Pratik Dahule Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Pratik Dahule: How to help a Product Owner bring the right amount of work to a Scrum team

The Great Product Owner: Present and thorough, two great PO qualities

This Product Owner had the customer and end users in mind, and was very thorough in their preparation of the stories. The PO was present at all times and helped the team during refinement. This helped the team understand the scope, and break down enough the stories and epics they had to work on.

The Bad Product Owner: How to help a PO bring the right amount of work to a team

When Product Owners force teams to take on more work, that’s never a good sign. And this PO was no exception to that rule. Additionally, the PO seemed unaware of how much they had already asked the team to take on, leading the team to burn out, and to have quality problems. Pratik understood that this anti-pattern had to stop, and he explains how he helped the PO and the stakeholders to find a new way of working with the team. In this segment, we also refer to User Story Mapping, a technique all Scrum Masters should bring to their work!

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 Pratik Dahule

Pratik is an Agile Project Manager and Agile enthusiast working in the USA. He leads teams and creates a culture of lifelong learning, constant collaboration and continuous improvement. Pratik has 12 years of experience and is passionate about helping teams in their agile transformation. Outside of work, he has a blogging site ClassactLifestyle.com where he shares insights on books and exotic places to travel.

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.

Pratik Dahule: Helping teams define their purpose, a step towards Scrum Master success

Pratik suggests that, for us to achieve success in our role as Scrum Masters, we must focus on a single purpose. As Scrum Masters, we can help the teams we work with understand that, and define their own purpose. Pratik also suggests a few questions that we can use to help understand and define that purpose for the team.

In this segment we refer to Vince Lombardi, an American Football coach, and the lessons we can take from his approach to the game.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Exercises to improve the team’s emotional intelligence

In this segment, we start by talking about Emotional Intelligence, as one of the skills that Scrum Masters must bring to the Agile Retrospectives they host, but also help their teams understand. We discuss the Hot Air Balloon retrospective format and the Peaks and Valleys Timeline exercise using the Happiness gradient.

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 Pratik Dahule

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.

Pratik Dahule: Helping a waterfall team move to Scrum with the Kotter change model

As Geoff Watts (a previous guest on the podcast) puts it: “a good scrum master helps a scrum team survive, a great scrum master helps to change the organization culture to help the team thrive.” Pratik was working with a Scrum team that needed to interact with another department, where they still used waterfall. Working with that waterfall team, Pratik helped them move to Agile and Scrum following the Kotter change model, which he explains in this episode.

About Pratik Dahule

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.

Pratik Dahule: Helping an Agile team that is stuck in the skill silo, which created chaos at the end of the sprint

Often, developers want to work on their stories until the last day of the sprint. However, that leads to many problems which we explore in this episode. We learn the story of a team that was clearly divided in skill silos, which led to a lot of chaos at the end of the sprint. When faced with this tricky situation, Pratik started to help the team understand the anti-pattern they were in, and using tools like cause-and-effect diagrams (aka Ishikawa Diagrams), he helped the team understand and get out of this anti-pattern.

Featured Book of the Week: Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

In Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, Pratik learned an approach that helps him make daily choices and be consistent in applying what he’s learned in his career. This approach has helped him accept that we must do things over and over again, if we aim to succeed in being a great Scrum Master and other areas of life.

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 Pratik Dahule

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.

Pratik Dahule: Learning to think in questions, a critical skill for Scrum Masters

When Pratik started, he tried to help the teams by giving direct feedback during the standups. When questions would come up, he’d offer an answer. But this eagerness to help, actually created a problem for the team, and for Pratik himself. Pratik asked for help from a coach who helped him understand that the team needs to have the space to struggle, and find their own answers. Only then can the team “own” their process, and way of working. We discuss how important it is for Scrum Masters to learn to think in questions, not answers!

In this segment, we discuss active listening, a skill all Scrum Masters must learn. We also discuss “powerful questions”, a recurring topic on the podcast.

About Pratik Dahule

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.