Philip Rogers Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Philip Rogers: Shared ownership in the Scrum Product Backlog

In this episode, we talk about how an empathic Product Owner can make a big difference when working with Scrum teams. We also discuss how Product Backlogs are really owned by the PO and the team, not only the PO.

The Great Product Owner: Empathy, and handling pressure, key PO skills

A team will quickly notice if the Product Owner has empathy, which is a critical asset for Product Owners that want to succeed. A great PO will also know how to communicate with the team, so that they can work on handling the inevitable delivery pressure that will affect both the team and the Product Owner. Finally, we discuss how great Product Owners are proactive about involving stakeholders.

In this episode, we talk about the #NoEstimates approach to determining release dates (We’ve also discuss the #NoEstimates ideas in these episodes).

The Bad Product Owner: Sharing the ownership of the backlog

Philip shares with us why he thinks that there is widespread confusion about the Product Owner role. Many think that it is only the Product Owner that writes / maintains the backlog. However, really great teams understand that the PO is only one of the people that ensures the backlog is ready and up to the necessary level for the team. We also discuss what we can do, as Scrum Masters, to help teams and Product Owners own the backlog together. In this episode, we also talk about the idea of the “3 amigos” session to refine product backlog items (we’ve covered the 3 amigos sessions and approach in these episodes).

Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Philip Rogers

Phil is a father of four children and a volunteer paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He is also an “agile whisperer” (coach) who has worked with scores of teams in the spirit of continuous learning, continuous improvement, and simply finding creative ways to collaborate and have fun in the workplace.

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.

Philip Rogers: How to measure Scrum team happiness and team satisfaction

When we try to assess our impact and success as Scrum Masters, we can look at team happiness and satisfaction. Measuring those will help us assess our impact, and there are simple ways to do it. In this episode, we talk about the Niko Niko Calendar (the Niko Niko Calendar has been previously discussed also in other episodes) and the ideas from the Spotify Health Check approach.

Featured Retrospective From for the Week: Pick Discussion Questions

Philip shares with us a format that can be set up relatively quickly and focuses on helping the team get started with a productive discussion on some of the most pressing topics for them. Philip shares some of the questions he uses when starting this kind of retrospective, and suggests we use a Futurespective to help teams gain fresh insights on their approach to work.

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About Philip Rogers

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.

Philip Rogers: Aligning Agile teams despite resistance to change from leadership

Philip was working with a health care organization, and discovered that they had not yet had help from other agile coaches. As he started working with teams, he discovered that one of the people who brought him in, was not all that positive on the change Philip had been hired to do.

This created confusion, and conflict. So Philip started working on how to align teams quickly and developed a “rapid alignment framework” using techniques like Inception from the book The Agile Samurai by Rasmusson.

In this episode, we also discuss Story Mapping and the Scrum Master playbook by Philip.

About Philip Rogers

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.

Philip Rogers: Team agreements to help Scrum teams thrive despite organizational constraints

Philip was working in an organization that was undergoing an Agile transformation. As they started to work with a few teams, they observed that the teams were quite large, and had a trade union representative. This meant that the teams were heavily silo-ed, with testers only doing testing, developers only programming, etc. Because of this, the teams could not be made smaller. In this episode, we discuss how we can help teams improve, even when they are stuck with their current structure. Philip shares the Team Canvas, to help facilitate the definition of working agreements.

Featured Book of the Week: Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen

In Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Philip found a book that helped him learn how to run effective retrospectives and become a retrospective specialist. As he practices his approaches to retrospectives, Philip ended up creating a Trello Board with many retrospective formats to serve as inspiration and help other Scrum Masters host great retrospectives. You can check out Philip’s retrospective Trello Board here.

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 Philip Rogers

Phil, is a father of four children and volunteer paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He is also an “agile whisperer” (coach) who has worked with scores of teams in the spirit of continuous learning, continuous improvement, and simply finding creative ways to collaborate and have fun in the workplace.

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.

Philip Rogers: Helping build a global software development operation with Agile teams

Philip was helping an organization setup an offshore operation by helping a team startup. That caused communication problems as the times the teams could be at work did not have sufficient overlap. But there were many other anti-patterns that came from having 2 teams on opposite sides of the planet.

In this episode, we talk about how to setup a global software development operation, and share some of the practices that can help, even when teams are globally distributed.

About Philip Rogers

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.