
User Stories – Part 8
Creating Tasks for Scrum Masters
According to The Agile Manifesto: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” As a Scrum Master, your job is to help your team become self-organizing, and thanks to the Scrum framework, you have what you need to help the team own their tasks in the project.
The Product Backlog
Everything a Scrum Team needs to work on is in the Product Backlog, which is simply a list of the things users and customers want from the product, grouped by epics, features and user stories. A popular format of recording a product backlog item (PBI) is writing down user stories: “As a (user role), I want to (describe action here) in order to (describe value or desired output here).”
A good PBI is understood by everyone: they know what its objective is, what the desired outcome is, and what level of complexity and feasibility it has. The team can opt to use an online tool to manage PBIs or a physical board with swim-lanes – whichever is more manageable. Ensuring that these characteristics are followed will help the development team have a better picture of what they need to do.
Sprint Ceremonies
While the Scrum Master can coach the team at any point during the project, the Sprint Ceremonies are the most important activities in the timeline and also the best venue for managing the work to be done. This is where the team inspects the work done and adapts to changes for upcoming work. While each ceremony has different purposes, they all have an impact on what tasks the team will accomplish.
59 Seconds Training Video
Master of Agile – Scrum Product Owner With 59 Seconds Agile (Video Training Course)
Introductory Offer: Free Course
What is this course?
This ‘Master of Agile – Scrum Product Owner With 59 Seconds Agile (Video Training Course)’ provides an in-depth understanding of the Scrum Product Owner roles and responsibilities
You will explore the Agile Scrum project life-cycle, including how an Agile User Story is created, to how we know when it is ‘done’
This course is aimed at those with or without prior knowledge and experience of the Agile values and principles
During this course you will learn the tools needed to succeed as a Scrum Product Owner
What will you learn?
You will gain an in-depth understanding of the Scrum Product Owner roles and responsibilities, and you will be able to
- Fully understand the role of the Scrum Product Owner
- Understand the roles involved in an Agile project
- Create an effective Product Backlog
- Effectively participate in Scrum Meetings such as the Daily Stand-up, Sprint Review and Retrospective
- Identify the roles involves in the Scrum Team

What topics are covered within this course?
You will cover the following topics during this course:
- An Introduction to Agile Project Management (Product Owner)
- The 12 Agile Principles (Product Owner)
- The Declaration of Interdependence (Product Owner)
- Introduction to Scrum (Product Owner)
- Scrum Project Roles (Product Owner)
- The Agile Project Life-cycle (Product Owner)
- Acceptance Criteria and the Prioritised Product Backlog (Product Owner)
- Epics and Personas (Product Owner)
- Sprint Planning (Product Owner)
- User Stories (Product Owner)
- The Daily Scrum (Product Owner)
- The Product Backlog (Product Owner)
- Scrum Charts (Product Owner)
- Review and Retrospective (Product Owner)
- Validating a Sprint (Product Owner)
- Releasing the Product (Product Owner)
Our Book Recommendations
We found these books great for finding out more information on Agile Scrum: