Author: Maik Seyfert

Measuring and using velocity of an agile team can be helpful in forecasting output of the near future. You need a certain stability in your team and enough data points / iterations. However, there are also things that could go wrong using velocity. Therefore I want to shed some light on pitfalls using velocity in agile planning. Velocity is not a measure for productivity! Velocity is only an indicator of how much work was done in the past, not how much work will be done in the future. It’s like measuring your running speed with a stopwatch and then using this value to predict how fast you can run tomorrow or next week. We would be able to predict who will …

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The role of the product owner comes with a lot of responsibility and things you supposed to do. However, there are also things that you shouldn’t do. This post brings attention to 5 Product Owner anti-patterns that you should avoid as they either harm your product or your team. Not being able to make decisions This is probably the number one anti-pattern for a product owner. As the product owner, it is your responsibility to make decisions that will move your product forward. This includes making tough calls and sometimes disappointing stakeholders. If you are not able to make decisions, you will quickly find yourself bogged down in analysis paralysis and your team will lose confidence in you. Making decisions …

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Profit from the awareness of your internal processes that comes with The Ladder of Inference. Use that to questions and validate your assumptions, beliefs and actions.

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In product development there is a lot of focus on the value creating units, the teams. As many products are developed in a complex context with a certain degree of uncertainty, teams should apply emergent development practices. Teams also should make decision out of their context rather than developing a product based decisions they didn’t make or where not involved in. Teams already get good support in order to do so by adding roles like Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches. What is often forgotten about, is to also adapt the environment that the team is working in. The consequence is that, once teams reach a certain maturity regarding emergent and self-organized way of working, conflicts with regards to the team’s …

The leadership problem Read more »