Over the last year Steve Trapps and I have been chatting to people in the Agile community, in case you haven't seen it yet here is the output from our opportunity to grab Dave West the CEO and Product Owner for Scrum.org.

For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...

In this talk, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org will look at the learnings from a joint study with McKinsey in terms of hiring, selecting and coaching people for agility, and the best characteristics you should be looking for. Dave will provide practical interview questions to support the ...

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Product Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

TL; DR: Ideas on How to Improve Your Product Backlog Management Techniques Scrum is a simple, yet sufficient framework to build emerging products, provided you identify in advance what is worth building. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing...

As CEO and Product Owner for Scrum.org I get the amazing opportunity to visit lots of different companies. Recently I spent a week in Brazil visiting some amazing companies and talking about agility.

La aceptación de los PBIs en Scrum es algo que suscita dudas en los equipos. En realidad es muy fácil.

Scrum Masters, ask yourself - Are you a natural servant leader, or do you struggle to be the inspiring coach that creates high-performing teams? If you have a real desire to change and are ready for some tough self-reflection, this article may inspire you, and give you hope that you can influence ma...

If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it?

A few months ago we looked at how teams can optimize flow across the Sprint boundary, a technique which is founded on their ability to make limited and sustainable commitments.

Critical Uncertainties is a powerful Liberating Structure helping groups develop strategies for dealing with plausible yet unpredictable futures. Strategy-making is an essential part of successful software-/product delivery with Scrum. With Critical Uncertainties, teams have an interaction pattern a...

In this talk, Jeff Gothelf, the co-author of the book Lean UX, and Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org, discuss the challenges and benefits of bringing practices from lean UX to Scrum Teams. They answer questions about empirical learning, managing the backlog, understanding the customer an...

During a recent meetup of The Liberators Network, we got together with 30 enthusiastic Scrum Masters.

"I am a project manager.  What is my role now that we are moving to Scrum?”

A personal story of what encouraged a Developer Culture at NowOnline. And why Scrum really doesn't work without it.

An organization’s ability to rapidly and deliberately respond to changing demand, while controlling risk helps ascertain its Agility.

The following 5 tips to increase the Emotional Intelligence of a Product Owner as inspired from Scott Watson’s work, an emotional intelligence speaker and trainer.

Your organization has been disturbed by late launches in its last few new products, and now management has charged you with “getting to the bottom of the problem.”

As a Scrum Master, I know that serving Development Team, Product Owner and Organization to adopt Scrum is not easy.

Saying no is an integral part of any Product Owner's job. In this short video, I explore the reasons why we might be saying yes when no is a more appropriate answer (these reasons are from a great book by Dominica DeGrandis Make Work Visible) and how to say No when you need to.

It was 8:59 am on Monday. It was another week which I thought was going to be amazing. Last week our company just closed another round of investment. The company is currently strategizing to scale agility throughout the company.

Overcome common transformation mistakes and enhance your agility.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Reggie Gardner answers Scrum questions from the audience.

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that...

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

A couple of years ago I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to Product Ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards.

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Last week, I had a long discussion with my friends about how to scale up the Scrum Team from the startup product. That was an interesting topic and we had many things to discuss. Some of my friends raised some interesting questions.

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org about the current state of Scrum and the latest initiatives by Scrum.org.

Teams are becoming the fundamental organizational entity, individual responsibility is being replaced by that of the team. But responsibility does not come about all by itself.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

From my experience, nothing is more important for Teamwork than trust. If having the secondary importance, it’s TRUST as well. You can't build a good team while they lack of trust.

This is the start of a series of articles about the Scrum.org PSM II class. It will address the most common questions asked. This article is focused on the difference between the PSM and PSM II class.

Flow of work and, most importantly, value is paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. Read to learn how flow can help while limiting work in progress.

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

As many Professional Scrum Trainers have experienced, there is always a good discussion around the Sprint Goal. A similar discussion recently led me to address this not so well understood aspect.

One of the most important things we can do to help individuals and teams improve is coach them to embrace the agile mindset. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development provides values and principles to help guide teams in navigating the complexities of product delivery.

What is Scrum Team Velocity? This is a tricky one, and you need to be answering it in the context of the organization you are interviewing with and its complementary practices.

In this webinar, Dave West, CEO & Product Owner, Scrum.org and Stefan Wolpers, Founder, Age of Product, explore the results including salary trends and agile adoption patterns, while also exploring gender equality within the Scrum Master role. They provide insights on what the results of this surve...

The topic of Agile Metrics inevitably comes up in many situations and conversations. For the Scrum practitioners these somehow are a subset of Velocity and Burn ups and downs. Now, there's a whole world out there, that operates with much reacher vocabulary of metrics. Professional Scrum With Kanban ...

As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I get to think about the Definition of "Done" and its meaning a lot.

In this episodeof the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, they explore the ideas from the book Lean UX, authored by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf.

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

An Agile mindset is crucial in management roles for organizations that are moving towards Agility. I observed this while working in various organizations and currently am a witness of it while assisting my customers. Decisions, actions, directions and vision often come from the management level, ...

There has been so much written about Velocity and its impact on teams yet it is one metric that eludes everyone and keeps cropping up whenever there is discussion around productivity.

Hearing a senior executive announce "We're committed to becoming agile!" is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany.

As a Global Vice President at a major financial institution, I spend two days a week teaching Product Ownership, Agile Leadership, Scrum, and Kanban to 25 employees per week. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I’ve taught over 1500 people through the years. This experience has made me a better leader.

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.