Robbie Ross: The many demands on the Scrum Product Owner role

The Great Product Owner: Curiosity, dedication and Vision, critical skills for great Scrum PO’s

Great Product Owners play a pivotal role in the success of Scrum teams, they define the Vision, and work to anticipate end user needs. But to achieve that, they – as Robbie puts it – “do all kinds of small things along the way”. In this episode, we discuss how this PO was able to put into practice some specific techniques that helped them define what needed to be done, while keeping a great relationship with the stakeholders, and keeping the trust by the team.

The Bad Product Owner: The many demands on the Scrum Product Owner role

The Product Owner is a very demanding role, Robbie describes how this aspect is often misunderstood by people in the role. The demands of the PO role go far beyond the context of the product itself, and include many demands on the human relations and collaboration skills for the Product Owner.

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 Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

Robbie Ross: Scrum Master tips for hosting an Agile Retrospective outdoors

Robbie invites us to consider the Scrum Master engagement as a game of chess. The Scrum Guide provides the rules, but the way you play the game is different every time. You learn from the past, but constantly adapt to what is there at the moment. He suggests we consider “relentless improvement” as the core focus of our reflection practice.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Tips for hosting an Agile Retrospective outdoors

As we publish this episode, the heat-wave in the northern hemisphere is subsiding, and it might even be a good idea to visit the great outdoors for that important conversation with the team. Robbie describes for us an Agile Retrospective that happened outside the office, in a park near by. In this episode, we explore why that might be a good idea, and how to prepare for acing the facilitation when the office material is not readily available.

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About Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

Robbie Ross: How to use the three amigos in Agile and Scrum to help teams handle complexity

Robbie was working with a large organization, and helping a team. But he quickly noticed that there was a wider, systemic impact for the change they were asked to do. When working with the team, he suggested that they consider the stories in a “3 amigos” session before Sprint Planning. When this new practice was adopted, it was clear that a simple change like adopting the “3 amigos session” had had a large impact on the team, and the surrounding environment. Listen in, to learn how the “3 amigos” session can help your team collaborate, and define better stories. Learn more about the 3 amigos meeting from Steve Thomas and the 3 amigos session strategy by George Dinwiddie, who were some of the first to propose the practice in the agile community.

About Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

Robbie Ross: Agile collaboration gone wrong, even with good intentions by the Scrum Master

Robbie was new to the Scrum Master role at this time. As many of us do, he was focusing on the stakeholders, and what they were asking from him, and the team. When an urgent situation came up, he accepted it immediately and canceled all the Sprint ceremonies, to let the team focus on the urgent request that had come up. Quickly, the team went in their own different ways, and Robbie noticed that some team members were working on similar topics, without knowing of each other’s work. But there was more to come! Listen in, to learn what anti-patterns are likely to emerge when the team stops with the Scrum ceremonies, and focuses on their own individual work.

About Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

Robbie Ross: The anti-patterns in Scrum teams that focus on velocity

Very often teams compare themselves to other teams. Even when successful, the comparison is inevitable, and sometimes even pushed/fostered by stakeholders. Robbie shares a story of a team that got stuck in the comparison of velocity with another team. And even if the team was working great, they were still trying to “achieve” the same number of story points that the other team was doing. Even when asked not to focus on the number, the team worked on getting their velocity higher, and higher, but not because they were working better, just because they were assigning more story points to the same work! In this episode, we discuss this and other anti-patterns that emerge when teams start focusing on the velocity, rather than the impact of the work they have ahead.

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,  by Sutherland Robbie found an inspiring book that helped him find the Scrum Master career. He describes the book as filled with solutions and valuable even for people with significant experience!

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 Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

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Down-to-earth, hard-earned Scrum Masters lessons and the Tips from the Trenches e-book table of contents, delivered by email
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
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Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
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Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works
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Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works