Milica Lubinic Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Milica Lubinic: Product Owner Anti-Pattern, The Renamed Project Manager

The Great Product Owner: Balancing Involvement and Authority in Product Ownership

Milica highlights how great Product Owners involve their teams in decision-making while maintaining responsibility for final decisions. She discusses tools for prioritization and the importance of structured approaches to processing team input. Scrum Masters can help PO’s balance ownership and shared decision making with the teams and stakeholders.

The Bad Product Owner: The Renamed Project Manager

Milica discusses a common anti-pattern in Product Ownership: simply renaming project managers as Product Owners, without role clarity or team involvement. She shares tips for distributing cognition between PO’s and their teams. She also emphasizes the importance of clear role definitions and external training for PO’s, stakeholders, and teams.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master

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 Milica Lubinic

Milica is a Mom and Professional and Organizational Coach who is all about dealing with complexity, whether it’s child development or organizational/team/individual transformation and growth. She found her true calling in the world of Agile, Cynefin, and Progressive organizational cultures. Creating safe spaces for innovation, nurturing trust, and sparking engagement is her true passion.

You can link with Milica Lubinic on LinkedIn.

Milica Lubinic: Measuring Psychological Safety in Agile Teams

In this episode, Milica emphasizes the importance of team trust and psychological safety, which are difficult to measure. She suggests using surveys to initiate meaningful conversations and reflections about these critical aspects.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Solution-Focused Retrospectives

Milica introduces her favorite retrospective format, focusing on future goals and leveraging existing strengths. This approach contrasts with the root cause analysis engineers often prefer, offering more actionable solutions and a variety of choices. This approach is based on insights from Solutions-focused Coaching.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Milica Lubinic

You can link with Milica Lubinic on LinkedIn.

Milica Lubinic: Consent-based Decision-making for Agile Organizations

Milica shares insights from her experience in a company undergoing Agile transformation. She highlights the misalignment in decision-making processes and the need for consent-based decision-making. By facilitating retrospectives with leadership and creating guides for new decision-making approaches, she navigated through various challenges.

Want to Improve Your Change Management Results? Discover the Lean Change Management Approach Today!

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

About Milica Lubinic

You can link with Milica Lubinic on LinkedIn.

Milica Lubinic: How to Foster Long-lasting Change for Agile Teams Without Micromanagement

Milica tells the story of a team’s struggle with sustainable change. Despite good intentions, the team lead’s constant reminders about incomplete actions led to a lack of ownership. She emphasizes the importance of developing habits for sustainable improvement and allowing teams to maintain ownership of changes. How can teams foster long-lasting change without micromanagement?

Featured Book of the Week: The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown

Milica discusses Brené Brown’s “The Power of Vulnerability” (audiobook) and how it transformed her understanding of belonging versus fitting in. This distinction helped her foster true belonging in her teams, where members felt safe to be themselves and contribute their best. This book addresses a question that is critical for Scrum Masters: How can we create environments that nurture genuine belonging?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

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 Milica Lubinic

You can link with Milica Lubinic on LinkedIn.

Milica Lubinic: Curiosity Over Assumption, How to Enter a New Agile Team or Company Without Triggering Resistance

In this episode, Milica tells the story of a pivotal failure from the start of her career. She entered a company that, at first sight, already practicing scaled Scrum and aligned with Agile values. Milica was eager to contribute. However, she quickly discovered underlying taboos and a lack of true transparency. Her push for more openness led to unexpected resistance, teaching her the importance of curiosity and avoiding assumptions. Listen to learn how we can navigate the current status of Agile adoption without making premature judgments.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Milica Lubinic

You can link with Milica Lubinic on LinkedIn.