Sadia Dibbens Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Sadia Dibbens: The Product Owner anti-pattern that leads to a breakdown in collaboration

The Great Product Owner: Negotiating priorities and knowing when to say “no”

Great Product Owners are in tune with the team, and their ability to deliver. They help the team by saying “no” to pieces of work that they believe the team is not able to work on at the moment. Another aspect that is critical for PO’s is the ability to negotiate with stakeholders and get to an agreement on priorities and scope. Great PO’s use their people skills to help manage those negotiations and get multiple stakeholders to agree on the right priorities.

The Bad Product Owner: The PO anti-pattern that leads to a breakdown in collaboration

This PO was a micromanager, wanted to be involved in everything and treated the team as “puppets”. When you add to that the lack of ability to prioritize, then the pressure on the team (and the PO) is so large that the PO is never able to step back to let the team take ownership of the work. Look out for these PO anti-patterns, as they usually come with a panicky sense and ultimately a loss of control, and break down in collaboration.

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 Sadia Dibbens

Sadia has a long experience in the payments industry, and loves helping teams and individuals. Personally, she likes keeping fit, being involved within the community, and makes sure to put some time aside for volunteering.

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Sadia Dibbens: Two critical areas that define the work of the Scrum Master

Sadia shares some of the questions that she asks herself to assess her work as a Scrum Master. In that discussion we talk about the focus on delivering running software, as well as the focus on self-organization. Both of these focus areas define the work of the Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective for the Week: The Elephant In The Room

Sadia chooses to highlight what might be, for some of us, a difficult kind of retrospective: to bring up the elephant in the room. We discuss why that is important and share some formats that we can use to help the team discuss the hard topics. In this segment, we talk about the Lego retrospective, as well as the Movie retrospective.

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About Sadia Dibbens

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Sadia Dibbens: Involving, motivating and working with stakeholders to support changes at the team level

Sadia joined this company at the start of their journey towards agility. As she started to understand how the team was organized, she noticed that there were several backlogs that the team needed to pull from. She started working with the stakeholders to establish a single backlog that would act as the “source of truth for the team”. But for that to happen, she needed to learn who the right stakeholders were, and prepare the conversations with those stakeholders. In this episode, we discuss how to map, involve and motivate stakeholders to support the change that the team needs.

About Sadia Dibbens

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Sadia Dibbens: The silent anti-pattern that can destroy Agile teams

When Sadia started working this this team, all looked great. Everybody was doing what they were supposed to. However, nothing was happening. There was no energy in that team, there was no conflict. As Sadia then learned, when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Listen in to learn about the anti-patterns that were silently destroying this team.

Featured Book of the Week: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

In Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson, Sadia found some critical lessons about how to communicate with certain types of people at work and in life in general. This book introduces the DISC model (assigning colors to certain personalities), and helps us understand how different people think differently. And understanding these differences is critical for our job as Scrum Masters.

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 Sadia Dibbens

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.

Sadia Dibbens: Learning how to be patient as a Scrum Master, helping teams in their own learning journey

Sadia joined a new team. It all started off well enough. She focused on observing first, learning what already worked well in the team. She quickly found that some of the ceremonies were not going so well. As she started working on the daily standup practices, she quickly realized that the team was very unhappy with her suggestions. It was then that Sadia recognized her failure (First Attempt In Learning, as she puts it): it is as important to help the team learn how to get there, as it is to do things right.

About Sadia Dibbens

You can link with Sadia Dibbens on LinkedIn and connect with Sadia Dibbens on meetup.com.