Daniel Westermayr Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Westermayr: Trusting Your Agile Team, The Foundation of Great Product Ownership

The Great Product Owner: Trusting Your Team, The Foundation of Great Product Ownership

In this segment, Daniel discusses the importance of the “leap of faith” that great POs take by letting go of control and trusting their team to deliver. By believing in their team, great POs are able to motivate and focus their team’s efforts. Daniel also mentions the NoEstimates movement and the idea that a forecast is a range rather than a single number. Great POs do not second guess their team or the data, and are willing to accept the team’s delivery even if they don’t fully understand it.

The Bad Product Owner: How to Help Your Product Owner Succeed by Saying “No” When Necessary

In this segment, Daniel discusses the tendency Product Owners have to say “yes” to everything in order to appease or please others, even if it means not properly prioritizing tasks. Daniel emphasizes the importance of understanding the PO’s perspective and using forecasting to help the PO say “no” when necessary. He also highlights the crucial role of Scrum Masters in helping the PO prioritize and say “no.” The ability for organizations to hear and accept “no” is also a key factor in mitigating this anti-pattern. Daniel encourages POs to say “no” when necessary and reassures them that it is possible to change their mind later.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master

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 Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: Connecting data with emotions, the key to triggering change

In this episode, Daniel emphasizes the importance of understanding the success of a system and how it is constrained by the way it has been set up. He explains that the ultimate goal of Scrum is the success of the product or organization, and that the key to successful Scrum is to look at the success of the system. We also discuss how the process and system of software development, broadly, has not yet been fully understood by the very software industry and community.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Connecting data with emotions, the key to triggering change

In this segment, Daniel focuses on the importance of connecting data with emotions in retrospectives. Daniel shares his preference for retrospectives that collect data with the emotions of people. He emphasizes that not everyone sees the same thing in the same data or events and that different perspectives can help understand positive things. Emotions are a driving force for change among the people we work with, and understanding them can help drive change management efforts. Daniel mentions the Timeline retrospective and the importance of using emotional intelligence to improve teamwork and product development.

How can I, as a Scrum Masters, supercharge my facilitation?

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: Moving Beyond Roadmaps, and Using Data to Drive Decision Making for Agile Product Development

In this episode, Daniel emphasizes the importance of collecting data from day one in product development. He discusses how data can help assess the capability of the system in place and create forecasts to assess delivery dates. He mentions the NoEstimates movement and suggests counting the product backlog items that can be finalized in one sprint as a useful metric. Daniel also provides tips for helping teams accept the data, and continuously updating forecasts. He emphasizes the need to work in hypotheses rather than requirements, as it allows for acceptance that they may be wrong. Finally, he notes that data gives us information on how to act and change over time.

Want to Improve Your Change Management Results? Discover the Lean Change Management Approach Today!

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: The Group Mentality vs. Creating Real Agile Product Teams

In this episode, Daniel discusses the overuse of the word “team” and the importance of true teams in product development. He highlights the need for preconditions for a team, and notes that sometimes teams don’t even have a shared goal. Daniel also warns against the “it’s done, just needs to be tested” anti-pattern and explains how it can lead to problems with team collaboration. We discuss the use of Causal Loop Diagram to find hypotheses, and mention a talk by Jeff Patton on the client-vendor anti-pattern. Finally, Daniel emphasizes the need to remove the notion that one party needs to own the game in the client-vendor relationship.

Featured Book of the Week: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In this segment, Daniel Westermayr discusses the importance of data-driven decision making in product development. He references the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which highlights the biases and faulty intuitions that can arise in decision making. Daniel emphasizes the need to use data to inform decisions and cites the book “Out of the Crisis” by W. Edwards Deming as an important resource. He also provides a link to a talk by Russell Ackoff about Deming’s approach.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

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 experience: 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 Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: The problem with cluttered backlogs and how to de-clutter them, coaching Product Owners

In this episode, Daniel Westermayr discusses his belief in the importance of the Scrum Master role in helping companies achieve their product goals. He shares his experience of encountering a cluttered backlog with items that were years old and how he cleaned it up, only to face complaints from someone in support. Daniel emphasizes the need for Scrum Masters to clarify why a large backlog is a problem, and why the company wants to keep all items. He also advises that Scrum Masters should understand what they stand for and constantly question why certain practices are being implemented. Finally, he suggests that, in order to avoid fears of losing important information, the older requirements can be stored in a safe location. Daniel also mentions an article on how to declutter product backlogs.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.