Welcome to our Product Owner article library, check out our articles on Scrum & Agile to support you with your journey.
Agile Top Tip – How to set personal goals that align with organisational goals
The start of the year feels like a natural point to set goals, both personally and at a team or orga…
Agile Top Tip – How to make goals specific
How do you make goals specific? In this video, John McFadyen shares his recommendation for making go…
Agile Top Tip – How to make sure goals are realistic
It can be easy to be over-optimistic when setting goals, leading to targets that aren’t attain…
Agile Top Tip – How to manage (and set) goals in a volatile world
Goals can be great to give us direction and keep us accountable. But in such a volatile world, you m…
Agile Top Tip – What do you do when a goal becomes obsolete?
What do you do when a goal becomes obsolete? The nature of today’s business climate means that…
Agile Top Tip – Conducting a Sprint Review when not all stakeholders can attend
The Sprint Review is an important event in Scrum, a chance for the Scrum Team to gain feedback on th…
Agile Top Tip – How to support your team after receiving negative feedback in a Sprint Review
How do you support your Scrum Team after receiving negative feedback in the Sprint Review? John McFa…
Agile Top Tip – Conducting a Sprint Review when the Product Owner is not present
This week’s top tip is how to conduct a Sprint Review when the Product Owner can’t make …
Agile Top Tip – How to give (and receive) constructive criticism in the Sprint Review
The purpose of the Sprint Review is to gain feedback. Sometimes it’s positive. Other times it&…
Agile Top Tip – How to foster openness from everyone in the Sprint Review
The Agile Top Tips theme for December 2022 is the Sprint Review, so we started by asking John his to…
The Definitive Guide to Scrum Training
Why take Scrum training? Scrum may appear simple at first, but it is deceptively difficult to do wel…
Product Owner Origins: Liam Neeson or Dragon’s Den?
Product Owners hold a lot on their shoulders. Responsibility for return on investment, ens…
Is your Agile getting stale? Take the Mani-fresh-to Challenge!
TLDR; Everything changed in 2020, even the Scrum Guide got an update, but the Agile Manifesto didn’t…
Essential Skills – Critical Analysis
In a recent conversation with Tyrrell Basson from Manchester University, we explored the topic of ‘e…
Technical Debt
Part of the Covid Hack series by John McFadyen We all experienced massive disruption, complexity and…
Customers and Developers in the same room. WTF?
At the turn of the 20th Century, the father of modern Business Management – Frederick Winslow …
How do I get the senior leadership team to buy into Agile?
‘How do I get the senior leadership team to buy into Agile?’ is a question I’m often asked. It’s a g…
Stealth Agile
I recently connected with Tyrrell Basson from the University of Manchester in one of my ‘Ask me Anyt…
Coronavirus and The Corner Shop – A Portrait of Agility?
If ever one wanted the ultimate portrait of a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and a…
Agile Bootcamp #4 – Using Story Mapping to Teach Agile
User Story Mapping is a great technique to help teams explore their product scope and plan how they …
Agile Bootcamp #3 – Scrum Simulation with the Inception Deck
There are lots of ways to help introduce the concepts of Scrum to teams and to give them a chance to…
Agile Bootcamp #2 – Behind The Scenes at an Agile Bootcamp
The bootcamp is planned, the travel arrangements made and suitcases packed. Now, the hard work start…
Predict Success by Finding Problems
Agile was supposed to make things easier. It was supposed to fix the problems of large projects with…
The Scrum Framework
The Scrum Framework is an Agile framework within which various Agile methodologies can be both emplo…
Don’t look back in anger
Continuous improvement is a core agile principle. The retrospective is an important event in all agi…
Ways for a group to reach a decision
There are always moments in a project when decisions must be made. How those decisions are reached w…
Feedback: it’s not what you get, it’s what you do with it
When teaching Scrum a large part of the information is around feedback: product feedback, process fe…
Show Confidence
We hear a lot about confidence in the contexts of business, personal relationships, and just about e…
A brief overview of Scrum
In this brief overview of Scrum, we introduce you to the Scrum Framework, roles within the Scrum met…
Sprint: the Heartbeat of Scrum
A Sprint, as described in the Scrum Guide, is a time-boxed period of one month or less during which …
What do Agile and Electricity have in Common?
In February, it will be 17 years since the writing of the Agile Manifesto. Much was, and still is, p…
The Responsibility Process® in Action
Recently I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Christopher Avery renewing my practice of…
Everyone can lead an exceptional life
You may not know who Rick Rubin is but you definitely would have heard of his music. He has been a m…
A Simple Method for Breaking down Product Backlog Items into Tasks
During Sprint Planning many teams resist breaking down Product Backlog items selected into task…
What Role do Team Members Play in the Scrum Team?
Let’s get to know the different roles and responsibilities of each person in an agile developm…
Premature Estimation
Don’t worry. It happens to a lot of people. Really, it doesn’t matter. But d…
Sprint burndown charts: Grapes of Progress or Watermelon Surprise?
In a recent discussion with an ‘Argument of Agile Coaches‘ (an apt collective noun for a…
What’s in a Name
Over the last few years, Agile has acquired a lot of unwanted baggage. Some of that baggage is as a …
What’s in it for you?
When starting any team, I ask a question that often shocks people in the room: What do you want to g…
Setting the agenda
While at a client, I noticed that the meetings tend to wander, a habit the developers try to break b…
A community of thinkers
Saw this in the twittersphere yesterday, and it really resonates with what I believe software develo…
Stop, reflect, resume
Yesterday, during sprint planning, one of the team members said he didn’t see the point in siz…
Beware planning poker
Planning poker is the most common sizing tool used within the Scrum community. Straightforward and f…
Understanding the mission
A very American phrase, I know, but it hits right at the heart of many of the problems I’ve se…