I have a confession to make: I have never seen a Scrum scaling framework succeed. Now, I do not claim to have seen all scaling frameworks that exist in action. I am highly doubtful there is a single person in the world who has concrete and substantial experience with all of them.

New scaling frameworks appear all the time, thank god still at a slower pace than JavaScript frameworks. If you’re that mythical unicorn who has experience with all scaling frameworks, please contact me. I want to learn from you.

Despite the many scaling frameworks I’ve become familiar with, I’m still waiting for a single positive encounter. I’ve had many challenges with the introduction of scaling frameworks over the years. I’m writing this article to express these concerns and share a better way to think about scaling. …

Agile Spotlight is Maarten Dalmijn’s personally curated collection of last week’s best articles on Medium that help with discovering better ways of delivering value.

The articles in this week’s edition will provide answers to the following questions:

• How do you figure out your actual product?
• Is feature clutter inevitable in products as they become popular?
• Should a Scrum Master prevent mistakes or let them happen?

Can You Answer the Following Question: What Is Your Product?

The first company I joined, was a start-up in the healthcare sector. We had many heated and lengthy discussions revolving around “What is our product?” and “What is exactly the definition of a product”. …

I read many articles on Medium on Agile, Scrum, Product Management, UX, and other subjects, to improve my ability to deliver value as a Product Owner. This is my personal weekly digest of the best articles I come across to help others make a difference for their customers and the business.

1. Product design in practice: Fixing broken customer experiences in existing products

You’ve got Product Market Fit, great! But where do you take it from there? Petr Augustin offers 5 concrete steps you can follow to maximize value delivery based on his experience of building products in the trenches at Kentico.

2. The rise and fall of InVision

InVision was the most popular prototyping tool back in 2017. Now in 2020 popularity of InVision has massively dropped, and the company seems to have lost its momentum. Blaming the popularity of Figma is too simple of an explanation, and Sean Dexter investigates what actually went down. …

Just like in 2019, I’ve read hundreds of Scrum articles on Medium in 2020. I thought it would be nice to reflect and share the best Scrum articles I’ve read for each month of 2020.

I want to stress these posts are my personal favorites. Their selection is not based on popularity or reads. This is also why I put a picture of a pretty espresso machine, just because I can! The espresso machine should remind people that this article is subjective, and you might not necessarily agree with my choices.

Without further ado, here are the 12 best articles I’ve read on Medium, one for each month and arranged by chronological order. …

With the release of the 2020 Scrum Guide, Scrum practitioners all over the world are suddenly confronted by three novel commitments:

1. Product Goal
2. Sprint Goal
3. Definition of Done

The purpose of these three commitments is to “Reinforce empiricism and the Scrum values for the Scrum Team and their stakeholders”. Especially the addition of the Product Goal seems to have left many Scrum practitioners stumped and confused.

I receive a lot of messages asking how to deal with Product Goals. Here are some examples of typical questions I get asked:

• What is the optimal time horizon for a Product Goal?
• How far ahead in time should you create Product Goals? …

Many Scrum Teams examine their burn-down chart at every Daily Scrum. When we’re below the perfect line, life is smiling at us, and things are going great! When we’re above the imaginary line, worry starts entering our minds.

“What if we won’t be able to complete everything in the Sprint?” We pray things will be better tomorrow when we examine our burn down chart together again.

Except tomorrow, things don’t look any better, and everything just seems to have gotten worse. We’re further above the line than ever. …

You might be thinking: why on earth would anyone switch back from Feature Teams to Component Teams? That’s like switching from the superior graphite tennis racket back to the outdated wooden version.

Hold on to that thought. I wrote this article to show how using Component Teams may be a sensible decision in some situations.

For those who don’t read my articles regularly, I’m a big proponent of Feature Teams. I’ve written multiple articles on Feature Teams to help convince people of their benefits and assist them in making the switch.

Regardless of my preference for Feature Teams, I’m a pragmatic person and do my best to not be blinded by idealism. Even if I have a predilection for working with Feature Teams, I try to keep an open mind. It is essential to entertain the possibility that your Feature Team set-up may actually be working against you. …

Most weather forecasts don’t match reality. Especially weather forecasts that are provided more than a week in the future.

Yet despite how often weather forecast are wrong, we still pay attention to them. Weatherwomen and weathermen all over the world tell us the weather every day, are often wrong, and still we keep listening. We know being wrong comes with the job.

We grant the weatherman the luxury to update his forecast as more information becomes available. Why do we often not grant our software development teams this same luxury?

What can we learn from weather forecasting?

When forecasting the weather, the accuracy of the weather forecast drops to around 50% when you try to predict the weather more than 7 days in advance. The closer you get to the date you’re trying to forecast, the better the information you will have to make a prediction. As a result, the closer you are to the date of interest, the more accurate your forecast will be. …