Mark Metze Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Mark Metze: Using Sprint Goals as a way to collaborate and communicate with Stakeholders

Sprint Goals are a tool for the PO to communicate with the team and Stakeholders. However, not all PO’s know how to use them, or even try. When PO’s aren’t able to communicate the value to the team and stakeholders, then bad things can happen as we learn in this week’s PO anti-pattern segment.

The Great Product Owner: Using Sprint Goals as a way to collaborate and communicate with Stakeholders

Sprint goals are a tool that helps teams focus and make decisions, however, those goals don’t create themselves. A great Product Owner is able to prepare those Sprint Goals in a way that speaks to the team. In This segment, we refer to a technique by a PO that brought several possible goals to the Sprint Review, and asked the stakeholders to help them choose the right goal for the Sprint.

In this segment, we also refer to Martin Dalmijn’s work (Martin has been a guest here on the podcast).

The Bad Product Owner: Value delivery as the focus for Product Owners

This segment starts with a sad story, that of a PO that was fired after 9 months of work with their team. The reason: they had no way to show the value of what the team had delivered in those 9 months. A critical responsibility for a Product Owner.

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 Mark Metze

Following the pattern of all good Computer Science majors, Mark began his career as a programmer and devoted the first 2 decades of his career to the craft of writing code. His next decade was spent in a managerial role for a software team. And then recently he pivoted once again to the role of Scrum Master. Mark has a heart for leading through service and has enthusiastically embraced the role of Scrum Master.

You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.

Mark Metze: Learning to create value as a Scrum team

Helping teams get User Stories “to Done” is Mark’s primary focus in his role as a Scrum Master. However, for that he needs to help the teams accept and adopt “empiricism” as the basis for their management of work. In this segment, we also discuss how important it is to help teams focus on “creating value”, and what that means.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The ORID Pattern

Mark wants to help teams avoid jumping into conclusions too early, and for that he’s found the ORID pattern is a great help. The ORID pattern covers: Observe, Reflect, Inspect and Decide activities, and helps team explore data and reflect on possible options before jumping into solutions.

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About Mark Metze

You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.

Mark Metze: When waiting for change is the right thing to do

Sometimes, it is when the change fails that the team is ready to accept and take on that change. In this episode, we discuss the story of a team that did not want to take Sprint Goals into use. Now, many would just say “the Scrum Guide says”, however, that’s not what Mark did. He stood back, and waited. At some point something happened and the team’s perspective on that change transformed. Listen in to learn about the “waiting” method of change leadership.

About Mark Metze

You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.

Mark Metze: Helping a Scrum team of introverts learn how to collaborate and engage

When working with a team, Mark noticed that the team was composed mostly of people that preferred to work in silence. They were introverts. However, their desire for privacy started to affect the team’s performance. Mark started to think about how to create more engagement and communication in the team, and designed a working agreements session to help the team understand how their distance was starting to affect their performance.

Featured Book of the Week: The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master by Barry Overeem

In the 8 Stances of a Scrum Master whitepaper, Mark found a model to help him reflect on his career, and understand that even as a manager, Mark was performing some of the Scrum Master duties. The whitepaper, authored by Barry Overeem (a previous guest on the podcast), helped Mark understand the Scrum Master role in-depth.

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 Mark Metze

You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.

Mark Metze: When a simple format is the right format for an Agile Retrospective

Mark reached his Scrum Master role by preparing his path from line manager to Scrum Master. He knew that Scrum Master was the position for him, and in that position, he tried to help teams get value out of their retrospectives, however… When preparing the retrospective, Mark ended up finding a format that he loved, but the team didn’t! Listen in to learn about why sometimes the easiest, most boring format is the best format for an Agile Retrospective.

About Mark Metze

You can link with Mark Metze on LinkedIn.