Alina Thapliyal Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Alina Thapliyal: Key Traits of an Exceptional Product Owner in Agile Teams

The Great Product Owner: Key Traits of an Exceptional Product Owner in Agile Teams

A great product owner, according to Alina, is someone who is knowledgeable and confident about the product they are overseeing. They build trust within the team by being respectful and involving everyone in decision-making processes. The ability to move the team forward is an important characteristic of a great PO. In order to support a PO, Alina suggests having open communication and avoiding assumptions. A great PO opens the door for discussion and finding ways to help the team succeed.

The Bad Product Owner: Overcoming Challenges with a Bossy Product Owner

In this segment, Alina describes a conversation with a scrum team about their Product Owner. The team agreed that their product owner was very bossy, dictating decisions and pushing the team. This kind of behavior from a product owner can create conflict, as the team is not involved in decision making and the product owner is not considering the needs of the team.

The relationship between the product owner and the team, as well as the relationship between the product owner and the scrum master, is critical to the success of a project. Alina offered tips on how to address this issue, such as talking with the product owner to understand their role and finding ways to support them in finding their potential. She also recommended resources such as the Product Owner Summit and the book “Scrum Product Ownership” by Bob Galen to help better understand the leadership roles of both the product owner and scrum master.

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 Alina Thapliyal

Alina is the Scrum Master for a team within the public sector. Her aspiration is to become an agile coach. She grew up in Romania and has been living in Germany for 13 years. She loves jogging, reading and actively listening to people’s life stories.

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.

Alina Thapliyal: Finding Scrum Master Success in Empowering Teams through Personal Connection

Our personal experiences will shape the approach we take to the role of the Scrum Master. Alina recalls her childhood where she always had the urge to motivate people around her. Later in life she never lost the drive to help people find their potential. As a Scrum Master, she believes that it is important to remember that before being a leader in any capacity, one is a human being and therefore, it’s essential to bring our humanity to work. She suggests starting with small acts of kindness, such as being there for your team when they need you, creating a kudos board to show appreciation, and conducting a discovery type of meeting to focus on personal and team strengths and motivation. The goal is to remind the team of their strengths and overcome the fear of problems.

Featured Retrospectives Format for the Week: Changing up the retrospective, by rotating the facilitator

In this segment, Alina highlights the importance of alternating between different types of retrospectives to keep things fresh and engaging. At times, a prepared template can be helpful, while at other times, an open conversation with very little formality, may be the best option. Alina also suggests that sometimes, it’s better to just give the team time, as there are situations when people need time to understand a problem. When focusing on enabling an open conversation, and deciding on the topic of the retrospective, Alina suggests collecting topics during the sprint and bringing them to the retrospective. To add even more dynamism, and creativity to the retrospective, we can also rotate the facilitator role, as that bring many different perspectives to the conversation.

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Alina Thapliyal

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.

Alina Thapliyal: A new Scrum Master’s journey to agility, a real-life story

In this episode, Alina explains the idea of the “law of attraction” and how aligning yourself with what you want can bring it into your life. Alina shares her personal experience of becoming a Scrum Master and her journey to bring agility to her organization. She initially felt overwhelmed and struggled to understand and apply Agile. However, all that changed after her participation in the Agile Online Summit, she learned to ask questions and see the opportunities. Alina emphasizes the importance of finding peace and enjoying the process of change, rather than feeling overwhelmed.

In this episode, Alina refers to the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

About Alina Thapliyal

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.

Alina Thapliyal: From Frustration to Faster Document Creation, The Journey of a Scrum Master in an Infrastructure Team

Alina was a scrum master for a platform team responsible for building infrastructure. The team faced a challenge when delivering an increment of their product, which happened to be a document. The team struggled with stories that would just take too long to complete, and the associated problems that arose in the PI event and the retrospectives. Alina felt frustrated with the long stories, but eventually found a training that taught the team how to write a concept more efficiently.

By focusing on the success factors from that training, and documenting what helped them write the concept more quickly, the team was able to find a new perspective on the problem they were facing. They applied the “double loop learning” concept by focusing on why a problem exists rather than how to solve it. The team used a quadrant to gain an overview of the concept document, which helped them progress. Alina’s tip is to find a way to get a different perspective on the problem you are facing, which can lead to positive outcomes.

Featured Book of the Week: Make Your Bed, by William McRaven

In Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World by Amiral William McRaven, Alina found a book that reminded her that small habits, small gestures can have a very large impact on ourselves and the people we work with. The book shares 10 things you can do to change the world, or yourself, and helps the reader learn the impact of learning to face our own fears.

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 Alina Thapliyal

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.

Alina Thapliyal: Mastering the Art of Facilitating Daily Meetings, A New Scrum Master’s Journey

Alina was excited about her first assignment as a Scrum Master and had even prepared a training to help the team, who was also new to Agile. However, when the team started having remote calls for the daily, it became a struggle. Although everyone knew WHAT to do, they didn’t know HOW to do it. At first the meetings were quiet, no one knew what to say, but as the team started to learn more about the daily, they wanted to participate so much that the meetings started to be too long, even close to one hour! Alina realized that the team expected her, as the Scrum Master, to do something to facilitate the meeting, but she was hesitant to interrupt, being polite and focused on problem solving as a Scrum Master and part-time developer.

After one of those very long daily meetings, a new colleague commented on the meetings being too long. This helped Alina reflect on the situation and realize she needed to act. In the following retrospective, the team talked about making the daily shorter, and over time, the daily improved. Alina learned that as a Scrum Master, she could let the team go until they realized they needed to act. Even if it took time to get there, the daily meetings became better over time and the improvement was pushed by the team themselves.

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Alina Thapliyal

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.