Susan, a senior leader of a 300-person department, wanted to reduce the risks of late deliveries, and respond to customers faster. Susan suspected the managers and teams were too wedded to their plans and not experimenting enough. That meant she needed an agile approach. But while she had been a part of several supposedly agile […]
I started this series with many specific concerns about a particular interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal. What should the Scrum Master
Do you want to improve your nonfiction writing skills? I offer a 6-week writing workshop to do just that. You’ll learn how to write faster and better, all while educating, influencing, and entertaining your readers. (That’s a big part of how you sell your nonfiction ideas.) And if you write, I’ll offer you feedback so
Back in Part 1 of this series, I explained all the problems I saw with this interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal.
Product owners have many challenges: They need to keep at least two thoughts about the product: what it needs to be in the near future, and what the organization wants it to be in the (distant) future. Some product owners think they’re supposed to fill out a complete backlog, including all the UI designs for
In How Product Goals Make it Easier to Create Sprint Goals and Reduce Feature Factories, Part 1, I started responding to Tom’s interview question. Now that we’ve dealt with the feature factory problem, it’s time to address planning time. Here’s the question again: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal,
A colleague, Tom, told me about this question he received in an interview: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. They (the team) feel that the tasks for the sprint are too varied to manage to a single sprint goal. What should the Scrum Master
Much of my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds have questionnaires with two or three choices. One of those choices contains the One Right Answer. All the other answers are Wrong. Or, a person poses a question that’s supposed to show that they—and they alone—know the answer to the question. (I ranted about one of those on
I started this series with the issues of trying to estimate/predict a specific backlog item quarters away, not even weeks away. (Even weeks away is iffy because the entropy is the default state for the world.) In Part 1, I suggested that the team can use cycle time, but even with cycle time, we need
In How to Predict When the Team Will Complete a Specific Backlog Item, Part 1, I said there was no way to accurately predict an estimate for a specific backlog item more than a month away. I did suggest several options if you want to go through the motions, but there’s no accurate answer to