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...

The Scrum Framework The Scrum Framework is a lightweight framework that defines three Roles, three Artifacts and five Events, which is used to develop and maintain complex Products in complex environments. Scrum doesn't prescribe a lot of things you must do, the Scrum Framework doesn't include exte...

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for stakeholder management. It's important that you know your stakeholders, their interests, what they need from you and your Product and how they may be able to help you out as well!

Value comes in many different forms, value is context dependent and the definition of value in a certain context may change over time! What? Yes, that's right! What 'value' is, or what it means, is firstly context dependent.

The Product vision describes the purpose of a Product, the intention with which the Product is being created and what it aims to achieve for customers and users. The Product vision describes a future state of the Product and what problems it tries to resolve or what ambitions it tries to fulfill.

In this post, we'll bust the myth that the Product Owner is a proxy for stakeholders. The bottom-line is that Scrum Teams become significantly less Agile when only the Product Owner communicates with stakeholders. Instead of framing the Product Owner as a proxy, we instead prefer to explain the Prod...

The Product Owner role is totally different from traditional roles that are know in most organizations. Some people think that the Product Owner is a kind of 'Agile project manager' or that the Product Owner is sort of a 'business analyst'. This is not true!

In this blog, we'll cover some tips and tools for starting Product Owners, to help you in your new role. The Product Owner role is a brand new role in many organizations and it's a role which can't be compared to traditional roles, such as project managers or business analysts. A Product Owner in...

System optimization: Upgrading Team Competencies When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members. The speed of the entire Development Team is often limited by the speed of the specialist with peak loads. To overcome th...

In this post, we'll the myth that the Product Backlog is ‘prioritized’. Although a seemingly trivial change of wording, the Product Backlog is ‘an ordered list’ instead.

The Intent of Scrum Scrum allows development organisations to invest a little time at regular intervals to allow teams with autonomy over their work to identify and enact frequent, small improvements to the process and the plan. Over time, like regular payments into a savings account, these impro...

"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran Scrum requires a Product Backlog and a Product Owner to account for the value of product increments. For as long as a product exists, a Product Backlog will exist to describe the work which o...

What is a Product Owner... and how different is it than the role of a Product Manager? Is it different at all? These questions and others are discussed with Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org -- one of the leading organizations helping companies with agile and scrum practices.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter tells a story about his experience as a Product Owner and why his mistrust for the Scrum Team was a mistake and how the Product Owner should use the Sprint Backlog as a way of building that trust.  Steve discusses the r...

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO). Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn. 1:46 Minutes

Although people with disabilities do have special needs, their purchase power isn’t special: it’s the same as everyone else’s. No longer can we think of accessibility as a compliance play. It’s simply good business. Let me frame this point with my story.

Cuando se trata de literatura ágil, donde hace años no había prácticamente nada, ahora hay una abundancia que hace realmente difícil elegir. Leer libros es una gran opción para expandir fronteras. Siempre he considerado que una de las ventajas de atender a mi MBA fue la capacidad de expandir mi m...

In Scrum, the Product Owner is an entrepreneur and the mini-CEO of a product, who is able to make fast decisions. The success of the Scrum Team and company as a whole depends on whether the Product Owner is real.