Tomo Lennox Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Tomo Lennox: How corporate planning destroys product ownership

In this episode, we challenge you to think about what is needed beyond a great PO to be able to help the Agile teams succeed. We also discuss how the planning practices in some companies actively destroy product ownership.

The Great Product Owner: What we need beyond a great PO

Is a good Product Owner enough? Do we really need the PO role? These are some of the thought-provoking questions we tackle in this episode. We explore ideas from Lean Startup, Customer Development and mention the book Rethinking Agile by Klaus Leopold.

The Bad Product Owner: How corporate planning destroys product ownership

The Product Owner is one of the hardest roles in Agile and Scrum. Tomo starts by sharing aspects of the PO role that are often forgotten or ignored. We also discuss the dynamics that often push PO’s to only focus on managing their backlog, and miss the impact of having a clear direction / Vision for the teams.

In this segment, we refer to the Beyond Budgeting movement, which tries to bring Agile ideas and practices to the finance departments of large and mid-size organizations.

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 Tomo Lennox

Tomo has 20 years of experience in project management, both waterfall, and Agile. A few years ago he was at David Anderson’s first Kanban Conference and has been a fanatic ever since, even though he has lost several jobs as a result of it. Tomo became then an advocate for projection over guessing, and reactive planning.

You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.

Tomo Lennox: Customer-delight as the success KPI, and how to measure end-to-end success

Tomo suggests we consider “customer-delight”, the measure of success. However, that is hard to measure. In this episode, we explore how we might be able to measure “customer delight” and mention some “end-to-end” tools we can use to help the teams be aware that their work only produces value after team-external activities are completed.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Best Story this sprint

Tomo starts by recommending we always have more than one format ready to go when preparing a retrospective. However, we explore “The Best Story” retrospective format that helps team members talk about their work. In this segment, we also refer to the “mood-graph” (aka Journey Lines for the Sprint).

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About Tomo Lennox

You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.

Tomo Lennox: Swarming out of a bad place, a Scrum team tool

Tomo worked with 6 teams on a project. Although the teams were good at developing software, they lacked something that was critical. As Tomo investigated further, he pinpointed what was missing, and focused on providing them with the tools to overcome their lack of innovation, and decision making ability.

In this segment, we refer to the concept of Swarming, which when applied correctly can make times much more productive.

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!

Featured Book of the Week: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck is one of the foundational books for Lean applied to software. Although many have followed the Poppendieck’s, their book still has many learnings on how to apply Lean to software development.

In this segment, we also refer to the work by Klaus Leopold, of which the book Rethinking Agile is one example.

About Tomo Lennox

You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.

Tomo Lennox: What we can learn from trying (and failing) to be #1 in the market with a new product

When Tomo took this position, he realized that it was a “make-it-or-break” kind of job. In that job, he successfully helped the team “inch” the velocity up, but the deck was stacked against the team. The company wanted the product to be #1 in the market, but that’s almost impossible job at the first try. Listen in to learn how Tomo and team tackled and learned from this nearly impossible mission.

In this episode, we refer to ScrumBan which combines the best aspects of Kanban and Scrum. In this episode, we also refer to the book Inspired by Marty Cagan.

About Tomo Lennox

You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.