Evelien Acun-Roos Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Evelien Acun-Roos: Unfocused, solution-centric, part-time Product Owner, a recipe for failure

In this episode, we share some of the most critical anti-patterns in the Product Owner role.

The Great Product Owner: Constantly seeking to learn

This Product Owner was a “team player”, worked with the team closely, and did not try to establish a position of superiority. The PO made the roadmap visible to all, and was great at involving the stakeholders in product decisions. But the PO did not stop there, and actively searched for training, to learn even more about the Product Owner role!

The Bad Product Owner: Unfocused, solution-centric, part-time Product Owner, a recipe for failure

This Product Owner was not able to focus, the engineering background didn’t help in this case, as the PO was constantly drifting into discuss solutions instead of sharing the “what” and “why” that would help the team find the right solution. But the biggest anti-pattern is when the PO can’t even dedicate their whole time to the role of PO.

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 Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.

Evelien Acun-Roos: Happiness and Business Value, the focus for a success conversation

Evelien focuses on the Happiness metric as well as business value to help her understand where the team and Product Owner are in their journey to success. By having the business value discussed during the retrospective and during Sprint planning she tries to focus the team on having an impact, and helps clarify what the PO wants to deliver.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4 L’s retrospective

Evelien shares the 4 L’s retrospective and how she changes the “Loved” square to focus on appreciating and thanking someone in the team for something they did. This helps us teach team members to compliment each other and creates positive energy in the retrospective.

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About Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.

Evelien Acun-Roos: Helping middle management overcome anxiety and fear in an Agile transformation

In this organization, both the leadership and the teams wanted Agile. However, the middle management was resisting the adoption of Agile. This story helped Evelien understand that sometimes, we need to tackle the anxiety and fear that an Agile adoption brings. Middle-management was the “backbone” of the organization, they had been there for a long time, and they didn’t know what Agile meant for them. That created anxiety, and consequently resistance. Evelien explains how they engaged with middle-management and started helping them understand how Agile would help them (not only teams and leadership).

About Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.

Evelien Acun-Roos: The “rotating” Scrum Master anti-pattern

This team had a “rotating Scrum Master”, however, what happened was that the Scrum Master role was mostly ignored, and the team stopped learning and improving. The rotating aspect of the Scrum Master role led to a lack of accountability for that role, and consequently for the team! The team stopped challenging themselves.

Featured Book of the Week: Training From The Back Of The Room by Sharon Bowman

In Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins, Evelien found one of the first professional agile coaching books, which helped her in her Agile journey. After that, Evelien found Training From The Back Of The Room by Sharon Bowman, a book that helped her perfect her delivery of training and understand why the game and engaging approaches are so important when delivering knowledge and information to the teams we work with.

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 Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.

Evelien Acun-Roos: How leadership sometimes pushes Scrum teams back into Waterfall

Evelien was asked to help an organization transition to Agile using Scrum. There were multiple teams in that organization which Evelien and others started working with. With a mix of training and hands-on support they started working with all the teams. However, later it became clear that leadership in that organization was not aware of what Agile or Scrum meant in practice. Leadership started to ask for the same things, and in the same way that they always had. Effectively pushing the teams back into waterfall!

We discuss what we can do, when starting to work with a new organization, to help leadership understand what changes when we adopt Agile.

About Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.