Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) &
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Student Resources
We've created this page to help recent CSM & CSPO graduates with some of the resources we think will help you through the first two years of being a Scrum Master or Product Owner.
Books
This is the first book written to specifically address Scrum. It was written by one of the co-creators of Scrum (Ken Schwaber) and the creator of Enterprise Scrum (Mike Beedle).
See how to mine the experience of your software development team continually throughout the life of the project. The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.
This edition builds on recent research, reflects the authors' experiences over two decades, and shares wisdom gleaned from the global retrospective community.
An unstoppable business revolution is under way - and it is Agile. Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything...all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.
Marquet was a Naval Academy graduate and an experienced officer when selected for submarine command. Trained to give orders in the traditional model of “know all-tell all” leadership, he faced a new wrinkle when he was shifted to the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine. Facing the high-stress environment of a sub where there’s little margin for error, he was determined to reverse the trends he found on the Santa Fe: poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet.
As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence.
You need to get value from your software project. You need it "free, now, and perfect." We can't get you there, but we can help you get to "cheaper, sooner, and better." This book leads you from the desire for value down to the specific activities that help good Agile projects deliver better software sooner, and at a lower cost. Using simple sketches and a few words, the author invites you to follow his path of learning and understanding from a half century of software development and from his engagement with Agile methods from their very beginning.
A fundamental resource for consultants, facilitators, coaches, trainers, and anyone who helps groups realize their creative and problem-solving potential. This new edition includes updated content based on the latest research and revised models of group effectiveness and mutual learning. Roger M. Schwarz shows how to use the Skilled Facilitator approach to: boost improvement processes such as Six Sigma and Lean, create a psychologically safe learning environment for training, and help coaches work with teams and individuals in real-time. This edition features a new chapter that explains how to facilitate virtual teams using conferencing technology.
The third edition of this groundbreaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole. With previous editions already embraced by business and community leaders and consulting professionals around the world, this new book is even more insightful and easy to use.
As long-time competitive advantages disappear, astute executives and change agents know they must achieve true agile transformation. In Unlocking Agility, Jorgen Hesselberg reveals what works, what doesn’t, and how to overcome the daunting obstacles.
Most people have experienced--at least once in their lives--the incomparable thrill of being part of a great team effort. They can remember the unity of purpose they experienced, the powerful passion that inspired them, and the incredible results they achieved. People who have been on a great team can attest that the difference between being on a team with a shared vision and being on a team without one is the difference between joy and misery.
Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making
The third edition of this groundbreaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole. With previous editions already embraced by business and community leaders and consulting professionals around the world, this new book is even more insightful and easy to use.
Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money - the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction - at work, at school, and at home - is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does - and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation - autonomy, mastery, and purpose - and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
The third edition of this groundbreaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole. With previous editions already embraced by business and community leaders and consulting professionals around the world, this new book is even more insightful and easy to use.
I know you are questioning why a children's book is on this list. This is probably one of the best written books to teach Product Owners to be clear with their written communications. Product Owners can learn a LOT from this book.
Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.
In keeping with the parable style, Patrick Lencioni begins by telling the fable of a woman who, as CEO of a struggling Silicon Valley firm, took control of a dysfunctional executive committee and helped its members succeed as a team. Story time over, Lencioni offers explicit instructions for overcoming the human behavioral tendencies that he says corrupt teams (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results). Succinct yet sympathetic, this guide will be a boon for those struggling with the inherent difficulties of leading a group.
The toughest part of innovation? Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for. Even if you ask them, they often can’t explain what they want. Now, there’s a breakthrough solution: Innovation Games. Drawing on his software product strategy and product management consulting experience, Luke Hohmann has created twelve games that help you uncover your customers’ true, hidden needs and desires.
Websites
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products. This Guide contains the definition of Scrum. This definition consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland developed Scrum; the Scrum Guide is written and provided by them. Together, they stand behind the Scrum Guide.
Maximize your agile investment or advance your career with training, coaching, and resources from Scrum Alliance—the only nonprofit provider of the world's most recognizable scrum and agile certifications.
Planning your next agile retrospective? Start with a random plan, change it to fit the team's situation, print it and share the URL. Or browse around for new ideas!
Ron Jeffries is one of the original Agilists that helped create XP, User Stories and probably invented Story Points (regardless of what you hear from other old-timers) - and he has apologized for it.
Join the XP Game for a fun and engaging journey into the heart of Agile Planning. Designed to tackle challenging concepts such as velocity, story estimation, feedback loops, and collaboration patterns, this playful experience brings developers and business professionals together like never before.
The Poppendiecks have been the leaders in the Lean Mindset community for decades. Do yourself a favor and learn from them before thinking you know what Lean is.
A website on building software effectively
If there's a theme that runs through my work and writing on this site, it's the interplay between the shift towards agile thinking and the technical patterns and practices that make agile software development practical. While specifics of technology change rapidly in our profession, fundamental practices and patterns are more stable. So writing about these allows me to have articles on this site that are several years old but still as relevant as when they were written.
Alistair Cockburn describes software development as a cooperative game. Scrum provides one set of rules for one such way of playing the game. The Scrum Guide is the official rule book. However, the Scrum Guide doesn't tell you the rationale behind Scrum as a whole, or behind many of its successful practices. Those rationales come out of experience, community, and the insights of its founders and inventors. The ScrumPLoP mission is to build a body of pattern literature around those communities, describing those insights, so we can easily share them with the Scrum and Agile communities.
The product owner is a product management role that emerged in Scrum in the late 1990ies. But many organisations still struggle to effectively apply it. In this article, I offer an overview of the role including its authority and responsibility.
An adequate Scrum Master can handle two or three teams at a time. If you're content to limit your role to organizing meetings, enforcing timeboxes, and responding to the impediments people explicitly report, you can get by with part time attention to this role. Probably nothing catastrophic will happen.
We developed Scrum in the early 1990s. We wrote the first version of the Scrum Guide in 2010 to help people worldwide understand Scrum. We have evolved the Guide since then through small, functional updates. Together, we stand behind it.
Videos
The Cynefin Framework is central to Cognitive Edge methods and tools. It allows executives to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problems and opportunities. Using the Cynefin framework can help executives sense which context they are in so that they can not only make better decisions but also avoid the problems that arise when their preferred management style causes them to make mistakes. Cynefin, pronounced kuh-nev-in, is a Welsh word that signifies the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand.
Clip from the cable series Silicon Valley that teaches some misunderstandings about what Scrum is and how it works. The cool thing about this is what happens in the wild: People believe they know what Scrum is and then teach and coach others their misunderstandings. Eventually this becomes the future of the thing that is misunderstood. Scrum is living this right now.
Movie about Ian Sense, Scrum master. Video was released as promotion for new book by Jeff Sutherland, Rini van Solingen and Eelco Rustenburg. Video was sponsored by Scrum.nl
Clip from the movie Office Space
We assume this is how most early Produce Owners justified their jobs.
How Is The Product Owner Role Supposed To Work? How Does Your Large Organization Misinterpret The Product Owner Role? How Does Misinterpreting The Product Owner Role Delay Customer Feedback? How Does Misinterpreting The Product Owner Role Reduce Developer Motivation and Empathy For Customers? How Do Real Product Owners Deliver The Highest Customer Value? How Does Misinterpreting The Product Owner Role Reduce Value Delivery? What Is Unpleasant About Trying To Fulfill The Misinterpreted Product Owner Role? How Can We Help The People Stuck In This Role While increasing team self organization and cross functionality? Is It Necessary To Create New PO-derived Roles Like Chief Product Owner, Business Owner, etc.? This video corrects some errors in my friend Henrik Kniberg's otherwise excellent "Product Owner In A Nutshell" video.