Madhuri Korapati Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Madhuri Korapati: The PO as a manager anti-pattern and its impact on Agile teams

The Great Product Owner: PO as the great motivator, a simple approach to motivating Agile teams

Great PO’s are able to share the vision they have for the product. But how do they do it? In this segment, we talk about the approaches that help great Product Owners be clear about, and share the vision of the product in a way that motivates the team!

The Bad Product Owner: The PO as a manager anti-pattern and its impact on Agile teams

When PO’s take control and start acting like a manager, the team needs to stand back. This creates a series of anti-patterns that we explore in this segment. From the team being silent, to the PO starting to assign tasks to individual team members. Listen in to learn how Madhuri was able to help the PO and the team get out of this PO-as-a-manager anti-pattern.

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 Madhuri Korapati

Madhuri a self-motivated servant leader with 14 years of software industry experience across Payments and Banking sectors. She is a Scrum Master at Mastercard, and enjoys helping teams in their agile transformation and showcasing their improvements.

You can link with Madhuri Korapati on LinkedIn and connect with Madhuri Korapati on Twitter.

Madhuri Korapati: Team building exercises for Agile Retrospectives

Madhuri starts by sharing her vision for a great Agile team, and then lists some of the questions she asks herself, as well as the team to help gage her own success as a Scrum Master. We also talk about how “work in progress limits” can help teams move quickly towards self-organization.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Great team building retrospectives

Madhuri starts by sharing with us that she prefers to use a different format every time, however, she also shares some of the formats she uses when starting off with a new team. We talk about the “Two truths and a lie” exercise, that helps team members know more about each other, and the “Candy Love” Agile retrospective format which helps create a positive atmosphere in 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 Madhuri Korapati

You can link with Madhuri Korapati on LinkedIn and connect with Madhuri Korapati on Twitter.

Madhuri Korapati: The change curve model for Agile teams, and team members

Madhuri was an active part of an Agile transformation at a department. They started by focusing on one team, and as she worked with that team, she noticed that things were moving slow. This helped her understand that, even if the team adopts practices and processes, there’s a deeper change that is needed, and each team member experiences the change in a different way, and at a different pace. Listen in to learn what is that deeper change, and learn more about the change curve model.

About Madhuri Korapati

You can link with Madhuri Korapati on LinkedIn and connect with Madhuri Korapati on Twitter.

Madhuri Korapati: A slow developing, high-impact anti-pattern in Agile teams, and how to fix it

The team we talk about in this episode was an example of a great team. They collaborated well, were able to tackle the challenges that came their way. However, after they were put on a bigger, higher pressure project, things started to change. Over time, in this new project, the team started to forget how to retrospect and improve as a team, and this started to affect their performance. Listen in to learn how Madhuri solved this slow developing, but high-impact anti-pattern.

Featured Book of the Week: Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey

Madhuri starts by introducing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, to show how important it is for Scrum Masters to focus on building trust with their team members and other stakeholders. But how do you do that in practice? That’s what the book Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey comes in. This book, which Madhuri acknowledges has changed her own way of acting, helps explain what trust is in practice, and how to build that in your Scrum team.

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 Madhuri Korapati

You can link with Madhuri Korapati on LinkedIn and connect with Madhuri Korapati on Twitter.

Madhuri Korapati: When visualization creates more problems in an Agile team, a Scrum Master warning

Madhuri had had great success with a team where she helped visualize their workflow, and the blockers they were struggling with. Moving into a new team, she tried to apply the same solution. However, things were not that simple, there were dynamics in the team that made the newfound visibility more of a problem than a solution. Listen in to learn how Madhuri worked around this problem, and the key lessons from this story.

About Madhuri Korapati

You can link with Madhuri Korapati on LinkedIn and connect with Madhuri Korapati on Twitter.