Serge Huybrechts Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Serge Huybrechts: Value-centered Product Ownership for Scrum teams

From value-centered product ownership to interruption-based product ownership, two contrasting patterns we must be aware of.

The Great Product Owner: Value-centered, and able to communicate that to the Scrum team

A great PO has the mindset that they are there to understand and serve the customer with the help of the team. The great PO knows the environment (both inside the company and the customer’s environment); knows the customer very well, and most importantly understands how to bring that information to the team. Finally, the great PO has conversations centered around the idea of “value” for the customer and the company.

The Bad Product Owner: Interrupting the team and causing them to fail

This particular PO kept bringing new things to the sprint late in the process: “This has to go in as well” was the key phrase. This PO was heavily influenced by influential salespeople in the organization. All of this led the team to never finish the work they started.

In this segment, we refer to the episodes with John Albrecht, who’s been a guest here on the podcast.

Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Serge Huybrechts

Serge is a Scrum Master, Agile coach, and trainer with a long background in IT Service Management. He considers himself a guide for continuous improvement where Agile, Scrum, and Kanban are the vehicles. Serge loves Agile because of its focus on people and learning resonates with him.

He also calls himself a bulimic reader and very passionate about music.

You can link with Serge Huybrechts on LinkedIn.

Serge Huybrechts: “Start with the end in mind”, a Scrum Master mantra

Serge invites us to define at first what we want to see as the outcome of our work. With this “end” in mind, he suggests we are then ready to start measuring the impact of our work. As the team progresses towards that goal, we celebrate the small successes and focus on enabling the growth of the team.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The OSKAR method

The OSKAR coaching model is a solution-focused coaching approach that we can use when setting up our retrospectives. It’s a method that starts by helping the team focus on the outcome, the result of their improvement ideas, and walks through what they need to put in place to reach that outcome. Starting with the outcome or end-result as the goal for the team.

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About Serge Huybrechts

He also calls himself a bulimic reader and very passionate about music.

You can link with Serge Huybrechts on LinkedIn.

Serge Huybrechts: Addressing emotional blockers in a DevOps transformation

Working in a bank, trying to help a team adopt the DevOps approach, Serge noticed that the people in the team were worried about how the new way of working would affect their position in the company. This taught Serge an important lesson: when in a change process, we need to address topics and issues that are not related to the object of the change but affect how people perceive and may reject the change process.

In this episode, we refer to the ADKAR change framework.

About Serge Huybrechts

He also calls himself a bulimic reader and very passionate about music.

You can link with Serge Huybrechts on LinkedIn.

Serge Huybrechts: How to overcome “firefighting” and help Scrum teams learn to collaborate

This particular manager was a master “firefighter”. Perhaps because of that, the manager had been promoted to that position. But there’s a problem! When the manager is a firefighter, the team starts to mimic that behavior and starts to focus on finding, and fighting fires, instead of building a reliable and replicable approach to work. In this episode, we explore the many anti-patterns that emerge when the team starts copying the manager’s behavior.

Featured Book of the Week: Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. By Brené Brown

In Dare to Lead by Brené Brown, Serge learned some important lessons that have helped him as a Scrum Master. He understood that leadership is a critical aspect for Scrum Masters, as well as how to act on that leadership requirement for Scrum Masters. In this segment, we also refer to Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, a book that helped Serge look at other’s actions from the “good intentions” perspective, something that he tries to apply in his work as Scrum Master.

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 Serge Huybrechts

He also calls himself a bulimic reader and very passionate about music.

You can link with Serge Huybrechts on LinkedIn.

Serge Huybrechts: The right way to bring up blockers and problems to leadership

When Scrum Masters find blockers or problems in teams, and even in organizations, they need to think what’s the right approach to share those insights. The approach we select must be fit to the organization and the prevailing culture. In this story, we hear how Serge found a “tabu” that, when brought up, caused the organization to block it, and effectively invalidate the work Serge had done.

About Serge Huybrechts

He also calls himself a bulimic reader and very passionate about music.

You can link with Serge Huybrechts on LinkedIn.