Med Marouane Ajraoui Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Med Marouane Ajraoui: From collaborator to bossy, the Product Owner attitude spectrum to look out for

The attitude that the PO exhibits will fundamentally affect their effectiveness in the role, and in this episode, we explore 2 contrasting attitudes in the PO role.

The Great Product Owner: The great Collaborator

A great Product Owner is able to collaborate with the teams and the stakeholders, through their listening skills and ability to communicate ideas and why they matter for the product and the customer. Another great asset for a Product Owner is to be able to understand and evaluate technical debt together with the team. Finally, we talk about how great teams have the PO inside, and as a key part of the team.

The Bad Product Owner: The bossy PO

In this segment, we talk about how PO’s sometimes take a “bossy” perspective and are not able to understand their role. They might think they are “the boss”, and can just give orders to the team. In this segment, we also discuss the concept of the “product team”, as opposed to having the product focus only in the PO role.

We refer to the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.

Are you having trouble helping the teamwork 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 Med Marouane Ajraoui

Med Marouane Ajraoui enjoys practicing AIKIDO while helping individuals, teams, and organizations embrace the agile mindset. He is from Morocco but has lived in several countries, and he enjoys being a “citizen of the world”. He is the founder of Agile Africa, an NGO for disseminating Agile culture in Africa. He is also the CEO and founder of JediSquad, an international firm that supports developing Eco Agile businesses and meaningful digital products.

You can link with Med Marouane Ajraoui on LinkedIn.

Med Marouane Ajraoui: Helping Agile teams learn about humane work, and be more humane

Med Marouane’s view is that Agile is “human-centric”, and that it is there to help humans to be better at their work and towards each other. When describing what success looks like for a Scrum Master, we discuss how the team’s human behavior is a great indicator that the Scrum Master has done a great job. Listen in to learn about what practices show that the team has adopted a humane approach.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Star Wars Retrospective

In this format, Med Marouane focuses on teamwork, and team setup to be able to help the team understand the enablers, and obstacles to great teamwork. This is also a format that helps focus on the values of the team

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About Med Marouane Ajraoui

You can link with Med Marouane Ajraoui on LinkedIn.

Med Marouane Ajraoui: Practices to troubleshoot an Agile adoption in a large organization

This company was large and had started an Agile transformation across the globe. However, Med Marouane quickly found out that part of the management was against the change. This situation forced Med Marouane to start investigating the reasons why and helped him put together a set of practices for evaluating the conditions for the success of an Agile adoption process. Listen in to learn about the practices Med Marouane applied, and how you can apply them in your company’s Agile transformation.

About Med Marouane Ajraoui

You can link with Med Marouane Ajraoui on LinkedIn.

Med Marouane Ajraoui: Helping a large group of Agile teams learn to collaborate

Med Marouane joined a large organization to work on a big Agile transformation. He was working with more than 10 teams in a difficult environment. The teams had started doing their cross-team collaboration using the Scrum of Scrums pattern, but when Med Marouane attended the Scrum of Scrums, he noticed the teams were merely reporting to each other. And, most importantly, they were sharing excuses for what was not delivered, instead of working together to overcome the challenges they faced.

Featured Book of the Week: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

In Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins, Med Marouanne found practices that helped him as a Scrum Master. The book also helped him reflect on how to shape his personal and work life so that it would be meaningful.

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 Med Marouane Ajraoui

You can link with Med Marouane Ajraoui on LinkedIn.

Med Marouane Ajraoui: Shaping products, by shaping the team’s mood and motivation

When Med Marouane joined this team, he observed that the team was missing daily collaboration and that the culture was to blame others when problems happened. While working with this new team, he recognized that Agile is a different philosophy for software development and that the quality of the work is directly affected by the mood, and motivation of the people working.

In this episode, we refer to Extreme Programming, an Agile approach that had a bias towards great technical practices.

About Med Marouane Ajraoui

You can link with Med Marouane Ajraoui on LinkedIn.