Steen Villumsen Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Steen Villumsen: Without a product strategy, the Product Owner brings only confusion

The Great Product Owner: Quick decisions, and excellent at collaboration

A great Product Owner knows the value they bring to the team and the stakeholders. They work with stakeholders and the team to make decisions, and are not afraid to challenge some decisions. Finally, we talk about the PO’s as critical success enablers for the team, and how Scrum Masters can work with the PO’s to define success for the team and the product.

The Bad Product Owner: Without a strategy, the PO brings only confusion

When Product Owners lack a strategy for their product, they create more than confusion for the team. In some cases, they become mere list managers, and don’t bring the insight the teams need to the work. In this segment, we discuss how important it is to help Product Owners that are stuck in these anti-patterns, as their performance directly affects the teams we work with.

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 Steen Villumsen

Steen is an Agile Coach, who calls himself a conceptualiser and a communicator. His focus is on moving people and supporting change through coaching.

You can link with Steen Villumsen on LinkedIn.

Steen Villumsen: Discovering our personal definition of success for a Scrum Master

Steen suggests that we start by defining success for ourselves. It’s from that reflection that we are able to create an approach to reach that state. Once we have defined what success looks like, then we can start working with the team to reach that level of performance. Listen in to learn what criteria Steen uses in his own definition of success.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Car Retrospective

The Car Retrospective is a metaphor retrospective that helps teams project onto the car what is going on in the team, and how the Sprint went. Listen in to learn how Steen suggests to run this retrospective format.

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About Steen Villumsen

Steen is an Agile Coach, who calls himself a conceptualiser and a communicator. His focus is on moving people and supporting change through coaching.

You can link with Steen Villumsen on LinkedIn.

Steen Villumsen: Small steps towards a big Agile transformation

Steen shares the story of a transition from Waterfall to Agile. He describes an approach to change that starts with some small changes, and slowly increases the things under change with the aim to make the process feel more like a natural evolution. Listen in to learn about the process and the lessons that Steen learned along the way.

In this episode, we refer to the Cycle of Change by Rick Maurer (PDF article).

About Steen Villumsen

Steen is an Agile Coach, who calls himself a conceptualiser and a communicator. His focus is on moving people and supporting change through coaching.

You can link with Steen Villumsen on LinkedIn.

Steen Villumsen: Coaching the Product Owner, a key strategy to help teams succeed

The team Steen was working with, wanted to do Scrum by the book, which, in their mind, meant attending to every request the Product Owner would bring to them. However, Steen started to see a loss of focus, and messy Sprint planning sessions. The team was not able to help the PO focus, and create a coherent Vision. This story illustrates why it is so important to be ready to help our Product Owners. In this episode, we refer to the Coaching Your PO e-course that we put together to help Scrum Masters that want to help their Product Owners.

Featured Book of the Week: Getting Things Done, by David Allen

The book Getting Things Done by David Allen resonated with Steen, and helped him understand that, as professionals, we must have a system that we can trust. As Scrum Masters, we are very often attending to many burning platforms, and being able to manage with that diverse focus of attention is a key skill that GTD (Getting Things Done) helps with.

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About Steen Villumsen

Steen is an Agile Coach, who calls himself a conceptualiser and a communicator. His focus is on moving people and supporting change through coaching.

You can link with Steen Villumsen on LinkedIn.

Steen Villumsen: A critical Agile adoption lesson for Scrum Masters

Steen took on the challenge of being both a Scrum Master and a Product Owner. In his eagerness to help the team adoption Agile, he ended up putting too many things in motion, and got frustrated when the team did not follow at the speed he wanted. This brought him an important lesson about how teams adopt Agile over time.

About Steen Villumsen

Steen is an Agile Coach, who calls himself a conceptualiser and a communicator. His focus is on moving people and supporting change through coaching.

You can link with Steen Villumsen on LinkedIn.