Shoaib Naik Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Shoaib Naik: When Product Owners don’t understand the team’s work, they actively destroy it!

The Great Product Owner: The PO that helped the Scrum Master improve their game!

A great Product Owner is able to balance the stakeholder expectations and the team expectations. In this episode, we also discuss how the Product Owner can help the Scrum Master in their job, by helping the Scrum Master step back when necessary, and help manage the pressure put on the team. Finally, we talk about how great Product Owners are able to listen to the team.

The Bad Product Owner: When PO’s don’t understand the team’s work, they actively destroy it!

One of the aspects that make Product Owners negatively affect the team, is their inability to understand the importance of some aspects of the team’s work. When the PO does not understand why, and how release planning helps the team, they might be tempted to skip that practice, or shortchange it, leading to problems for the team, and ultimately conflicts. In this episode, we explore how bad Product Owners slowly undermine the team, especially when they don’t speak up! Helping the team speak up, and working through that with the Product Owner are key responsibilities for the Scrum Master!

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 Shoaib Naik

Shoaib is a Scrum Master with over 11 years in Software development with experience in different roles, from IT Account Manager, Product Manager to Project Manager in product as well services-based companies.

You can link with Shoaib Naik on LinkedIn, and follow Shoaib Naik’s blog.

Shoaib Naik: The Appreciation retrospective, a great way to grow a team after a difficult project

Shoaib took some time to learn to define success. He was inspired by Geoff Watts book “Scrum Mastery”, and started working on what success meant for him. With the idea that a great Scrum Master will, over time, become redundant, he explored the different lessons in the book, and started defining some questions he could use for his own reflection.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Appreciation Retrospective

After working for a while on the project, the team members spent a lot of time, and many retrospectives discussing problems and challenges. When that happens, there’s tension. The Appreciation retrospective is one way to create space for being grateful to each other for the help, and the solutions team members were able to come up with during the project. In the past, we’ve covered a similar format with the name: The Appreciation Shower Retrospective.

In this episode, we also refer to the Build Your Own Scrum Master retro.

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About Shoaib Naik

You can link with Shoaib Naik on LinkedIn, and follow Shoaib Naik’s blog.

Shoaib Naik: How to introduce Agile and Scrum to a team that thought Waterfall was the only possible process for their work!

Shoaib was both the project manager and the scrum master for this project. When the project started, Waterfall was the overall process framework the teams were using, and they thought it was the most adequate process because they were installing Data Centers from scratch. However, Shoaib was not convinced, and helped the teams understand the differences between Scrum and Waterfall. Listen in to learn how Shoaib introduced Agile and Scrum to a team that thought Waterfall was the only possible process for their work!

About Shoaib Naik

You can link with Shoaib Naik on LinkedIn, and follow Shoaib Naik’s blog.

Shoaib Naik: Making the impossible happen as a Scrum Masters, lessons from mountaineering

The team had finished their first 3 sprints, but failed to deliver on the sprint goal for any of those sprints. The team believed that the lack of understanding of their velocity (aka capacity), was the reason for their failure. However, the problem lied somewhere else! Listen in, to learn what Shoaib helped the team understand, and ultimately overcome. A very common anti-pattern in Agile teams!

Featured Book of the Week: Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks ― My Life In The Death Zone by Nimsdai Purja

In Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks by Nimsdai Purja, Shoaib found a reminder that what seems impossible for some, is very possible for others. In that book, he learned about Nismdai’s approach to put together a mountaineering project that seemed impossible for others. But he thought otherwise, starting with naming the project: Project Possible! We, as Scrum Masters, also face situations that others might think are impossible, but we need to make them happen!

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 Shoaib Naik

You can link with Shoaib Naik on LinkedIn, and follow Shoaib Naik’s blog.

Shoaib Naik: The steps young Scrum Masters take when learning the role, and which ones to avoid!

Failures help us stay grounded, they are reminders that reality isn’t always as we expect it to be. And these failures make us better Scrum Masters. In this episode, we talk about the learning journey for a young Scrum Master, and how Shoaib slowly climbed the learning curve, and what were the steps he took. Learning from other’s stories is a shortcut we can take in our own learning journey, and Shoaib’s story is a great example of that.

About Shoaib Naik

You can link with Shoaib Naik on LinkedIn, and follow Shoaib Naik’s blog.