Julie Wyman Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Julie Wyman: How to help unempowered Product Owners step up, and start to make decisions

The Great Product Owner: Two characteristics that make a great PO

This Product owner had two characteristics that made her a great Product Owner for the team. She had: a) domain expertise, and b) availability to work with the team. She also knew that it was important to involve others in making decisions and actively asked help from other experts when needed. She was also great at collecting feedback.

The Bad Product Owner: Helping unempowered PO’s step up, and start to make decisions

This Product Owner was missing empowerment to make decisions. This was further complicated by the fact that the PO was part of a larger program, where there were multiple PO’s that also did not feel empowered. We discuss how to help these Product Owners slowly start to gain ownership, and assert their ability to make decisions.

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 Julie Wyman

Julie Wyman has been working with Agile teams for over a decade and is continuously learning with and from them. She’s based just outside Washington, D.C., but has had the pleasure of supporting teams distributed across the globe and even experienced her own Agile takeaways all the way in Antarctica.

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.

Julie Wyman: Involving the Scrum team in defining our success as Scrum Masters

Julie invites us to ask what success looks like for the teams we work with. Based on that, and a few other questions that Julie suggests, we can assess our impact, as well as invite the teams themselves into the reflection about success.

In this segment, we talk about Psychological Safety, a topic we have also covered in previous episodes.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Mixing up formats to focus on the right question for the team

Julie likes to mix up several formats as a way to try and tap into what’s critical for the teams at that time. We also talk about bringing up the team working agreements regularly, to ensure that the team sticks to the agreements they have made.

In this segment, we refer to the Agile Retrospectives book and a tool Julie calls The Working Agreement Report Card, where the team scores themselves on how well they follow the agreements they had defined for themselves.

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About Julie Wyman

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.

Julie Wyman: Introducing Agile to a new organization with Kanban

While working with an organization in their Agile transition, Julie and colleagues recommended that they start with Kanban. Kanban would bring minimal disruption to the teams, and enable them to learn what Agile would mean in their context. However, there was a lot more to do before the teams were able to run a Kanban flow and start learning what Agile meant for them. In this episode, we explore not only how to introduce Kanban, but also what to consider when bringing Agile to a group of teams that are new to Agile.

About Julie Wyman

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.

Julie Wyman: Getting a Scrum team back on the retrospectives train

Julie was part of a team supporting a large program of 10 scrum teams. The team that Julie was working with, started to skip the retrospectives because they were trying to catch-up. However, after they had been able to catch-up, the team did not come back to start holding their retrospectives again. When should the Scrum Master stand-up and push the team to hold their retrospectives again? In this episode, we talk about the critical role Scrum Masters play in keeping the teams accountable to themselves when it comes to process, and how sometimes, it is important to stop, even if that affects delivery, because retrospectives are the “power station” for the rest of the work the team does.

Featured Book of the Week: Impact Mapping, by Gojko Adzic

In Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects by Gojko Adzic, Julie found a way to crystalize the concept of business impact. Impact Mapping, is a short book with lot of visuals. You can also learn about Impact Mapping in Gojko Adzic’s presentation on Impact Mapping.

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 Julie Wyman

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.

Julie Wyman: Learning to coach, and listening to the Scrum team’s needs

As we move from our mentoring/training stance, to more of a coaching stance, we need to be mindful of the team’s own journey. In this episode, we talk about the transition that Julie was going through, from mentoring to coaching, and how the team reacted to her change. Listening to the team, and learning what is the right stance to take is critical for Scrum Masters.

About Julie Wyman

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.