vision Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Tinatin Tabidze: The key to an awesome Agile team, the hands-on and insightful Product Owner

The Great Product Owner: The key to an awesome Agile team, the hands-on and insightful Product Owner

Tinatin highlights the key traits of a good Product Owner (PO) in this segment. She emphasizes that great PO’s are knowledgeable about the product they are working on, as well as its competitors. This knowledge helps the PO to understand what the team needs in order to deliver the best possible product. The PO should be hands-on with the team, and should work closely with them on defining clear acceptance criteria. This helps the team to understand what is expected of them and enables the PO to be more effective in their role.

Tinatin also notes that a great PO is easy to work with and has a good synergy with the team. She mentions that the synergy between the PO and the team is a telling factor in the team’s success. She stresses that there’s not only one way to be a great PO, as different PO’s can have different approaches to the role, but when a PO combines knowledge about the product and its competitors with a hands-on approach to working with the team, the result is an awesome PO.

The Bad Product Owner: Unleashing the Full Potential of a Product Owner in partnership with the Scrum Master

In this segment, Tinatin starts by questioning the essence of the PO role and highlights the importance of commitment and ownership of the product for a team’s success. Tinatin emphasizes that a PO should have a clear vision and evolve it based on data and feedback. She stresses the need for a PO to have a foot in both development and business and to be hands-on with the product. As a Scrum Master, Tinatin suggests testing the product and making time to play with it to help the PO understand it better. She also suggests sitting down with the PO to build a roadmap for the product and to ask why they value certain features or deliveries. Lastly, Tinatin highlights the importance of the PO being able to sell the ideas in the backlog to the Scrum team and recommends using tools to help the PO take a more active role with the team. Tinatin also mentions the books by Roman Pichler as resources for Scrum Masters and Product Owners.

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 Tinatin Tabidze

Tinatin Tabidze is a Scrum Master currently working in Stuttgart, Germany. Originally she started out as a project manager. She has experience with multiple scrum and kanban teams, working with scaled agile frameworks.

You can link with Tinatin Tabidze on LinkedIn.

Bram De Block: Aligning agile team and company goals for Scrum Master success

In this episode, Bram emphasizes the importance of understanding the goal for the company and working with teams to align their goals with the company’s vision. He believes that a Scrum Master’s own success is tied to helping teams reach their goals. Bram provides insights on how to help teams define success, by challenging them to think about the vision for their product and having conversations about success, providing data points as examples, and using readily available product data to define what better could look like. The episode aims to help Scrum Masters to understand their role in the success of the team and the company, and to provide guidance on how to align goals and work towards achieving them.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Lean Coffee Format for engaging retrospectives

Bram introduces the Lean Coffee format, a dynamic and engaging way to facilitate meetings and discussions. This format is designed to make sure that everyone is engaged, regardless of whether they are introverted or extroverted. In a Lean Coffee session, we discuss the most voted topic and change the format regularly to maintain engagement.

In this segment, Bram refers to a collection of recipes for agile retrospectives which he, and his team make available to everyone at DataMiner Dojo.

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 Bram De Block

Bram is not an official trainer, consultant nor freelancer. He is just himself, supporting colleagues in applying and growing their own potential and getting stuff done. Bram started as a software developer for 10 years, then grew into a half-time agile coach, and finally, full-time “Global Agile Lead” at Skyline Communications. Something “special” he learned (even if he wishes it wasn’t special): the meaning and impact of “respect”.

You can link with Bram De Block on LinkedIn, or meet Bram face-to-face at this meetup he hosts in Belgium.

Ruta Hardikar: The Product Owner that skipped the Sprint Reviews, and what that caused for the Scrum team

The Great Product Owner: The Customer advocate Product Owner

This Product Owner was very close to the customer, and listened to their needs as well as the struggles they had with the product. Through their work, the PO tried to focus on adding to the backlog stories that would help the customer directly, and would often act as the customer when talking to the team. They were able to focus on prioritization, and prioritized the work for the team. The PO was also able to create clear priorities and have conversations with the team about the 3 V’s: Vision, Value, and Validation.

The Bad Product Owner: The Product Owner that skipped the Sprint Reviews, and what that caused for the Scrum team

The processes we have in place influence the choices, and the focus of the Product Owners. In this segment, we talk about a team and their Product Owner that did not host a Sprint Review. Instead, the PO would focus on reviews with individuals, separate discussion with single stakeholders. However, that meant that other stakeholders would not know what the team had worked on during the Sprint. Furthermore, the team was not involved, and did not have the chance to show, and be proud of what they had accomplished during the Sprint. This was an anti-pattern that Ruta tried to overcome. Listen in to learn how Ruta tackled this anti-pattern.

About Ruta Hardikar

Ruta has over 8 years experience with Agile, and has taken the roles of Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer (RTE in SAFe), working with GM Financial.

You can link with Ruta Hardikar on LinkedIn.

Jeremia Riedel: The Visionary Product Owner that was able to help the team own their Backlog

The Great Product Owner: The Visionary PO that was able to help the team own their Backlog

Great PO’s are often visionary. They have an idea of what they want to deliver and focus on conveying that to the team. They set the context for the Vision, and work from that Vision to explain the direction to the Scrum team. They don’t necessarily spend much time working on the backlog, because the teams are able to translate the Vision into the detailed stories to implement. Great PO’s focus on “what problem we should solve in the next iteration”!

In this segment, we talk about the Product Vision Canvas, and the Story Map tool.

The Bad Product Owner: The Requirements Manager

This particular PO acted like a requirements manager, focusing on collecting requirements from stakeholders, and doing whatever the customer had explained they wanted. However, for teams to be able to succeed, the PO role needs to be much more than a mere requirements collector and manager. In this segment, we discuss the role of Vision and the PO’s responsibility to go beyond merely writing down requirements.

About Jeremia Riedel

Jeremia is an Agile Coach that describes himself as an Explorer, Enthusiast and Challenger.

You can link with Jeremia Riedel on LinkedIn, and read Jeremia Riedel’s blog on Medium.

BONUS: Stephen Parry on how to create Alignment and Purpose in your Agile organization

“Most purpose statements are dry and uninspiring”, that’s how this episode starts. But Stephen goes deeper and explains why that may be the case. We dive into what are the missing aspects in most purpose statements and share some examples of how he’s been able to help organizations go beyond those dry and uninspiring purpose statements.

The three types of purposes we need to take into account

When we think about purpose, usually we talk about the purpose of the team, or organization we work within. However, Stephen also challenges us to consider that there is one more perspective we need to take into account: the customer’s purpose. Continue reading BONUS: Stephen Parry on how to create Alignment and Purpose in your Agile organization