Lakshmi Ramaseshan Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Lakshmi Ramaseshan: 4 critical aspects that great Product Owners bring to the team

In this episode, we talk about the consequences of having overly-detailed Product Owners, and we discuss 4 critical aspects that great Product Owners bring to the team.

The Great Product Owner: The 4 key aspects of great Product Owners.

A new PO joined the team that Lakshmi was working with, and brought a different perspective. One that helped the team feel their views were listened to and respected. This PO was excellent at four different aspects necessary for the PO role: being a Product Manager, a Project Manager, a Business Analyst, and a leader for the team.

The Bad Product Owner: From prescriptive to collaborative, a PO transformation

“The Product Owner is the toughest role in the team” Lakshmi starts when introducing this story, in which we explore the anti-pattern of a PO that was super detail-oriented, and prescriptive. The team was feeling demoralized by that attitude, and here is where Lakshmi introduced a different perspective. She introduced the idea of running an experiment on the way the team and PO collaborated. Listen in to learn what that experiment was, and how it can help PO’s learn to trust and listen to 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 Lakshmi Ramaseshan

Lakshmi considers Agile Coaching her true calling! With 20+ years in the software industry, her journey started as a developer on an agile team. After which she quickly realized good product development is all about having the right conversations, building happy teams, and being aligned with your customer.

Lakshmi is passionate about growing people, fostering trust amongst the team members, and building high-performance teams. She also believes in giving back to the community & paying it forward to help inspire others on their Journey!

You can link with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on LinkedIn and connect with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on Twitter.

Lakshmi Ramaseshan: Helping Scrum teams be self-sufficient

Great Scrum Masters are able to help the teams be self-sufficient, and has Lakshmi puts it: “work themselves out of a job”. We discuss what are the signs that teams are ready to start moving in that direction and become more self-sufficient.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Circles and Soup

In this segment, we discuss the Circles and Soup Agile retrospective format, a format that helps the teams see what’s in their control, and focus on that instead of all the things that would need changing but are outside their control.

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About Lakshmi Ramaseshan

You can link with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on LinkedIn and connect with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on Twitter.

Lakshmi Ramaseshan: Agile adoption through linking day-to-day tasks to a higher purpose

In this story, Lakshmi shares the story of an organization that was trying to move from “work as usual” to a more collaborative approach and improve their Agile practice. However, the teams were not clear on what success looked like. We discuss how we can help organizations move from focusing on the day-to-day only to linking everything they do to a higher purpose.

About Lakshmi Ramaseshan

You can link with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on LinkedIn and connect with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on Twitter.

Lakshmi Ramaseshan: Helping Scrum teams go from an individual contributor mindset to a collaboration mindset

When Lakshmi started to work with this team, she noticed that the team did not see the value of the Scrum ceremonies, and started to silently sabotage those by being late or not participating actively. As Lakshmi investigated the situation further, she understood that at the root, the team did not see themselves as a team, but rather as individual contributors. In this episode, we discuss how we can help teams get out of the individual contributor mindset and into a team-effort and collaboration mindset.

Featured Book of the Week: Turn The Ship Around! By David Marquet

In Turn The Ship Around! By David Marquet, Lakshmi found a story that shaped her understanding of the Scrum Master role. The book is about how to go beyond building high-performing teams and focus on the organization and how it impacts the teams. We discuss Intent-Based Leadership, which David Marquet introduced when he visited the podcast in a previous episode.

About Lakshmi Ramaseshan

You can link with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on LinkedIn and connect with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on Twitter.

Lakshmi Ramaseshan: When contracts trump collaboration, even in Agile software development

Lakshmi tells us a story that is very unusual. In this story, the team and the client were communicating well, and effectively. They had agreed to change the content of the deliverable through collaboration. However, the leadership of the company where the team worked, was not happy with that. They still had the Waterfall, fixed price / fixed schedule mindset. In this story, Lakshmi shares how important it is to work with all stakeholders, and never ignore the fact that when a contract exists, we must make sure that contract is respected.

About Lakshmi Ramaseshan

You can link with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on LinkedIn and connect with Lakshmi Ramaseshan on Twitter.