In this episode, Richard answers the question: “Our team is trying to use Scrum, but we get a lot of interruptions, a lot of work that pops up mid-sprint. How do we handle that kind of thing well?” He explains how to borrow a couple of concepts from Kanban to accommodate emergent work on a Scrum team in a healthy way. Read More
Just saying “you’re empowered” doesn’t make it happen. In this episode, Peter and Richard offer a more nuanced way to think about empowerment and a structured path to increase the level of empowerment for your employees and teams Read More
Feature Mining is a technique for figuring out where to start on a big, complex idea. Following up on a Feature Mining webinar on February 6, 2023, in this episode, Richard and Peter answer questions from the webinar and from other workshops on the topic of Feature Mining. If you’re not familiar with the Feature Mining technique, don’t worry, there’s a short intro to it before the Q&A. Read More
In the previous episode of the show, Peter and Richard mentioned the importance of team coaching to increase your chances of a healthy, successful team. In this episode, they look at the seven skills all great coaches master. Read More
The health of teams has a direct impact on organizational results as well as on individuals’ happiness in their work. In this episode, Richard and Peter outline the 6 conditions that researchers J Richard Hackman and Ruth Wegeman have discovered are critical for a team to be healthy and effective. They also cover what you can do to contribute to those conditions, whether you’re a leader or a junior team member. Read More
People often assume prioritization—whether for a Scrum product backlog or a personal todo list—is an analytical problem best solved with value calculations and spreadsheets. But it turns out that great product people tend to use intuition, gut feel, rather than analysis to prioritize. In this episode, Peter and Richard introduce a set of heuristics gathered from the best product people that you can use to prioritize work quickly and intuitively. Read More
When we survey Product Owners on the techniques they (actually, not officially) use to prioritize backlogs, we consistently get three answers: HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s… Read More
The Sprint Retrospective is perhaps the most important event in Scrum. In this episode, Richard and Peter share their two favorite ways to make the Sprint Retrospective meeting way more effective. If your team’s retros have become boring, repetitive, or just a waste of time, these two key moves will bring them back to life. Read More
In this episode, Richard and Peter dig into how to have an effective Sprint Review meeting. Great Sprint Reviews, achieve 3 goals and answer 3 key questions. Learn how do accomplish this on your team. (And discover why “Sprint Demo” is too limited a name for this meeting.) While this is explicitly Scrum-focused, it’s really about how to have a meeting to review a body of work as a team, whether you’re using Scrum or not. Read More
Exciting. Entertaining. Do these words describe your sprint review meetings? Or are boring and unfocused more accurate? Here are tips and best practices for a reliably good sprint review (demo). Read More