Email the Author
You can use this page to email Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves about Growing Agile: A Coach's Guide to Mastering Backlogs.
About the Book
Scrum is great for getting teams to deliver good quality software regularly, but that doesn't really help if you are building the wrong thing! The Product Backlog is a key artefact to helping steer the team in the right direction. Yet sometimes the Product Backlog is just a long list of tickets logged by the business. Often Product Owners can't see the forest for the trees. There are so many items in their backlog that the team have no idea what direction the product is actually headed. Even if you know what your backlog should look like, finding the time to get it in order seems impossible.
If this sounds familiar, this book is for you. We have worked with a number of business analysts and Product Owners who feel the same way. We found that sending Product Owners on two day theoretical training courses is not the answer. Instead we run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner's actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.
We have combined a number of these workshops into this book. We provide all our workshop plans, tips for facilitation, and teaching points to cover for each topic. You can use these workshops to help the Product Owners you work with to master their backlogs.
About the Authors
My passion for agile is lived daily at Growing Agile. My personal motto is ‘be brave’, and I embody this by taking on challenges one small step at a time. On weekends you can find me planting on the farm, building things or playing with my fur children.
I've worked with agile approaches since 2001 when I joined an eXtreme Programming team as their "Onsite customer". After working in a range of roles and companies as an agile coach, trainer, and leader, I now focus on helping individuals, either though one on one coaching, or through books and courses that inspire them to grow their agile and leadership skills. I also work part time as an accreditor for ICAgile helping trainers around the world create engaging learning experiences.