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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Every week day, Certified Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Business Consultant Vasco Duarte interviews Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches from all over the world to get you actionable advice, new tips and tricks, improve your craft as a Scrum Master with daily doses of inspiring conversations with Scrum Masters from the all over the world. Stay tuned for BONUS episodes when we interview Agile gurus and other thought leaders in the business space to bring you the Agile Business perspective you need to succeed as a Scrum Master. Some of the topics we discuss include: Agile Business, Agile Strategy, Retrospectives, Team motivation, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement, Scaling Scrum, Lean Startup, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Paper Prototyping, QA in Scrum, the role of agile managers, servant leadership, agile coaching, and more!
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Now displaying: February, 2022
Feb 28, 2022

We explore 2 stories that have a key similarity: the Scrum Master directing the team. In one story we learn about how the team was able to step up and own the process, while the other story had a different ending. But both stories are about our stance as a Scrum Master when working with a new team. Listen in to learn about the tips Jon and Lorna have for Scrum Masters starting with a new team.

About Lorna Mason & Jon Lawrence

Lorna Mason and Jon Lawrence are both agilists working in an insurance scale-up based in Brighton. Their journey to agile has walked a less 'traditional' path of Change Management and Continuous Improvement, to Scrum Master, Delivery Manager and Agile Coach; (proving not EVERY Scrum Master needs to code!). They hold the firm belief that you can be a successful Scrum Master as long as you genuinely care about people and value first; and hold a profound desire to always make things better!

You can link with Lorna Mason on LinkedIn

You can link with Jon Lawrence on LinkedIn.

Feb 26, 2022

The Scrum Master Journey (SMJ) is a program designed to help you succeed as Scrum Master. Marc joins us to explain what that SMJ program includes, and share some first-hand stories of how this program has already helped many Scrum Masters in practice. 

If you want to know more, you can visit the Scrum Master Journey at https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/SMJ

For the full show notes on this episode, please visit the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

About Marc Löffler

Marc’s a super active member of the Agile community. In his spare time from consulting, speaking and training he’s found the time to start a blog, a podcast and write two books! 

Marc is also the host of the Scrum Master journey

You can link with Marc Löffler on LinkedIn and connect with Marc Löffler on Twitter.

Feb 25, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

The Great Product Owner: The empowering Product Owner

This PO was in her first job as a Product Owner. Still, she had a natural sense for how to work with the team. Using both of her technical and business experience, she brought a mix of skills and a curious mentality that sparked great collaboration with the team. 

Another great sign, was when she asked Usman to be the Scrum Master for that team (which was missing one), and worked with him to help the team. To start with, she recognized her presence was important, and when she realized she had too much on her plate, she actively started sharing work with Usman, the Scrum Master.

Through her work and attitude, she was able to make the team feel both responsible and empowered!

The Bad Product Owner: How to help a “hands-off” PO to engage more with the Scrum team

This Product Owner was very hands-off. The PO was working with a team from a consultancy, which had their own “shadow PO”. This only made the situation worse, as the Product Owner did not feel responsible for the success of the team (as the team was “external”), and wanted the “shadow PO” to solve all the problems, with very little information or interaction. 

In this segment, we also discuss what Scrum Masters can do to help “hands-off” PO’s to feel more responsible and engage more with the teams.

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.

Feb 24, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

When we start working with a team, we need to understand what is their situation, so that we can decide what to start with. As we start to understand the team’s situation, we might need to focus on the organizational impediments to help the team progress. Some useful questions to ask are: is the team engaging with the stakeholders? Are they able to interact with customers/users? Do they have clear impact metrics for their product? What is the level of engagement in the team? 

All of these questions help us, Scrum Masters, understand if the team is ready to focus on, and work on outcomes. 

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Retrospectives for Scrum Masters starting with a new team

The Team Health Check is one of the formats we talk about as a possible “getting started with a new team” format. Usman also recommends the Sailboat Retrospective for Scrum Masters getting started with new teams. 

Once we are “in the rhythm” with a team, Usman recommends some more “free” formats like 1-2-4-all or something from Liberating Structures. Finally, his recommendations is: “help teams make their own choices, as they are much more committed to those”

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 experience: 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 Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.

Feb 23, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

In an organization that was going through a “agile at scale” transformation, Usman noticed that the teams felt overwhelmed. Usman and his colleagues understood that they had to change the approach to help the teams benefit from the scaling tools they were being trained on. They had to actively counter the idea of “big scaling”, since this was a group of only 10 teams, where some “large scale” approaches would only cause chaos and mis-understandings. Listen in to learn how Usman and his colleagues were able to “scale down” the “scaling agile” project in a way that made sense to the teams, and helped them achieve their goals. 

About Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.

Feb 22, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

In this project, some new Product Owners were appointed. However, the PO’s wanted to have their own teams. Working with a consulting company, they set the new teams up for the project, however, and based on experience, the consulting company organized for each team to have a “shadow PO”. Over time, it became clear that the buyer-side Product Owners were very much “hands-off”, and the teams were discouraged from talking directly to the stakeholders, which led to trouble because they started missing information they could not get any other way. 

In this episode, we explore this anti-pattern in a team, and what we can do - as Scrum Masters - to combat the potential consequences.

Featured Book of the Week: Empowered by Marty Cagan et al.

In Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan et al, Usman learned about how to help teams move towards the focus on outcomes, and own the decision making in the product development process. The book shares tips on how to help product teams, also from the perspective of a manager or Scrum Master.

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.

Feb 21, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Usman was “mesmerized” by Agile. The idea of inspecting and adapting was for him like a scientific approach to work. When he started to work with this one team, he observed that most of the team was collaborative, but there was one senior developer that did not share the same approach. The team felt the same, but they did not want that team member to leave, as they felt he contributed to the team despite the lack of collaboration. However, the situation was about to turn for the worse… Listen in to learn what Usman learned, and eventually did to help this team.

About Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.

Feb 19, 2022

The Scrum Master Journey (SMJ) is a program designed to help you succeed as Scrum Master. Marc joins us to explain what that SMJ program includes, and share some first-hand stories of how this program has already helped many Scrum Masters in practice. 

If you want to know more, you can visit the Scrum Master Journey at https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/SMJ

For the full show notes on this episode, please visit the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

About Marc Löffler

Marc’s a super active member of the Agile community. In his spare time from consulting, speaking and training he’s found the time to start a blog, a podcast and write two books! 

Marc is also the host of the Scrum Master journey

You can link with Marc Löffler on LinkedIn and connect with Marc Löffler on Twitter.

Feb 18, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

The Great Product Owner: The decision maker that saw themselves as an ally to the team

Great product owners don’t necessarily start with a long experience in the PO role. The example Jan shares with us is a person that had a senior position in the company, but did not have experience as a Product Owner. Yet, this PO had a sense for the team’s space and allowed the team to make decisions on their own. When his decision was necessary, he was ready to make that decision “on the spot”, to help the team move forward, and he never blamed the team for something he would have decided. This PO was a real ally to the team. 

The Bad Product Owner: The anti-collaborator PO

When PO’s don’t collaborate, or don’t want to collaborate with the team, and see themselves as an outside entity, they end up destroying the team’s ability to perform. In this segment, we also discuss how the communication style of this PO led the team to feel powerless, leading to a worse product in the end. 

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Jan Neudecker

Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.

You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog

Jan also organizes a Scrum User Group in Germany.

Feb 17, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Jan shares with us two dimensions of the Scrum Master work that define success for him: the business perspective, and the team members perspective. We discuss some of the questions that Scrum Masters can ask themselves in order to help them assess their work thus far, as well as define possible areas for improvement to focus on. 

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Movie Critic Format

The Movie Critic Agile Retrospective format is the one that Jan shares with us. He focuses on how this format lightens the mood and helps the team share their thoughts without the burden of “being serious”. Jan describes this format as one of several “fun methods” that can help understand how everyone perceived, and experienced the previous iteration. 

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 experience: 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 Jan Neudecker

Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.

You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog

Jan also organizes a Scrum User Group in Germany.

Feb 16, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Jan started working with a new team. He noticed there were a lot of escalations and conflict on that team. 

On the surface everything seemed well enough, but as he started to investigate, he noticed a lot of conflict. While talking to the managers of the people involved, he noticed there was no clear purpose/direction set for that team. As he reflected on the situation, he noticed that a lot of the escalations came from that lack of alignment/purpose. Listen in to learn about how Jan went about trying to solve the conflicts as well as the lack of alignment between team members. 

In this segment, we talk about the book Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Team by Larsen and Nies, and how Team Agreements can help teams align on purpose

 

About Jan Neudecker

Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.

You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog

Jan also organizes a Scrum User Group in Germany.

Feb 15, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Does your team have a sustainable pace? Sometimes teams let quality slip and suffer from that, but some other times, missing a sustainable pace can lead to much more serious consequences. Jan shares his own story, of how not focusing on what he needed to keep a sustainable pace, almost led to missing a critical health diagnosis that thankfully saved his life. In this segment, we talk about both the individual sustainable pace, as well as the team’s sustainable pace. 

Featured Book of the Week: The People’s Scrum by Tobias Meyer

In The People's Scrum: Agile Ideas for Revolutionary Transformation by Tobias Meyer, Jan found a book that had different views on what Scrum is about. He recommends this book as a great and inspiring text for experienced Scrum Masters.  

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Jan Neudecker

Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.

You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog

Jan also organizes a Scrum User Group in Germany.

Feb 14, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Jan was hired as a Scrum Master to a new organization. He realized later that as he joined, his emphasis on process, and following the process was actually hindering his work as a Scrum Master. How much pressure should we put on the team to follow the process? What is the right level of listening vs. advising or teaching? We discuss these ideas with Jan to find the right level of pushing, and stepping back for Scrum Masters.

 

About Jan Neudecker

Jan is an Agile Coach and Trainer. His vision is to make workplaces more humane, enjoyable and purposeful. An unpleasant diagnosis three years ago had a big impact on how he looks at these topics today. It became his mission to get these topics more into the spotlight of teams and organizations so they are less of a taboo subject in future.

You can link with Jan Neudecker on LinkedIn and connect with Jan Neudecker on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Jan’s fight with cancer, you can follow his blog

Jan also organizes a Scrum User Group in Germany.

Feb 11, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

The Great Product Owner: Negotiating priorities and knowing when to say “no” 

Great Product Owners are in tune with the team, and their ability to deliver. They help the team by saying “no” to pieces of work that they believe the team is not able to work on at the moment. Another aspect that is critical for PO’s is the ability to negotiate with stakeholders and get to an agreement on priorities and scope. Great PO’s use their people skills to help manage those negotiations and get multiple stakeholders to agree on the right priorities. 

The Bad Product Owner: The PO anti-pattern that leads to a breakdown in collaboration

This PO was a micromanager, wanted to be involved in everything and treated the team as “puppets”. When you add to that the lack of ability to prioritize, then the pressure on the team (and the PO) is so large that the PO is never able to step back to let the team take ownership of the work. Look out for these PO anti-patterns, as they usually come with a panicky sense and ultimately a loss of control, and break down in collaboration. 

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Feb 10, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Sadia shares some of the questions that she asks herself to assess her work as a Scrum Master. In that discussion we talk about the focus on delivering running software, as well as the focus on self-organization. Both of these focus areas define the work of the Scrum Master. 

Featured Retrospective for the Week: The Elephant In The Room

Sadia chooses to highlight what might be, for some of us, a difficult kind of retrospective: to bring up the elephant in the room. We discuss why that is important and share some formats that we can use to help the team discuss the hard topics. In this segment, we talk about the Lego retrospective, as well as the Movie retrospective

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 experience: 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 Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Feb 9, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Sadia joined this company at the start of their journey towards agility. As she started to understand how the team was organized, she noticed that there were several backlogs that the team needed to pull from. She started working with the stakeholders to establish a single backlog that would act as the “source of truth for the team”. But for that to happen, she needed to learn who the right stakeholders were, and prepare the conversations with those stakeholders. In this episode, we discuss how to map, involve and motivate stakeholders to support the change that the team needs. 

About Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Feb 8, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

When Sadia started working this this team, all looked great. Everybody was doing what they were supposed to. However, nothing was happening. There was no energy in that team, there was no conflict. As Sadia then learned, when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Listen in to learn about the anti-patterns that were silently destroying this team. 

Featured Book of the Week: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

In Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson, Sadia found some critical lessons about how to communicate with certain types of people at work and in life in general. This book introduces the DISC model (assigning colors to certain personalities), and helps us understand how different people think differently. And understanding these differences is critical for our job as Scrum Masters. 

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Feb 7, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Sadia joined a new team. It all started off well enough. She focused on observing first, learning what already worked well in the team. She quickly found that some of the ceremonies were not going so well. As she started working on the daily standup practices, she quickly realized that the team was very unhappy with her suggestions. It was then that Sadia recognized her failure (First Attempt In Learning, as she puts it): it is as important to help the team learn how to get there, as it is to do things right. 

About Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Feb 5, 2022

In this episode, we explore the use of NoEstimates approaches in a regulated and governmental environment. 

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

About Craeg Strong

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a woman-owned IT consulting company based in Times Square.  He is currently teaching classes in Kanban, Test Automation, and Human Centered Design, helping organizations transform themselves by connecting strategy with execution, handling dependencies, and improving quality.  He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Craeg recently helped teach 1200 Air Force personnel Jira and Agile.

You can link with Craeg Strong on LinkedIn and connect with Craeg Strong on Twitter.

Feb 4, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

The Great Product Owner: The PO as a leader

A great PO is also a great leader. As Nilesh puts it, it’s not possible to disconnect leadership from the role of the PO, because that role is all about creating alignment, and autonomy in the team. 

In this segment, we refer to the book: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Bad Product Owner: The PO that had multiple responsibilities

In this segment, we talk about a Product Owner that was not able to shield the team from the interference by external stakeholders, and what are the consequences we can expect from that anti-pattern. We also talk about how, sharing the PO role with other responsibilities can create other anti-patterns. 

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Nilesh Makan

Nilesh is the founding Director at Padawan Consulting, where the vision is to build transformed businesses through transformed people. He works with companies in the arena of Digital Transformation, considering how to leverage people, process and technology to design and build innovative solutions.

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Feb 3, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

What is the team happiness in your team? Nilesh suggests that, even if we tend to ignore that, it is a critical aspect of creating a well functioning and productive team. He suggests that we start by understanding where the team members are regarding different aspects, even if we need to talk about emotions. Nilesh shares a great tip on how to tackle emotions productively in your team. 

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start with the Why/Intent for the retrospective!

When preparing a retrospective, we are reminded by Nilesh that we should focus on the “intent” of the retro. What are we trying to achieve with that ceremony, in “this” sprint? Nilesh also prefers formats that are designed to focus on enabling conversations and dialogue between team members. 

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 experience: 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 Nilesh Makan

Nilesh is the founding Director at Padawan Consulting, where the vision is to build transformed businesses through transformed people. He works with companies in the arena of Digital Transformation, considering how to leverage people, process and technology to design and build innovative solutions.

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Feb 2, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Often we refer to Change “management”, however, managing change in practice is very difficult. When we think of “change” as a normal path of evolution, however, things change. The metaphor helps us discover new approaches and possibilities. In this episode, we explore how thinking about change as an evolution changes the work we do as Scrum Masters and change agents. 

In this segment we talk about the books Theory U by C. Otto Scharmer, Knowledge for Action by Argyris; and we refer to Systems Thinking and some of the thinkers that influenced the Agile movement: Ari-Pekka Skarp, Esko Kilpi, Ralph Stacey.

About Nilesh Makan

Nilesh is the founding Director at Padawan Consulting, where the vision is to build transformed businesses through transformed people. He works with companies in the arena of Digital Transformation, considering how to leverage people, process and technology to design and build innovative solutions.

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Feb 1, 2022

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Nilesh was working with a recently formed “centre of excellence” team. Their goal was to drive agility across the organization. However, the team lead fell ill, and the team found itself without anyone else to report up to, with no clear leadership and inevitably a new leader was assigned to that team. That new leaders, however, changed the Vision of the team. The new Vision was dictated to the team, and the team members didn’t feel anymore that the Vision reflected why they had signed up to the team. This taught Nilesh a very important lesson that we explore with the example of Elon Musk’s SpaceX

In this segment, we discuss the role of shared Vision in a team, and why that matters

Featured Book of the Week: Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella

In Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Nilesh found a good example of what it is to imagine a change from a monolithic company to an agile, transformed company. He also discovered a different type of leadership that resonated: empathetic leadership. Finally he got a reminder of how important it is to find meaning in the work we do. 

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Nilesh Makan

Nilesh is the founding Director at Padawan Consulting, where the vision is to build transformed businesses through transformed people. He works with companies in the arena of Digital Transformation, considering how to leverage people, process and technology to design and build innovative solutions.

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

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