Walk through your hands-on Agile and Scrum experience as a product manager

In a product manager interview at Salesforce, you are asked about your working experience with Agile, and with Scrum in particular. Talk through the teams you have worked with and how they ran: the practices you used, any you introduced to a team that was new to them, and what you consider the essential ideas behind Agile. Explain how Scrum relates to Agile as a whole, and how the work was divided between you, as the person owning the backlog, and the engineers and designers delivering it. ```hint Show practice, not vocabulary For each principle you mention, point to one concrete thing you did with a team, such as a sprint goal you wrote or an estimation habit you introduced, and say what changed for the team or its customers as a result. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Do you want strict Scrum, with its fixed roles, events and sprint length, or Agile practice more broadly, including flow-based approaches such as Kanban? - Should I focus on teams that already ran Scrum when I joined, or on a time I brought these practices to a team that had not used them? - Should I cover how team-level sprints fit into a larger, fixed release calendar, or only the team's own rhythm? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear distinction between Agile as a set of values and principles and Scrum as one specific framework with defined accountabilities, events and artifacts - Concrete practices the candidate ran or introduced (sprint cadence, sprint goals, estimation, retrospectives), each tied to a result - A precise split between what the product owner decides (priorities, requirements, backlog order) and what the whole team owns (sizing, sprint commitment, delivery) - Judgment about adapting or dropping a practice when it stops helping, rather than following the framework mechanically - Evidence that the team delivered value in small increments and kept improving how it worked ### Follow-up Questions - A senior stakeholder asks for a new feature halfway through a sprint. What do you do? - Your team's estimates miss by a wide margin sprint after sprint. How do you find out why and fix it? - When would you advise a team not to use Scrum?