff Bubolz about Product Ownership, building a culture of trust and more. (1:03:37 Hours)

Imagine a project with hundreds of people, a lead time in months, few releases a year. You could compare these as large cruise boats or tankers navigating for few weeks in the immensity and emptiness of the oceans and seas and then stopping to ports very far away from each other.

Hi Duncan, I took your Scrum Training class a couple of months back. You mentioned if we had any questions, we could email you and I have an interesting situation I found myself in regarding QA’s in our Scrum teams.

Hello awesome people. Back at it again with new learning from the trenches. Over the years working with Product Owners who mainly work in large corporations, I see common challenges.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma discusses the myth that Scrum cannot be used when rewriting legacy applications. Ravi provides benefits of using Scrum during such a project and how the Product Owner can place a critical role. (6:44 Minutes)