Kamal Hans Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Kamal Hans: The “messenger” Scrum Product Owner

The messages that the PO passes to the team are critical. Even when the PO is being a “messenger” there are different types of messages that they pass to the team. We talk about two contrasting ways to be that “messenger”, one that works, and one that doesn’t

The Great Product Owner: Explaining the “why” of the User Stories

When we describe a great Product Owner, we focus on how they help the team learn about the customer, and “why” they are asked to deliver certain functionality. We also discuss how great PO’s make themselves available to the team when necessary

The Bad Product Owner: The “messenger” Product Owner

This particular PO was acting like a “messenger”. The PO would show up to the meetings and say “we need to deliver this because this executive said so”. There was a lack of Vision or “why” that functionality was being asked for, and that lead to the team feeling disengaged. In this segment, we talk about what a Scrum Master can do in such a situation.

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 Kamal Hans

Kamal Hans believes people are capable of incredible things if they have the support they need. He is at his best when he gets to connect people with each other and their vision, create a structure of support, build a system to achieve their goals to accomplish bigger things than themselves. As an Agile Coach and disciplined facilitator, he has worked with global organizations like Ericsson, and Bose to name a few.

You can link with Kamal Hans on LinkedIn and connect with Kamal Hans on Twitter

Kamal Hans: How Scrum Masters help teams succeed, building a learning team

Scrum Masters are there to help the team learn. Therefore, when we think about success for Scrum Masters, we need to look at what we have helped the team learn with our presence. But this brings a challenge, as Scrum Masters, we must help the team make time for learning. The team’s goal is not only to “code”, it’s to learn and improve over time, both on the “coding” but also other aspects (like being more customer-centric).

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4 L’s, I Long for, I Learned, I Liked, I Lacked

The 4 L’s format, which was mentioned in a previous episode, is all about learning. With the “Like” question, we help create empathy, with “lacked/longed for” we explore what the team was missing, and with the “learned” question we help transform mistakes into hopeful lessons for the team.

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Kamal Hans

You can link with Kamal Hans on LinkedIn and connect with Kamal Hans on Twitter

Kamal Hans: Self-change, the hardest change for Scrum Masters

This episode starts with a question: which of the following is the hardest to change? Your boss, your spouse, or yourself? The key message is that, in order to be able to help others through a change process, we need to be able to change ourselves. We discuss what are some of the steps we need to go through when changing ourselves, and only then others.

In this episode, we refer to work by Audree Sahota.

About Kamal Hans

You can link with Kamal Hans on LinkedIn and connect with Kamal Hans on Twitter

Kamal Hans: How the Scrum Master can help teams work through their fear of taking risks

In this episode, we talk about a team that everyone felt was “high performing”. However, when Kamal joined he started to notice that something was off. The team members themselves had started to feel the “burden” of being seen as high performing. At the same time, Kamal was working with another team that was not considered to be high performing, and the contrast became evident: the “high performing” team had started to fear taking risks. This is when the job of the Scrum Master is so important: how to help teams work through their fear of taking risks!

Featured Book of the Week: Permission To Screw Up, by Kristen Hadeed

In Permission To Screw Up, by Kristen Hadeed we learn how to embrace failure as part of our journey, and turn those moments into learning points that help us get better at our work. The book also talks about the “people first” perspective and how to be OK with vulnerability and asking for help.

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 Kamal Hans

You can link with Kamal Hans on LinkedIn and connect with Kamal Hans on Twitter

Kamal Hans: Beware of the Scrum-mom, a Scrum Master anti-pattern

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

When Scrum Masters want to help their teams, they put a lot of focus on working with the teams, but sometimes that may be the wrong thing to do. How do we know that? In this episode, we talk about when the Scrum Master does “too much” and creates a dependency from the team towards the Scrum Master, as well as what can happen when teams are no longer able to take ownership of their ways of working.

About Kamal Hans

You can link with Kamal Hans on LinkedIn and connect with Kamal Hans on Twitter