Story Splitting Poster Now Available in Portuguese
Working in small increments of value—good user stories—is the key habit that makes the rest of Agile Software Development work. But people everywhere struggle to…
Category: Product Owner
Making Info Visible for Better Decisions
A key part of the ScrumMaster’s or Product Owner’s job is making information visible.* Whether that’s a product backlog, taskboard, cumulative flow diagram, or a…
Vertical Slices and Scale
Last week, I tweeted, Working in thin vertical slices is the keystone habit for agile software development. It enables so many other good practices. —…
Turn The Ship Around – A View Into Agile Leadership
Note: This post is adapted from some posts that I originally created on Adobe’s blog while I was an employee there. I recently finished reading former…
80/20 Product Ownership Updates
A few updates on 80/20 Product Ownership, my online course that teaches you how to slice your work at every level of detail to get…
Reducing the Load on the Product Owner
Product Owners have it tough. They need to spend time and energy working to understand the needs of customers and users. They need to work…
5 Key Skills Great Product Owners Have
Being Product Owner is hard. Actually, that’s not quite true. Anybody can make a list of things to build, call it a backlog, and bring…
Splitting Stories in Chinese (or, 用户故事切分招数)
Thanks to Bob Jiang for the translation (with feedback from Evelyn Tian and Daniel Teng). This poster is also available in English, French, German, Russian,…
Agile antipattern: Sizing or estimating bug fixes
Is the bug to the left a large bug or a small bug? It looks HUGE to me! Well, in reality it is probably between…
New to agile? Remember a user story is more than a card!
What’s wrong with the user story on the card? It seems to have everything we need: a) short title, b) a size (in this case…
Patterns for Splitting User Stories
Update, October 2020: Richard’s latest story splitting resources are available at Humanizing Work. Good user stories follow Bill Wake’s INVEST model. They’re Independent, Negotiable, Valuable,…
Agile pondering: Is it agile to have a “single wringable neck?”
In Scrum one of the named roles is that of Product Owner. Some people have taken to referring to this position as the “single wringable…
Agile antipattern: Waiting for all the requirements before starting
Time for a short blog entry (I tend to be way too verbose!). I often see teams trying to make sure they have all of…
How to make a LOT more money using agile
Yesterday’s blog post dealt with how to manage scope for an agile project. Today I have to admit it was a bit of a setup. …
New to agile? 3 ways to cut scope (and live)
The primary way I see teams release products faster is by reducing the scope of each product. However, this can’t be done in an arbitrary…
New to agile? INVEST in good user stories
As a <user> I want <function> so that<value>. Above is a very simple user story template. How can something so simple be so hard to…
New to agile? Do the simplest thing that works – THEN STOP!
As an agile trainer and coach I often see new teams struggle with a simple question: “How much to do on a user story?” A lot…
Agile antipattern: Code freezes during each iteration
Over the past 18 months I’ve encountered a number of teams where it is standard practice to have a code freeze late in the iteration. …
Agile Antipattern: Everything is priority 1
I was just working on some Powerpoint slides for our Agile Product Management Boot Camp coming up on March 9 and 10 and I realized I should…
When in Doubt Ask “How Will I Know I’ve Done That?”
Tired of not knowing exactly what to create or test? Get in the habit of asking the magic question “How will I know I’ve done…