When teams first learn that every Sprint they must deliver a usable, Done increment—including both development and testing—it can feel impossible. A common temptation is to develop in one Sprint and test in the next. Don’t. The extra cost is far higher than most teams expect. Here are the five biggest problems this creates. Administrative Burden You've just created a whole lot of administrative burden for the Scrum team. Now instead of keeping track of one Product Backlog it

Shorter, focused events create better inspection, better adaptation, and higher engagement. Longer events that wander tend to do the opposite.

If your Product Backlog contains hundreds of items - many that are years old - and even the Product Owner isn’t sure what all is in there, it may be time to do some clean-up.

When a Product Owner spends most of their time writing detailed user stories, they may be focused too much on the tactical work of their job while neglecting product strategy.

You have an entire team of developers working full-time to build the product. Doesn’t it make sense to have someone fully focused on deciding what should be built?

Sometimes dependencies are temporary. A feature may require collaboration between teams that don’t normally work together. In that case, here's how the Product Owner can help the team manage dependencies: Work with Developers to reorder work on the Product Backlog to sequence dependencies logically Coordinate roadmaps with other Product Owners, if dependencies cross Products The Product Backlog is more than just a "to do" list. It's a plan. Good plans account

Scrum training isn’t (just) about certification or even "learning the rules". It’s about alignment. When teams train together, they don’t just learn Scrum—they learn how to work together. And that shared understanding is often the difference between a group that simply does the work and a team that truly performs.

During my recent Professional Scrum Product Owner - Advanced classes, one of the class participants - Anna Rosine - made the comment that "Band-aids last forever." We were talking about technical debt and the tendency for organizations to do a quick fix, but then not come back around and, well, fix it.

New Years is a time to pause and reflect - and that applies to Scrum teams as well. So why not plan a New Years-themed Retrospective this year?