This is the second episode of our monthly digest, the best of what we read, saw, work with or recommend— interesting articles, technology or industry updates, advices, etc… simply useful stuff related to our core competencies and interests: agile, cloud, front-end or back-end development, and UX. Hope you enjoy it 🌱
Canvas templates from Design a better business
A very nice set of canvases, useful for plenty of situations and roles, not just during Scrum ceremonies. Get some inspiration or use it easily, thanks to step-by-step guide and detailed How-to section.
10 Powerful Strategies To Break Down Product Backlog Items in Scrum (with cheatsheet)
A blogpost from Christiaan Verwijs, well known in agile community, for e.g. Zombie Scrum (more about it later).
This one helps you or anyone from your team to work with your Backlog more efficiently. That is, slice it down to smaller chunks that are better suited to describe, prioritize, estimated and so on.
Did you know a vertical break-down is better then a horizontal one?
Dark Scrum
Normally, I wouldn’t recommend a text that is just bashing agile or Scrum. As you can guess, this isn’t one. It starts dark when naming several pitfalls of Scrum (when it goes wrong, that is) and all these are very real.
But Ron Jeffries doesn’t stop there, luckily! He offers couple of solid ways out. These to-dos are more from programmer’s perspective, but Scrum Masters should definitively make notes.
Why Figma wins
A great long read, not only about Figma's success — highly recommended for those who are interested in product management, collaboration, design tools, processes and operations (Design Ops).
How to make your Figma components easier to use
While we are talking Figma, check out this useful blogpost about components and what you can do to optimise them.
Building product roadmaps that everyone understands
Oh yes, this one delivers on the promise and shows, how to build and use a product roadmap to communicate high-level priorities so clearly that anyone — from CEO to summer intern — could walk away knowing what’s going on.
