Laurens Bonnema: Resolving the “everything is a priority” Scrum Product Owner anti-pattern 

Sharing the passion for the product with the team is a great way to energize the team while sharing the Vision for the product. 

In this episode, we also about how to solve the “everything is a priority” anti-pattern, even if the PO does not want to!

The Great Product Owner: Sharing the passion and energizing the team

This Product Owner was “an energizer bunny” for teamwork. The PO worked with the team when needed, was decisive in decision making, included the team as much as possible and had a real passion for the product. All of this brought great energy to the team.

The Bad Product Owner: Resolving the “everything is a priority” anti-pattern

The Product Queen, is a PO anti-pattern, where the PO wants everything, and they want it now, just like that famous Queen song. However, this anti-pattern does not stop there. This particular PO also wanted everything to be “high-priority”. You may think it is impossible for a Scrum Master to help this PO, but you are wrong. Laurens shares with us an approach that helped this PO change their approach and be very clear on priorities! 

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 Laurens Bonnema

Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in.” 

You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.

Laurens Bonnema: Growing high-performing teams as a Scrum Master

As Scrum Masters, we try to grow high-performance teams. In this episode, we talk about what might help teams become high-performing. We discuss the Team Vision, and how that can help teams progress and have fun on their way to high-performance.

In this episode, we refer to the Retrospective’sPrime Directive, which was crafted by Norm Kerth, author of the Project Retrospectives book

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Timeline

When helping teams reflect, one of the most important things is to help them “see” the same events, and causes, so they can then analyze them and come up with possible solutions to try. But how do we help teams visualize what happened? In this episode, we talk about the Timeline Retrospective, a way to help the team visualize and come to a common agreement on what happened, so they may define improvement actions based on a shared understanding of the past.

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 experiences: 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 Laurens Bonnema

Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in.” 

You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter

Laurens Bonnema: Making a Big Bang Agile transformation work

A “big bang” approach to Agile adoption isn’t easy to pull off, and it may not even be a good idea in some cases. That was also Laurens’ thinking until he saw it happen in front of his eyes. From one day to another, 900 people were trained, and moved willingly to an Agile way of working. If you are a skeptic of “big bang” agile transformations, listen in. You might be surprised! 

About Laurens Bonnema

Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in.” 

You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.

Laurens Bonnema: Helping Scrum teams that are stuck “talking” improvements

In this team, the right mindset was there. They wanted to transform the way of working to follow their self-defined moto: “quality without compromise”. However, the mindset wasn’t enough. Even as the team discussed and discussed how to get better, it was missing one key aspect: the actual doing of the work. Listen in to learn how to help teams that are stuck in “discussion” mode.

Featured Book of the Week: Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck

Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck is a foundational book in the Agile movement, and inspiration for Laurens to define his own approach to Agile. As Laurens puts it: “Extreme Programming transformed my way of working”.

About Laurens Bonnema

Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in.” 

You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter.

Laurens Bonnema: Learning from failure, the contract negotiation edition

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation is one of the Agile values. Even if that value has been there since the start of the Agile adoption process, its application isn’t easy. We have quite a few episodes on how difficult this value is to apply in practice, and this episode isn’t an exception. All of these stories have insights that are critical to learning how to apply this value. In this episode, we talk about how fulfilling a contract is never enough, and how the customer must be brought on board, and be part of the decision making all the way. 

In this episode, we refer to Kent Beck and Extreme Programming.

About Laurens Bonnema

Laurens helps leaders create high-performance organizations by guiding them to embrace who they are. As Laurens puts it: “when leaders ignite their inner strength and capability—and lead from love—they soar beyond their expectations. That is how we create a world of work that we would want our kids to live in.” 

You can link with Laurens Bonnema on LinkedIn and connect with Laurens Bonnema on Twitter

You can also learn more about Laurens company at GladwellAcademy.com.

Get The Booklet!
How to deliver on time and eliminate scope creep By scoping projects around outcomes and impacts, not requirements!
Get the Product Owner Booklet!
Avoid scope creep! And learn to scope projects around impacts and outcomes, not requirements!
Get These Valuable Lessons Today!
Down-to-earth, hard-earned Scrum Masters lessons and the Tips from the Trenches e-book table of contents, delivered by email
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Internal Conference
Checklist
Internal Conference
Checklist
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works
A moving story of how work at the Bungsu Hospital was transformed by a simple tool that you can use to help your team.
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works
A Quick & Practical Guide to Agile Projects for BI
No Spam. Only your book. And you can unsubscribe any time.
Start Reading Now