Category: Leadership

The answer to that question according to the Scrum Alliance is: An agile coach helps individuals, teams, and entire enterprises embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values. This culture shift helps people and organizations continue to thrive in the ever-changing world of work. That sounds good to me, so let’s dig a bit deeper into what is the actual work that an agile coach does in order to help individuals, teams and entire enterprises. Does an agile coach actually coach? To answer that you need to find out what it actually takes to embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values. Obviously an agile coach needs to convey values …

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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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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 »