productivity Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Caterina Palmiotto: Address conflicts in your Agile Team, or else…

In this segment, Caterina Palmiotto discusses the story of a software development team that was self-destructing due to conflicts and a blame culture. When Caterina joined the team, she heard blame, resentment, and conflicts among the developers. The team struggled to resolve bugs, and one developer was causing the majority of the conflicts. Caterina tried to address the conflicts and had some success, but it took a difficult decision to remove the person causing the conflicts for the team to work better. Caterina emphasizes the importance of addressing conflicts and the impact of culture on the success of a team.

Featured Book of the Week: Legacy, by James Kerr

In this segment, Caterina Palmiotto discusses the book Legacy by James Kerr, which is a collection of leadership stories about the All Blacks rugby team from New Zealand. As a scrum master, Caterina noticed similarities in leadership between sports and software development. The book connected all the dots in her mind and emphasized the importance of a strong team culture. According to Caterina, if you focus on the team, the results will follow. The book highlights the idea that strong leadership is essential to building a strong team culture.

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 Caterina Palmiotto

Caterina started as a software developer but soon realized that she was passionate about team dynamics and communication, and embraced agility from the moment she saw it.

Caterina believes a team can be more than the sum of its parts and that growing the right culture is essential. When people are surrounded by good examples they will be motivated to do their best. So the first step is doing your best to be a good example of the culture you want to nurture.

You can link with Caterina Palmiotto on LinkedIn.

Jurgen Appelo: Being a Product Owner for your own business, the challenges

This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work.

Jurgen shares his own experience as a product developer (Mindsettlers), and the critical lessons he’s learned as a Product Owner for his own business.
We discuss how hard it is to define the real problem, as seen by our customers, and the market at large.

In this episode, we refer to Kathy Sierra and her idea of “make your users awesome”, we refer to the Jobs To Be Done Framework, and the work by Clayton Christensen, and discuss the ideas in the book Team Topologies which has been featured here on the podcast.

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 Jurgen Appelo

Jurgen Appelo is an entrepreneur, an author, and keynote speaker who applies Agile to his life and his businesses. He’s also prolific writer on all topics business and agile. He wrote Management 3.0, How to Change the World, Managing for Happiness and his latest book about entrepreneurship and product development: Startup, Scale up, Screw up.

You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

Jurgen Appelo: The front-to-back model and other novel organization models for Agile in the real world

This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work. In this episode, we discuss organization design, an aspect that scaling frameworks enforce without explaining or preparing the organizations that adopt them for what that means. Jurgen shares the end-to-end model of organization design, and what he thinks will be the winning model of organizational design in the future.

In this episode, we refer to Anton Zotin’s episodes a guest that talks about how teams are formed based on company goals, the book Organization Design: Simplifying complex systems by Nicolay Worren, the book Networked, Scaled, and Agile: A Design Strategy for Complex Organizations by Amy Kates et al., the front-to-back model, and the concept of dual operating system.

About Jurgen Appelo

You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

Jurgen Appelo: Productivity should not be the only focus of Scaling frameworks, the missing ingredient

This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work.In this episode we talk about productivity in teams and organizations. Jurgen shares with us how he sees the current productivity paradigm, and what the productivity paradigms are missing: community. We explore why community, not only productivity, should be the focus of Agile and the frameworks around Agile adoption.

In this episode we refer to The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, Chris Smith from Redgate Software, the book Shift from Product to People by Pete Oliver-Krueger, and Michael Dougherty, LeSS and SAFe, which have both been covered here on the podcast with their respective creators: Bas Vodde and Dean Leffingwell.

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 Jurgen Appelo

You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

BONUS: Busting the “tech genius” myth with Shawn Livermore

Shawn Livermore is the author of Average Joe: Be the Silicon Valley Tech Genius (Amazon direct link). In that book, Shawn describes how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more.

However, the way those products were created, was not as you expect it. Shawn shares what he learned about how the people behind acclaimed products work. Based on that he created the “Slow Create Framework”, a method that can help anyone apply what the “Silicon Valley Tech Geniuses” apply to create the products you love and use.

What science says about creativity

Unlike many expect, what we learn when we research creativity is that a few recipes actually help greatly with the creative output. Many of these recipes are so simple that anyone can apply them. However, we are regularly bombarded with the wrong impression. Shawn describes how creating slack time, and “slowing down” are creativity boosters.

Instead of letting their calendars take over their time, the Silicon Valley “tech geniuses”, block out time to think and develop their ideas.

Listen in to learn more about the Slow Create Framework and Shawn’s book, where he describes the recipes that can help anyone perform like a tech genius!

About Shawn Livermore

Shawn Livermore is a tech startup founder, entrepreneur, and technology consultant for over 20 years. After raising investment capital for his startups 6 times, Shawn began to look beyond the code to see the bigger picture: The systems, patterns, and models of thinking that most deserve our attention. Instead of hype and hustle, Shawn focuses on tangible, factual, and replicable bits to help people think, speak, and create like a tech genius.

You can link with Shawn Livermore on LinkedIn and connect with Shawn Livermore on Twitter.

You can learn more about Shawn Livermore’s work at his website.