speedboat retrospective Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Sofi Simonyan: Growing Healthy Agile Teams with a Simple Scrum Master Success Assessment

In this segment, Sofi highlights how important it is to pay attention to moments when team members independently adhere to agreements, prioritize customer needs, and suggest improvements. She shares a KPI framework developed to measure Scrum Master effectiveness through team feedback, emphasizing the value of transparency and personal development.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Speedcar Retrospective

Sofi’s favorite retrospective format, The Speedcar Retrospective (similar to the speedboat retro), uses a simple yet effective race car image to identify what slows the team down and what drives them forward. She emphasizes the importance of varying retro formats and adapting them to the team’s needs, making retrospectives engaging and insightful.

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About Sofi Simonyan

Sofi is a Scrum Master with 6 years of experience in tech startups and a diverse work background. Passionate about people, her mission is to build teams where active listening and growth mindset are essential values. Currently on maternity leave, Sofi practices agility in a completely different dimension.

You can link with Sofi Simonyan on LinkedIn and connect with Sofi Simonyan on Twitter.

Chris Garvey: Crafting a Culture of Love for Work, The Real Challenge for Real Agile Leaders

Chris delves into his perspective on success for Scrum Masters, drawing inspiration from a Simon Sinek story about hotel experiences. He aspires to help team members genuinely love their jobs. Success, for Chris, hinges on trust among team members and leaders, enabling them to excel and voice concerns. He emphasizes the transition from stressing about delivery to focusing on high performance. Ownership of work methods and problem-solving is key, as is the ability to step back under pressure. Chris also advocates for creating a safe space to foster open communication within the team.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Visualizing Progress with the Speedboat Retrospective

Chris discusses his favored retrospective format, the “Speedboat.” He appreciates its visual nature and the ease with which participants grasp it. Using a standard laminated print, he guides teams to imagine their ideal day together. This imaginative exercise helps unlock insights for improvement and encourages team cohesion through the use of metaphor.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

About Chris Garvey

Chris is passionate about people, and creating empowering spaces where people can thrive. He is a coach at heart having been a Life Coach before becoming an Agile Coach. For close to 10 years he has been working in the agile space as a Scrum Master, then Agile Coach, then trainer, and now as an Enterprise Agile Coach.

You can link with Chris Garvey on LinkedIn.

Pino Decandia: Why do Scrum teams cancel Scrum meetings, and other reflections on success for Scrum Masters

When a Scrum Master leaves a team, and the team starts canceling all the Scrum ceremonies to “make space for work” in the calendar, that’s a critical sign that something was off with the work of the Scrum Master. In contrast, when the team takes ownership of the process, and the Scrum Master can start to step back, that’s a sign of success. In this segment, we also discuss how, sometimes, the team canceling meetings can be a good sign.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Metaphor based retrospectives unlock the fun and critical insights for Agile teams

Pino likes to work with metaphor based retrospective formats like The Speedboat Retrospective, or The Sailboat Retrospective. His favorite metaphors are around sports, and he describes how he would use a (European) football game as the format to help team members find their “place” in the team.

About Pino Decandia

Pino started in software development but realized he was more interested in people than code. With experience, Pino came to believe that people can change; they don’t resist change but offer their own vision, which needs to be met.

Secondly, needs drive behaviors. To provide help, we must allow them to be clearly expressed. To set the example, we need to be ready to be the first to state our needs.

And thirdly, that ideological battles are meaningless.

You can link with Pino Decandia on LinkedIn.

Leslie McCormack: The ultimate success goals for Scrum Masters and Scrum teams

Leslie asks a few questions of herself when evaluating her success. We review those questions and why they are important to assess team growth and product success which are the ultimate success goals for Scrum Masters and Scrum teams.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Rotating exercises to create creative thinking

Scrum Masters must be able to adapt their Agile Retrospective exercises to the needs of the team at that time. In this episode, we talk about multiple exercises you can run, and why it is important to always be ready to facilitate a different exercise. We also discuss some of the downsides of repeating exercises over time.

In this episode, we refer to the Sailboat / Speedboat Restrospective exercise, the 3 L’s Retrospective exercise (similar to the 4L’s Retrospective exercise) and others.

About Leslie McCormack

Leslie is a full-time Scrum Master. Prior to that Leslie was a Project Manager, and started her career as a mainframe database developer (COBOL, HCL, DB2, Oracle, Unix). After that, she moved on to Java support for a few years. Finally, she transitioned to an analyst role, and it was in that role that she first encountered Agile and Scrum.

You can link with Leslie McCormack on LinkedIn.