Dragana Hadzic Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Dragana Hadzic: How to deal with an Absent or Overly busy PO

From passionate Product Owners to the Product Owners that are MIA (Missing in Action), we talk about two aspects that directly affect the team’s performance.

The Great Product Owner: The Passionate Product Owner

Great Product Owners are often passionate about the product they work on. In this segment we talk about a PO that was able to give that passion to the team, making them an great team. In this segment we also about User Story Mapping, a method popularized by Jeff Patton (Jeff has been a previous guest on the podcast) that helps the team and PO understand the context of the User Stories they are implementing.

The Bad Product Owner: The Absent Product Owner

Working with a Proxy Product Owner is bad enough, however, then that PO doesn’t have time to work daily with the team, things get even worse! We’ve discussed this anti-pattern before here on the blog, and have created a guide for you to help those product owners. Get the guide on how to work with absent or overly busy Product Owners here.

Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Dragana Hadzic

Dragana is an agile enthusiast who believes communication is critical for success in everything, including software projects. A Scrum Master and an Agile Coach with broad experience in IT industry and different leadership roles. Passionate about everything that brings positive energy and enables people to achieve great results.

You can link with Dragana Hadzic on LinkedIn and connect with Dragana Hadzic on Twitter.

Dragana Hadzic: Guess Who? A Retrospective exercise to learn more about the Sprint

When it comes to being a successful Scrum Master, a happy team is arguably the most common answer. However, for Scrum Masters, that is not enough. In this segment, we talk about how Scrum Masters should also focus on the product the team is developing. Is the product being successfully developed as well?

In this segment, we refer to a tool that helps the team focus on the impactful ways to help the product succeed: Impact Mapping.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Guess Who? A game to learn more about the Sprint

It is sometimes hard to focus on the details of what happened during the Sprint. However, when we fail to do so, the team and the organization lose out on a big opportunity to improve how they work. With the “Guess who?” Agile Retrospective exercise Dragana helps the teams – in a fun and entertaining way – explore the detailed events of the Sprint, so that they are ready to discuss improvements and take concrete actions out of the retrospective.

About Dragana Hadzic

You can link with Dragana Hadzic on LinkedIn and connect with Dragana Hadzic on Twitter.

Dragana Hadzic: Lessons learned scaling Scrum to larger projects

Of the many types of changes we need to go through, scaling up the use of Scrum may be one of the most common at the moment. When we go from one team using Scrum, to many teams collaborating and using Scrum together many things change.

In this episode, we talk about some of the challenges that scaling up Scrum brings, and how we – Scrum Masters – can prepare for those, so that we can help both the teams and the organization benefit from Scrum in larger projects.

About Dragana Hadzic

You can link with Dragana Hadzic on LinkedIn and connect with Dragana Hadzic on Twitter.

Dragana Hadzic: Positive Psychology and its positive impact on the Scrum team

When working with teams that are starting their downward spiral, Dragana found that focusing on positive thoughts can have a great impact and help teams avoid going further down in that spiral.

We talk about Positive Psychology and the use of Kudo Cards as a way to focus the teams on what is worth emphasizing.

Featured Book of the Week: Drive by Daniel Pink

In Drive by Daniel Pink, Dragana found many insights on motivation and importance of helping teams work on, and define clearly their purpose.

About Dragana Hadzic

You can link with Dragana Hadzic on LinkedIn and connect with Dragana Hadzic on Twitter.

Dragana Hadzic: How can we help Scrum teams in a large waterfall organization?

Scrum Masters need to sometimes face the Agile islands in the middle of large organizations. How can we react to that? How to address the team, and the stakeholders? How to do planning? There are many questions that Scrum Masters must answer differently when working with “island” Agile teams.

In this episode, we explore how Scrum Masters can work with isolated Agile teams without having the teams to go back to waterfall.

About Dragana Hadzic

You can link with Dragana Hadzic on LinkedIn and connect with Dragana Hadzic on Twitter.