customer involvement Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Ruta Hardikar: The Product Owner that skipped the Sprint Reviews, and what that caused for the Scrum team

The Great Product Owner: The Customer advocate Product Owner

This Product Owner was very close to the customer, and listened to their needs as well as the struggles they had with the product. Through their work, the PO tried to focus on adding to the backlog stories that would help the customer directly, and would often act as the customer when talking to the team. They were able to focus on prioritization, and prioritized the work for the team. The PO was also able to create clear priorities and have conversations with the team about the 3 V’s: Vision, Value, and Validation.

The Bad Product Owner: The Product Owner that skipped the Sprint Reviews, and what that caused for the Scrum team

The processes we have in place influence the choices, and the focus of the Product Owners. In this segment, we talk about a team and their Product Owner that did not host a Sprint Review. Instead, the PO would focus on reviews with individuals, separate discussion with single stakeholders. However, that meant that other stakeholders would not know what the team had worked on during the Sprint. Furthermore, the team was not involved, and did not have the chance to show, and be proud of what they had accomplished during the Sprint. This was an anti-pattern that Ruta tried to overcome. Listen in to learn how Ruta tackled this anti-pattern.

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 Ruta Hardikar

Ruta has over 8 years experience with Agile, and has taken the roles of Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer (RTE in SAFe), working with GM Financial.

You can link with Ruta Hardikar on LinkedIn.

Catherine Kraus: Helping the Product Owner understand why interruptions are disruptive for the team

The Great Product Owner: The PO as a key role in customer involvement, and understanding

A good PO has a good understanding of the product, and is also able to communicate the Vision they have for the product. This particular PO was also able to delegate to the team many of the decisions that were needed, and invested their time into building and maintaining relationships with the customers of that product. Because of that, he was able to set up user testing sessions, where the team was invited, to collect direct feedback and help the team understand the product, and the customer better!

The Bad Product Owner: Helping the PO understand why interruptions are disruptive for the team

This PO was amazingly organized, and great at following up with the team. This was the PO’s superpower. However, in some cases, this superpower also had a negative effect. This team, which was working remotely, was being constantly interrupted by the PO, in their attempt to follow-up on the progress by the team. The team went to Catherine, and shared what was going on. This started a process of changing how the PO worked, so that the team could be given the time and focus to finish their work.

In this segment, we talk about the concept of “maker time”, popularized in this article by Paul Graham.

About Catherine Kraus

As a Scrum Master & Team Coach, Catherine Kraus inspires and galvanizes others into action with her playful and pragmatic approach. She works with organizations to build happier, healthier teams with purpose. She has over 15 years experience leading various transformation and change management projects in IT, Finance, HR & Marketing.

You can link with Catherine Kraus on LinkedIn.

Marc Löffler: A happy customer is the ultimate success metric for Scrum Masters

Involving the customer is one of the key aspects of building the path towards an agile product development environment. There are many types of customers, and we discuss how to involve some of the most common types of customers. Marc also suggests some tools, like Story Mapping, that you can use to work directly with customers and create a shared understanding of the ultimate goal.

About Marc Löffler

Marc’s passion is to help teams implementing agile frameworks like Scrum and XP and to transform our world of work. Marc loves to help teams, that are struggling with agile transitions, to overcome dysfunctional behaviour. He loves to generate new insights by approaching common problems from the other side and trying to deliberately make havoc of the process.
You can connect with Marc Löffler on Twitter, and link with Marc Löffler on LinkedIn.
He hosts a Blog in English and another blog in German.

Daniel Nielsen explains what is the fundamental ingredient for any team to avoid self-destruction

There are many reasons for teams to disintegrate, but there is one ingredient that, when missing can cause that process to start much faster. In this episode Daniel explains the setting, the context, and the project that led his team to disintegrate due to the lack of that fundamental ingredient for any team.

Special call to all Dubai agilists: Daniel is relocating to Dubai and is looking to connect to local agilists. If you fit the bill, then reach out to him on twitter: Daniel Nielsen on Twitter.

About Daniel Nielsen

Daniel is a developer turned Scrum Master turned Agile Coach, with an increasing focus on the coach part. Over the last 10+ years, his interest in how teams work and how we interact as individuals has only grown. He has worked in both small and large companies and tried to cope with the complexities in both worlds.
You can reach out to Daniel Nielsen on Twitter, and link with Daniel Nielsen on LinkedIn.
You can also read his blog in Danish at QED.dk