What is a Product Owner? What are the differences between a Product Owner and Project Manager? Isn’t a Product Owner some kind of an Agile Project Manager? These are some of the questions we often get from people in our Scrum.org classes.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on "their" tasks...

In this blog post, we explain the Liberating Structure ‘Simple Ethnography’. We clarify its purpose, the steps to facilitate it, our findings, and examples of using it with Scrum.

It really created the situation where we were able to have really honest conversations that have been suppressed before.

Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.

Continuing to grow your skills is vital in a field where technologies, frameworks, and skills change so rapidly. So what do you do? How do you get other developers in your team excited about their craft?

This article goes into detail how anti-patterns can evolve and possibly create other issues for the Scrum Team.

During the 19th Hands-on Agile meetup, 30-plus people addressed the path to becoming a successful Scrum Master or agile coach, following up on the “Scrum Master Career 2020 — Using Ecocycle Planning to Identify Opportunities” meetup we had in December 2019.

In this post I‘d like to share an exercise for Scrum Masters to help their Scrum Teams and stakeholders build a deeper understanding of the importance of the Scrum Values and how directly the Scrum Values impact work and value.

This article is about how we improved on the Spotify inspired model in one tribe inside a Large Dutch Bank.

A topic at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos this year was the question "How do we upskill a billion people by 2030?"

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. 

If you are working as a Product Owner, there is—very likely—room for improvement. This list of some of the most common Product Owner anti-patterns might be a starting point.

A while ago, I received an interesting scientific article from Gunther Verheyen titled “Getting Things Done: The Science Behind Stress-Free Productivity” (Heylighen & Vidal, 2007). The article discusses possible scientific explanations for the success of a personal productivity approach called “Gett...

Product Backlog Refinement (PBR) is an ongoing process in Scrum. But in a scaled Scrum, complexity vastly increases, and Refinement becomes mandatory. In this article, I will explain how you can use Refinement to your advantage and enhance organizational agility.

One of the teams I worked with suggested dropping the Sprint Retrospective and the Sprint Review from the Sprint and only do them every other Sprint.  

In my previous 2 episodes of this series on Systems Thinking, I elaborated on what Systems Thinking is and on the Wicked Problems Systems Thinking is trying to solve. In this episode, I want to explore Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).

How to use the Liberating Structure 'Mad Tea' with Scrum.

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

This is quite a long read which you can download as the whitepaper "Systems Thinking in Organizational Coaching".

When it comes to Product Ownership, there are a couple of things that are essential to get the job done right.

How do you change a system that is as complex as an organization? This is the quintessential question facing Scrum Masters, Product Owners and other drivers of change. In this post, we explore how the Liberating Structure ‘Panarchy’ offers a powerful perspective and allows you to put systems thinkin...

How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.

In this article, I want to clarify the need for agility in modern businesses and what agility in organisational design actually is.

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

Although I am going to use the term technical debt in this discussion. I am actively forming the opinion that this is the wrong term to be used both in how various assessments assess understanding and by practitioners in the agile community.

This is a series on how to create more engaging and interactive Scrum Events with Liberating Structures and recover from Zombie Scrum.

In my earlier article, I explained what Scrum Patterns are and why they could be useful for you in your transformation. In this blog, I discuss how to select and use the Scrum Patterns from the Pattern Languages.

How to start an Agile transformation? What are the initial steps? In this article I explain how transformations could be planned using Scrum Patterns and systems thinking.

It’s that time again. The end of the year, where many of us take a step back to reflect on the year that will almost be over soon and create another new year resolution. Like many of you, I do the same. On my last year life retrospectives, I wrote about servant leadership.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems such as software teams not delivering the right software fast enough.

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.

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.

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.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

In this blog, Professional Scrum Trainer Magdalena Firlit talks about some of the differences in words between English and the Slavic languages with helpful tips for translations when it comes to Professional Scrum certification assessments.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

Are we still on the right track? Answering this question in a collaborative effort of the Scrum Team as well as internal (and external) stakeholders is the purpose of the Sprint Review. Given its importance, it is worthwhile to tackle the most common Sprint Review anti-patterns.

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 webinar focuses on the key areas in the new book, Agile Leadership Toolkit- Learning to Thrive with Self-Managing Teams. Peter Koning, Professional Scrum Trainer and author of the book, provides practical, concrete tools and examples to give you the ability to create an environment in which you...