team collaboration Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Konstantin Ribel: The Three Tiers of Scrum Master Success, Team, Multi-team, and Product

Konstantin outlines three tiers of success for Scrum Masters. Level 1 centers on fostering teamwork and trust within a single team. Level 2 emphasizes collaboration between multiple teams, avoiding silos, and ensuring equitable workloads. Level 3 delves into product-focused success, considering customer-driven value, delivery efficiency, and feedback loops. Konstantin advises bringing teams together through multi-team events and facilitating progress sharing among teams to enhance overall success in the Scrum Master role.

Featured Retrospective Format For The Week: Tailoring Retrospectives, Konstantin’s Recipe For Scrum Master Adaptability To Team Needs

Konstantin advocates for adaptability in retrospectives, noting the importance of ditching a pre-planned format if it doesn’t suit the team dynamics at the time of the retrospective. He emphasizes the need to prepare each retrospective, as it helps us to be secure if there’s a need to improvise. Konstantin shares the example of a team that received news of an impending change just before the retro, and that prompted Konstantin to focus on the team’s need for a conversation around closure, rather than future improvement. This highlights the value of addressing real-time team needs over rigid adherence to a set format.

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

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Konstantin Ribel

Konstantin drives organizational success through innovative thinking, simplifying processes, and building high-performing teams. With a strong track record in change management and process optimization, he leads agile transformations and applies systems thinking for adaptable, thriving businesses in dynamic industries.

You can link with Konstantin Ribel on LinkedIn.

Khwezi Mputa: The Product Owner that knew how to collaborate with the Agile team

The Great Product Owner: The PO that knew how to collaborate with the team

In this segment, Khwezi highlights an exceptional Product Owner (PO) she collaborated with. The PO possessed a deep understanding of the product’s market, customers, and business context, enabling her to continuously update the product effectively. She exhibited excellent teamwork despite the distributed nature of the team, showing awareness of diverse cultures. Her proficiency in user story mapping facilitated smoother processes, including onboarding new team members. Overall, the PO’s comprehensive grasp of the product’s ecosystem and her collaborative skills stood out as instrumental in driving the team’s success.

The Bad Product Owner: The Unavailable and Bossy PO

While POs typically hold respected roles with authority over the product backlog, some misuse this status, behaving as if superior to the team. Often from management, such POs pose various challenges, including not being available often enough when the teams need their presence. Scrum Masters play a role in educating POs, advising team lift-offs to define roles, and coaching the POs to be active team participants. Khwezi emphasizes the Scrum Master’s mediation role, and we discuss the “Coach Your PO e-course” which aims to help Scrum Masters have an effective PO collaboration.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a 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 Khwezi Mputa

Khwezi is an experienced Agile coach, trainer, and IT professional since 2008. With diverse roles like Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager, and Business Analyst, she’s active in the Agile community, promoting diversity. Passionate about teaching, she empowers individuals and organizations to reach their full potential through coaching and mentoring.

You can link with Khwezi Mputa on LinkedIn.

Sónia Won: The Helicopter PO anti-pattern explained

The Great Product Owner: Empathy and Vision, Two Signs of a Great Product Owner

In this segment, Sónia discusses the characteristics of a great Product Owner (PO) who had a programming background, which proved advantageous. The PO had a strong connection with the team and displayed empathy for their work. Focusing on the Vision space, the PO inspired the team by communicating the desired outcome and trusting them to find the solutions. Encouraging them to think creatively and go beyond the obvious, the PO also had a keen sense of what the team needed. Striking a balance, the PO pushed the team while providing them with sufficient time to accomplish their tasks. Overall, the PO’s ability to inspire, communicate, and understand the team’s needs contributed to their effectiveness in the role.

The Bad Product Owner: The Helicopter PO anti-pattern

In this segment, the discussion revolves around a bad Product Owner pattern known as “The Helicopter PO.” The PO is frequently absent, only occasionally attending planning sessions and providing a barrage of sprint goals. The lack of consistent presence and participation in retrospectives led to a lack of vision, making it difficult for the team to focus and make decisions. The team functioned more as a “simple provider” for the PO, resulting in frequent failures, excessive work in progress, and numerous unfinished tasks. The episode highlights the critical role of communication and the importance of the PO being present and engaged with the team for successful outcomes.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master

About Sónia Won

Sónia is an experienced professional with 17 years in Software Engineering. She has held roles as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach for a decade. Currently, as a Product Owner, she values teamwork and recognizes the significance of prioritizing people in any endeavor.

The big lesson she’s learned so far: no matter how complex a subject can be, the most important thing is to take care of people. Because teams, companies, and communities are made of those!

You can link with Sónia Won on LinkedIn and connect with Sónia Won on Twitter.

Sónia Won: How to Overcome The Pressure in a Small Feature Team Serving Multiple Products

In this episode, Sónia shares her experience with a small feature team consisting of 3-4 members responsible for delivering 3 products, each with separate calendars. The team constantly faced pressure, and the knowledge of the products was concentrated in just 2 team members. This knowledge imbalance led to overwork and complaints from those 2 members. In retrospectives, the team decided to address the issue and brainstormed solutions. They chose not to assign any work to the 2 overloaded members, leading to the knowledge spreading across the team over a few sprints. Sónia highlights the importance of discussing such challenges in retrospectives and emphasizes that team-driven solutions are key to addressing knowledge transfer issues during team growth.

Featured Book of the Week: Transforming Nokia, by Risto Siilasmaa

In this segment, Sónia discusses her favorite book, “Transforming Nokia” by Siilasmaa. The book explores how to handle tragedy scenarios while maintaining inspiration and optimism. It shares radical stories of optimism and serves as a valuable lesson for large companies, emphasizing that the market dictates the direction. The book’s concepts are linked to VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). Sónia highlights that Scrum’s essential aspect is the ability to swiftly adapt to new requirements, making it a crucial tool for coping with changing circumstances in the business world.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Sónia Won

The big lesson she’s learned so far: no matter how complex a subject can be, the most important thing is to take care of people. Because teams, companies, and communities are made of those!

You can link with Sónia Won on LinkedIn and connect with Sónia Won on Twitter.

Kaisa Martiskainen: Product Owner collaboration, and the importance of building relationships in Scrum

In this episode of the podcast, Kaisa shares her experience as a rotating scrum master at the start of her journey. She was eager to be a good scrum master and saw every problem as an impediment she had to remove, which led her to act as a messenger between the Product Owner and the team. Also because the team was not comfortable with the Product Owner’s communication style. Kaisa provides some tips for handling such situations, such as pausing and asking questions instead of immediately rescuing the team, and asking who is in the best position to solve the issue when the team asks for help. She emphasizes that in many cases, the scrum master is not the best person to solve the issues the team is facing.

Kaisa also suggests building a relationship between the team and the Product Owner, such as by organizing a happy hour. She highlights the anti-pattern of communicating only asynchronously and recommends the use of synchronous communication methods to build better relationships within the team.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Kaisa Martiskainen

Kaisa is an Agile coach working for a large multinational software company. Originally from Finland, her thirst for learning new things and passion for languages led her to live in Sweden, and Scotland before settling in Montreal, Canada. She is an avid Redditor who spends her free time reading, knitting, investing and playing with her two daughters.

You can link with Kaisa Martiskainen on LinkedIn.