One of the techniques that Agile teams use for estimating their release or sprint backlog is Planning Poker. The game is very simple, but also a very nice instrument for provoking discussions and enhancing the quality of the planning meeting. For those of you who are not familiar with it, here is an explanation of some key concepts, along with a brief…
Let’s look at an average day in the life of an Agile team member. For many of us the day may start with a team standup meeting. The daily standup is the moment when we update each other about the progress and align on what is the next important thing that we need to complete today to make sure team…
In Part 1 of this post, I shared some of the practices that I use to define my personal development needs and focus. In Part 2, I am sharing some of the ways to address these needs. Step 3. Building my development plan Coming to this step, I know what I am aiming at in 1-3 years from now, and…
It’s the start of the year. For me, this is a time when I look back at what I have achieved over the past year and set my goals looking forward. And just like we would build strategy and roadmaps for our products, I believe it is important to build a strategy and roadmap for ourselves, as a product vision…
Happy GDPR Day! Today is May 25, and as we all know already, it is the day when the now famous GDPR regulation of the European Union comes into force. Your mailbox has gone crazy with all the e-mails to confirm your mailing preferences, hasn’t it? Quite a few people I’ve spoken to recently honestly admitted they take it as…
In one of the latest updates of the Scrum Guide, the five values of Scrum – commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage were officially added to the guide. Values are something that I consider very important as they define behaviors in the team, but they are also something that I find very hard to explain to people who are new…
Scrum is a great way to manage a project when the team is fully focused on that single product. Many teams, however, are very often stretched between delivering a new product or a new release of a product, and maintenance activities for older releases and existing customers. Since Scrum prescribes at least a dose of predictability and planning for the…
In the past few years, I have been engaging with more and more technology organizations that started as pure service providers and are now evolving to offer their own products on the marketplace. Typically, these products have been started based on needs these organizations have identified through their experience in service-based projects with different customers. While this is a good…
In this webinar we talk about the role of a Product Manager and why PM skills are key to the organization success. We also discuss our motivation to create the Product Academy and what participants will experience during the sessions.
In recent years, being “agile” is nearly a standard in the IT industry. More and more companies transform their work processes and bring agile methodologies like Scrum, to meet the need for rapid adaptation to the dynamically changing business environment and to more effectively exploit the potential of their employees. An essential part of this transformation is the definition of roles and…