Foreword

Over my decades-long career, I’ve had the privilege of acting in all three of the Scrum roles: developer, Scrum master, and product owner. And I have a confession: I didn’t always perform those roles well.

For example, I was once on a Scrum team that was horrible at breaking down work into something that could be completed in a sprint. It took months before we produced anything of value, which was incredibly demoralizing for the Scrum team and caused our stakeholders to disengage.

Then there was the time I was both the product owner and the Scrum master for the same Scrum team. I embraced being a Scrum master and invested the time required to be good at it—–but that meant I didn’t have time to be a good product owner. The result was a development team that excelled at turning out features that none of our customers wanted.

And even once I had become a decent Scrum master, I used to lean a little too much toward the servant part of being a servant leader. When I saw someone struggling with their role on a Scrum team, I would step in to help instead of letting them find their own way. That made it hard for people to learn how to self-organize.

As I look back on my career, I know I’ve learned from these missteps. But it would have saved me a lot of time, energy, and frustration if I’d had someone with more Scrum experience to guide me and help me avoid making these mistakes in the first place. While I wasn’t lucky enough to have such a mentor, you are: the authors of this book.

In the following pages, Ryan and Todd share a ton of hard-earned lessons that they’ve learned during their careers. In their easy-to-absorb collection of examples, they offer advice for avoiding similar mistakes and for minimizing any damage from unfortunate choices you and/or your team might have already made.

Today, I’m an employee at Scrum.org, where my full-time job is to help professionals educate others about Scrum. But even though I’m a recognized expert in my field, I’m constantly learning new approaches and finding opportunities to improve my Scrum practice.

This book is full of practical suggestions that you can easily try for yourself. As you read this book and implement its advice, keep in mind that Scrum can be reduced to a small set of ideas:

Try something new.

See how it goes.

Repeat.

So if, like me, you need help with breaking down your work, or you’re not sure who to select as your Scrum master, or you want to avoid being the Superhero Scrum Master, then this book is for you. You may even find a solution to a problem you didn’t realize existed. I know that by the time I finished this book, I had several new ideas that I was eager to try.

Remember, your next sprint can always be better.

Ta.

Steve Porter

Team Member, Scrum.org