Product Playbook: Why You Need One
Effective product ownership is harder than it looks. In this essay we explain why creating a strong product playbook is a key part of product ownership success.
Adapting Scrum: Know Your Limits
Scrum leaves a lot of room for teams to experiment, but what are the core elements that should not be changed? And what are the elements that can be tailored for your team?
Types of Scrum Product Owners
There are many different types of Product Owners in the world, so let us examine the common ways I have seen Product Ownership implemented in the wild from the most powerful to the least powerful. God (or Goddess) of the Product: this is the most powerful of all the Product ...
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Five Ways to Write Better Action Items
Writing specific, observable and repeatable Action Items with clear owners is an important skill for Product Owner and ScrumMasters to master (see my last post on why I feel this way). In Online Education at Applied Frameworks, we will give you plenty of opportunities to put this skill into practice as you ...
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Importance of Concrete Action Items
Retrospectives without concrete action items are pretty much a complete waste of time (and this coming from a guy who thinks the Retrospective is the MOST important discussion in Scrum!!). Over-and-over again, when I encounter teams and organizations struggling to adopt Scrum and Agile, I often find lame, uninspiring Action ...
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Fourteen Cognitive Biases Common to Product Owners
While the human mind has an amazing capacity for creative thought and sheer computational power, it has some annoying misfires that can get in the way of building really great products. These misfires, sometimes referred to as cognitive biases, were first identified by Daniel Kanheman and Amos Tversky in the ...
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A Developer Can’t Be the Product Owner
The Product Owner on my team is also a developer on the team. Do you have any advice on using Scrum in such a scenario? SHORT ANSWER: Yeah - stop doing it! LONG ANSWER: In a healthy Scrum Team, each person fills only one Scrum role at a time. Having someone ...
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Six Common Mistakes of a Product Owner
How do you cope with the weak Product Owner? You don't - find a new Product Owner (PO) or stop using Scrum. Scrum is based on the idea that an empowered, knowledgable business leader is setting direction for the product (or service) under development. When that person does not exist, ...
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Thirteen Facilitation Tips for ScrumMasters & Product Owners
One of the many important skills for any Agile leader to master is the ability to facilitate a group's discussion. When the issue before the group is familiar, an Agile leader does not need to take an overly active part facilitating the group. However, when the issue is unfamiliar, or requires participants ...
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65 Tasks for an Agile Coach
Agile Coaches (CSP-SM) are really busy people! There is no way one person can do all these activities on this list each week nor would it make sense to do so, but an effective Agile Coach would be working on most these jobs every six months or so. Rome was not ...
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