The First Hundred Days: Books by Pierluigi Pugliese
Two people. The same team. The same hundred days. Seen from two sides.
Connie’s First Hundred Days as a Scrum Master and Marco’s First Hundred Days as a Product Owner are companion books that follow two newcomers into roles nobody really prepares you for. Connie learns to lead without authority; Marco learns to choose without certainty. Each book stands on its own, but together they give you the full picture of what happened in that team during those hundred days.
These are not textbooks. There are no frameworks to memorise and no maturity models, just a story drawn from years of coaching the real people behind these characters.
Connie’s First Hundred Days as a Scrum Master
Connie has been a software developer for eight years. She is good at it. So when the head of engineering asks her to become the Scrum Master for a struggling team, her first reaction is not excitement. It is confusion.
This is the story of how she figures it out.
Over a hundred days, Connie navigates the territory that every new Scrum Master discovers the hard way: Sprint Plannings where she talks too much, Daily Scrums that feel like status reports, a retrospective where the team finally says what they actually think, and an organisation that does not always understand what she does or why.
The learning is not linear. Connie makes mistakes, corrects course, and slowly develops the instincts that no training class can teach. She discovers that the hardest part of the role is not learning the framework but learning to lead without authority.
Marco’s First Hundred Days as a Product Owner
Marco counts his backlog every Monday morning. Two hundred and fourteen items. Six stakeholders who all want different things. No principled way of choosing between them.
He writes detailed specifications, answers every question before it is asked, and says yes to everything. He is not a Product Owner. He is a requirements clerk with a fancier title.
This is the story of how that changes.
Over a hundred days, Marco collides with the limits of saying yes to everything and learns to ask a different kind of question. He discovers that a product vision is not a slide deck but a decision-making tool. He builds a roadmap that says no to more things than it says yes to. And he finds out that the hardest part of the job is not managing a backlog but deciding what is worth building and why.
Every situation in both books is drawn from years of coaching Scrum Masters and Product Owners who were learning their roles while already doing them. If you recognise yourself in Connie’s or Marco’s story, that is not a coincidence.
Both books are available in English, German and Italian from the Connexxo shop.