Gonçalo Valverde Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Gonçalo Valverde: The “doer” Scrum Product Owner and its anti-patterns

The Great Product Owner: Key behaviors great PO’s exhibit

Great Product Owners are able to help the teams focus on the impact (and outcomes) of their work. Gonçalo shares a tip to define outcomes in a way that is easy to understand for the team and the stakeholders. We also talk about some specific behaviors that great PO’s have in relation to the team.

The Bad Product Owner: The “doer” PO and its anti-patterns

This particular PO had a background as a Project Manager. That led him to focus on controlling the team’s work and tasks, rather than the evolution and impact of the product. When PO’s focus more on “delivering” and less on “impact”, this may lead to the team losing sight of the customer and their needs.

Are you having trouble helping the teamwork 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 Gonçalo Valverde

Gonçalo is an Agile Coach from Portugal working with teams and organizations in their continuous improvement journey. As a keen amateur photographer, he learned that less is more and how constraints help one focus on the outcomes. He’s also a co-organizer of Agile Coach Camp Portugal.

You can link with Gonçalo Valverde on LinkedIn and connect with Gonçalo Valverde on Twitter.

Gonçalo Valverde: A list of questions for Scrum Master self-evaluation

What are some of the questions we can ask ourselves to evaluate our work? Gonçalo shares some of the questions he asks himself, and we discuss how critical it is to evaluate the relationship between the team and the Product Owner.

In this segment, we refer to #NoEstimates, a topic we’ve covered before here on the podcast.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The small add-ons that make retrospectives awesome

There are many ways to facilitate great retrospectives. The format of the retro will influence the success of the retro, but so will the small exercises we use for check-in or check-out. In this segment, we introduce shared visual board like Jamboard or Mural, the use of breakout rooms, Liberating Structures, Kudos, the Core Protocols (which have been featured on the podcast before) and small add-ons that make retrospectives awesome for the team!

In this segment, we also refer to the episodes recorded with Dov Tsal.

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About Gonçalo Valverde

You can link with Gonçalo Valverde on LinkedIn and connect with Gonçalo Valverde on Twitter.

Gonçalo Valverde: Turning Agile all the way up to 11, when the deadline is fixed

This story starts with the CEO saying “we are going agile”. As it usually happens, that transformation was not coming alone. Gonçalo was put on a project that had a very hard deadline: A Christmas release that would have a big impact on the company’s sales.

When the project started, the requirements were not yet fully understood, yet the deadline was already known, and unmovable. How can a Scrum Master help a project like this successfully deliver? Listen in to learn what techniques and tools Gonçalo introduced, and used to help this super-critical, and super-time-sensitive project succeed.

About Gonçalo Valverde

You can link with Gonçalo Valverde on LinkedIn and connect with Gonçalo Valverde on Twitter.

Gonçalo Valverde: How to deal with a disruptive team member (before it is too late)

Gonçalo was working with two teams that were busy migrating to a new system. However, in one of these teams there was a disruptive team member. The management tried to put this team member aside by pushing him into test management. But this only made the situation worse. Listen in to learn what Gonçalo tried to help this team member, and what he learned from this story that he carries with him ever since.

Featured Book of the Week: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Stone et al.

While reading Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Stone et al., Gonçalo realized that it’s possible and there’s a method to having conversations on very difficult topics, yet be constructive. This book shares some critical tools that all Scrum Masters should be aware of.

In this segment, we also refer to the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, and to the Oikosofy’s User Story Mapping facilitator’s guide, available for free.

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 Gonçalo Valverde

You can link with Gonçalo Valverde on LinkedIn and connect with Gonçalo Valverde on Twitter.

Gonçalo Valverde: How (not) to deliver bad news as a Scrum Master!

Sometimes things go wrong. And it is at that time that we need our senses to be sharp, and our communication to be on point. In this episode, we learn the story of a project that was about to go bad, but no one was willing to deliver the bad news. When should the Scrum Master be the messenger? Listen in to learn how Gonçalo handled this situation and what he learned for the future.

In this episode, we refer to Monte Carlo simulation and Troy Magennis’ work.

About Gonçalo Valverde

You can link with Gonçalo Valverde on LinkedIn and connect with Gonçalo Valverde on Twitter.