Caterina Reinker Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Caterina Reinker: Lost in the inbox, how Product Owners can lose sight of what matters for the product and the Scrum team!

The Great Product Owner: Thinking BIG, but executing the details together with the team

A great Product Owner is able to change their perspective easily, they are able to talk about “the big vision”, as well as discuss some detailed questions that the team needs to answer when implementing the stories selected for a Sprint. This PO kept a “one pager” with a visual representation of the product roadmap, which helped create a language about the product that helped define direction, and collect feedback from the team, as well as stakeholders.

The Bad Product Owner: Lost in the inbox, how PO’s can lose sight of what matters for the product and the Scrum team!

This PO saw themselves as the project manager. He delegated work to specific team me mbers, and saw his relationship with stakeholders as one of reporting only. This PO ended up acting like a (broken) telephone between stakeholders and the team. The PO was not able to focus on outcomes, instead focusing on detailed requests that arrived constantly by email and other means.

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 Caterina Reinker

Caterina is a social anthropologist and passionate Scrum Master. She regards organizations like villages – or cities – with their own language, institutions, and explicit and many implicit rules. Caterina works and lives in Germany and helps groups of people, big and small, in their agile journey.

You can link with Caterina Reinker on LinkedIn.

Caterina Reinker: Creating transparency towards the Scrum Master role as way to drive continuous improvement

Caterina invites us to evaluate success in the Scrum Master role by defining and making success measurable. She uses a Continuous Improvement roadmap to solicit feedback from her stakeholders and the team. Using transparency towards her work as a way to create the right conversations in the team, as well as with the stakeholders.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 5 Why’s, a facilitation guide to helping the team go beyond symptoms

Caterina’s favorite format for Agile Retrospectives is the 5 Why’s retrospective. In this segment, Caterina shares with us her insights on how to facilitate the conversation with the team, and how to avoid some potential pitfalls of that format.

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About Caterina Reinker

You can link with Caterina Reinker on LinkedIn.

Caterina Reinker: SAFe adoption, a story of involving the business owners long enough for change to happen

When a new organization starts to adopt SAFe, they usually start with a push by management. However, it’s not always easy to keep management’s attention on that change for a long time. In this episode, we hear about a SAFe adoption where Caterina and the team were able to keep management’s attention on the adoption of SAFe enough to help all the teams learn, adopt and adapt to this new framework.

About Caterina Reinker

You can link with Caterina Reinker on LinkedIn.

Caterina Reinker: The technical debt trap, when a Scrum team can no longer talk about value for the customer!

Caterina was working with a team who was really burdened by technical debt. The team talked about technical debt all the time. However, when the Product Owner started to be part of the conversation, the team realized that many of the things they worried about were not really that relevant for the customer. In this episode, we explore how some teams focus on certain aspects so much (like technical debt), that they end up forgetting other, eventually more important, aspects of their work.

Featured Book for the Week: User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton

In this episode, we explore the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, who has been a guest on the podcast. Caterina shares the key lessons from the book, and describes how she uses this book almost every day because of the powerful, yet simple methods that it shares.

In this segment, we also talk about Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu, a book that helped Caterina understand the importance and impact of people’s backgrounds can have on how they relate to each other and communicate.

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 Caterina Reinker

You can link with Caterina Reinker on LinkedIn.

Caterina Reinker: How to ace the Scrum Master role, even if you don’t have any technical knowledge!

Caterina was the Scrum Master for a team whose work she did not understand. This can be a tough spot, especially for new Scrum Masters. In this episode, we hear how Caterina learned to be a Scrum Master for a team, even when she did not understand the technical aspects the team was working on. A must have skill for Scrum Masters!

About Caterina Reinker

You can link with Caterina Reinker on LinkedIn.