Gurucharan Padki Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Gurucharan Padki: Customer-centric Product Owners that destroy the team because of that

The Great Product Owner: Great PO’s are committed to the success of the team, not only their personal success

Great Product Owners are able to relate to the team members, and share their perspective on the future of the product. This particular PO, was able to talk to the team about the roadmap, and communicated the Vision for the product. Even if the team was distributed among several timezones, the PO was able to be in contact and available to the team. Great PO’s are committed to the success of the team, not only their own success.

The Bad Product Owner: Customer-centric PO’s that destroy the team because of that

This PO thought they were the boss of everyone, and tended to micro-manage the team. This particular PO was more focused on sales, and pushed all customer ideas to the team without concern for their feasibility or applicability to the product Vision. The PO heard the customers, but was unable to filter out the bad ideas from the good ones.

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 Gurucharan Padki

Gurucharan Padki comes with 18 years of experience in the IT industry, of which he has spent more than a decade in the Agile world delivering products, programs and projects with focus on engineering and quality . He has played the role of product owner, scrum master and agile coach in multiple organizations across India and the world driving transformations.

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.

Gurucharan Padki: Does your Scrum team own the resolution of the impediments? A success question for Scrum Masters

A great Scrum Master is not only helpful for the team, but knows when to step back and let the team take the lead, as their aim is to bring the team to a self-sustaining point of their journey. To check his own progress, Guru focuses on how much ownership the team exhibits when it comes to resolving impediments.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Using MURAL boards to spice up remote retrospectives

Guru often changes the retrospective format he uses with his teams. His aim is to find a format that fits a specific type of retro that that team might need at that point. However, he’s got a tip for all Scrum Masters working with a remote or hybrid team. He suggests we use tools like MURAL and shares some tips on how we could run the Timeline Retrospective with a MURAL board.

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About Gurucharan Padki

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.

Gurucharan Padki: The critical differences between Project Management and Agile/Scrum

There’s a big contrast between some of the Agile values and principles, and the approach that we see implemented when Project Management is the ruling approach to delivering software. Agile and Scrum require that leaders (including Scrum Masters) learn about servant leadership, instead of looking at teams as “school children” that must be managed, and controlled.

In this episode, we talk about the key differences we must be aware between the “old” approach to software development (based on project management ideas), and what Agile is all about.

In this episode, we refer to the Tuckman’s stages of group development.

About Gurucharan Padki

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.

Gurucharan Padki: The many anti-patterns that emerge when we focus on story points and velocity

The team Guru was working with was asked to “be more productive” and to “burn more story points”. That request led to a big anti-pattern, as the team was only concerned with the numbers after that point. In this episode, we discuss the many anti-patterns that emerge when teams are asked to focus on “the numbers”, instead of the quality and impact of their work.

In this segment, we refer to SDLC, aka Software Development Lifecycle, and the Shift-left movement approach in software development.

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland, Guru found an inspiring book that explains how, and where Scrum can be used, from visual boards for painting a house, to Scrum in education. The book makes Scrum easy to understand, and helps change agents learn how to present the framework to stakeholders and teams.

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 Gurucharan Padki

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.

Gurucharan Padki: How to deal with Agile adoption anxiety in waterfall organizations

Gurucharan (aka Guru) was working in a large organization, in a waterfall process. The people at that organization were not aware of Agile, and Guru took the initiative to discuss Scrum with the leaders of the organization. The start of the journey was rough, with people unsure, and even scared of the change. This gave Guru an opportunity to bring change in a slow, but effective way. Listen in to learn about the story of change, and how to deal with Agile adoption anxiety in waterfall organizations.

About Gurucharan Padki

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.