Then, as the Product Owner, put together a road map of where you think things are going. What do you think you can get done this quarter? Where do you want to be this year?

Everyone Knows Everything. Communication saturation accelerates work.

The important thing, though, is just to begin. Just start. You can see the detailed steps on how to do it in the appendix. Scrum is designed so that you can boot up a team in a couple of days. Get your Backlog, plan your first Sprint, and away you go. You don’t need to devote a lot of time to planning, reflection, meditations, mission statements, o

That’s why I came up with the idea of “Change for Free.” In a standard fixed-price contract, just say changes are free. List all the functionality you expect; for example, if you’re building a tank, you want one that can go seventy-five miles per hour and shoot ten rounds a minute, has seating for four, has AC, etc., etc.—everything you think you n

What using the Fibonacci sequence to calculate task size permits is estimates that don’t have to be 100 percent accurate. Nothing will be exactly a five or an eight or a thirteen, but using those numbers gives us a way to collect opinions on the size of a task where everyone is using roughly the same measuring stick, and in that way a consensus is

That’s what Scrum does. It sets goals and systematically, step by step, works out how to get there. And even more important, it identifies what is stopping us from getting there. Scrum is the code of the anti-cynic. Scrum is not wishing for a better world, or surrendering to the one that exists. Rather, it is a practical, actionable way to implemen

The Product Owner needed to be able to deliver feedback to the team from the customer each and every Sprint. They needed to spend half their time talking to the people buying the product (getting their thoughts on the latest incremental release and how it delivered value) and half their time with the team creating the Backlog (showing them what the

Then one day, one of the developers came in with a Harvard Business Review paper from 1986, written by two Japanese business professors, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. It was titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” Takeuchi and Nonaka had looked at teams from some of the world’s most productive and innovative companies: Honda, Fuji-X

The term “Agile” dates back to a 2001 conclave where I and sixteen other leaders in software development wrote up what has become known as the “Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating wit