Denniz Dönmez Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Denniz Dönmez: How to succeed as a Junior Product Owner

Seniority is not always a good asset for a Product Owner, but attitude and mindset can be. In this episode, we explore the kind of attitude and mindset that help Product Owners succeed.

The Great Product Owner: How to succeed as a Junior Product Owner

When a junior PO joined the team Denniz was working with, the expectation was that there would be certain challenges ahead. Turns out, being a junior was a great advantage for this Product Owner because of the attitude and the mindset he brought with him. Listen in to learn about some of the key attributes needed to succeed as a Product Owner when just starting to learn the role.

The Bad Product Owner: The Project “Owner” anti-pattern

When Product Owners come to the teams from a Project Manager role, they usually bring a specific mindset that has served them well in that previous role. However, those same patterns that worked well in a project management paradigm, don’t work so well when the role is the Product Owner role. In this segment, we discuss some of the anti-patterns that emerge when Project Managers join a Scrum team as a Product Owner.

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About Denniz Dönmez

Denniz has both huge academic and practical experience. He studied agile teams for his PhD at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) before becoming a Scrum Master and freelance consultant in 2016. Denniz believes the key to becoming more agile is to establish what he calls “enabling structures.”

You can link with Denniz Dönmez on LinkedIn and connect with Denniz Dönmez on Twitter.

Denniz Dönmez: Three layers of Scrum Master success

In this episode, we talk about the success of a Scrum Master at three different levels, the individual, the team, and the organization. We explore some of the metrics that can be used at each of those levels to assess and reflect on the success of the Scrum Master role.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Keep retrospective actions top of mind

One of the aspects that makes retrospectives fail sometimes, is that the teams don’t focus on acting on the improvement ideas they’ve already collected. In this segment, we talk about how to help teams follow-up and act on the improvement ideas that surface in the retrospectives.

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About Denniz Dönmez

You can link with Denniz Dönmez on LinkedIn and connect with Denniz Dönmez on Twitter.

Denniz Dönmez: Lessons learned as a facilitator in a DevOps transformation

In this company, Denniz supported a DevOps transformation. As time went by, it was clear that management had to start taking the coaching role that Denniz had taken until then. While working through this change, Denniz learned some important lessons about change, and how to be able to step back from the work, so that he could be a facilitator.

In this episode, we refer to the One-team, One-goal article on Software Development Today.

About Denniz Dönmez

You can link with Denniz Dönmez on LinkedIn and connect with Denniz Dönmez on Twitter.

Denniz Dönmez: Helping Scrum teams overcome deadline pressure

Deadlines cause all kinds of side effects in team’s behavior. In this story, Denniz saw that the deadline pressure was increasing, and the teams were starting to show signs of stress. However, the teams were still trying to “power through” those deadlines, and they started to skip things. As it usually happens, at some point they started to skip important things. Listen in to learn how Denniz helped the team step back from that self-destructive behavior.

Featured Book of the Week: The Skilled Facilitator by Roger Schwarz

In The Skilled Facilitator by Roger Schwarz, Denniz found something that was in stark contrast with the command and control mindset. The book helped him understand his role as a facilitator, create approaches that favored collaboration and mutual learning, collaborative games, and more. All of it with backing from decades of research. As Scrum Masters, being a facilitator is perhaps the most important role we play, and this book helped Denniz learn a lot about what that role means in practice.

Denniz shares a list of the most important books for him at his site: enablingstructures.com/books.

About Denniz Dönmez

You can link with Denniz Dönmez on LinkedIn and connect with Denniz Dönmez on Twitter.

Denniz Dönmez: Good intentions can also turn sour for Scrum Masters: what not to do as a Scrum Master

When Denniz joined this team, he observed, that even if the Product Owner was close to the customer, the team had little to no contact with the users of the product. He worked on preparing a workshop that had a hidden agenda: get the developers to understand the users. However, that didn’t turn out so well, and it taught Denniz an important lesson. Listen in to learn how to not organize a workshop with users, and what Denniz learned from that failure that helped him be a better Scrum Master.

About Denniz Dönmez

You can link with Denniz Dönmez on LinkedIn and connect with Denniz Dönmez on Twitter.