Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
From the focus on Value and Product Vision to the aspect of growing great PO’s. Two aspects that Scrum Masters must keep in mind at all times.
Great Product Owners aren’t afraid to share their Vision for the product or service they work with. But they also exhibit an interest in what other stakeholders (including the team) can bring to the product, and even change their Vision if that is needed. In this conversation with John, we discuss the focus on value, and how great PO’s focus the team on delivering value at all times.
In this episode, we refer to a previous episode on Lean and Agile Financial Planning, as well as the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide (PDF LINK).
In this segment, we talk about how Scrum Masters can have a big influence on the role of the Product Owner. We discuss how that influence can derail the team, and the PO by focusing the PO on aspects that are not critical for the success of the team and the PO. We then discuss what Scrum Masters can do to help PO’s, starting from the perspective and experience they have at that time.
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About John Albrecht
Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile 03/04 via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
When we discuss success with John, he brings up the idea that Scrum Masters that are successful have the ability to go off and do something else (outside the team) while the team focuses on their own goals and Sprint. In this episode, we also describe 7 characteristics of great Scrum teams.
The Scrum Builders game that John Albrecht developed, is about helping teams reflect on their actions during the Sprint. John was working with a team at the time that was constantly overcommitting and needed to reflect on what was pushing them towards that anti-pattern.
Listen in to learn how to use the game to help your teams reflect on their behavior during the Sprint.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experiences: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About John Albrecht
Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile 03/04 via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
“Everything we do is about change.” This is the phrase we start the episode with. John shares his experience on how to bring and support change in organizations and teams. In particular, we hear the story of a startup, and how bringing people together to a shared goal was the task at hand.
In this episode, we talk about the Google Design Sprint as well as the NoEstimates book.
About John Albrecht
Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile 03/04 via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Conflict is a natural process in teams. How teams handle, and survive conflict becomes therefore a critical aspect of their work. In this episode, we explore some of the skills/tools that help teams survive and benefit from (constructive) conflict, instead of suffering and being destroyed by (destructive) conflict.
In One From Many, The Rise Of The Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock, John found a book that gave him a different perspective of organizations and the role of “order” and “control” in management. In this real-life story about the creation of VISA (the credit card and payment processing organization), John found many ideas that help us navigate complex organizations. In this episode, we also talk about Wardley Maps, Complexity, and the Cynefin framework.
About John Albrecht
Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile 03/04 via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
The story that John shares with us, starts when Project Management transformations were a thing. He went through a PRINCE2 adoption process, which led to the emergence of the inevitable silos. John started searching for better alternatives and found Extreme Programming, Scrum and Kanban. As he tried to play the servant leader role that comes with Scrum, however, he discovered that there’s a good and a bad way to be a servant leader. Listen in to learn when to stop serving, and when to be a true leader!
About John Albrecht
Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile 03/04 via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.
About Samantha Corbett and Jeff Campbell
Samantha Corbett is an Agile Coach at Meltwater. She previously worked in IT project management. Samantha credits finding agile and lean as the exciting alternative from the traditional 9-5. At Meltwater she has been focused on training, coaching, and developing the Platform business unit.
You can link with Samantha Corbett on LinkedIn.
Jeff Campbell is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility.
He is the author of actionable agile tools, which you can get on Amazon and directly from the author at bit.ly/aatbook
As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organizations both small and large.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
You can also learn more about Jeff Campbell’s work at his company’s website.Read the Meltwater engineering blog at Underthehood.meltwater.com.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Sharing the passion for the product with the team is a great way to energize the team while sharing the Vision for the product.
In this episode, we also about how to solve the “everything is a priority” anti-pattern, even if the PO does not want to!
This Product Owner was “an energizer bunny” for teamwork. The PO worked with the team when needed, was decisive in decision making, included the team as much as possible and had a real passion for the product. All of this brought great energy to the team.
The Product Queen, is a PO anti-pattern, where the PO wants everything, and they want it now, just like that famous Queen song. However, this anti-pattern does not stop there. This particular PO also wanted everything to be “high-priority”. You may think it is impossible for a Scrum Master to help this PO, but you are wrong. Laurens shares with us an approach that helped this PO change their approach and be very clear on priorities!
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Laurens Bonnema
Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in."
You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
As Scrum Masters, we try to grow high-performance teams. In this episode, we talk about what might help teams become high-performing. We discuss the Team Vision, and how that can help teams progress and have fun on their way to high-performance.
In this episode, we refer to the Retrospective’sPrime Directive, which was crafted by Nrom Kerth, author of the Project Retrospectives book.
When helping teams reflect, one of the most important things is to help them “see” the same events, and causes, so they can then analyze them and come up with possible solutions to try. But how do we help teams visualize what happened? In this episode, we talk about the Timeline Retrospective, a way to help the team visualize and come to a common agreement on what happened, so they may define improvement actions based on a shared understanding of the past.
About Laurens Bonnema
Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in."
You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
A “big bang” approach to Agile adoption isn’t easy to pull off, and it may not even be a good idea in some cases. That was also Laurens’ thinking until he saw it happen in front of his eyes. From one day to another, 900 people were trained, and moved willingly to an Agile way of working. If you are a skeptic of “big bang” agile transformations, listen in. You might be surprised!
About Laurens Bonnema
Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in."
You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
In this team, the right mindset was there. They wanted to transform the way of working to follow their self-defined moto: “quality without compromise”. However, the mindset wasn’t enough. Even as the team discussed and discussed how to get better, it was missing one key aspect: the actual doing of the work. Listen in to learn how to help teams that are stuck in “discussion” mode.
Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck is a foundational book in the Agile movement, and inspiration for Laurens to define his own approach to Agile. As Laurens puts it: “Extreme Programming transformed my way of working”.
About Laurens Bonnema
Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in."
You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation is one of the Agile values. Even if that value has been there since the start of the Agile adoption process, its application isn’t easy. We have quite a few episodes on how difficult this value is to apply in practice, and this episode isn’t an exception. All of these stories have insights that are critical to learning how to apply this value. In this episode, we talk about how fulfilling a contract is never enough, and how the customer must be brought on board, and be part of the decision making all the way.
In this episode, we refer to Kent Beck and Extreme Programming.
About Laurens Bonnema
Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in."
You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.
You can also learn more about Laurens company at GladwellAcademy.com.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
In this episode, we talk about the focus destroyer and the 5 characteristics that successful PO’s share.
We talk about 5 characteristics that great Product Owners have. From the ability to listen to the team and customers to their focus on measuring the impact of their ideas/product on the customer.
“Everything is a priority” is a phrase that points to a PO that can’t make decisions, or is unaware of the priorities that matter for their customers. However, there’s where the anti-pattern starts. There are many more consequences from that perspective/attitude like the team losing focus and not being able to finish the things they started.
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Nikoletta Tátar
Nikoletta is an Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where teams and individuals have the space to grow, deliver awesome products to customers, and have fun doing so. She is also a Collaboration Superpowers facilitator holding workshops online about remote working and collaboration.
You can link with Nikoletta Tátar on LinkedIn and connect with Nikoletta Tátar on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Do you have a culture of appreciation in the Scrum team? That’s one of the signs of a team that is jelling and on its way to success. We also discuss tips on how to help the team spend more time and effort highlighting the best things that happen, with the goal of building energy and achieving a more positive work atmosphere.
We’ve discussed the Mad/Sad/Glad Agile Retrospective format before, but in this episode, we talk about adding a Kudos card section to that format. The Kudo card section adds higher energy to the retrospective and helps motivate the team.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experiences: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Nikoletta Tátar
Nikoletta is an Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where teams and individuals have the space to grow, deliver awesome products to customers, and have fun doing so. She is also a Collaboration Superpowers facilitator holding workshops online about remote working and collaboration.
You can link with Nikoletta Tátar on LinkedIn and connect with Nikoletta Tátar on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Change management is primarily an exercise in managing expectations among all stakeholders. In this episode, we talk about the role that “small changes” have in that process. We also discuss how to find the motivation / needed changes by working with the teams we support. Nikoletta shares many tips on how make change thrive and overcome change resistance.
About Nikoletta Tátar
Nikoletta is an Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where teams and individuals have the space to grow, deliver awesome products to customers, and have fun doing so. She is also a Collaboration Superpowers facilitator holding workshops online about remote working and collaboration.
You can link with Nikoletta Tátar on LinkedIn and connect with Nikoletta Tátar on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
This particular team acted more like a set of independent individuals. While trying to figure out why Nikoletta found out that they were missing a common goal and purpose. On top of that, their individual goals were set up in a way that led to conflict. Nikoletta set about working with the team to understand why that was the case and to help them overcome the lack of shared goals with the aim of helping them collaborate better.
In this episode, we refer to the concept of “holding the space” and the “Personal Maps” tool that helped Nikoletta understand better the team members and their motivation.
Nikoletta was recommended Coaching Agile Teams by her mentor, and the book helped her understand the role of the coach and how Scrum Masters must evolve towards a coaching role as they help the teams.
About Nikoletta Tátar
Nikoletta is an Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where teams and individuals have the space to grow, deliver awesome products to customers, and have fun doing so. She is also a Collaboration Superpowers facilitator holding workshops online about remote working and collaboration.
You can link with Nikoletta Tátar on LinkedIn and connect with Nikoletta Tátar on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
An Agile transformation is not an easy goal to achieve. In this episode with Nikoletta, we discuss what are some of the “must-have” conditions for the Agile transformation to have a chance to succeed. We also talk about how Scrum Masters can help organizations find the right reason for change while working with both leadership and the “doers”.
About Nikoletta Tátar
Nikoletta is an Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where teams and individuals have the space to grow, deliver awesome products to customers, and have fun doing so. She is also a Collaboration Superpowers facilitator holding workshops online about remote working and collaboration.
You can link with Nikoletta Tátar on LinkedIn and connect with Nikoletta Tátar on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
About Jeff Campbell and Simone Sciarrati
Simone Sciarrati is an Engineering Team Lead at Meltwater. He has worked with distributed systems from online gaming to data-intensive applications while participating in the many changes happening in our industry. At Meltwater he has been focusing on building a platform to make life easier for the development teams.
You can link with Simone Sciarrati on LinkedIn and connect with Simone Sciarrati on Twitter.
Jeff Campbell is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility.
He is the author of actionable agile tools, which you can get on Amazon and directly from the author at bit.ly/aatbook
As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organizations both small and large.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
You can also learn more about Jeff Campbell’s work at his company’s website.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
In this episode, we talk about the consequences of having overly-detailed Product Owners, and we discuss 4 critical aspects that great Product Owners bring to the team.
A new PO joined the team that Lakshmi was working with, and brought a different perspective. One that helped the team feel their views were listened to and respected. This PO was excellent at four different aspects necessary for the PO role: being a Product Manager, a Project Manager, a Business Analyst, and a leader for the team.
“The Product Owner is the toughest role in the team” Lakshmi starts when introducing this story, in which we explore the anti-pattern of a PO that was super detail-oriented, and prescriptive. The team was feeling demoralized by that attitude, and here is where Lakshmi introduced a different perspective. She introduced the idea of running an experiment on the way the team and PO collaborated. Listen in to learn what that experiment was, and how it can help PO’s learn to trust and listen to the team.
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Lakshmi Ramaseshan
Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.
Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Great Scrum Masters are able to help the teams be self-sufficient, and has Lakshmi puts it: “work themselves out of a job”. We discuss what are the signs that teams are ready to start moving in that direction and become more self-sufficient.
In this segment, we discuss the Circles and Soup Agile retrospective format, a format that helps the teams see what’s in their control, and focus on that instead of all the things that would need changing but are outside their control.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experiences: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Lakshmi Ramaseshan
Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.
Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
In this story, Lakshmi shares the story of an organization that was trying to move from “work as usual” to a more collaborative approach and improve their Agile practice. However, the teams were not clear on what success looked like. We discuss how we can help organizations move from focusing on the day-to-day only to linking everything they do to a higher purpose.
About Lakshmi Ramaseshan
Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.
Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
When Lakshmi started to work with this team, she noticed that the team did not see the value of the Scrum ceremonies, and started to silently sabotage those by being late or not participating actively. As Lakshmi investigated the situation further, she understood that at the root, the team did not see themselves as a team, but rather as individual contributors. In this episode, we discuss how we can help teams get out of the individual contributor mindset and into a team-effort and collaboration mindset.
In Turn The Ship Around! By David Marquet, Lakshmi found a story that shaped her understanding of the Scrum Master role. The book is about how to go beyond building high-performing teams and focus on the organization and how it impacts the teams. We discuss Intent-Based Leadership, which David Marquet introduced when he visited the podcast in a previous episode.
About Lakshmi Ramaseshan
Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.
Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Lakshmi tells us a story that is very unusual. In this story, the team and the client were communicating well, and effectively. They had agreed to change the content of the deliverable through collaboration. However, the leadership of the company where the team worked, was not happy with that. They still had the Waterfall, fixed price / fixed schedule mindset. In this story, Lakshmi shares how important it is to work with all stakeholders, and never ignore the fact that when a contract exists, we must make sure that contract is respected.
About Lakshmi Ramaseshan
Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.
Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
PO’s can be overly prescriptive when they feel unsure about certain aspects of the product. In this episode, we share tips about how to turn those fears into collaboration boosters.
Good PO’s are able to communicate the vision and ideas behind the stories in a way that the teams will even repeat their words when discussing how to implement the stories they work on. But great PO’s are also available to the team then the team needs and is able to say “no, that’s your decision, not mine” to the teams that feel insecure and try to get the PO to make all the decisions, even implementation technical details.
A Product Owner with technical knowledge can be a blessing for a team that requires more support when creating their User Stories, however, that’s not always the case. In this segment, we talk about the Technical PO that could not stop telling the team “how” they should work and develop the solutions the PO had in mind. In this segment, we talk about how we can work with those Technical PO’s and help them turn their fears and anxieties into tools for better collaboration with their teams.
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Daniel Lenhart
Daniel never knew what his dream job would be, but now that he is a Scrum Master, he loves it. I studied Biology in university and switched fields to software development. This really showed me the importance of cross-disciplinary learning and looking into new areas of interest.
You can link with Daniel Lenhart on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lenhart on Twitter.