Building Innovative Products

Read more about the article How to Handle Scope Creep in Scrum: A Guide for Agile Teams
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How to Handle Scope Creep in Scrum: A Guide for Agile Teams

Picture this: You're three weeks into a sprint when your stakeholder drops by with "just one small addition" to the feature you're building. Sound familiar? Welcome to what traditional project managers call scope creep. But here's the thing about scope creep in Scrum: it doesn't exist. Not because requirements don't change (they absolutely do), but because…

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March 19, 2025
Read more about the article Product Discovery and Validation: 10 Proven Techniques for Better Products
Product Management Training and Coaching
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Product Discovery and Validation: 10 Proven Techniques for Better Products

Building products without validating them first is like cooking without tasting. You might get lucky, but more often than not, you'll end up with something nobody wants to consume. Product discovery isn't just a nice-to-have in your development process. It's the foundation that determines whether your product will solve real problems or just add to the…

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March 12, 2025
Read more about the article How to Use Design Sprints to Validate Product/Market Fit
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How to Use Design Sprints to Validate Product/Market Fit

Design Sprints is a discovery technique created by Jake Knapp and popularized in his book Sprint - How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days, based on techniques he used helping teams while working at Google Ventures. Design sprints are not a part of Scrum and the Design Sprint concept differs…

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February 4, 2025
Read more about the article Creating Powerful Sprint Goals: A Practical Guide for Agile Teams
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Creating Powerful Sprint Goals: A Practical Guide for Agile Teams

How to Write an Effective Sprint Goal? Crafting effective Sprint Goals is essential for Scrum team success. A well-written Sprint Goal provides focus, direction, and purpose for your team's work during each Sprint. This guide will show you exactly how to create Sprint Goals that drive meaningful outcomes. What Makes a Sprint Goal Effective? Great Sprint…

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November 14, 2023
Read more about the article 7 Risks in Waterfall Development
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7 Risks in Waterfall Development

What is Waterfall Development? When most of us think about traditional project management, we're picturing waterfall development. It's that step-by-step approach where you finish one phase completely before moving to the next one. Winston Royce wrote about it back in 1970, and teams have been using it ever since. But here's the thing: as markets move…

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July 22, 2023
Read more about the article The Definition of Done vs. the Acceptance Criteria
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The Definition of Done vs. the Acceptance Criteria

The Definition of Done often gets confused with the Acceptance Criteria. Acceptance Criteria Acceptance Criteria is specific to a user story and it will differ from one user story to the next as it’s tied to a particular functionality or feature. The acceptance criteria further clarifies the feature by proving context and intent. It helps manage…

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March 19, 2021
Read more about the article 6 Tips for Effective Product Backlog Refinement
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6 Tips for Effective Product Backlog Refinement

The Scrum Guide defines Product Backlog Refinement as the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items. This is an ongoing activity to add details, such as a description, order, and size. Product Backlog Refinement is a key activity in Scrum that is often overlooked. If a team finds…

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November 5, 2020
Read more about the article Top 13 Patterns to Split a User Story
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Top 13 Patterns to Split a User Story

Many teams struggle with breaking up or splitting a user story into smaller ones. Here are the top 13 patterns to split a user story that you can use when clarifying user stories with the team during product backlog refinement. Start by asking: 1. By Business or User Perspective Can a business stakeholder understand the user…

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March 11, 2020
Read more about the article 9 User Story Smells and Anti-patterns
User Story

9 User Story Smells and Anti-patterns

1. Thinking that everything is a user story Many mistakenly believe that if you are Agile or using Scrum, then you must use user stories and no other format is acceptable. User stories are not required in Scrum. Product Backlog Items can take any format. User stories are a recommended technique due to some benefits over…

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August 30, 2016
Read more about the article What’s the Most Important Part of a User Story?
User Story

What’s the Most Important Part of a User Story?

Looking at the user story template, which part of the user story is the most important? Is it the Who, What, Why, How, or Acceptance Criteria? The How Let’s first look at the How – It’s important to note that the user story does not contain details about the How. Generally, the how are technical tasks…

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July 14, 2016
Read more about the article Top 5 Techniques for Splitting a User Story
User Story

Top 5 Techniques for Splitting a User Story

When splitting user stories, we should always split them vertically as if we are slicing a piece of cake. The whole cake is a cake and each vertical slice is a piece of cake with all it’s layers. A horizontal slice might just have the icing, or maybe just the filling, or just the crust and…

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June 16, 2016
Read more about the article What’s the Right Size for a User Story
User Story

What’s the Right Size for a User Story

Product Backlog Items (PBIs) or user stories should be small. Small stories provide focus for the team and gives members the flexibility to adjust and adapt to changes. The larger the story, the higher the risk of team members getting lost in the details and creating bottlenecks as members are busy and unavailable to collaborate and…

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May 7, 2016
Read more about the article Top 3 Reasons to Split a User Story
User Story

Top 3 Reasons to Split a User Story

Here are the top 3 reasons to split a user story: Size – Large user stories need further refinement to break them down into more manageable pieces. Key indicators that a user story is too large are if the estimate is greater than the Sprint duration, or if the estimate is greater than the remaining time…

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April 7, 2016
Read more about the article The 6 Attributes of Effective User Stories – INVEST
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The 6 Attributes of Effective User Stories – INVEST

Bill Wake came up with the INVEST acronym to help us remember guidelines for writing effective user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable. Invest As much as possible, try to make sure that stories are not interdependent as this might lead to prioritization and planning problems. Independent is different from the logical order of…

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March 8, 2016
Read more about the article Top 5 Advantages of User Stories
User Story

Top 5 Advantages of User Stories

Before we look at why use user stories, let’s first start by looking at other common requirement gathering techniques. 1st, there is the IEEE 830 with “The system shall… “, The system shall do this…, the system shall do that, and my favorite, the system shall be bug free 😊. We typically start out with an…

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February 8, 2016