Daniel Lutz Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Lutz: The Product Owner as a Visionary, and a great team leader

The Great Product Owner: The PO as a Visionary, and a great team leader

When a Product Owner is able to define and communicate a Vision for the product, and the impact it brings to the customer, this is a Visionary Product Owner. Great PO’s look into the future, but are also able to be present with the team and help them solve day-to-day issues. In this story, we also talk about the importance of involving the team in communication with the stakeholders, and helps the team feel as responsible as the PO themselves for the success of the product.

The Bad Product Owner: The dishonest, and absent Product Owner

This particular Product Owner was not honest with the stakeholders. They promised something to the stakeholders, even if that was not what was agreed with the team. They focused on “looking good”, but not spending time with the team. Combined with their day-to-day absence from the team, this created a failure-spiral.

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 Daniel Lutz

Daniel is an organizational agile coach, working full time at a leading European Energy company, scaling agile with around 30 agile teams. After years in Marketing departments, he realized how much more impact he can have as a Scrum Master by empowering people and building cross-functional teams. He also works part-time as a freelance coach and business consultant helping clients on building high performing teams.

You can link with Daniel Lutz on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lutz on Twitter.

Daniel Lutz: Scaling from 4 to 30 Agile teams, a transformation story

When working in an Agile transformation, the organization that Daniel was at tried to scale from 4 pilot teams to 30 agile teams. In this episode, we explore the approaches and steps they took to go from a simple, and contained pilot project, to an organization-wide project. We discuss the difficulties, asd well as the wins during this process.

About Daniel Lutz

You can link with Daniel Lutz on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lutz on Twitter.

Daniel Lutz: Difficult conversations, how to confront a Scrum team that became too passive

This team started on the right foot. Everything seemed to be working. However, a pattern started to develop. The team was becoming quieter and quieter in their Agile Retrospectives as time went by. The body language was passive, and every team member had the camera off as much as they could. You could feel they were distracted, not present during the retrospectives. In this episode, we discuss how to turn around this anti-pattern of passiveness and lack of commitment to agile retrospectives by the team.

In this segment, we also talk about the book Moose heads on the table by Karin Tenelius. Karin Tenelius has been a guest on the podcast to talk about her book.

Featured Book of the Week: The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni

In The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni (a book we’ve mentioned a few times here on the podcast), Daniel found a great guide to the dynamics that can emerge on a team, and helped him understand how to slowly walk up the pyramid of needs for the team. The book also gives us tools and models that are useful to apply when working with teams.

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 Daniel Lutz

You can link with Daniel Lutz on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lutz on Twitter.

Daniel Lutz: How to set up teams for success during an Agile transformation!

Daniel has a background in Marketing, which gave him a keen understanding of how important it is to reach across departmental boundaries, and work in a cross-functional way. Through that experience, he came to be a fan of Scrum, and learned that there’s no better way to do projects.

In his Fail–Monday story, he shares the tale of a company that was adopting Agile, but put together teams with team members that used to be in multiple different departments. It was not a smooth journey. In this episode, we talk about: how important it is to have a Sprint goal, and what it means when teams can’t agree on one; how backlogs can sometimes be more of “todo lists”, which detracts from the value of a cross-functional team; and how sometimes you have to get somebody out of the team for the team to work!

Lots of insights on how to set up teams for success during an Agile transformation!

About Daniel Lutz

You can link with Daniel Lutz on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lutz on Twitter.