Salvatore Rinaldo Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Salvatore Rinaldo: Helping an absent Product Owner, learn and improve on their role

The Great Product Owner: The Chief Clarity Officer, providing clarity and decisions when needed

Great PO’s are able to influence, without being seen as “the boss”, and they take their work very seriously, even if they don’t take themselves too seriously. As Salvatore says: great PO’s become the Chief Clarity Officers, being present, answering questions, and clarifying what is necessary for the team to function. In this segment, we talk about the “kill criteria”, a concept you can use to help PO’s decide what to remove from the product, a skill that great Product Owners also exhibit.

The Bad Product Owner: How to facilitate a conversation with an absent PO, so they understand the impact they have on the team

This PO was unavailable to the team, and that caused a number of problems for the team. In this segment, we talk about the anti-patterns that show up in the team, when the PO is too busy to be present with the team. Salvatore suggests a few things to try, to help the PO understand their impact on the team, and we refer to the Sprint Checklist, a hands-on guide that we produced to help you facilitate that conversation with the PO.

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 Salvatore Rinaldo

Salvatore is an Agile Coach and Scrum Master based in London. His background is in telecommunications and software engineering. For the past 7 years, Salvatore has been helping organizations leverage Lean, agile, Flow principles and system thinking to achieve better business agility.

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

Salvatore Rinaldo: Helping a team reach self-management, the behaviors to look for

Salvatore focuses on assessing the team’s ability to work, and do what is needed without his presence or support. Salvatore describes for us a number of behaviors he looks for, and the set of skills a self-managing team shows when they are on their way to working independently and without constant support by the Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Celebration Grid, a Management 3.0 tool

The Celebration Grid, a Management 3.0 tool, helps the team think about practices, success, failures and experiments. It helps them get familiar with the process of learning, and accept that sometimes things don’t happen as expected, and that’s ok from a learning, and improvement perspective.

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About Salvatore Rinaldo

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

Salvatore Rinaldo: Taking the lead in an Agile transformation, the Agile Coaching approach

In this episode, we hear the story of a large-scale Agile transformation that started with the business units taking the lead on engaging Agile Coaches. At first, that was enough. However, soon the Agile Coaches realized that their potential impact was being hampered by the lack of understanding of where Agile could help these business units. Salvatore shares the story of how they turned the engagement model around, and started to work together with the business unit leaders, instead of waiting for them to call on the Agile Coaches.

About Salvatore Rinaldo

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

Salvatore Rinaldo: When helping a Scrum team is unable to stick to a Sprint plan, look outside the team

Salvatore was working in a startup with a team that, on paper, was a star team. However, when he started to observe how they worked, he noticed that the team was rarely sticking to what they had planned for the Sprint, and even the PO was at a loss on how to help the team stay on track and focus on what they had planned. In this segment, we refer to Cost of Delay, one of the topics discussed in The Principles of Product Development Flow, and share some tips on how to help a team that is stuck in this situation.

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Elyahu Goldratt

In The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt, Salvatore found the principles behind lean thinking as well as a model that helped him in his work as a Scrum Master. The Goal is a book where Theory Of Constraints is introduced to a business focused audience concerned with improving the performance of their businesses. In this segment, we also refer to The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen, which helped Salvatore understand how the flow of work can be investigated and improved in organizations.

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 Salvatore Rinaldo

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

Salvatore Rinaldo: The 3 critical concerns Scrum Masters must focus on

Salvatore was working in a large-scale transformation, when he and his colleagues started noticing that it was hard to get clarity across many team backlogs, and the planning sessions at scale were not delivering the value they expected. As the team of Scrum Masters started investigating the situation, they discovered that decision making was only happening outside the teams, in management groups or higher. As the Scrum Masters started to talk to managers, Salvatore realized that Scrum Masters were not allowed to influence the system around the teams. This taught Salvatore an important lesson about being able to, and focusing on influencing the system around the teams, not only the teams themselves or the PO. These are the 3 concerns Scrum Masters must pay attention to: the Scrum team, the PO and the system around them!

About Salvatore Rinaldo

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.