Product definition is a complex, political and challenging task in large IT organizations. In this blog we discuss what organizations need to consider when looking at their product model. We discuss why shared services could be candidates to become products and the value of tying product to strategy and value. We provide some simple questions to ask of your products to help guide the selection and remind the reader that product models like organizational structures require people and people come with politics.

The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a natural progression for your agile transformation. It provides an ‘in-between’ stage between the whole enterprise change and delivery team change with the idea of products. By aligning to products, you can incrementally change the organization, allowing each product group to adopt a different operating model. Of course, that comes with some challenges, including how products are funded, comfort in parts of the organization operating differently, and where authority and decision-making reside.

Project to Product states that product-based approaches will replace project-based approaches for delivering digital work. The book Project to Product by Mik Kersten describes this approach, comparing how BMW manages production to how a bank delivers digital products—highlighting the complexity, bureaucracy, and lack of transparency in project-based approaches. The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a framework that helps organizations adopt a product-based approach. It helps organizations change mindset, alignment, and funding to support a product approach. APOM, an empirical approach, has seven characteristics: self-managed teams, learning-oriented, aligned incentives, empowered product leadership, integrated strategy, product investment, and agile governance.

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.

Lean Startup provides an approach to delivering breakthrough businesses. It does that by focusing on learning and working with customers and stakeholders to explore the problem and product space. By connecting the ideas of Lean Startup with Scrum practitioners have a blueprint for exploring risk and value. In this blog, we discuss how the two approaches can work together.

Scrum and Digital are not the same things, but often Digital Transformations comprise some sort of agile change. In this blog, Dave West discusses a recent Dare To Lead Podcast where the overlap between Scrum and Digital was apparent. He discusses the six elements of a digital strategy and their relationship with Scrum.

Today, Scrum.org announced a new skills-based course focusing on facilitation. Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS). This class provides a practical, hands-on learning experience focused on developing facilitation skills and the mindset to apply them. This class responds to the importance of facilitation in working in teams on complex work and how good facilitation can lead to improved Scrum adoption.

For many years the agile movement advocated that all teams had to be co-located for success. Scrum also encouraged that approach. But the pandemic taught us that remote does not always mean bad. However, we are seeing more and more executives force an in-person return to the office as the pandemic resides. But will this improve productivity? Yes and No. Without a clear focus on three things neither in-person nor remote work will be successful, so stop focusing on that and instead focus on the what and the how of working together to deliver value!

Product Ownership is a complex and often confusing idea, but if done right those accountabilities can help the Scrum Team deliver valuable, amazing Products. In this blog, we discuss and address some common concerns about the idea of Product Ownership.

Recently I was asked to answer some questions for a journalist on how to structure IT organizations. The questions were interesting and I wanted to share my responses here.

In tis blog post, Dave West shares tips on being a good Stakeholder based on his experiences.

In this Blog, Dave West explores how we are transitioning into the deployment phase of the digital age.

Scrum celebrated its 25 year anniversary last year with an update to the Scrum Guide and lots of socially distanced parties. Over that quarter of a century, Scrum has gone from a niche method used by software developers to mainstream adoption with many millions of people using Scrum or at least parts of Scrum every day. Now Scrum is not just a smart way of delivering software, it is a fundamental part of any enterprise agility transformation. 

In this blog post, Dave West answers the question - How do you, for the lack of a better word, “manage” Stakeholders?

In this article Dave West discusses the importance of Kindness and the benefits agile teams get when people are thinking about kindness.

On June the 8th Scrum.org hosted a webinar on the subject of using Scrum in Biotech research. The blog addresses unanswered questions from the session

Today, Scrum.org launches the new Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based Management ™  (EBM) training course.

In this blog post, Dave West describes professionalism in Scrum and why it is so important in this crazy, ever-changing world.

November 2020 was the launch of the Scrum Guide update. It seems like only yesterday but was over 3 months ago...

A brief overview of the word changes between the 2020 and 2017 version of the Scrum Guide.

Scrum is described as a framework, not a methodology. The Scrum Guide provides just enough prescription to allow Scrum to work and encourages its ‘users’ to be smart, adding practices and other things specific to them on top of the framework as needed to form their process.

With the 2020 release of the Scrum Guide, the term role was replaced with accountabilities. The purpose of this change was to place special emphasis that this is not a job description, but the bare minimum set of accountabilities necessary to execute Scrum. The blog describes how these accountabilities are split into 3 groups.

One interesting change to the Scrum Guide for the 2020 release was the change of the term Self-Organizing to Self-Managing. This blog discusses the change.

With the 2020 release of the Scrum Guide, Commitments were added for each artifact. The commitments provide a nice, structural way to describe some of the key characteristics of each artifact. The intent of this change was to provide clarity and make the Scrum Guide simpler to read and use.

With the 2020 update to the Scrum Guide, three commitments were added to the artifacts. The idea of a commitment is to provide additional quality to the artifact to improve transparency. In the case of Product Backlog, the commitment is to the Product Goal. 

At Scrum.org we have used this update of the Scrum Guide as an opportunity to have some interesting discussions and our CEO Dave West has documented some of them for your review and attention. 

Today, the 18th of November 2020 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an update to the Scrum Guide. If you are interested in an overview of what has changed, read about the seven main changes described with some context.

McKinsey and Scrum.org presented a webinar on joint research about measuring business value. There were a number of questions unanswered. This blog answers those questions.

The best Scrum Teams are diverse. Diverse teams are more fun to work on and deliver better products. A diverse team will provide diversity of thought because they  bring different experiences to the discussions and decisions. Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).

A number of weeks ago I was chatting to Jeff Gothelf the co-author of Lean-UX and co-creator of our Professional Scrum with User Experience class. He described a project that he is working on which sparked my interest and is something I believe to be relevant to our Scrum community. I wanted to share some of this discussion with you.

Scrum.org CEO Dave West looks back at March and how the Scrum.org Community has rallied in the wake of COVID-19.

In this blog post, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org, will explore the benefits of using Scrum for Marketing, dealing with pressures from every side of the business and using Scrum to address complexity.

As CEO and Product Owner for Scrum.org I get the amazing opportunity to visit lots of different companies. Recently I spent a week in Brazil visiting some amazing companies and talking about agility.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is an update to the 2017 Scrum Master Salary Report that Age of the Product conducted in 2017. By partnering, we have secured a larger sample and broadened the reach of the research, growing from over 500 to more than 2,100 respondents and adding more geographies and a broader set of demographics.

With the launch of Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) – An Advanced Scrum Master Class, Scrum.org has built a course that is aimed directly at enabling the Scrum Master.

I recently wrote an article for Entrepreneur on why Tech Companies need a code of ethics which got me thinking more broadly about the role of ethics, values and professionalism and why the agile community have been thinking about it more than most.

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more professional.

“I designed a defined framework for using many Scrum Teams on a single product or problem. The result is Nexus, an exoskeleton that rests on top of many Scrum Teams. Nexus provides information and management information for guiding their working together.” - Ken Schwaber

Everyone building software products today aspire to be able to seamlessly update the production software in a continuous manner. To be able to deploy code without the ‘normal’ friction of process controls, reviews, test departments and committee meetings.

And after reading Jeff Gothelf’s and Josh Seiden’s book “Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously”, I realized that the world is full of complex problems. This got me thinking about the relationship between Scrum and modern organizations as they pivot toward becoming able to ‘sense and respond’. So, I decided to ask Jeff Gothelf… Here is a condensed version of our conversation.

Today (November 7th 2017) Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an update to the Scrum Guide.The Scrum Guide is the definitive definition of Scrum, authored by Ken and Jeff, the creators of Scrum.