David Wallace Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

David Wallace: Is your PO behaving like a Project Manager?

Great Product Owners know how to involve team members in the definition and decision-making processes. However, the contrast is a PO that thinks they were given the mission to be a Project Manager. Is your PO behaving like a Project Manager? Listen in to learn about the signs that the PO might have taken the Project Management role.

The Great Product Owner: Building collaboration by involving team members across disciplines

Great Product Owners are amazing that getting people to buy in to the Vision for the product/project. But they also know how to help the team put in practice continuous discovery, involving both engineering and the design team. As the POs starts to involve team and stakeholders, they make their job both more effective, and easier! A win-win!

The Bad Product Owner: Is your PO behaving like a Project Manager?

When Product Owners think they are Project Managers – maybe because they had that role in the past – they forget about the product vision and start focusing too much on topics that the team should focus on. They dictate dates, scope and force the teams to follow the plan without questioning it. When this happens, a lot is lost in the team. Is your Product Owner behaving like a Project Manager?

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 David Wallace

David Wallace is an agile coach with 25 years of experience in the IT industry. He’s a passionate Agilist and the cohost of the Heart of Agile – Boulder meetup group. He’s currently based in Denver as a Product Delivery Coach at Xero, a New Zealand based cloud accounting software company.

You can link with David Wallace on LinkedIn and connect with David Wallace on Twitter.

David Wallace: How to know when Scrum teams have taken ownership of their work

We’ve heard many times here on the podcast, that success is about making ourselves obsolete. Allowing for the team to take ownership and leadership in their work. However, that’s easier said than understood! How do we know that we’ve reached that point? We discuss the signs and leading indicators that teams are stepping up and taking ownership of their work!

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Spicying up an old format to keep things fresh

David likes to rely on a simple, and consistent format, and slightly change it to suit the situation. David shares how simple approaches, can help us spice up a familiar format, allowing the Scrum Master to focus on the conversation with the team.

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 David Wallace

You can link with David Wallace on LinkedIn and connect with David Wallace on Twitter.

David Wallace: How working with a team helped change leadership

David was working with a new part of the company that had just been acquired by his employer. This new unit had been using Agile for 2 years when David arrived, but all they had was a 2-day training by a local Agile Coach. As he started to dive in, David noticed that the team was unable to challenge the VP’s, they just took orders and never brought their creativity into the process. In this episode, we walk through a change process where this team went from being order takers to taking ownership of their work and the product. We discuss how a Scrum Master can help teams step up, even when senior managers are involved. Oh, and listen to the end, there’s a surprising change in this story!

About David Wallace

You can link with David Wallace on LinkedIn and connect with David Wallace on Twitter.

David Wallace: When Agile teams care more about the product than its users

In this team, we could see the team members cared for the product they were working on. However, they cared so much, they started to allow themselves to “dive into the code and refactor” at will. Eventually, that care for the product was translated into an anti-pattern: caring more about the code, than the people using the product. Does your team care more about the product than the users? In this episode, we share some tips on how to handle that Agile anti-pattern of caring more for the product than the users.

Featured Book of the Week: The human side of Agile by Gil Broza

In The human side of Agile by Gil Broza, David found insights on how to focus on the people in the team, and the organization that is adopting Agile. The book helped David understand that, even if it is tempting to focus on the tools and processes, the core of Agile adoption is focusing on people.

In the same vein, the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast published a book that is exactly about how to focus on people in your Agile adoption. If you want to know more, download your free chapters to Shift from Product to People, a book by Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Krueger.

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 David Wallace

You can link with David Wallace on LinkedIn and connect with David Wallace on Twitter.

David Wallace: Working with Agile skeptics in a Scrum team

David was working with a team that had just started its Agile journey. And while most of the team seemed enthusiastic, the tester/QA in the team was not happy about the new way of working. Listen in to learn how to prepare for team members that might not be keen on adopting an Agile way of working.

About David Wallace

You can link with David Wallace on LinkedIn and connect with David Wallace on Twitter.