Luís Santos Silva Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Luís Santos Silva: Helping teams succeed, a key task for the Scrum Product Owner

The Great Product Owner: Helping teams succeed, a key task for the PO

As Luís puts it: “We underestimate how hard it is to be a PO”, which is one more reason to be happy when we get to work with an example Product Owner. We should be highlighting, and talking a lot more about how to become a great PO, because it is so difficult! Luís shares how this PO worked with the team to tackle their biggest challenge: long time to release. The PO understood that, and helped the team remove work from each release for the team to be able to release in time.

In this segment, we talk about the Opportunity Solution tree by Teresa Torres (check this podcast episode with Teresa), which borrows from a Theory Of Constraints tool: the current reality tree.

The Bad Product Owner: The PO that was afraid to own the problems to be solved

When we look at Product Owner related anti-patterns, we should be aware that many of those are usually “systemic”, in other words, they usually originate from other areas of the company. In this segment, we talk about the PO’s that are afraid to own the problems the product is supposed to solve. They stick only to the backlog of stories, and miss the big picture. The second, critical, anti-pattern we discuss is forgetting about “outcomes”, and instead focusing on functionality. Luís suggests that we should help PO’s focus on goals first, so that outcomes are not forgotten.

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Luís Santos Silva

Luís is not your typical Agile Coach as he doesn’t have an IT background. He worked his way from a contact center up to Lean and Agile Coach and is now a Agile Coach team lead at OutSystems.

You can link with Luís Santos Silva on LinkedIn.

Luís Santos Silva: Focusing Scrum teams on outcome-based goals

We must look at the team’s goals when defining team’s success, a key measure of our own success as Scrum Masters. Being Agile, or adopting Scrum are not goals in themselves, so that should not be the focus for the team, even if it needs to be our own. Luís shares some tips on how to help teams define their own goals.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4L’s format, simple and effective

Luís shares his approach to the 4L’s format, and how its simplicity enables him to focus the team on the outcomes and actionable items we want the retrospectives to yield.

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 Luís Santos Silva

Luís is not your typical Agile Coach as he doesn’t have an IT background. He worked his way from a contact center up to Lean and Agile Coach and is now a Agile Coach team lead at OutSystems.

You can link with Luís Santos Silva on LinkedIn.

Luís Santos Silva: Changing the culture and effectiveness of Sprint reviews

In this organization, the iteration reviews were not producing the needed impact. So Luís and the other Scrum Masters did an investigation to find out what was actually going on. They discovered several anti-patterns that we must also pay attention to as Scrum Masters. However, what they learned led them to focus on changing the culture underlying the reviews. Listen in to learn how they were able to define, and change the culture around iteration reviews.

About Luís Santos Silva

Luís is not your typical Agile Coach as he doesn’t have an IT background. He worked his way from a contact center up to Lean and Agile Coach and is now a Agile Coach team lead at OutSystems.

You can link with Luís Santos Silva on LinkedIn.

Luís Santos Silva: Focusing on flow, a must for Scrum Masters and teams

Sometimes teams want to have too many stories in progress. This detracts from their ability to deliver. Luís suggests that, instead, teams should be focusing on “flow”, and instead highlight and solve the possible priority conflicts that sometimes lead to this anti-pattern of having too much in progress.

Featured Book of the Week: Inspired by Marty Cagan

The book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, by Marty Cagan, helped Luís understand that he needed to get out of the Scrum Master comfort zone, and work on the “upstream” activities as well. The book broadened Luís’ sision on what product development is. Luís leaves us a call-to-action as Scrum Masters, to stop focusing only on the “downstream” activities and learn how to help the organizations we work with focus on “the right things”.

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 Luís Santos Silva

Luís is not your typical Agile Coach as he doesn’t have an IT background. He worked his way from a contact center up to Lean and Agile Coach and is now a Agile Coach team lead at OutSystems.

You can link with Luís Santos Silva on LinkedIn.

Luís Santos Silva: Measuring and learning from the level of morale in your Scrum team

Failure stories are an important part of our community, and as Luís puts it: “battle scars are the things that help us grow”, so we explore one of those stories in this episode. Luís was working with a team that was very low on morale. The team had been forced to adopt Scrum without being ready for it. Luís needed to find a way to make this visible.

We discuss how we can make morale transparent to the team itself, as well as to the stakeholders.

In this episode, we refer to the Niko Niko Board, as well as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

About Luís Santos Silva

Luís is not your typical Agile Coach as he doesn’t have an IT background. He worked his way from a contact center up to Lean and Agile Coach and is now a Agile Coach team lead at OutSystems.

You can link with Luís Santos Silva on LinkedIn.