Jim Sammons Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Jim Sammons: The Feature Owner anti-pattern in the Scrum Product Owner role

Confidence is one of the symptoms you are in the presence of a good Product Owner, when you add to that the ability to articulate the reasons for the decisions made as well as using data and analysis to support decisions, we know we have a great PO working with us.

We also talk about the consequences from creating an implicit or explicit competition between Product Owners.

The Great Product Owner: The confident and articulate Product Owner

A great Product Owner will have a clear Vision of their product, but that’s not the only characteristic they exhibit. They can also clearly defend their Vision, using data, and analysis they’ve made. They intimately understand their product, business and customers. As they move away from “guessing” as a practice, they are not afraid to have difficult conversations about the product.

The Bad Product Owner: The Feature Owner anti-pattern

Let’s imagine that your company creates an internal competition among teams and Product Owners. What will happen then?

We discuss the consequences on the PO role that Jim has witnessed.

In this segment, we refer to the work by Daniel Vacanti.

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 Jim Sammons

Jim is currently a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and works with an amazing team at Insight as an Agile Coach and trainer for their clients around the world. His time as a Scrum Master was awesome and fueled his passion for agility at all levels.

You can link with Jim Sammons on LinkedIn and connect with Jim Sammons on Twitter.

Jim Sammons: The Baseball Agile Retrospective and one important success question for Scrum Masters

“Am I making other people better?” is the question that Jim starts his own success retrospective with. We then dive into the “do no harm” rule that Jim applies to his own work, and how to use Retrospectives in our work and reach a successful outcome.

We talk about the standards that we must ourselves to, as Scrum Masters.

Featured Retrospective for the Week: The Baseball Retro

Although there are many possible games and exercises for Agile Retrospectives, in this Agile Retrospective format – The Baseball Retro -, the focus is on creating an analogy of the Sprint to a baseball game. And how we can use this analogy thinking to find opportunities for improvement.

Listen in to learn how Jim prepares and hosts that retrospective.

About Jim Sammons

You can link with Jim Sammons on LinkedIn and connect with Jim Sammons on Twitter.

Jim Sammons: Communities of practice for Scrum Masters as a change practice

When working with change, one of the tools we use most often use is the “community of practice” pattern, where people get together and talk about the challenges they are facing, and discuss possible solutions. For Scrum Masters, this is especially important as we are – Jim reminds us – also leaders in our organisations and must set the example that others can follow. What are you doing to be an example of the change you are supposed to help implement?

About Jim Sammons

You can link with Jim Sammons on LinkedIn and connect with Jim Sammons on Twitter.

Jim Sammons: How to recognize the anti-pattern the buries the Scrum teams in a mountain of technical debt

As this story starts, the team is buried under technical debt. Why they got there is the topic of this episode’s story. We talk about finding the signs that the team is starting to drown in tech debt, as the recognition of that pattern is the first step to avoid major damage to the team and the product.

In this segment, we refer to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Featured Book of the Week: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, Jim found a reminder of some practices that are useful for Scrum Masters. The highlight is the process of “decluttering”, removing the mess we often have to deal with in our teams, our backlogs or in relationships between team members. Jim challenges us to find those “cluttered” areas in our work and ask the team: “do you feel overwhelmed?”

In this segment, we also refer to Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins.

About Jim Sammons

You can link with Jim Sammons on LinkedIn and connect with Jim Sammons on Twitter.

Jim Sammons: Dealing with Agile team destructive behaviours, what not to do!

As we start our journey as Scrum Masters, we are bound to find situations and team dynamics to deal with that we were either not familiar or not responsible for handling before.

Everyone will face one of those situations. In this episode, we talk about one such situation in Jim’s career. There was a pattern of behaviour happening that was destructive to the team, but Jim was unsure how to deal with it. Listen in to learn what he learned from that story, that you can also apply in your team when facing a similar situation.

About Jim Sammons

You can link with Jim Sammons on LinkedIn and connect with Jim Sammons on Twitter.