Ryan Brook Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Ryan Brook: The Product Owner that helped, and asked for help!

Perhaps the most common anti-pattern in the PO role, is the “no real PO” anti-pattern. Either because of their absence, or because the organization downplays that role. In contrast, great PO’s show up everyday, and make sure they help the team, and ask for help from the team.

The Great Product Owner: The PO that helped, and asked for help!

For Mandy, the PO that Ryan introduces, nothing was too much trouble. She was focused on helping the team succeed. When interacting with the team, she made sure the team had everything they needed to succeed. On the other hand, she was also very clear about what she wanted the team to help her achieve, and the problems they needed to help solve. In this episode, we discuss how the PO role is also a servant leader role.

The Bad Product Owner: The “no real PO” anti-pattern

The Product Owner “accountability” is very powerful, but many organizations think they can live without. The PO role is perhaps one of the linchpin roles in Scrum, but yet ignored or downplayed by many. In this episode we discuss why that is, and some of the least productive stances that people take when playing that role.

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 Ryan Brook

Ryan is a practicing Agile Coach and Scrum Master based in the UK. He is also the co-creator of Scrum Lake, a safe community of practice focused on story telling and deep exploration with Scrum Masters from around the World. He holds both the PSM III and PSPO III and is a candidate Professional Scrum Trainer for scrum.org.

You can link with Ryan Brook on LinkedIn. Or check Ryan’s website at optilearn.co.uk.

Ryan Brook: Measuring Scrum Master success through product and team success

Happiness and enjoyment are two of the metrics that Ryan focuses on to help his teams grow and evaluate his own success as a Scrum Master. We discuss Jason Little’s NPS for the team exercise that helps both the team and the Scrum Master evaluate their success. Ryan also suggests to look at metrics over time, and not only as a single number.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Using “fun” as a hook for great retrospectives

Ryan is a fan of gamification in Agile retrospectives. He suggests we use the “fun” side of the games we bring as a way to motivate team members to actively participate in the retrospective. He then explains how he focuses the retrospectives on feelings, rather than facts as a way to trigger insightful conversations.

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 Ryan Brook

You can link with Ryan Brook on LinkedIn. Or check Ryan’s website at optilearn.co.uk.

Ryan Brook: Large scale Scrum adoption process

This organization wanted to adopt LeSS, the Large Scale Scrum Framework. However, the leadership team had first tried to “push” the change through. Unsurprisingly, that did not go as expected, so they took a different approach. They got all the teams together, explained their vision and worked with the Scrum Masters to facilitate the change they were looking for.

Listen in to learn how Ryan and his colleagues organized the new change process.

In this episode, we refer to Lean Change Management, and David Marquet’s work (David Marquet was a previous guest on the podcast).

About Ryan Brook

You can link with Ryan Brook on LinkedIn. Or check Ryan’s website at optilearn.co.uk.

Ryan Brook: Are you letting bad behavior grow in your team? A warning for Scrum Masters

Ryan was working with a team that had responsibility over 6 different products. The team was underwater and overwhelmed by all the work that was coming at them. As Ryan describes it there was a Zebra and a Hippo in the team (see Animals of Product Management), which made the team afraid of making decisions and move forward. This segment ends with a warning for Scrum Masters: “are you letting the bad behavior grow in your team?”

Featured Book for the Week: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Coaching by Agile42 consulting

Ryan was offered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Coaching by a mentor of his at the time. The book helped him to go beyond the facilitation skills he already had, and focus on skills like Active Listening, and understanding the implications from working in the Complex Domain. That book was a lesson on truly focusing on being empirical in his work.

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 Ryan Brook

You can link with Ryan Brook on LinkedIn. Or check Ryan’s website at optilearn.co.uk.

Ryan Brook: How to NOT change a Scrum team, a Scrum Master warning

Ryan has a background as a school teacher. And even if he did not have a long background in the IT space, he was able to transform his teaching and facilitation skills into a strength in his Scrum Master role. His failure story takes us to a high-pressure environment where Ryan came in as a “turn around” Scrum Master. We discuss what happens when we want the team to improve, despite the team’s own wishes. Ryan shares some critical tips for Scrum Masters that are brought into a team “to change them”.

About Ryan Brook

You can link with Ryan Brook on LinkedIn. Or check Ryan’s website at optilearn.co.uk.