Leslie McCormack Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Leslie McCormack: The Product Owner that helped the team progress

From communication skills to the ability to step back from the day-to-day work, we review the Open-minded PO and the Micromanager PO patterns.

The Great Product Owner: The open-minded PO

Great Product Owners are not always people with lots of knowledge of Scrum. In this episode, we explore the characteristics that made this Product Owner a great PO. We discuss the need to be open-minded, able to communicate goals clearly, their attitude, their way to handle feedback and how those characteristics drive the Scrum team forward.

The Bad Product Owner: The Micromanager PO

Micromanager Product Owners are a drag on the team’s ability to perform. They usually become a bottleneck for decision making, and end-up often second-guessing the team, causing latent conflict and disengagement. In this episode, we discuss what Scrum Masters can do to help Product Owners that are stuck in this anti-pattern.

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 Leslie McCormack

Leslie is a full-time Scrum Master. Prior to that Leslie was a Project Manager, and started her career as a mainframe database developer (COBOL, HCL, DB2, Oracle, Unix). After that, she moved on to Java support for a few years. Finally, she transitioned to an analyst role, and it was in that role that she first encountered Agile and Scrum.

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.

Leslie McCormack: The ultimate success goals for Scrum Masters and Scrum teams

Leslie asks a few questions of herself when evaluating her success. We review those questions and why they are important to assess team growth and product success which are the ultimate success goals for Scrum Masters and Scrum teams.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Rotating exercises to create creative thinking

Scrum Masters must be able to adapt their Agile Retrospective exercises to the needs of the team at that time. In this episode, we talk about multiple exercises you can run, and why it is important to always be ready to facilitate a different exercise. We also discuss some of the downsides of repeating exercises over time.

In this episode, we refer to the Sailboat / Speedboat Restrospective exercise, the 3 L’s Retrospective exercise (similar to the 4L’s Retrospective exercise) and others.

About Leslie McCormack

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.

Leslie McCormack: A story of personal change for Scrum Masters

Once in a while, the focus of change is our own way of working. As Scrum Masters, we must also be adapting to the changes that happen around us. In this episode, we discuss how a Scrum Master with a background in Scrum, can adapt to a scaled Scrum approach, specifically, LeSS (Large Scale Scrum).

A story of personal change, and how you can keep yourself up to date with the changes around.

About Leslie McCormack

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.

Leslie McCormack: Trying to be Agile in a Waterfall organization

Sometimes we work with teams that are in a context where Agile values and principles are not applied correctly. In this episode, we explore the story of a team that thought they were practicing Agile, but in fact, were still in the Waterfall mentality. We discuss how the mentality of the team directly affects their ability to understand and benefit from Agile ways of working.

Featured Book of the Week: The Scrum Field Guide by Mitch Lacey

In The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year by Mitch Lacey, Leslie found inspirational ideas and practical advice that she could relate to, and therefore apply in her own practice.

About Leslie McCormack

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.

Leslie McCormack: How to host impactful Agile Retrospectives

Retrospectives are an important ceremony for Agile teams. The goal of the retrospectives is to help the teams assess their practices, learn and improve. Without that ceremony, Scrum would not be an Agile practice. After all the manifesto clearly states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

So, it’s no surprise that when Leslie struggled with her first retrospective, she went about learning how to host better, more engaging, and more impactful retrospectives.

About Leslie McCormack

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.