Matthew Green Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Matthew Green: The “knows-all, decides-all” Product Owner anti-pattern

The Great Product Owner: The protector of the team

Great Product Owners are catalysts, they help the team deliver and protect them from interference and chaos. Great PO’s look at the team’s performance as the product of their ability to set them up for success by focusing on the problem, and letting the team contribute to designing the solution.

The Bad Product Owner: The “knows-all, decides-all” Product Owner anti-pattern

Sometimes, Product Owners think their role is to be heroes. Even if that’s a well intended anti-pattern, it creates significant problems for the teams they work with. In these cases, PO’s become easily bottlenecks for the team, as they want to be involved in everything, and every decision. Why does this anti-pattern emerge, and what can we do about it? Matthew helps us explore some tips and tools for Scrum Masters working with this type of Product Owners.

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 Matthew Green

Before becoming a Scrum Master, Matthew worked in a variety of roles both inside and outside of IT. This eclectic background has served him well in working with teams and individuals to help them on their own journey to a more humane way of working.

You can link with Matthew Green on LinkedIn and connect with Matthew Green on Twitter.

Matthew Green: Assessing what we can’t measure in the Scrum Master role

Matthew describes his goal as a Scrum Master and explains how he assesses the impact of his performance. We also discuss some of the “unmeasurable” aspects of the Scrum Master role, and how to keep those in mind even if it’s hard to quantify our impact on those dimensions.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Wheel of Agile Goodness

Matthew shares a format that focuses on finding the teams’ strengths and focusing on how to get even better. In some cases, teams can feel that Scrum is “pushing them to the hamster wheel”, and that detracts from motivation and satisfaction. Matthew suggests a format that helps teams get out of that hamster wheel anti-pattern.

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 Matthew Green

You can link with Matthew Green on LinkedIn and connect with Matthew Green on Twitter.

Matthew Green: Helping organizations change by focusing on people

Matthew shares with us two contrasting approaches to change, and change leadership. Company 1 wanted to go Agile in a way that would require only the IT department to change. Company 2 focused on helping the teams and viewed change as a slow, and people-centric process. In this episode, we talk about the role of creating “community” in a change process as well as supporting people through Communities of Practice. Listen in to learn how a community of practice can help your organization.

About Matthew Green

You can link with Matthew Green on LinkedIn and connect with Matthew Green on Twitter.

Matthew Green: How a refinement meeting helps see BIG collaboration problems in Agile teams

Matthew was helping a team working in a “big data” context. He started noticing that their refinement meetings did not look like he expected. As he started to look deeper into that practice, he found that the team had developed a critical anti-pattern that prevented them from collaborating. The refinement meeting was just one symptom of a much deeper problem…

Featured Book of the Week: The Coaching Habit by Michael Stainer

In The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Stainer, Matthew found a model that helped me get into the “curiosity mindset”, and out of the Scrum dictator role that some Scrum Masters adopt. This helped Matthew learn to adapt Scrum to the context where he worked.

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 Matthew Green

You can link with Matthew Green on LinkedIn and connect with Matthew Green on Twitter.

Matthew Green: Helping COBOL teams adopt Agile and Scrum

Matthew started working with 3 COBOL teams who promptly stated: “Scrum does not work here”. The team also had heavy deadline pressure which made it even harder for them to think about changing their way of working.

In this situation, the role of the Scrum Master is to look for opportunities. Not to push, but to help. Matthew shares his tips on how to handle this tough situation.

About Matthew Green

You can link with Matthew Green on LinkedIn and connect with Matthew Green on Twitter.