From my go-to barbecue chicken to practicing Scrum, I have tried adding many different ingredients over the years. Is there a point when too many ingredients get in the way of the original recipe?  Would the Scrum framework in your world of work be more optimal with less of them?

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally  diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult.

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.

A common question I hear in Scrum training courses and in coaching sessions is, “how much Product Backlog refinement should we do and how much detail should be in the Product Backlog?”

I need to get something off my chest. It's a personal thing, so don't mind me. But maybe it will get you thinking also. It's been on my mind for quite some time. Troublesome sometimes.... Here it goes.

In this video Richard Hundhausen, Professional Scrum Trainer talks about software delivery as a team, living the Scrum values, and using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to plan and execute the work.

In this episode of the Agile for Humans Podcast, Don McGreal (@donmcgreal) and Ralph Jocham (@rjocham) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss their new book The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage.

Over the centuries, humans have managed to adapt to many situations and evolve to become what we are today. History shows that we have an innate ability to adapt and evolve. This remains valid as part of a change in business, such as the adoption of Scrum.

In this episode of the Agile.FM Podcast with Professional Scrum Trainer, Joe Krebs, Professional Scrum Trainers Ralph Jocham and Don McGreal share their thoughts around the role of the Product Owner and what challenges a person in that role often face.

What we avoid is still being processed and affecting our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.  Sometimes we are aware this is running in the background, and we catch ourselves thinking about it.  Then we try to distract ourselves.  Often we don’t even have awareness, and the effects still show up.

Based on the feedback that I have received from my blog about the most popular blog articles, I have decided to do the same for the Scrum.org video series.  Over the past few years, we have generated more than 160 videos to help people learn more about Scrum.

In this talk Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org talks about the roles of Scrum and how the three roles relate to your existing job titles. He describes the future of work in the context of an agile delivery model and what the implications are to job descriptions and career progression.

A description of the Liberating Structure "User Experience Fishbowl and how we've used it within Scrum.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Noneman describes empiricism, how it is used and why it is so critical when practicing Scrum. 3:36 Minutes

Agile Metrics are meant to serve certain purpose(s) and can be very useful if leveraged appropriately. In this series, I want to share my experiences of how metrics may be used, abused and effectively become focal point of failure of Agile adoption in an organization.

I recently finished writing a book with fellow Professional Scrum Trainer, Don McGreal, titled,  "The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage." I learned a lot from this experience and wanted to share it here. 

Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage: Product ownership is about more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and focusing on value in everything you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in Scrum product ownership show how to identify, measure, and maximize valu...

I recently wrote an article for Entrepreneur on why Tech Companies need a code of ethics which got me thinking more broadly about the role of ethics, values and professionalism and why the agile community have been thinking about it more than most.

In this talk, Dave West Product Owner and CEO of Scrum.org and Mik Kersten CEO of Tasktop discuss the challenges of introducing value streams to a Scrum world and how you can balance flexibility with the structure to enable better flow and deliver more value to customers. They discuss how to avoid V...

In this blog, PSTs Sjoerd Kranendonk and Wilbert Seele explain how to achieve more and risk less by being a less visible Product Owner. In the Scrum Guide the following is written about the role of the PO: "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the ...

Special Spanish Edition presented by Professional Scrum Trainer, Joel Francia and Rodolfo Suarez, Agile Consultant, CeaSoft  En este webinar exploramos el Rol del Product Owner en Scrum. - Parte de las responsabilidades del Product Onwer es definir una visión y objetivos de negocio para el pro...

Teams with high diversity are more innovative. They have more perspectives that create a higher rate of idea flow. More new ideas are generated that lead to new products and innovations than in homogeneous teams. What is innovation? Innovations are the steps that lead to improved products. ...

In the "Scrum from the trenches" blog post series I like to address topics that I encounter in practicing Scrum in the real world, with real Scrum Teams. Sharing where theory comes into practice, what challenges teams encounter along the way and ways to help Scrum practitioners use the power of empi...

This short video provides a review of the Scrum Framework.  Scrum is defined by its creators in the Scrum Guide which is the body of knowledge of Scrum. 2:22 Minutes

In this session, we provide an overview of the Scrum framework, discuss how Scrum enables agility and ways that empiricism can empower the teams that use it.

As a Product Owner, there is nothing more frustrating than having to use valuable development time to deal with technical debt. Like death and taxes, it’s just never a good time when those lurking defects decide to unravel.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ty Crockett provides an overview of the Sprint Review and guidance on ways to make them more effective. Ty addresses some of the issues that come up when he is working with Scrum Teams and ways he has overcome them. 8:00 Minutes

Hello great people of the world. Welcome back to Professional Software Delivery with Scrum (PSD) blog series with yours truly. This time we're going talk about how to use Scrum And DevOps. I am interested to discuss this topic because it's quite common I get a question from someone in the agile comm...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Noneman talks about ways to measure the impact of agile practices on an organization. He looks at this in 4 parts, Development, Outputs, Outcomes and Impacts. 3:31 Minutes

When your product gets really big and you need to work with teams at scale, what options do Product Owners have? In this episode, Scrum.org CEO, Dave West joins the show to discuss the Nexus framework and what PO’s need to know in order to work in this type of scaled environment. We cover some of th...

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Charles Bradley looks that the Scrum Value of Focus and ways to help improve and maintain it. He uses an excellent example about how the Sprint Goal helps individuals and the Scrum Team stay focused throughout the Sprint. 3:18 Minu...

We regularly work with teams that see the Daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Chris Lukassen talks about how he used Scrum when working with a group of children to build a bee house and how this experience can apply to any team looking to deliver a product using Scrum. (4:20 minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham discusses the evolution of mindset from a project to product point of view. He looks at some of the differences and benefits of thinking about a product rather than a project. (5:05 minutes)

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. I think it is a good idea for Scrum Teams also to start with why for their product development. An important point for Simon is „people don’t buy wha...

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it? Without any worth, the thing that you're doing becomes a chore or you can easily drift on to something else. So we need to see the value in what we're doing. However, as a team we don't alwa...

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller In an earlier post we took a critical look at metrics and at how easily they can be abused. Pretty much anything can be meas...

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

Nexus builds upon Scrum’s foundation and minimally extends the Scrum framework to enable multiple teams to work from a single Product Backlog to build an Integrated Increment that meets a goal.

In this article we’ll bust the myth that in Scrum too much time is spend in meetings. We’ll not only describe how time-consuming the Scrum events factually are, but also clarify the purpose and importance. After explaining the origins of this myth, we’ll offer some practical tips to prevent or resol...

In this article we'll bust one of the more radical myths in Scrum; the belief that plans and planning have no place in Scrum.

There is a frustrating misunderstanding of reality when one thinks that the Product Owner can reject a single story at the Sprint Review. This is the fallacy of the rejected backlog item and the misguided belief that this backlog item can just be left out of this delivery. That backlog item that was...

"See it all. See it fairly. Be truthful, be sensible and be careful with language" - Henry Grunwald In Scrum we care about the precise and considered use of language, since any obfuscation reduces transparency. When we try to implement Scrum, we can sometimes find that the pressure is on to c...

In this post I will review what's a Proxy Product Owner, why you can find so often this role in organizations embracing Scrum, and some proposals to avoid this role and achieve a true Product Owner. What is a Proxy Product Owner? A Proxy Product Owner (Proxy PO) is a middleman role between the...

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog management, stakeholder management and forecasting. Therefore, you will probably use a variety of tools and techniques to track progress, manage expectations and keep people informed. One of the tools that may come in handy for you is a pro...

Release Planning As a Product Owner, you are responsible for managing expectations of customers, users and other stakeholders. You are also responsible for Product Backlog Management, for deciding that to built when and what not to built. Also, you'll need to decide what to deliver (release) to cus...

Product Backlog Management As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog Management, in order to maximize the value of the Product. The Product Backlog is the single source of truth which contains all the work to be done on the Product. As a Product Owner, you will have to make some c...

And after reading Jeff Gothelf’s and Josh Seiden’s book “Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously”, I realized that the world is full of complex problems. This got me thinking about the relationship between Scrum and modern organization...