So here’s an observation and question for the #scrum community.

One of the biggest issues I’ve seen with teams new to scrum is backlog refinement. Most people do it wrong and it has huge implications on #prodmgmt. /1 I have seen hundreds of teams treat backlog refinement as a two hour meeting where they rewrite user stories and estimate them.

While both of those are good things to do, they usually only do these two activities, instead of creating shared understanding about the work. /2

We were looking for a way to do something different than our competitors who were focused on SEO. We decided to tackle sending people rental listings in slack. @davemastersnyc #agileux We discovered it was too hard to install apps on slack, so we decided to keep the thread of the idea but pivot to FB messenger. @davemastersnyc #AgileUX

So I haven’t been tweeting a lot lately because I overcommitted myself, but one topic keeps picking at me and I feel like we should talk about it.

Over and over I keep seeing people struggle with decisive decision making in #prodmgmt... at every level. /1 To me this is one of the most important skills a Product Manager can master - how to make decisions about their product and communicate it upwards. /2

I want to talk about something I keep hearing from many places when I ask teams about their processes:

"We are different"

#agile #prodmgmt /1 Whenever I coach someone or start consulting with a company, I start off with an assessment where I try to learn about the individual products and how they are run. /2

Last week @JoshuaKerievsky, @mattbarcomb, and I had some fun poking at the Product Owner role in #Agile: . 1/n As someone who spends every day training POs in #prodmgmt, this is close to my heart. There are so many POs who do not do real PM. 2/n