Nousheen Manzoor Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Nousheen Manzoor: The many anti-patterns that emerge when the Scrum Product Owner does not understand their role

The Great Product Owner: The balance of skills that enables delivery of customer value!

A great Product Owner finds a balance between helping, and attending to the customer needs, and what the team needs to succeed. Great Product Owners also build relationships with the team and their stakeholders. Even if a great PO might not be technical, they are able to create a common language with the team, so that both can inform each other and come to decisions that help the team succeed in the ultimate goal of delivering customer value!

The Bad Product Owner: The many anti-patterns that emerge when the PO does not understand their role

In this segment, we discuss several Product Owner anti-patterns. We start with the problem that many people in the role don’t have a deep enough understanding of the role, and it’s expectations, even if they are quite clearly defined in the Scrum Guide. From that lack of understanding many patterns can emerge, from not being able to contain/manage the scope to lack of understanding that the PO is there to help the team succeed, and not to be a “demanding tyrant customer” to the team! Listen in to learn about some of the critical anti-patterns that emerge when people don’t understand the PO role sufficiently well.

In this segment, we refer to the Coach Your PO e-course, which outlines some of the aspects to cover with PO’s and how to do it.

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 Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.

Nousheen Manzoor: Reflecting on success for a Scrum Master, without getting stuck on velocity as a metric

Velocity can be a tempting metric for Scrum Masters to follow, but that’s no measure of success as Nousheen reminds us. In this segment, we talk about how important it is to create an environment where the team itself can work on improving their performance, and how to include 3rd party (e.g. a client) feedback in your own assessment as a Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The WADE Matrix, a great retrospective for the end of a tough project

In this segment, we talk about the WADE Matrix retrospective format, which can be used as an in depth reflection and a closure technique for a project that just ended. In this segment, we also talk about some techniques you can use to help a team create a lot of ideas in a retrospective, even if they are usually silent.

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 Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.

Nousheen Manzoor: Applying change management in a client organization

Nousheen was working with a team at the client’s site. Based on what the client wanted to achieve, they suggested that the client change their processes, and instead of working with a collection of Excel spreadsheets, the team suggestd the client use JIRA, and a process defined in JIRA instead. As soon as they presented their ideas, Nousheen sensed massive resistance from the client. This was a clear sign that a new approach to the change was required. Listen in to learn about the approaches that Nousheen and the team put in place to help the client, and get the client onboard.

In this episode, we refer to the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little.

About Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.

Nousheen Manzoor: Helping an Agile team recover from de-motivation and resignation in a death march project

Nousheen started working with this team in the middle of the project. At the time, the team had one month to go live. However, Nousheen noticed that the team was demotivated, and there was a lot of blaming behavior happening in the team meetings. In this episode, we discuss how teams can sometimes push themselves beyond what’s acceptable, and forget about self-care and sustainability.

In this segment we talk about the Three Amigos meeting, a method to help teams prepare the requirements/User Stories in time, and with the right perspectives.

Featured Book of the Week: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

The book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer tells the story of how very experienced people can fail. The book explores the disaster that occurred in Mount Everest on 10–11 May 1996, and how good intentions, and the desire to “achieve the summit” (literally) created a complex set of factors that ultimately led great people to make some very bad decisions. It’s a book filled with lessons for Scrum Masters, even those that work with great teams!

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 Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.

Nousheen Manzoor: A death march project, from a Scrum Master perspective

In this project, there were several teams working on different aspects of the project: UI, Data, etc. The Project Manager pushed the different teams to “deliver”, even if that was done at the expense of quality. Nousheen, wanting to help, started to push the team as well, leaving some of the critical aspects of being a Scrum Master behind. Listen in to learn how the “push to deliver” created a negative spiral for the project, and learn some of the key lessons Nousheen got from that project.

About Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.