anti-patterns Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Harri Tunturivuori: When Suggestions Sound Like Orders, The Cost of Micro-Management in Agile Teams

In this episode, Harri recounts a challenging experience he had while working with a team that had a new manager. The manager was promoted from within the team and was a high-performing team member, but lacked good leadership skills. He couldn’t let go of the technical skills and ended up micro-managing the team.

The manager would step in and give suggestions to the team members, but it came out as an order. He even wrote the solution in the user stories, which resulted in the team disengaging because the manager was bossing them.

Some team members quit their jobs, and others became demotivated. Harri felt helpless in the situation and eventually came up with tips to deal with it, including having a conversation with the manager, preparing for the conversation, and being understanding. The team’s feedback was collected, and facts were presented to the manager on how this behavior was affecting the team.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone dealing with anti-patterns in their team dynamics.

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts

Harri’s most influential book is Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts, who has been a past guest on the podcast. The book offers many practical tips and advice for Scrum Masters, emphasizing the importance of being a servant leader. Harri found the book funny, which made it a pleasant read. He appreciated the tips provided in the book, which can help Scrum Masters go from being good to great. Geoff Watts is a well-known author in the field of Scrum and agile software development, and his book has been highly recommended by professionals in the industry. If you are a Scrum Master looking for practical advice to improve your leadership skills, Scrum Mastery is definitely worth checking out.

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About Harri Tunturivuori

Harri is an experienced leader, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach who was introduced to the world of agile software development in 2010. Since then, Harri has had the pleasure of leading great agile teams in various forms.

Harri enjoys working in a fun environment where there is room for innovation, and Harri is driven by the challenge of growing a group of good people into a great team.

You can link with Harri Tunturivuori on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: The Group Mentality vs. Creating Real Agile Product Teams

In this episode, Daniel discusses the overuse of the word “team” and the importance of true teams in product development. He highlights the need for preconditions for a team, and notes that sometimes teams don’t even have a shared goal. Daniel also warns against the “it’s done, just needs to be tested” anti-pattern and explains how it can lead to problems with team collaboration. We discuss the use of Causal Loop Diagram to find hypotheses, and mention a talk by Jeff Patton on the client-vendor anti-pattern. Finally, Daniel emphasizes the need to remove the notion that one party needs to own the game in the client-vendor relationship.

Featured Book of the Week: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In this segment, Daniel Westermayr discusses the importance of data-driven decision making in product development. He references the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which highlights the biases and faulty intuitions that can arise in decision making. Daniel emphasizes the need to use data to inform decisions and cites the book “Out of the Crisis” by W. Edwards Deming as an important resource. He also provides a link to a talk by Russell Ackoff about Deming’s approach.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Mike Salogub: The ex-developer skills that help Product Owners excel at Agile software development

The Great Product Owner: The ex-developer skills that help PO’s excel with Agile software development

This segment describes an example of a great Product Owner who was also a developer before (like the anti-pattern example). However, this PO had a deep understanding of the product and the business, thought ahead and talked about opportunities with stakeholders. She made tradeoff decisions using her experience, talked to the team on their terms, and went to bat for the team. There was a great chemistry between the Scrum Master and the PO.

The Bad Product Owner: The ex-developer skills that destroy the PO’s performance

In this segment, Mike discusses Product Owner anti-patterns, including POs who think they are the boss, those who are clueless, and those with a development background who second-guess the team. The segment advises that POs should focus on overall aspects such as working with stakeholders, and recommends setting expectations on the role with each PO. The segment also emphasizes the importance of being deliberate about how we integrate our background in our future positions.

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 Mike Salogub

Mike’s an accomplished, committed and creative Scrum Master with over 10+ years of expanding horizons in the healthcare technology industry. Focused on continuous improvement using data to inform business decisions, and driving innovation to meet the needs of patients.

You can link with Mike Salogub on LinkedIn and connect with Mike Salogub on Twitter.

Kirill Golubev: The Challenges with Scaling and Product Ownership for a Growing Scrum Team

In the podcast episode, Kirill Golubev shares a story of a team he was working with, which had grown larger. As they grew larger, they added a second and a third product manager. However, this led to constant fighting for priorities among the product managers. What was worse, the product managers were organized around components, rather than features, which caused even more conflicts, and delays in delivery for the team.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of having only one Product Owner working on the backlog. In that situation, the team adopted the Nexus framework to scale their approach to Scrum and created three different teams for the three different components. This was not optimal, but helped to avoid the biggest PO anti-patterns.

Finally, Kirill emphasizes the importance of building agreements between teams and Product Owners to ensure a successful outcome. Overall, Kirill’s story highlights the challenges that can arise when a team grows too large and the importance of effective communication and collaboration between Product Owners, Scrum Master, and teams.

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About Kirill Golubev

Kirill considers himself an Agile and common-sense apologist. He wants to see simple processes in place, when people self-organize and manage themselves without constant push from management.

You can link with Kirill Golubev on LinkedIn.

Pino Decandia: How company policies can destroy collaboration in Agile teams

This segment starts with a statement that we should understand and interiorize in our role as Scrum Masters, and continuous improvement experts: “Organization structures and policies are the cage we must free ourselves from in the day to day collaboration in the team.”

In this context, we discuss how the “it’s not my job” anti-pattern can cause intense conflict in a team, and how Scrum Masters can reach out to management and HR to help change this anti-pattern.

Featured Book of the Week: Nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg

In Nonviolent Communication by Rosenberg, Pino found important lessons that helped him learn how to listen and think about what “they” say when talking about the problems they see and face.

In this segment, we also talk about Clean Language, a dialogue model that aims to help clients access their own inner wisdom and resources to achieve their goals.

About Pino Decandia

Pino started in software development but realized he was more interested in people than code. With experience, Pino came to believe that people can change; they don’t resist change but offer their own vision, which needs to be met.

Secondly, needs drive behaviors. To provide help, we must allow them to be clearly expressed. To set the example, we need to be ready to be the first to state our needs.

And thirdly, that ideological battles are meaningless.

You can link with Pino Decandia on LinkedIn.