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.

The Scrum Team consists of accountabilities devides over three roles. The only three roles needed in Scrum. But all needed! And all equally important to be successful. If we would practice Scrum within our companies the way described in this way we can all be successful in delivering incremental val...

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

Questions about agile certifications (especially those from Scrum.org) are an integral part of my routine. People always come to me saying that they are going to act as a Scrum Master / Product Owner / Developer on an agile project and they want to know what to study and what's the best first certif...

In this webinar, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org and Wouter Aghina, a partner in the McKinsey & Company Amsterdam office explore the key attributes companies should be looking for when developing agile teams and share real-life examples of how pinpointing these traits and values can fost...

The Scrum Guide is markedly ambitious in the standard of professionalism it demands of a team. Development Team members must be self-organizing and cross-functional, to the point that they will repeatedly and sustainably create a valuable product increment...

I am learning awesome things that can relate to our world of “Agile” and “Product Ownership.”

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

In this article, I will discuss the dangerous dynamic that can arise when a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or the management of an organization focuses a Development Team on velocity.

Scrum limita el riesgo, proporciona transparencia y ayuda a la adaptación a través de los Sprints y la entrega alto valor. Scrum funciona bien con equipos auto organizados que tienen todas las competencias para entregar el incremento de producto.

Scrum is easy to understand, yet difficult to master. The Scrum Guide says so and it's true. If you have worked with Scrum in your organization you probably recognize it also. It's not difficult to start with Scrum.

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology.

In this edition of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Wilbert Seele answered some tough Scrum questions from the audience.

The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) class was launched a year ago - Feb 26 to be precise. We've done some inspection and adaptation throughout the year but this anniversary is a nice opportunity to reflect on where we are and where we're going. So what did we have in this inaugural year of ...

In this little blog I share some tips for multi-team Product Backlog refinement. What is Product Backlog Refinement? Product Backlog Refinement (PBR) is an activity that Scrum Teams regularly do to clarify potential upcoming Product Backlog Items (PBI). In single team Scrum, typically the Scru...

In January 2019 I was at Prowareness in Delft, Holland, and attended the 2 day Professional Product Owner course delivered by Ralph Jocham, co-author of The Professional Product Owner book. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the course with you.

No hay necesariamente una relación directa entre la complejidad de un PBI definido en términos de puntos de historia y el tiempo de desarrollo. Es decir, un PBI o historia de usuario que tiene mayor complejidad en puntos de historia puede terminarse en menos tiempo que un Item que tenga menos puntos...

In this webinar, Nic Easton, Nexus Scrum Master, Net Health, and Patricia Kong, Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions, Scrum.org walk through how they worked together to help Net Health address these challenges using Evidence-Based Management (EBM), a framework by Scrum.org that helps organizations ...

In my career, I have had the great privilege to witness different companies undergo many different phases of agile transformations. I’ve met many amazing Scrum Masters along the way that have evolved to take on major responsibilities in their organizations.

McKinsey & Company and Scrum.org conducted a joint study exploring the values and traits that make agile teams successful, helping to guide companies with concepts and ways to better recruit and coach their teams. This report summarizes the findings.

Dave West, Product Owner of Scrum.org, co-authored a paper in collaboration with McKinsey about favorable personally traits for team members in agile teams. In this episode of the Agile.FM Podcast with Joe Krebs, receive confirmation about some well known facts such as handling ambiguity but also so...

Why would Product Owners prevent value delivery, you ask? They shouldn’t, and don’t want to, but yet I see them do it every day. And usually, it’s without them even knowing they’re doing it. Here’s four observations of how Product Owners prevent value delivery, and suggestions to improve.

Scrum stands on the three legs of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Of these, transparency can arguably be said to come first. Unless a situation is made clear it cannot be inspected, and any consequent adaptation arising therefrom is likely to prove futile.

The year 2018 was about amplifying. Amplifying my message, thoughts, ideas, inspiration and passion. My energy and stamina are not what it once was. The journey ahead of me is smaller than the one behind me.

A few days back I did a Scrum Tapas Video explaining a few of the rules within Scrum. Besides these rules, there are also certain guidelines which help Scrum Teams to make the best possible use of Scrum framework to create maximum Business Impact.

The Scrum framework deliberately leaves the manager role out, thus allowing business to structure and organize how it sees fit. 

As an agile coach and trainer, I have had the opportunity to reach thousands of students that are just beginning their journey into the Scrum and agile world.

Once you have started to create a strong foundation, the second action of an effective servant-leader is to empower and enable others.