Category Archives: agile

Unlock Your Team’s Potential with Working Agreements

A row of people sit on a wall with arms around each other as a team

Photo by Duy Pham

Every team is unique, with its own dynamics, challenges, and potential. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to helping a team thrive. Yet, when it comes to building high-performing teams, there’s one practice I recommend every time: creating team working agreements.

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Improve Your Scrum Implementation with Our Scrum Scorecard

Health metrics displayed on a heart monitor

Photo by Joshua Chehov

While the effectiveness of scrum is made up of much more than what a scorecard can show, having some criteria to start conversations about how well scrum is working on your team can be helpful. For this reason, we’ve created the Scrum Scorecard. Use this Scorecard to assess your team’s implementation of scrum and identify areas of improvement.

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Team Health Assessment

A stethoscope hangs on a mesh wall before a setting sun

Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson

Healthy teams are effective teams that meet goals, produce high-quality work, and delight customers.

When we measure team health, we step away from these outcomes of the team – however valuable they may be – and instead look at the team itself. What environment are they working in? How do the team members feel about the work they’re doing? How do they feel about each other?

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Testing Product Hypotheses Before Implementation

We’ve described how to use product hypotheses to measure the value of what a scrum team has built. We’ve also explored how to test product hypotheses more quickly by only building a minimum viable product (MVP). Now let’s look at ways to test those product hypotheses before the scrum team builds anything, using product discovery techniques.
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Testing Product Hypotheses With A Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

Image of blocks showing the letters MVPA previous article described how a scrum team could measure the value delivered by completed product backlog items. The approach is based on creating a product hypothesis for each item, describing how the value will be measured. By implementing an item (user story) and then measuring the results, the team is conducting an experiment to validate their beliefs about the value of the item.

A minimal viable product (MVP) allows us to implement less than the full feature, and still gather data about how valuable users find it. While an MVP is often used to test an entire product idea, the approach can also be used to test new feature areas of an existing product. An MVP is a simple implementation that allows us to gather real data from our users. Read the full article…

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Measuring Value With Product Hypotheses

Photo by Hans Reniers

A scrum team’s product owner and stakeholders believe that each item in the team’s product backlog is valuable and should be built. There is evidence that suggests that these beliefs are often incorrect. According to a 2019 study, 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.

Sadly, most teams never measure the value of what they create, and thus they continue to invest in building those aspects that aren’t delivering value. Measuring value allows the product owner to direct the team’s focus toward the 20 percent of features that hold most of the value. Read the full article…

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How To Create A User Persona

Young woman with suitcase and palm trees in the background

Photo by Tyler Nix

A user persona is a fictional character that represents a real group of product stakeholders, most often a market segment of end users or customers. A persona is generally based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of the stakeholders represented by that persona. User personas can help a product owner communicate more effectively with their scrum team and the team’s stakeholders.

Here’s how to create a persona to represent a group of users, customers, or other stakeholders of your team’s product. Read the full article…

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