Chris Foley Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Chris Foley: Growing the Product Development community as a Scrum Product Owner

The relationship between PO, team and stakeholders is critical. We talk about some of the anti-patterns, as well as what would a great community-building PO look like.

The Great Product Owner: Growing the Product Development community as a PO

Product Owners that can take advantage of the team’s ingenuity and creativity are more likely to succeed in their role! This PO would listen to the team’s ideas on what to demo, and act as the bridge between the team and the business stakeholders, effectively creating a “wider” product development team that included not only the team, but the PO and the stakeholders as well!

The Bad Product Owner: The “over-engineer all the things” PO

When Product Owners try to “control” the team by dictating how they should be working on the stories, and ignoring their ideas they prevent the team from bringing in their creative input and augmenting the PO’s ideas. In this segment, we also talk about the “not enough detail” and the “over-engineer all the things” PO, who does not understand the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mindset.

Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Chris Foley

Chris is a Principal Systems Design Engineer at Red Hat working in the area of Engineering Improvement. He has over 20 years of experience in software and has filled PO and ScrumMaster roles. The team, to Chris, is the essence of the whole process and the Scrum Masters role is to help optimize that. He uses his experience from the sporting world to draw parallels around how successful teams function.

You can link with Chris Foley on LinkedIn and connect with Chris Foley on Twitter.

Chris Foley: How can we develop a really good, functioning Scrum team?

We start by assessing that “a really good, functioning team” is what success looks like for a Scrum Master. But we continue by developing that idea, and discussing some of the characteristics of great teams. In this segment, we also address the critical subject of “language” in teams, and how the lack of that common language can negatively impact a team.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Future-spective, traveling to the future

In this segment, we talk about the forward-looking retrospective (the future-spective), which allows the team to imagine, and define what success would look like, including the behaviors and the conditions need to setup “now” to be successful in the future.

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 experiences: 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 Chris Foley

You can link with Chris Foley on LinkedIn and connect with Chris Foley on Twitter.

Chris Foley: Scaling Agile, from one-team planning to multi-team planning in a Scrum organization

This organization’s planning process was about commitments, not shared understanding. This led to teams planning their work, and invariably coming to the conclusion that they could not deliver “because others…”. The organization would then spend time reassessing the output of the planning process, but never addressing the root cause of the problem. In this episode, we learn about how Chris and others in that organization started to develop a completely different approach: Continuous Planning for a multi-team organization.

About Chris Foley

You can link with Chris Foley on LinkedIn and connect with Chris Foley on Twitter.

Chris Foley: Defeating the “Hero” anti-pattern in Scrum teams

In this episode, we talk about the “heroes” anti-pattern, which describes the case of a team that is focused on the performance of its members, rather than the whole team. It starts with the siloed knowledge and skills, which cases over-dependence on a single team member for certain work, and hampers the team when that specific team member is out. Liste in to learn how to help your team get out of that self-defeating pattern.

Featured Book of the Week: Mindset, The New Psychology Of Success by Carol S. Dweck

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, Chris found the concept of the “Growth Mindset” a model that helped him work with teams to develop their ways of working. And he also found that model useful in his study for coaching accreditation.

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 Chris Foley

You can link with Chris Foley on LinkedIn and connect with Chris Foley on Twitter.

Chris Foley: Starting the Agile adoption journey on the right foot

When organizations start their journey towards agility, it is normal, and predictable that not all participants in the journey will have the same level of understanding. In this story, Chris shares the common misunderstanding around the estimation conversation, and how it may generate conflict between teams and stakeholders. What’s a Scrum Master to do in those situations? First, we need to start by recognizing what step of the journey we are in, and what is still ahead of us! But there’s a lot more that Chris shares about the start of the Agile adoption journey.

About Chris Foley

You can link with Chris Foley on LinkedIn and connect with Chris Foley on Twitter.