Dave West

In this blog, we dispel a series of myths associated with product discovery in Scrum. Myths such as “it's a phase in the process and can not be done in a Sprint,” “It's only for greenfield projects,” to “ The DoD stops us from doing Discovery”.

Discovery and validation should be an integral part of the work of a Scrum Team. It provides a collection of practices that enable Scrum Teams to drive an evidence-based approach to value.

Digital technology allows organizations to be more customer-centric by delivering more value to customers via faster time to market, improved data insights, and more innovative products. However, aligning with customers is only part of the story. Not only do you need to focus on customers, but you also need to consider their needs in the context of value, cost, governance, and culture. Customer opportunity is a crucial ingredient but in the context of something much more significant and complex. Product has become the container for this. Product thinking must take center stage to enable organizations to align better with outcomes and value. In this blog, we discuss why everyone is talking more and more about Product Thinking and how knowledge workers need to think about value in the digital age.

As more and more companies wrestle with the digital age, they are increasingly looking to approach initiatives differently. They are moving from a project to a product mindset. In this blog, I describe why product thinking is increasingly important to project managers.

The Product Backlog is an essential artifact in Scrum, but backlogs could be better for many teams. In this blog, we discuss introducing a new class, Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management - Skills, and how it provides learners with the skills necessary to improve their Product Backlogs.

The Product Backlog is crucial for Scrum to be effective. But for many teams, Product Backlogs are bloated, confusing, and hard to navigate. This blog discusses the challenges of building a great Product Backlog and what Scrum Teams can do to fight the bloat.

Agile is over 20 years old, and the Agile conference has been running since 2005. But are we seeing any changes? Has agile adoption stalled? This blog discusses enterprise adoption challenges and the environment necessary for Agile to succeed.

Scrum is a Product centric approach to delivering value. But what if your team is not aligned with a Product? In this blog, we discuss what Product means in Scrum and why it can help a team even if they do not feel they are working in a Product organization. In this blog, we talk about why Product is used in Scrum, the characteristics of a Product, and how those characteristics can even help if you are working on a Project.

Product Owners have a variety of job titles ranging from Project Manager to Product Manager, From Business Analyst to Team Leader. Still, these job titles reflect the complexity of their work environment. In this blog, we discuss the messy reality of Product Ownership and provide a 2 by 2 grid focused on Product-ness and Ownership to reflect that complexity.

In the following interview with Marjolein Pilon, she describes how Scrum has empowered the Scrum Teams she has worked with to approach the challenging problem of Climate Change.