Nilesh Makan Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Nilesh Makan: Looking at the Product Owner role as a leadership role in Scrum

The Great Product Owner: The PO as a leader

A great PO is also a great leader. As Nilesh puts it, it’s not possible to disconnect leadership from the role of the PO, because that role is all about creating alignment, and autonomy in the team.

In this segment, we refer to the book: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The Bad Product Owner: The PO that had multiple responsibilities

In this segment, we talk about a Product Owner that was not able to shield the team from the interference by external stakeholders, and what are the consequences we can expect from that anti-pattern. We also talk about how, sharing the PO role with other responsibilities can create other anti-patterns.

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 Nilesh Makan

Nilesh is the founding Director at Padawan Consulting, where the vision is to build transformed businesses through transformed people. He works with companies in the arena of Digital Transformation, considering how to leverage people, process and technology to design and build innovative solutions.

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Nilesh Makan: Learning to listen to, and work with emotions in an Agile team

What is the team happiness in your team? Nilesh suggests that, even if we tend to ignore it, happiness is a critical aspect of creating a well functioning and productive team. He suggests we start by understanding where the team members are regarding different aspects, even if we need to talk about emotions. Nilesh shares a great tip on how to tackle emotions productively in your team.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start with the Why/Intent for the retrospective!

When preparing a retrospective, we are reminded by Nilesh that we should focus on the “intent” of the retro. What are we trying to achieve with that ceremony, in “this” sprint? Nilesh also prefers formats that are designed to focus on enabling conversations and dialogue between team members.

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About Nilesh Makan

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Nilesh Makan: The future of Change Management in Agile organizations (warning: advanced topics!)

Often we refer to Change “management”, however, managing change in practice is very difficult. When we think of “change” as a normal path of evolution, however, things change. The metaphor helps us discover new approaches and possibilities. In this episode, we explore how thinking about change as an evolution changes the work we do as Scrum Masters and change agents.

In this segment we talk about the books Theory U by C. Otto Scharmer, Knowledge for Action by Argyris; and we refer to Systems Thinking and some of the thinkers that influenced the Agile movement: Ari-Pekka Skarp, Esko Kilpi, Ralph Stacey.

About Nilesh Makan

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Nilesh Makan: Why a working team that loses their Vision is not a team anymore

Nilesh was working with a recently formed “centre of excellence” team. Their goal was to drive agility across the organization. However, the team lead fell ill, and the team found itself without anyone else to report up to, with no clear leadership and inevitably a new leader was assigned to that team. That new leaders, however, changed the Vision of the team. The new Vision was dictated to the team, and the team members didn’t feel anymore that the Vision reflected why they had signed up to the team. This taught Nilesh a very important lesson that we explore with the example of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

In this segment, we discuss the role of shared Vision in a team, and why that matters.

Featured Book of the Week: Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella

In Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Nilesh found a good example of what it is to imagine a change from a monolithic company to an agile, transformed company. He also discovered a different type of leadership that resonated: empathetic leadership. Finally he got a reminder of how important it is to find meaning in the work we do.

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 Nilesh Makan

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.

Nilesh Makan: Teaching Scrum teams how to talk about, and learn from failure

Nielsh works with a startup that is creating technology to help people with little or no access to legal services. As important as this work is, the team is faced with a dilemma: even if the technology is needed, why don’t we see the adoption we expected to see? Together with Nilesh, we explore the need to create a language for the team so that they can talk about what is not working, and therefore take ownership of solving the adoption problem.

About Nilesh Makan

You can link with Nilesh Makan on LinkedIn and connect with Nilesh Makan on Twitter.