The other day I was working with a product owner, let’s call him John, for a team that had been using Scrum for about 10 weeks and was becoming proficient with the framework. Compared to some of his peer teams within the larger program, they were doing quite well. They were effectively planning iterations, managing a backlog and consistently increasing velocity. Everything was looking good as we were putting together the agenda for iteration planning the next day, when John asked if we really needed to set aside time to do a retrospective. more »