Justin Chapman Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Justin Chapman: How to help the Product Owner learn to collaborate with the Scrum Team

Market focus by PO’s is always a great start, however, when they take that focus to mean “ignoring the team’s needs”, the PO role rapidly turns into an anti-pattern. In this episode, we discuss the two sides from that “market focus” coin, when it comes to the PO role.

The Great Product Owner: Deliberate assumption validation

Great Product Owners are deliberate about how and what do when trying to validate their assumptions about the product they own. If we add to this the ability to learn from and listen to the Scrum Master’s perspective on the role, we might be close to the perfect PO.

The Bad Product Owner: Lack of collaboration with the team

Often, Product Owners have a Product Manager background, and therefore bring in that perspective. One of the biggest problems with those PO’s is that they don’t carve out the time to work with, and understand what the teams need. This presents a big challenge for Scrum Masters. In this episode, we talk about how to work with PO’s that come from the PM background, and how to use “powerful questions” to help the PO understand their role when it comes to collaborating with the team

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 Justin Chapman

A Product and Agile Coach with product management experience ranging from payments to enterprise custom build. Justin has hosted a small series on Product Management and another series on Being a Scrum Master.

Justin has also pioneered a new form of Canvas to help bring teams together. All of this information can be found on his blog: http://www.ponolabs.com/labs/

You can link with Justin Chapman on LinkedIn.

Justin Chapman: How to find what Agile Retrospective format works for your team

Justin’s definition of success revolves around the success of the team and the product itself. We discuss how Scrum Masters can find out what is success for the product, and help their teams focus on product success. In this episode, we also talk about the need to involve the executives in the definition of success for the product.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: How to find what retrospective works for your team

In this segment, Justin asks the question: “do you really know what kind of retrospective would work for your team?” We explore this question and how Justin works with the team to define what would be the best approach for them, and for their context.

About Justin Chapman

Justin has also pioneered a new form of Canvas to help bring teams together. All of this information can be found on his blog: http://www.ponolabs.com/labs/

You can link with Justin Chapman on LinkedIn.

Justin Chapman: How a challenging project offered an opportunity for change

When this project started, there were multiple teams involved that had not yet collaborated effectively. On top of that, the project was very challenging for everyone involved. Justin worked with the teams to help them realize that their shared challenge could be resolved if they were able to change their approach to collaboration. In this episode, we share a great story of transformation at the team level that yields many insights for changes across the whole organization.

In this episode, we refer to the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

About Justin Chapman

Justin has also pioneered a new form of Canvas to help bring teams together. All of this information can be found on his blog: http://www.ponolabs.com/labs/

You can link with Justin Chapman on LinkedIn.

Justin Chapman: Work only on what you and the Scrum team can influence

Once in a while, we work with a team that is down in the doldrums of morale. That’s never an easy challenge to take on as a Scrum Master because the reasons for the lack of morale can be deep-seated and completely outside the team’s control. On the other hand, as we discuss in this episode, that realization can transform our perspective and help thet eam find ways to jump out of the hole they found themselves in. We talk about morale, and how simple tricks can totally transform the morale of a team, and we do that by realizing and implementing something all Scrum Masters should focus on work on what you can directly affect.

Featured Book of the Week: Agile Retrospectives

In Agile Retrospectives by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby, Justin found great inspiration for how to facilitate retrospectives with the teams he works with and also learned how important it is to prepare and crush the facilitation challenges we face as Scrum Masters.

About Justin Chapman

Justin has also pioneered a new form of Canvas to help bring teams together. All of this information can be found on his blog: http://www.ponolabs.com/labs/

You can link with Justin Chapman on LinkedIn.

Justin Chapman: How to work with executives in an Agile transformation

When we start working as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach in an organization, we very often face “resistance” to the adoption of the ideas we are already on board with. Without noticing, we start talking the “lingo” of Scrum Master and Agile Coach, and in the process, we lose our most important allies: the people who will ultimately benefit from Agile adoption. In this episode, we talk about how to talk to executives to get their understanding and cooperation. We need to learn to address their fears.

About Justin Chapman

Justin has also pioneered a new form of Canvas to help bring teams together. All of this information can be found on his blog: http://www.ponolabs.com/labs/

You can link with Justin Chapman on LinkedIn.