Chris Stone Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Chris Stone: Helping Scrum Product Owners even when the context is difficult

The personality traits that help PO’s succeed and the need for context in the PO role are the topics of this episode.

The Great Product Owner: Humor and Vision drive motivation in the Scrum team

Chris shares the story of a Product Owner that was a native storyteller. He contrasts that with the anti-pattern he calls “JIRA ticket machine”. This Product Owner was able to bring Vision and humor to the interactions with the team. But most importantly was able to easily and clearly convey the “why” for the work the team was doing.

The Bad Product Owner: Helping PO’s even when the context is difficult

When the Product Owner is absent, we face many problems as a Scrum team. Questions that aren’t answered, details that are missed, but most importantly, we lose the quick feedback cycle that the Product Owner role is supposed to provide. In this segment, we talk about the reasons why some PO’s are absent, and how we – as Scrum Masters – can help the PO’s by understanding their context, and their needs.

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 Stone

Chris is The Virtual Agile coach, a #PeopleFirst champion, and an Agile Evangelist / Agile Transformation Lead / Scrum Master possessing over 8 years of experience within the IT industry.

You can link with Chris Stone on LinkedIn.

Chris Stone: Getting coached as a Scrum Master will change your view of success for that role

When the Scrum Master gets help, the team benefits. Chris shares his story, and how getting a coach for himself helped him improve as a Scrum Master and improve his work with the teams he was serving.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Hero’s Journey Retrospective

This retrospective format needs you to start preparing the scene before the retrospective starts. Chris explains how this format can help you get ready (collect data), and the team motivated at the same time. After all, retrospectives can be fun too!

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 Stone

Chris is The Virtual Agile coach, a #PeopleFirst champion, and an Agile Evangelist / Agile Transformation Lead / Scrum Master possessing over 8 years of experience within the IT industry.

You can link with Chris Stone on LinkedIn.

Chris Stone: Introducing an Agile process the right way, step-by-step instructions

This is the story of a merger between an older, bigger company and a startup. The scene was set for conflict, as these companies had very different cultures and different structures, and that was just the start of the troubles that Chris and the team had to face. The older, more established company, naturally wanted the startup to start following their process, but how they went about it, made things even worse. In this episode, we talk about how we can introduce a process to a new team (or teams) in a way that gains commitment, and engagement.

About Chris Stone

Chris is The Virtual Agile coach, a #PeopleFirst champion, and an Agile Evangelist / Agile Transformation Lead / Scrum Master possessing over 8 years of experience within the IT industry.

You can link with Chris Stone on LinkedIn.

Chris Stone: Pushing an Agile team to a waterfall project, a disaster story

This team was asked to work in an Agile way. So far, so good. However, they then were given “waterfall deadlines” (listen in to learn what those are). The team started to drift. Stopped doing retrospectives, looked at the stand-up as a status reporting meeting, and just plowed through to try and meet those deadlines. What happened next wasn’t pretty. Listen to the story of this team, and learn what Chris would have done differently, had he needed to face that team again.

Featured Book of the Week: Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet

In Turn the Ship around by David Marquet, Chris read about a different leadership model, the “leader-leader” model that David Marquet illustrates with a real-life story of how he turned the Santa Fe submarine, from the last in the ranks of the US Navy to number #1 in 12 months. You can listen to David Marquet describe the book in this episode.

In this segment, we also refer to Drive, by Dan Pink.

About Chris Stone

Chris is The Virtual Agile coach, a #PeopleFirst champion, and an Agile Evangelist / Agile Transformation Lead / Scrum Master possessing over 8 years of experience within the IT industry.

You can link with Chris Stone on LinkedIn.

Chris Stone: Creating a culture of high-performance in Agile organizations

When mistakes happen, the natural tendency in many organizations is to find the ones “to blame”. However, that’s not how you create a high-performing culture. Understanding this, helps us work as Scrum Masters to direct people’s energy and attention to the next step: “how do we make sure similar problems don’t happen, what change do we need?” In this episode, Chris shares one story where an organization was able to go beyond the blame game and create a culture of achievement that helped everyone feel supported and accountable. Listen in to learn what tools helped create that culture.

About Chris Stone

Chris is The Virtual Agile coach, a #PeopleFirst champion, and an Agile Evangelist / Agile Transformation Lead / Scrum Master possessing over 8 years of experience within the IT industry.

You can link with Chris Stone on LinkedIn.