Alex Gbaguidi Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Alex Gbaguidi: The Bossy and Absent Product Owner, the perfect storm for the Scrum team

The Great Product Owner: The Visionary PO that involved the users

This Product Owner was new to the job, and just fresh out of University. However, the skills she displayed made her a great Product Owner. She was able to listen and understand what was going on, share the Vision and do so through great storytelling. She also helped the team to learn from the users.

The Bad Product Owner: The Bossy and Absent PO, the perfect storm for the team

When the Product Owner thinks they are “the boss” things can go terribly wrong, and this was the case in a PO that just wanted the teams to “deliver this feature”. On top of that, the PO was too busy to answer questions by the team, making it even harder for the team to deliver. Finally, we talk about the consequences for the team of such a PO.

Are you having trouble helping the teamwork 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 Alex Gbaguidi

Alex is an experienced agile practitioner, coach and trainer with twenty years of experience in IT consulting. He is passionate about helping teams discover the best ways of working adapted to their context. He’s worked in many different types of industries (Telecoms, Energy, Finance or Aeronautics) and provides training on many agile frameworks and practices all around the world in French & English.

You can link with Alex Gbaguidi on LinkedIn and connect with Alex Gbaguidi on Twitter.

You can join Alex Gbaguidi’s Agile Africa community.

Alex Gbaguidi: Crafting purpose to reach success as an Agile Coach or Scrum Master

Are your teams smiling? That’s one of the questions Alex suggests we ask ourselves. Alex shares some more questions we should go through when evaluating our success as Scrum Masters. However, those tools only help you assess if you need to go back to a core aspect of Scrum and Agile: discussing the purpose of our work.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Lean Coffee, the conversation facilitator

There are many formats we can use with the teams we help. Each team, and each situation may need a different format. However, Alex suggests that there’s a good format to get started with a new team: Lean Coffee.

In this segment, we also refer to the Retrospective Poker Cards, that can help you be inspired to choose your next retrospective format.

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 Alex Gbaguidi

You can link with Alex Gbaguidi on LinkedIn and connect with Alex Gbaguidi on Twitter.

You can join Alex Gbaguidi’s Agile Africa community.

Alex Gbaguidi: Changing an old-school PMO into Agile (with a surprising twist)

Alex joined a company that was build plane engines. This was not a pure software company, even if they had a lot of software engineers, and produced a lot of software. Alex brought in a different culture as an Agile member of the company’s PMO (Project Management Office). He shares the tools, and techniques he used to change the culture of the software teams in the organization.

In this episode we refer to a shared online quiz tool called Kahoot.

About Alex Gbaguidi

You can link with Alex Gbaguidi on LinkedIn and connect with Alex Gbaguidi on Twitter.

You can join Alex Gbaguidi’s Agile Africa community.

Alex Gbaguidi: Overcoming the skill silos in backend Scrum teams

When you are the Scrum Master in the backend team, and you understand that your team cannot deliver anything without other teams, what do you do? In this episode, we explore Alex’s story, and learn what he applied to align different teams that were organized around skill silos.

Featured Book of the Week: The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni

Alex shares with us a new edition of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, this is the Manga version of the book. As Alex puts it: the perfect edition for the visual learners among us.

In this segment, we also refer to the Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley et al.

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 Alex Gbaguidi

You can link with Alex Gbaguidi on LinkedIn and connect with Alex Gbaguidi on Twitter.

You can join Alex Gbaguidi’s Agile Africa community.

Alex Gbaguidi: When preparing for the Scrum daily goes overboard

Getting a good, collaborative conversation in the daily standup is key to help teams deliver. However, when we put too much emphasis on preparing for the daily standup we may be creating more problems for the team. In this episode, we hear the story of a super well prepared daily standup that was actually worse for the team.

About Alex Gbaguidi

You can link with Alex Gbaguidi on LinkedIn and connect with Alex Gbaguidi on Twitter.

You can join Alex Gbaguidi’s Agile Africa community.