Keep going after class

The Agile Manifesto

Beck, Fowler, Sutherland, et al.

Four values, twelve principles, one page. Everything else is commentary.

The Scrum Guide

Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland

The actual definition of Scrum. It's free, and about 13 pages. Most team disagreements are settled by re-reading it together.

Scrum Alliance

The certifying body for CSM and CSPO. Certification paths, renewal, and the member community.

ClearlyAgile Blog

Practical Agile and Scrum articles from the Braintrust / ClearlyAgile network.

Mountain Goat Software

Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn's deep library on user stories, estimating, and planning.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

Jeff Sutherland

From the co-creator of Scrum. The best starting point after your CSM: why the framework is shaped the way it is, not just the ceremonies.

A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game

Jeff Sutherland, James O. Coplien, et al.

Scrum as a language of patterns, showing how the pieces reinforce each other. For when you want depth, not a checklist.

The Scrum Fieldbook

J.J. Sutherland

Field stories of Scrum used well (and badly) outside software, from the CEO of Scrum Inc.

Mastering Professional Scrum

Stephanie Ockerman & Simon Reindl

For teams past the basics who want to get honest about what 'done' and 'working' really mean.

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

Kenneth S. Rubin

The thorough, well-illustrated reference. The one to own if you want a single desk copy.

The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year

Mitch Lacey

Aimed squarely at teams in their first year of Scrum, and the real problems that show up then.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum

Mike Cohn

Cohn's playbook for rolling Scrum out across an organization, not just one team.

The Art of Agile Development

James Shore & Shane Warden

A practitioner's guide to the engineering and teamwork practices that make agility real. Fully rewritten 2nd edition.

30 Days to Better Agile

Angela Druckman

A short, practical run at the habits that move a new team forward quickly.

Scrum for the Rest of Us!: A Braintrust Field Guide

Brian M. Rabon, The Braintrust Group

Our own plain-English field guide to getting started with Scrum.

Jeff Sutherland Breaks Down the Structure of Scrum

Jeff Sutherland

Intro to the Scrum Framework

Scrum.org

The Five Scrum Values

Scrum Alliance

The Scrum Essentials: Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation

Scrum Alliance

Product Increment (PSPI)

Fred Mastropasqua, ClearlyAgile

One of our own instructors on what a potentially shippable increment really means.

Kanban 101: What is Kanban?

How to Organize a Children's Party

The classic two-minute illustration of adaptive vs. up-front planning.

Team WIKISPEED: How a Lean, Agile Team Built a Car

Joe Justice, TEDxRainier

Arguing Agile Podcast

Om Patel & Brian Orlando

A working PO and a coach argue through real Agile questions. Good for the commute.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres

The book that named XP. Still the clearest case for the engineering practices Scrum leaves unspoken.

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

David J. Anderson

The foundational Kanban text. It improves flow by starting where you are, with no big reorg required.

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability

Daniel S. Vacanti

Flow metrics done right: cycle time, throughput, and how to forecast without story-point theatre.

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

Dean Leffingwell

The precursor to SAFe, from its creator. Useful background on why the scaling frameworks look the way they do.

Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change

Bill Joiner & Stephen Josephs

A developmental model for how leaders grow into leading change, not just managing it.

Agile Government Contracting

John Stenbeck & Kevin Jans

For the hard case: running Agile inside fixed-scope government procurement.

Agile Contracts: Creating and Managing Successful Projects with Scrum

Andreas Opelt, Boris Gloger, Wolfgang Pfarl & Ralf Mittermayr

How to write a contract that survives contact with an empirical, changing scope.

Making Sense of MVP

Henrik Kniberg

The skateboard-to-car drawing everyone cites, from the person who drew it, with the nuance most people miss.

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Marty Cagan

The reference text for modern product management. Start here if the CSPO left you wanting more depth.

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Marty Cagan & Chris Jones

The follow-up to Inspired, on how product leaders build teams that solve problems rather than just ship features.

Continuous Discovery Habits

Teresa Torres

The most practical book on talking to customers every week: opportunity solution trees and interview habits.

Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

Luke Hohmann

Structured games for pulling real needs and priorities out of customers and stakeholders.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

Mike Cohn

The book that taught a generation how to write and split stories that actually help a team.

Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell

Henrik Kniberg

Fifteen minutes of whiteboard that explains the PO role better than most two-day courses.

Nordstrom Innovation Lab: Sunglass iPad App Case Study

Nordstrom Innovation Lab

A product built in a week, live in-store, with real customer feedback every day. The loop, made visible.

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

Jeff Patton

The definitive book on story mapping: keeping the whole user journey in view instead of a flat backlog.

Mapping Experiences

James Kalbach

A complete guide to journey maps, service blueprints, and diagrams that align a team on the customer's experience.

User Experience Mapping

Peter W. Szabó

Practical techniques for story maps, journey maps, and the diagrams that make UX decisions visible.

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

Ellen Gottesdiener

How to run the workshops where real requirements actually get discovered, together.

Impact Mapping

Gojko Adzic

A one-page technique to connect what you build to the business outcome it's supposed to move.

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories

Gojko Adzic & David Evans

Exactly what it says: fifty small, practical fixes for the way your team writes and splits stories.

UZMO: Thinking With Your Pen

Martin Haussmann

A visual-thinking handbook for facilitators and product people. Sketch ideas so a room can see them.

Scrum@Scale

Jeff Sutherland

The scaling framework built out from Scrum itself.

SAFe: Scaled Agile Framework

The reference site for SAFe roles, events, and configurations.

DORA: The Four Keys

Google Cloud

Deployment frequency, lead time, change fail rate, recovery time. The four measures worth arguing about, plus a free self-assessment.

Team Topologies

Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

Why your org chart keeps producing the same delivery problems, and four team shapes that fix it.

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim

The research behind the four key metrics. Evidence, not opinion, for making the case to change.

Scrum Master Checklist

Michael James

The classic one-page checklist for what a Scrum Master actually tends to, day to day.

Coaching Agile Teams

Lyssa Adkins

The book to read once you've mastered the mechanics of Scrum and realise the hard part is people.

Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant-Leadership

Geoff Watts

What separates a competent Scrum Master from a genuinely great one, with concrete examples.

The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay

Zuzana Šochová

A compact, modern take on the role and how it grows from team to organization.

Scrum Shortcuts Without Cutting Corners

Ilan Goldstein

Bite-sized, battle-tested tactics for the situations the courses don't cover.

Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching

Robert Galen

A candid guide to agile coaching as a craft, from beginner to mastery.

The Daily Scrum is NOT a Status Meeting

Scrum.org

Project Manager Responsibilities in Scrum

Fred Mastropasqua, ClearlyAgile

Where the project manager's work actually goes when a team adopts Scrum.

Professional Coaching for Agilists

Damon Poole & Gillian Lee

Real coaching skills for Agilists, aimed at accelerating adoption without pushing.

Co-Active Coaching

Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House & Phillip Sandahl

The classic coaching text behind many coach-training programs. The craft beneath 'the coaching stance.'

Tasty Cupcakes

A big catalogue of agile games and exercises for training and facilitation.

Retromat

Mix-and-match retrospective plans: pick an activity for each phase and get a ready-made agenda.

Retrospective Wiki

A community wiki of retrospective tools, ideas, and formats.

FunRetrospectives

Activities and ideas for retrospectives and team check-ins.

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

Esther Derby & Diana Larsen

The definitive book on running retrospectives that change something, not just vent.

Agile Estimating and Planning

Mike Cohn

Why estimates go wrong and how to plan iteratively without pretending to predict the future.

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

Jean Tabaka

A toolkit for facilitating the meetings a Scrum Master actually runs.

Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making

Sam Kaner

The deep reference on getting a group to a decision everyone actually owns.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Jake Knapp

Google Ventures' five-day design sprint, step by step. A great structured way to de-risk a big bet.

Relative Sizing

Fred Mastropasqua, ClearlyAgile

Why story points beat hours, from one of our instructors.

Build a Tower, Build a Team (The Marshmallow Challenge)

Tom Wujec, TED

Why kindergartners beat MBAs at a build challenge. A great team exercise and a lesson in prototyping.

The Secrets of Facilitation

Michael Wilkinson

A structured, repeatable method for facilitating groups to a real decision. Deeply practical.

Google re:Work: Project Aristotle

Google

Google studied 180 teams to find what predicts performance. It wasn't talent. It was psychological safety.

Liberating Structures

33 facilitation microstructures that get everyone contributing, not just the loudest voice in the room.

The Power of Vulnerability

Brené Brown, TED

Twenty minutes on why psychological safety isn't a soft nice-to-have. Worth it before your next retrospective.

How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Simon Sinek, TED

The 'start with why' talk. The clearest short argument for leading with purpose over process.

The Puzzle of Motivation

Dan Pink, TED

Autonomy, mastery, purpose, and the evidence that incentives often make thinking work worse.

How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team

Amy Edmondson, TED

The researcher who named psychological safety, on why teams that report more errors are often the better ones.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Patrick Lencioni

Reads like a novel and lands hard. The best explanation of why capable teams still don't perform.

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy R. Clark

A practical model for the safety that lets people include, learn, contribute, and challenge.

Turn the Ship Around!

L. David Marquet

A submarine captain's account of moving from leader-follower to leader-leader. The clearest case study in devolving authority.

Spotify Engineering Culture (Part 1)

Henrik Kniberg

The 'Spotify model' from the source: squads, tribes, and why autonomy needs alignment.

Agile Rhapsody (Bohemian Rhapsody Parody)

Bart den Haak

The Agile Manifesto set to Queen. For the lighter end of a team offsite.

A Funny ScrumMaster Movie

Jeff Sutherland

Lucy & Ethel at the Chocolate Factory

I Love Lucy

The definitive two-minute demonstration of what happens when you overload a system past its capacity.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide

Patrick Lencioni

The practical companion to the fable: exercises for actually fixing trust, conflict, and accountability.

Radical Candor

Kim Scott

Care personally and challenge directly. The best framework for feedback that's both kind and honest.

Leading Change

John P. Kotter

Kotter's eight-step model, still the reference for why change efforts stall and how to sustain them.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler

How to hold the high-stakes conversation you've been avoiding, without it going sideways.

Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf

The essay that started it all, and where 'servant leader,' the heart of the Scrum Master role, comes from.

Discover Your True North

Bill George

On leading from who you actually are. A grounding read for anyone stepping into leadership.

Authentic Leadership

Bill George

The earlier book that made the case for values-led leadership over image management.

The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace

Gary Chapman & Paul White

People are motivated differently. A simple lens for recognition that actually lands.

StrengthsFinder 2.0

Tom Rath

Build on what people are already good at. Includes the assessment; a common team-building starting point.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie

The century-old classic on working well with people. Still worth the afternoon.

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

A cold, clear-eyed look at organizational power. Read it to recognize the games, not to play them.

Agile Data Warehouse Design

Lawrence Corr & Jim Stagnitto

Collaborative dimensional modelling: designing data warehouses with the business in the room.

Agile Data Science 2.0

Russell Jurney

Building analytics products iteratively, shipping insight in thin vertical slices.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Gino Wickman

The EOS operating system: a concrete way to run a company on vision, data, and accountability.

Get a Grip: An Entrepreneurial Fable

Gino Wickman & Mike Paton

The story-form companion to Traction: EOS shown, not just told.

Profit First

Mike Michalowicz

A cash-management system that flips the formula so a business is profitable by design.

Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

Richard Sheridan

Menlo Innovations' story of building a deliberately joyful, transparent, pair-programming culture.

Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World

Brian J. Robertson

A serious attempt at distributing authority through explicit roles instead of a management hierarchy.

Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey A. Moore

Why great products stall between early adopters and the mainstream, and how to bridge it.

All In Startup

Diana Kander

A fable on validating a business idea before betting everything on it. (The one also referred to as 'Fall in Love with the Problem.')

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Adding people to a late project makes it later. The essays that named the traps, still true 50 years on.

Death March

Edward Yourdon

How doomed projects happen and how to survive one. A candid antidote to planning optimism.

Prompt Engineering Guide

Anthropic

Practical, current techniques for getting useful output from an LLM. Pairs with our AI workshops.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Ethan Mollick

The most grounded book on working with LLMs day to day: what they're good at, and where they quietly fail.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Daniel H. Pink

The research on timing, and when to do what. Useful for scheduling the work, not just doing it.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli

A field guide to the cognitive biases that quietly wreck decisions. Short, sharp chapters.

The Journey to the East

Hermann Hesse

The short novel that inspired Greenleaf's idea of the servant leader. A quiet, worthwhile detour.