Maximilian Dazer Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Maximilian Dazer: The Agile anti-patterns that emerge when the PO tells the team what to do

The Great Product Owner: Great tools that PO’s use to help Agile teams shine

Great Product Owners help the team take responsibility by giving them more ownership. They are also able to challenge the team, yet respect their decisions. We also talk about the tools and practices that great PO’s have which help the team deliver, and contribute to the product.

The Bad Product Owner: The Agile anti-patterns that emerge when the PO tells the team what to do

Who is the real Product Owner for your team? That’s a great question that Max asks us at the start of the episode, and we explore further. Not knowing who is the real PO is only one of the anti-patterns we discuss, as we also explore the Bossy PO who wants to tell people exactly what to do. We discuss what that looks like as well as the problems that happen when the PO tries to tell the team what to do.

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 Maximilian Dazer

Maximilian’s goal is to drive change from the bottom. For every team he creates a vision and tries to get them on board to pursue the change together. Maximilian wants to free people from the micromanagement-hell version of “scrum”.

You can link with Maximilian Dazer on LinkedIn.

Maximilian Dazer: Agile team morale as an indicator of Scrum Master success

Team morale is Max’s focus when it comes to measuring his success as a Scrum Master. He asks a few specific questions which he describes in this episode, and then evaluates the team’s answer to a survey he sends the team members during the Sprint. Max also likes to use some flow metrics (e.g. Cycle time) to reflect on how the team is evolving, as well as help the team select the improvements to put in practice.

In this episode, we refer to Cycle time, and Cycle time scatter plot.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Scrum Values Retrospective

Max prefers to prepare his retrospectives based on the events of the preceding Sprint. However, he has a format he likes to run with all of his teams, and even at regular intervals. The Scrum Values retrospective is about helping the team reflect on how they grow, and evolve as Agile teams by creating a conversation on how they want to apply the Scrum values as defined in the Scrum Guide.

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 Maximilian Dazer

You can link with Maximilian Dazer on LinkedIn.

Maximilian Dazer: Changing Salaries and Career progression rules in an Agile organization

Max worked in an company-wide initiative that touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of software development: career progression, and salaries. This was a change program that required care and attention to people’s expectations. In this episode, he describes how the organization was able to bring in change, even in the most sensitive topics, and still get people’s support and collaboration.

About Maximilian Dazer

You can link with Maximilian Dazer on LinkedIn.

Maximilian Dazer: Fighting Conway’s law, an Agile story we all should learn

Max worked with a team that was composed of team members from two previous teams. As he joined in the role of the Scrum Master, he started noticing that the team members did not focus on collaboration, but rather on single, individually assigned tasks (listen in to learn about how you can detect if your team is falling prey to the same anti-pattern). This way of working was causing delays, and slowing down the team because of the many handovers necessary. In this episode, the Scrum Master can help the team understand the anti-pattern, and help teams get out of the silo-thinking. In this episode we refer to Conway’s Law, an empirical observation and statement by Mel Conway that helps us understand why organizations and software end up mirroring each other: “if you have a 3 team compiler organization, you end up with a 3-pass compiler”.

Featured Book of the Week: User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton

User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton helped Max understand many critical aspects of applying Agile to the requirements/definition of the product. He learned about how the Backlog could be different than a simple list of requirements/user stories, and how User Stories are meant to be used.

Jeff Patton has been a previous guest on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

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 Maximilian Dazer

You can link with Maximilian Dazer on LinkedIn.

Maximilian Dazer: Applying Agile is not the same as following Scrum

When Max started as a Scrum Master, and tried to put in practice what he knew about the role, he faced some unexpected challenges. Having had industrial engineering training, he felt he should be busy all the time, and therefore started to “force” Scrum on the team. This story does not end well for Max, but the lesson he learned was fundamental for his growth as a Scrum Master. Listen in to learn what was his lesson, and how it changed him for the future.

In this episode, we refer to Taylorism, and the online publication Serious Scrum.

About Maximilian Dazer

You can link with Maximilian Dazer on LinkedIn.