 I'm Jeff Watts and welcome to my Kickstarter project, Team Mastery milestone cards. Now, this little video hopefully will explain what it's all about and how you might want to get involved. I'm really excited about it because it's something that I've been thinking about for a long time and I've finally figured out a way of bringing it to life. Now, I've written a couple of other books and I've had lots of questions over the last few years about when I'm going to finish the trilogy, if you like. Right, the third book. So I've written Scrum Mastery for Scrum Masters and I've written Product Mastery for Product Owners. Now, the third role, and there are only three roles in Scrum, is around the team, the development team. So I've been asked so many times, when are you going to write Team Mastery? And I've had an idea that I want to do that for a long time, but I haven't really, until now, I've really figured out how to do it. I knew it was going to be different. I've always had an idea that it would be different, but everybody knew how it was going to be different. So this might sound strange, but hopefully I'll explain a little bit more. And recently, for those of you who've been following my YouTube channel and social media posts, you'll realize that I've had another trilogy recently where I've had my third child and a big gap, age gap between. So there are things around now for this child that weren't around when I had my first two children. And one of those products is something that I've come across and thought this was quite interesting and sort of made a connection for me and these are milestone cards. So the idea behind milestone cards is that you have this deck of cards and when your baby reaches a certain milestone, such as, you know, I had my first tooth or, you know, I crawled for the first time or I slept through for the first time or I had my first poonami. That's a word that I've just been introduced to recently. And you can take a picture with that card and it sort of formed part of your journey almost like, you know, a visual development or journey often through social media posts or have you. I thought, that's pretty cool. What about if there were some milestone cards to chart the progress development journey of an agile team? And so I put those two together. I thought, well, maybe I can create some kind of hybrid a book that helps give the background and a few stories behind traits, characteristics and anecdotes of successful teams, but also some almost prompts, almost intermediary goals if you like for teams to know that they're on the right path either for capturing their successes and their milestones or even to proactively aim towards achieving them as a team. It will still be a book. There will still be chapters, stories, theory, anecdotes and explanations but there will also be some detachable pages that will effectively be milestone cards. Now I've put a prototype on the Kickstarter website so you can see the kind of thing that it will be, a front, very graphical not a huge amount of information on there text-wise but it will be an important milestone in that team's development and on the back will be some specific theory around that particular milestone and also some links to resources, information, tools, techniques if you like that will help you achieve that or different ways that you might be able to achieve that. So there will be five sections in the book and each of those sections will be focused on a common core characteristic of the successful teams that I've come across and been part of over the years and each of those characteristics will have a number of milestones within them they'll all be grouped together and easily accessible you can dip into or dip out of them it's not going to be a linear thing because different teams will mature in different ways and in different orders so I'm really excited about it and I thought well I'm going to, it's a different type of project so I'm going to try and do this in a different way because it's not something that you can produce that easily it's going to be quite a bespoke development, this idea of a hybrid book I'm going to have to engage in a really good designer for this and I'm going to have to engage with a specialist book printer as well over in the US so there's a lot more higher upfront costs here and I think well would people like to get involved in this so if you back this project then you will get a copy of this book a month before it goes on general sale so you will have one of the first few copies of this you can pay extra and have a signed copy you can pay extra and get in the credits so you can be named in the book itself or for a certain small number of people there are only limited places available for this you can actually collaborate with me on the production so you can tell me your stories perhaps we could include one of your stories that's one of the anecdotes in there you can give me some feedback on the designs and the prototypes and the options that we're coming up with the milestones themselves get involved share with me what you think the milestones of teams are and maybe we can incorporate them so if you want to get involved in that you can be one of the select few collaborators helping me shape the content of the book I expect this project to be finished in January 2020 which is for a new book quite tight schedules but I'm in charge of my own schedules and I've managed to use my velocity from the past few books as a pretty good indicator that that is definitely doable but as with any good agile project I will be keeping you my Kickstarter backers and collaborators fully up to date with actual progress along the way so I'd love to have you on board any questions in the meantime have a look at the Kickstarter page if there's questions that the Kickstarter page doesn't answer then drop me a message we haven't got a long time we only have 45 days to get the funding to make this Kickstarter project happen and here is to Team Mastery