Podcasts about Scrum

Sara Di Gregorio: Coaching Product Owners from Isolation to Collaboration Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Using User Story Mapping to Break Down PO Isolation "One of the key strengths is the ability to build a strong collaborative relationship with the Scrum team. We constantly exchange feedback, with the shared goal of improving both our collaborating and the way of working." - Sara Di Gregorio   Sara considers herself fortunate—she currently works with Product Owners who exemplify what great collaboration looks like. One of their key strengths is the ability to build strong collaborative relationships with the Scrum team. They don't wait for sprint reviews to exchange feedback; instead, they constantly communicate with the shared goal of improving both collaboration and ways of working.  These Product Owners involve the team early, using techniques like user story mapping after analysis phases to create open discussions around upcoming topics and help the team understand potential dependencies. They make themselves truly available—they observe daily stand-ups not as passive attendees but as engaged contributors. If the team needs five minutes to discuss something afterward, the Product Owner is ready. They attend Scrum events with genuine interest in working with the team, not just fulfilling an attendance requirement. They encourage open dialogue, even participating in retrospectives to understand how the team is working and where they can improve collaboration. What sets these Product Owners apart is their communication approach. They don't come in thinking they know everything or that they need to do everything alone. Their mindset is collaborative: "We're doing this together." They recognize that developers aren't just executors—they're users of the product, experts who can provide valuable perspectives.  When Product Owners ask "Why do you want this?" and developers respond with "If we do it this way, we can be faster, and you can try your product sooner," that's when magic happens. Great Product Owners understand that strong communication skills and collaborative relationships create better products, better teams, and better outcomes for everyone involved.   Self-reflection Question: How are your Product Owners involving the team early in discovery and analysis, and are they building collaborative relationships or just attending required events? The Bad Product Owner: The Isolated Expert Who Thinks Teams Just Execute   "Sometimes they feel very comfortable in their subject, so they assume they know everything, and the team has only to execute what they asked for." - Sara Di Gregorio   Sara has encountered Product Owners who embody the worst anti-pattern: they believe they don't need to interact with the development team because they're confident in their subject matter expertise. They assume they know everything, and the team's job is simply to execute what they ask for. These Product Owners work isolated from the development team, writing detailed user stories alone and skipping the interesting discussions with developers. They only involve the team when they think it's necessary, treating developers as order-takers rather than collaborators who could contribute valuable insights.  The impact is significant—teams lose the opportunity to understand the "why" behind features, Product Owners miss perspectives that could improve the product, and collaboration becomes transactional instead of transformational. Sara's approach to addressing this anti-pattern is patient but deliberate. She creates space for dialogue and provides training with the Product Owner to help them understand how important it is to collaborate and cooperate with the team. She shows them the impact of including the team from the beginning of feature study.  One powerful technique she uses is user story mapping workshops, bringing both the team and Product Owner together. The Product Owner explains what they want to deliver from their point of view, but then something crucial happens: the team asks lots of questions to understand "Why do you want this?"—not just "I will do it."  Through this exercise, Sara watched Product Owners have profound realizations. They understood they could change their mindset by talking with developers, who often are users of the product and can offer perspectives like "If we do it this way, we can be faster, and you can try your product sooner."  The workshop helps teams understand the big picture of what the Product Owner is asking for while helping the Product Owner reflect on what they're actually asking. It transforms the relationship from isolation to collaboration, from directive to dialogue, from assumption to shared understanding.   In this segment, we refer to the User Story Mapping blog post by Jeff Patton.   Self-reflection Question: Are your Product Owners writing user stories in isolation, or are they involving the team in discovery to create shared understanding and better solutions?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Sara Di Gregorio: How to Know Your Team Has Internalized Agile Values Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Scrum isn't just a process to follow, it's a way of working." - Sara Di Gregorio   For Sara, success as a Scrum Master isn't measured by what the team delivers—it's measured by how they grow. She knows that if you facilitate team growth in communication and collaboration, delivery will naturally improve.  The indicators she watches for are subtle but powerful. When teams come to her with specific requests outside the regular schedule—"Can we have 30 minutes to talk and reflect mid-sprint?"—she knows something has shifted. When teams want to reflect outside the retrospective cycle, it means they've internalized the value of continuous improvement, not just going through the motions. She listens for the word "goal" during sprint planning.  When team members start their planning by talking about goals, she feels a surge of recognition: "Okay, for me, this is very, very, very important." Success shows up in unexpected places. One of her colleague's teams pushed back during a cross-team meeting, saying "We're going out of the timebox" and suggesting they move the discussion to a different time. That kind of proactive leadership and accountability signals maturity. It means the team isn't just attending Scrum events because they have to—they truly understand why each event matters and actively participate to make them valuable.  When Sara first met a team, they asked if she wanted to change things. She said no. What she focuses on is how people improve and understand the process better. For her, it starts with the people—when people change and understand the value, that's when real changes happen in the company. It's about helping people feel good and be guided well, because when they're working well, that's when transformation becomes possible. As Sara reminds us, Scrum isn't just a process to follow—it's a way of working that teams must embrace, understand, and make their own.   Self-reflection Question: Are your teams coming to you asking for reflection time outside scheduled events, and what does that tell you about how deeply they've internalized continuous improvement? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Unstructured Retrospective After facilitating many structured retrospectives, Sara started experimenting with an unstructured format that brought new energy to team reflection. Instead of using predefined frameworks, she brings white paper, sticky notes, and sharpies of different colors. She opens with a simple question: "Guys, what impacted you mostly during the last week? How do you feel today?" Sometimes she starts with data and metrics; other times, she begins with how the team is feeling.  The key is creating open space for conversation rather than forcing it into a predetermined structure. What Sara discovered is remarkable: "They are more engaged, more open, and more present in the conversation, maybe because it was something new." Instead of the same structured format every time, the unstructured approach breaks the routine and creates space for true reflections that bring out something deeper and more meaningful. It allows people to express what's genuinely going on for them, not just what fits into a predefined template.  Sara doesn't abandon structured formats entirely—she alternates between structured and unstructured to keep retrospectives fresh and engaging. She also recommends, if you work hybrid, trying to schedule unstructured retrospectives for days when the team is in the office together. The physical presence combined with the open format creates an environment where teams can be more vulnerable, more creative, and more honest about what's really happening. The unstructured retrospective isn't about chaos—it's about trusting the team to surface what matters most to them, with the Scrum Master providing light facilitation and space for authentic reflection.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

5 Essential Skills Every Scrum Master NeedsBeing a Scrum Master isn't just about booking meetings and quoting the Scrum Guide. It's about showing up every day as a change agent — the one who helps people work better together, face complexity with courage, and actually deliver value.It's easy to forget that Scrum is fundamentally about people.Your job as a Scrum Master is to unlock that potential — not by managing them, but by enabling them.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠- [instagram] ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠- [facebook] ⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠- [Linkedin] ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Sara Di Gregorio: Facilitating Deeper Retrospectives—When to Step In and When to Step Back Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "When they start connecting and having an interesting discussion, I go to the corner, and I'm only trying to listen." - Sara Di Gregorio   Sara faces a challenge that many Scrum Masters encounter: teams that want to discuss too many topics during retrospectives without going deep on any of them. The team had plenty to talk about, but conversations stayed surface-level, never reaching the insights that drive real improvement. Sara recognized that the aim of the retrospective isn't to talk about everything—it's to go deeper on topics the team genuinely cares about.  So she started coaching teams to select just three main topics they wanted to discuss, helping them understand why prioritization matters and making explicit which topics are most important. But her real skill emerged in how she facilitated the discussions. When she saw communication starting to flow and team members becoming deeply connected to the topic, she moved to the corner and listened. She didn't abandon the team—she remained present, ready to help shy or quiet members speak up, watching the clock to respect timeboxes.  But she understood that when teams connect authentically, the Scrum Master's job is to create space, not fill it. Sara learned to ask better questions too. Instead of repeatedly asking "Why? Why? Why?"—which can feel accusatory—she reformulated: "How did you approach it? What happens?" When teams started blaming other teams, she redirected: "What can we influence? What can we do from our side?" She used visual tools like white paper, sharpies, and sticky notes to help teams visualize their discussion steps and create structured moments for questions.  Sometimes, when teams discussed complex technical topics beyond her understanding, she empowered them: "You are the main expert of this topic. Please, when someone sees that we're going out of topic or getting too detailed, raise your hand and help me bring the communication back to what we've chosen to talk about."  This balance—knowing when to step in with structure and when to step back and listen—is what transforms retrospectives from checkbox events into genuine opportunities for team growth.   Self-reflection Question: In your facilitation, are you creating space for deep team connection, or are you inadvertently filling the space that teams need to discover insights for themselves?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Sara Di Gregorio: Rebuilding Agile Team Connection in the Remote Work Era Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "The book helped me to shift from reacting to connecting, which completely changed the quality of conversation." - Sara Di Gregorio   When COVID forced Sara's team into full remote work, she noticed something troubling—the team was losing real connection. Replicating in-office meetings online simply didn't work. People attended meetings but weren't truly present. The spontaneous coffee machine conversations that built relationships and surfaced important information had vanished.  So Sara started experimenting. She introduced 5-minute chit-chat sessions at the start of every meeting: "Guys, how are you today? What happened yesterday?" She created "coffee all together" moments—10-minute virtual breaks where the team could drink coffee or have aperitivos together, sometimes three times per week. She established weekly feedback sessions every Friday morning—30 minutes to recap the week and understand what could improve.  These weren't just social niceties; they were deliberate efforts to recreate the human connections that remote work had stripped away. Sara recognized that mechanized interactions—"here are the things I need you to do, let's talk next steps"—kill team dynamics. Teams need moments where they relate to each other as people, not just as functions.  The experiments worked because they created space for genuine connection, allowing the team to maintain the trust and collaboration that makes effective teamwork possible, even when working remotely.   In this episode, we refer to Non-Violent Communication concepts and practices.   Self-reflection Question: How are you creating moments for your remote or hybrid team to connect as people, not just as colleagues executing tasks? Featured Book of the Week: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg Sara credits Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg (translated in Italian as "Words are Windows, or They are Walls") as having a deep impact on her career. The book explores how to listen without judging, how to ask the right questions, and how to observe people to understand their real needs. But above all, it teaches how to communicate in a way that builds connection rather than creating barriers.  For Sara, the book was remarkably practical—she didn't just read it, she experimented with the techniques afterward. She explains: "I think that without this mindset, it's easy to fall into reactive communication, trying to defend, justify, or give quick answers. But that often blocks real understanding." The book helped her shift from reacting to connecting, which completely changed the quality of her conversations.  As a Scrum Master working with people every day—facilitating meetings, mediating conflicts, supporting teams—the way we communicate determines whether we open dialogue or close it. Sara found that taking time to reflect instead of giving quick answers transformed her ability to help teams discover dependencies, improve dialogue, and address communication issues. For anyone in the Scrum Master role, this book provides essential skills for building the kind of connection that makes true collaboration possible. In this segment, we also refer to the NVC episodes we have on the podcast. Check those out to learn more about Nonviolent Communication   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Sara Di Gregorio: When Teams Lose Trust—How Scrum Masters Rebuild It One Small Change at a Time Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I continue to approach this situation with openness, positivity, and trust, because I truly believe that even the smallest changes can make a difference over time." - Sara Di Gregorio   Sara faced one of the most challenging situations a Scrum Master can encounter—a team member who had lost all trust in change, creating a negative atmosphere that weighed heavily on the entire team. She remembers the heaviness on her shoulders, feeling personally responsible for the team's wellbeing. The negativity was palpable during every meeting, and it threatened to undermine the team's progress.  But Sara refused to give up. She started experimenting with different approaches: one-to-one conversations to understand what was happening, bringing intentional energy to meetings, and trying new facilitation techniques in retrospectives. She added personal check-ins, asking "How are you today?" at the start of stand-ups, consciously bringing positive energy even on days when she didn't feel it herself.  She discovered that listening—truly listening, not just hearing—means understanding how people feel, not just what they're saying. Sara learned that the energy you bring to interactions matters deeply. Starting the day with genuine interest, asking about the team's wellbeing, and even making small comments about the weather could create tiny shifts—a small smile that signaled something had changed.  Her approach was rooted in persistence and belief: she continued approaching the situation with openness, positivity, and trust, knowing that even the smallest changes can make a difference over time. For Sara, reestablishing a good environment wasn't about quick fixes—it was about showing up every day with the right energy and never giving up on her team.   Self-reflection Question: What energy are you bringing to your interactions with the team today, and how might that be shaping the team's atmosphere?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

BONUS: Flawless Execution — Translating Fighter Pilot Precision to Business Results In this powerful conversation, former fighter pilot Christian "Boo" Boucousis reveals how military precision translates into agile business leadership. We explore the FLEX model (Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief), the critical difference between control-based and awareness-based leadership, and why most organizations fail to truly embrace iterative thinking. From Cockpit to Boardroom: An Unexpected Journey "I learned over time that it doesn't matter what you do if you're always curious, and you're always intentional, and you're always asking questions." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian's path from fighter pilot to leadership consultant wasn't planned—it was driven by necessity and curiosity. After 11 years as a fighter pilot (7 in Australia, 4 in the UK), an autoimmune condition ended his flying career at age 30. Rather than accepting a comfy job flying politicians around, he chose entrepreneurship. He moved to Afghanistan with a friend and built a reconstruction company that grew to a quarter billion dollars in four years. The secret? The debrief skills he learned as a fighter pilot. By constantly asking "What are you trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is there a gap?" he approached business with an agile mindset before he even knew what agile was. This curiosity-driven, question-focused approach became the foundation for everything that followed. The FLEX Model: Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief "Agile and scrum were co-created by John Sutherland, who was a fighter pilot, and its origins sit in the OODA loop and iteration. Which is why it's a circle." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The FLEX model isn't new—fighter pilots have used this Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief cycle for 60 years. It's the ultimate simple agile model, designed to help teams accelerate toward goals using the same accelerated learning curve the Air Force uses to train fighter pilots. The key insight: everything in this model is iterative, not linear. Every mission has a start, middle, and end, and every stage involves constant adaptation. Afterburner (the company Christian now leads as CEO) has worked with nearly 3,800 companies and 2.8 million people over 30 years, teaching this model. What's fascinating is that the DNA of agile is baked into fighter pilot thinking—John Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, wrote the foreword for Christian's book "The Afterburner Advantage" because they share the same roots in the OODA loop and iterative thinking. Why Iterative Thinking Doesn't Come Naturally "Iterative thinking is not a natural human model. Most of the time we learn from mistakes. We don't learn as a habit." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Here's the hard truth: agile as a way of working is very different from the way human beings naturally think. Business leadership models still hark back to Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 book on scientific management—industrial era leadership designed for building buildings, not creating software. Time is always linear (foundation, then structure, then finishing), and this shapes how we think about planning. Humans also tend to organize like villages with chiefs, warriors, and gatherers—hierarchical and political. Fighter pilots created a parallel system where politics exist outside missions, but during execution, personality clashes can't interfere. The challenge for business isn't the method—it's getting human minds to embrace iteration as a habit, not just a process they follow when forced. Planning: Building Collective Consciousness, Not Task Lists "Planning isn't all about sequencing actions—that's not planning. That's the byproduct of planning, which is collectively agreeing what good looks like at the end." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Most people plan in their head or in front of a spreadsheet by themselves. That's not planning—that's collecting thoughts. Real planning means bringing everyone on the team together to build collective consciousness about what's possible. The plan is always "the best idea based on what we know now." Once airborne, everything changes because the enemy doesn't cooperate with your plan. Planning is about the destination, not the work to get there. Think about airline pilots: they don't tell you about traffic delays on their commute or maintenance issues. They say "Welcome aboard, our destination is Amsterdam, there's weather on the way, we'll land 5 minutes early." That's a brief—just the effect on you based on all their work. Most business meetings waste 55 minutes on backstory and 5 minutes deciding to have another meeting. Fighter pilots focus entirely on: What are we trying to achieve? What might get in the way? Let's go. Briefing: The 25-Minute Focus Window "You need 25 minutes of focus before your brain really focuses on the task. You program your brain for the mission at hand." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The brief is the moment between planning and execution when the plan is as accurate as it'll ever get. It's called "brief" for a reason—it's really short. The team checks that everyone understands the plan in today's context, accounting for last-minute changes (broken equipment, weather, personnel changes). Then comes the critical part: creating the mission bubble. From the brief until mission end, there are no distractions, no notifications. If someone tries to interrupt a fighter pilot walking to the jet, the response is clear: "I'm in my mission bubble. No distractions." This isn't optional—research shows it takes 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus before your brain truly locks onto a task. Yet most business leaders expect constant availability, with notifications pinging every few minutes. If you need everyone to have notifications on to run your business, you're doing a really bad job at planning. Execution: Awareness-Based Leadership vs. Control-Based Leadership "The reason we have so many meetings is because the leader is trying to control the situation and own all the awareness. It's not humanly possible to do that." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   During execution, fighter pilots fly the plan until it doesn't work anymore—then they adapt. A mission commander might lead 70 airplanes, but can't possibly track all 69 others. Instead, they create "gates"—checkpoints where everyone confirms they're in the right place within 10 seconds. They plan for chaos, creating awareness points where the team is generally on track or not. The key shift: from control-based leadership (the leader tries to control everything) to awareness-based leadership (the leader facilitates and listens for divergences). This includes "subordinated leadership"—any of the four pilots in a formation can take the lead if they have better awareness. If a wingman calls out a threat the leader doesn't see, the immediate response is "Press! You take the lead." This works because they planned for it and have criteria. Business teams profess to want this kind of agile collaboration, but struggle because they haven't invested in the planning and shared understanding that makes fluid leadership transitions possible. Abort Criteria: Knowing When to Stop "We have this concept called abort criteria. If certain criteria are hit, we abort the mission. I think that's a massive opportunity for business." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   There are degrees of things going wrong: a little bit, a medium amount, and everything going wrong. When everything's going wrong, fighter pilots stop and turn around—they don't keep pressing a bad situation. This "abort criteria" concept is massively underutilized in business. Too often, teams press bad situations, transparency disappears, people stop talking, and everyone goes into survival mode (protect myself, blame others). This never happens with fighter pilots. If something goes wrong, they take accountability and make the best decision. The most potent team size is four people: a leader, deputy leader, and two wingmen. This small team size with clear roles and shared abort criteria creates psychological safety to call out problems and adapt quickly. The Retrospective Mindset: Not Just a Ritual "A retrospective isn't a ritual. It's actually a way of thinking. It's a cognitive model. If you approached everything as a retrospective—what are we trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is it not going where we want? What's the one action to get back on track?" — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The debrief—the retrospective—is the most important part of fighter pilot culture translated into agile. It's not just a meeting you have at the end of a sprint. It's a mindset you apply to everything: projects, relationships, personal development. Christian introduces "Flawless Leadership" built on three M's: Method (agile practices), Mindset (growth mindset developed through acting iteratively), and Moments (understanding when to show up as a people leader vs. an impact leader). The biggest mistake in technology: teams do retrospectives internally but don't include the business. They get a brief from the business, build for two months, come back, and the business says "What is this? This isn't what I expected." If they'd had the business in every scrum, every iteration, trust would build naturally. Everyone involved in the mission must be part of the planning, briefing, executing, and debriefing. Leading in the Moment: Three Layers of Leadership "Your job as a scrum master, as a leader—it doesn't matter if you're leading a division of people—is to be aware. And you're only going to be aware by listening." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian breaks leadership into three layers: People Leadership (political, emotional, dealing with personalities and overwhelm), Impact Leadership (the agile layer, results-driven, scientific), and Leading Now (the reactive, amygdala-driven panic response when things go wrong). The mistake: mixing these layers. Don't try to be a people leader during execution—that's not the time. But if you're really good at impact leadership (planning, breaking epics into stories, getting work done), you become high trust and high credibility. People leadership becomes easier because success eliminates excuses. During execution, watch for individual traits and blind spots. Use one-on-ones with a retrospective mindset: "What does good look like for you? How do we get to where you're not frustrated?" When leaders aren't present—checking phones and watches during meetings—they lose people. Your job as a leader is to turn your ears on, facilitate (not direct), and listen for divergences others don't see. The Technology-Business Disconnect "Every time you're having a scrum, every time you're coming together to talk about the product, just have the business there with you. It's easy." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   One of the biggest packages of work Afterburner does: technology teams ask them to help build trust with the business. The solution is shockingly simple—include the business in every scrum, every planning session, every retrospective. Agile is a tech-driven approach, creating a disconnect. Technology brings overwhelming information about how hard they're working and problems they've solved, but business doesn't care about the past. They care about the future: what are you delivering and when? During the Gulf War, the military scaled this fighter pilot model to large-scale planning. Fighter pilots work with marines, special forces, navy, CIA agents—everyone is part of the plan. If one person is missing from planning, execution falls apart. If someone on the ground doesn't know how an F-18 works, the jet is just expensive decoration. Planning is about learning what everyone else does and how to support them best—not announcing what you'll do and how you'll do it. High-Definition Destinations: Beyond Goals "Planning is all about the destination, not the work to get there. Think about when you hop on an airplane—the pilot doesn't tell you the whole backstory. They say 'Welcome aboard, our destination is Amsterdam, there's weather on the way, we'll land 5 minutes early.' All you want is the effect on you." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian uses the term "High-Definition Destinations" rather than goals. The difference is clarity and vividness. When you board a plane, you don't get the pilot's commute story or maintenance details—you get the destination, obstacles, and estimated arrival. That's communication focused on effect, not process. Most business communication does the opposite: overwhelming context, backstory, and detail, with the destination buried somewhere in the middle. The brief should always be: Here's where we're going. Here's what might get in the way. Let's go. This communication style—focused on outcomes and effects rather than processes and problems—transforms how teams align and execute. It eliminates the noise and centers everyone on what actually matters: the destination.   About Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian "Boo" Boucousis is a former fighter pilot who now helps leaders navigate today's fast-moving world. As CEO of Afterburner and author of The Afterburner Advantage, he shares practical, people-centered tools for turning chaos into clarity, building trust, and delivering results without burning out.   You can link with Christian "Boo" Boucousis on LinkedIn, visit Afterburner.com, check out his personal site at CallMeBoo.com, or interact with his AI tool at AIBoo.com.  

Alidad Hamidi: When Product Owners Facilitate Vision Instead of Owning It Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Co-Creating Vision Through Discovery "The best product owner I worked with was not a product owner, but a project manager. And she didn't realize that she's acting as a product owner." - Alidad Hamidi   The irony wasn't lost on Alidad. The best Product Owner he ever worked with didn't have "Product Owner" in her title—she was a project manager who didn't even realize she was acting in that capacity. The team was working on a strategic project worth millions, but confusion reigned about what value they were creating. Alidad planned an inception workshop to create alignment among stakeholders, marketing, operations, advisors, and the team.   Twenty minutes into the session, Alidad asked a simple question: "How do we know the customer has this problem, and they're gonna pay for it?" Silence. No one knew. To her immense credit, the project manager didn't retreat or deflect. Instead, she jumped in: "What do we need to do?" Alidad suggested assumptions mapping, and two days later, the entire team and stakeholders gathered for the workshop. What happened next was magic. "She didn't become a proxy," Alidad emphasizes. She didn't say, "I'll go find out and come back to you." Instead, she brought everyone together—team, stakeholders, and customers—into the same room.   The results were dramatic. The team was about to invest millions integrating with an external vendor. Through the assumption mapping workshop, they uncovered huge risks and realized customers didn't actually want that solution. "We need to pivot," she declared. Instead of the expensive integration, they developed educational modules and scripts for customer support and advisors. The team sat with advisors, listening to actual customer calls, creating solutions based on real needs rather than assumptions. The insight transformed not just the project but the project manager herself. She took these discovery practices across the entire organization, teaching everyone how to conduct proper discovery and fundamentally shifting the product development paradigm. One person, willing to facilitate rather than dictate, made this impact. "Product owner can facilitate creation of that [vision]," Alidad explains. "It's not just product owner or a team. It's the broader stakeholder and customer community that need to co-create that."   Self-reflection Question: Are you facilitating the creation of vision with your stakeholders and customers, or are you becoming a proxy between the team and the real sources of insight? The Bad Product Owner: Creating Barriers Instead of Connections "He did the opposite, just creating barriers between the team and the environment." - Alidad Hamidi   The Product Owner was new to the organization, technically skilled, and genuinely well-intentioned. The team was developing solutions for clinicians—complex healthcare work requiring deep domain understanding. Being new, the PO naturally leaned into his strength: technical expertise. He spent enormous amounts of time with the team, drilling into details, specifying exactly how everything should look, and giving the team ready-made solutions instead of problems to solve.   Alidad kept telling him: "Mate, you need to spend more time with our stakeholder, you need to understand their perspective." But the PO didn't engage with users or stakeholders. He stayed comfortable in his technical wheelhouse, designing solutions in isolation. The results were predictable and painful. Halfway through work, the PO would realize, "Oh, we really don't need that." Or worse, the team would complete something and deliver it to crickets—no one used it because no one wanted it. "Great person, but it created a really bad dynamic," Alidad reflects. What should have been the PO's job—understanding the environment, stakeholder needs, and market trends—never happened. Instead of putting people in front of the environment to learn and adapt, he created barriers between the team and reality.   Years later, Alidad's perspective has matured. He initially resented this PO but came to realize: "He was just being human, and he didn't have the right support and the environment for him." Sometimes people learn only after making mistakes. The coaching opportunity isn't to shame or blame but to focus on reflection from failures and supporting learning. Alidad encouraged forums with stakeholders where the PO and team could interact directly, seeing each other's work and constraints. The goal isn't perfection—it's creating conditions where Product Owners can connect teams to customers rather than standing between them.   Self-reflection Question: What barriers might you be unintentionally creating between your team and the customers or stakeholders they need to serve, and what would it take to remove yourself from the middle?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Alidad Hamidi: Maximizing Human Potential as the Measure of Success Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Does my work lead into maximizing human potential? Maximizing the ability of the human to use their potential and freedom." - Alidal Hamidi   Alidad calls himself a "recovering agility coach," and for good reason. For years, he struggled to define success in his work. As an enterprise coach, he plants seeds but never sees the trees grow. By the time transformation takes root, he's moved on to the next challenge. This distance from outcomes forced him to develop a more philosophical definition of success—one rooted not in deliverables or velocity charts, but in human potential and freedom.   His measure of success centers on three interconnected questions. First, are customers happy with what the teams create? Notice he says "create," not "deliver"—a deliberate choice. "I really hate the term product delivery, because delivery means you have a feature factory," he explains. Creating value requires genuine interaction between people who solve problems and people who have problems, with zero distance between them. Second, what's the team's wellbeing? Do they have psychological safety, trust, and space for innovation? And third, is the team growing—and by "team," Alidad means the entire organization, not just the squad level.   There's a fourth element he acknowledges: business sustainability. A bank could make customers ecstatic by giving away free money, but that's not viable long-term. The art lies in balance. "There's always a balance, sometimes one grows more than the other, and that's okay," Alidad notes. "As long as you have the awareness of why, and is that the right thing at the right time." This definition of success requires patience with the messy reality of organizations and faith that when humans have the freedom to use their full potential, both people and businesses thrive.   Self-reflection Question: If you measured your success solely by whether you're maximizing human potential and freedom in your organization, what would you start doing differently tomorrow? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Six Intrinsic Motivators Alidad's favorite retrospective format comes from Open Systems Theory—the Six Intrinsic Motivators. This approach uses the OODA Loop philosophy: understanding reality and reflecting on actions. "Let's see what actually happened in reality, rather than our perception," Alidad explains.   The format assesses six elements. Three are personal and can have too much or too little (rated -10 to +10): autonomy in decision making, continuous learning and feedback, and variety in work. Three are team environment factors that you can't have too much of (rated 0 to 10): mutual support and respect, meaningfulness (both socially useful work and seeing the whole product), and desirable futures (seeing development opportunities ahead).   The process is elegantly simple. Bring the team together and ask each person to assess themselves on each criterion. When individuals share their numbers, fascinating conversations emerge. One person's 8 on autonomy might surprise a teammate who rated themselves a 3. These differences spark natural dialogue, and teams begin to balance and adjust organically. "If these six elements don't exist in the team, you can never have productive human teams," Alidad states. He recommends running this at least every six months, or every three months for teams experiencing significant change. The beauty? No intervention from outside is needed—the team naturally self-organizes around what they discover together.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this episode, Dave West sits down with Darrell Fernandes, executive advisor at Scrum.org to explore the The AI Teammate Framework: A Four-Step Framework for Product Teams, featured in a new whitepaper. They discuss how to treat AI like a true teammate—onboarding it with context, guiding interactions through user stories, and establishing governance to manage performance.Darrell emphasizes the importance of structured AI adoption, comparing it to onboarding human team members, and highlights how a disciplined approach can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and even protect jobs. From writing AI job descriptions to building prompt libraries and governance strategies, this episode offers actionable insights for teams navigating the evolving AI landscape.Listen now to learn how to bring AI onboard as a true teammate.For more, there is a live webcast coming up next week that will also be available as a recording. Learn more. Topics covered:Introduction to the AI Teammate FrameworkWhy a framework?The need for a structured, holistic approach to AI in teamsAI as a Team MemberTreating AI like a teammate rather than a toolThe importance of onboarding and providing contextComparing AI onboarding to human onboardingThe Four Steps of the FrameworkIdentify AI's Role – defining the problem and writing an AI “job description”Onboard with Context Management – giving AI access to product, customer, and process contextInteract Using User Stories – structuring collaboration through clear, outcome-based interactionsGovernance and Performance Management – ensuring accountability, compliance, and efficiencyChallenges of Working with AIContext management and maintaining prompt librariesBalancing AI experimentation with structureCost, scalability, and efficiency concernsLessons from the Early Days of Cloud ComputingParallels between the AI adoption curve and cloud evolutionThe shift from unregulated enthusiasm to disciplined governanceFuture of AI in Product TeamsThe importance of a disciplined, thoughtful approachHow structured AI collaboration can enhance — not replace — human workActionable Next Steps for TeamsRead the white paperAssess current onboarding and management practicesApply the four-step framework to integrate AI effectively

Join Joanna Płaskonka and Ashutosh Garg as they explore the journey from robotics to agile leadership. Discover insights on Scrum, Agile Kata, psychological safety, and small steps that drive big impact in teams and organizations.00:35- About Joanna PłaskonkaJoanna is a professional scrum trainer, a consultant and an effectiveness expert.She's the first agile Kata trainer in Poland, a certified action learning coach and a team psychological safety certified expert. 

Alidad Hamidi: The Tax Agile Teams Pay for Organizational Standards Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "If you set targets for people, they will achieve the target, even if that means destroying the system around them." - W. Edwards Deming (quoted by Alidad)   The tension is familiar to every Scrum Master working in large organizations: leadership demands standard operating models, flow time metrics below specific numbers, and reporting structures that fit neat boxes. Meanwhile, teams struggle under the weight of context-insensitive measurements that ignore the nuanced reality of their work. Alidad faces this challenge daily—creating balance between organizational demands and what teams actually need to transform and thrive.   His approach starts with a simple but powerful question to leaders: "What is it that you want to achieve with these metrics?" Going beyond corporate-speak to have real conversations reveals that most leaders want outcomes, not just numbers. Alidad then involves teams in defining strategies to achieve those outcomes, framing metrics as "the tax we pay" or "the license to play." When teams understand the intent and participate in the strategy, something surprising happens—most metrics naturally improve because teams are delivering genuine value, customers are happy, and team dynamics are healthy.   But context sensitivity remains critical. Alidad uses a vivid analogy: "If you apply lean metrics to Pixar Studio, you're gonna kill Pixar Studio. If you apply approaches of Pixar Studio to production line, they will go bankrupt in less than a month." Toyota's production line and Pixar's creative studio both need different approaches based on their context, team evolution, organizational maturity, and market environment. He advocates aligning teams to value delivery with end-to-end metrics rather than individual team measurements, recognizing that organizations operate in ecosystem models beyond simple product paradigms.   Perhaps most important is patience. "Try to not drink coffee for a week," Alidad challenges. "Even for a single person, one practice, it's very hard to change your behavior. Imagine for organization of hundreds of thousands of people." Organizations move through learning cycles at their own rhythm. Our job isn't to force change at the speed we prefer—it's to take responsibility for our freedom and find ways to move the system, accepting that systems have their own speed.   Self-reflection Question: Which metrics are you applying to your teams without considering their specific context, and what conversation do you need to have with leadership about the outcomes those metrics are meant to achieve?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Is your team moving in sync—or spinning in circles? - Mike CohnEver feel like your agile team should be working smoothly—but something's just a bit off? Handoffs feel clunky. Meetings drag. Even small changes spark big debates.It's not that your team isn't skilled—it's that you're not quite in sync.Rowers have a word for the alignment you're seeking: swing.What is swing?In crew rowing, swing is that near-magical moment when every rower moves in perfect unison—each stroke in sync, each effort amplified. And I do mean perfect unison. This means each rower: puts an oar into the water at the exact same timepulls for the same time and distance at the same speedlifts the oar out of the water at the same timeslides forward at the same paceTeam members hand off work frequently, without fanfare, and in small chunks.Team members can finish each other's… (Did you try to finish my sentence for me?) work. They can jump in and pick up tasks if someone is out sick or on vacation.Meetings are short, focused and valuable.Goals are ambitious, but usually met. When the team falls short, everyone (including leaders) understands that goals are not guarantees.A try-it-and-see mindset permeates the team. They're willing to experiment with new practices (such as user stories vs. job stories or story points vs. time) or frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban).The team is confident in their ability to succeed. As they deliver more and more value, and achieve outcome after outcome, the team feels almost unstoppable. Team members have fun. I sometimes decry that work is called work. I sincerely want work to be fun. I'm not naive: I know that won't always be the case. But when a team is working together well, it is fun.Swing is rare. When I rowed, our boat might have gone an entire race without once truly achieving swing. (And yes, it was usually my fault. Thanks for asking.)But when it happens, it's effortless. The boat flies.Agile teams can experience the same kind of swing. When everything starts to flowWhen teams are aligned and in sync you'll know it: ​​​​​None of this happens by accidentAchieving all of this isn't easy.Like rowers chasing swing, agile teams have to practice, reflect, and adjust—over and over again—in their quest to go from good to great.But take it from me, when it clicks, it's magic.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠- [instagram] ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠- [facebook] ⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠- [Linkedin] ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Wie gelingt der Schritt von der agilen Beratung hinein in den Unternehmensalltag? In dieser Folge von Unboxing New Work spricht Joanna mit Larissa Reis, die nach anderthalb Jahren bei HelloAgile ihre Leidenschaft für agiles Arbeiten in ein neues Umfeld getragen hat – als Scrum Masterin bei der Datagroup. Larissa erzählt, wie sie das, was sie bei HelloAgile gelernt und gelebt hat, nun in der Praxis weiterentwickelt: Wie sich Agilität im Unternehmenskontext anfühlt, welche Learnings sie aus der Theorie mitnimmt – und warum „Kill Meetings“ für sie mittlerweile mehr als nur ein Spruch ist. Gemeinsam sprechen die beiden über Feedbackkultur, gelebte Werte und darüber, wie man Agilität Schritt für Schritt in den Alltag bringt. Ein inspirierendes Gespräch über Weiterentwicklung, Teamarbeit und den Mut, Neues auszuprobieren – mit vielen Einblicken in die agile Praxis.

In this episode, Ryan Brook brings his homework with him as he joins hosts Jim Sammons and Rich Visotcky for a vibrant Q&A session to answer questions from our viewers. Ryan flips the script, taking over emcee duties to extract key ideas and insights from Rich and Jim as they cover a range of topics from team autonomy and navigating roles to measuring outcomes and outputs to understand the impacts of agility.Join us for a lively session answering your questions! Have a question you want answered in a future episode? Comment on this episode, or reach out to us.00:00:00 Opening00:00:29 Introductions 00:02:54 Question Setup 00:04:16 Navigating New Roles in an Organization 00:13:07 Coaching Leadership on Agility and Fixed Projects 00:20:09 Managing Dependencies in Agile and Waterfall 00:28:38 Metrics for Agile Progress 00:36:00 Creating a Culture of Experimentation 00:47:23 Measuring Outcomes vs Output 00:52:40 The Gantt Chart Debate 00:58:16 Tools for User Story Mapping 01:05:21 Balancing Team Autonomy with Organizational Goals 01:13:01 Change Management in UI/UX Handoffs 01:19:38 Managing Parallel Sprints 01:29:13 Closing Connect with Mastering Agility

Alidad Hamidi: When a Billion-Dollar Team Becomes Invisible Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Most of the times, it's not teams that are self-destructive or anything... Simple analogy is when a flower is not blooming, you don't fix the flower, you fix the soil." - Alidad Hamidi   The team sat on the sidelines, maintaining a large portfolio of systems while the organization buzzed with excitement about replatforming initiatives. Nobody seemed to care about them. Morale was low. Whenever technical challenges arose, everyone pointed to the same person for help. Alidad tried the standard playbook—team-building activities, bonding exercises—but the impact was minimal. Something deeper was broken, and it wasn't the team.   Then Alidad shifted his lens to systems thinking. Instead of fixing the flower, he examined the soil. Using the Viable Systems Model, he started with System 5—identity. Who were they? What value did they create? He worked with stakeholders to map the revenue impact of the systems this "forgotten" team maintained. The number shocked everyone: one billion dollars. These weren't legacy systems gathering dust—they were revenue-generating engines critical to the business. Alidad asked the team to run training series for each other, teaching colleagues about the ten different systems they managed. They created self-assessments of skill sets, making visible what had been invisible for too long. When Alidad made their value explicit to the organization, everything shifted. The team's perspective transformed. Later, when asked what made the difference, their answer was unanimous: "You made us visible. That's it." People have agency to change their environment, but sometimes they need someone to help the system see what it's been missing. Ninety percent of the time, when teams struggle, it's not the team that needs fixing—it's the soil they're planted in.   Self-reflection Question: What teams in your organization are maintaining critical systems but remain invisible to leadership, and what would happen if you made their value explicit? Featured Book of the Week: More Time to Think by Nancy Kline Alidad describes Nancy Kline's More Time to Think as transformative for his facilitation practice. While many Scrum Masters focus on filling space and driving conversations forward, this book teaches the opposite—how to create space and listen deeply. "It teaches you to create a space, not to fill it," Alidad explains. The book explores how to design containers—meetings, workshops, retrospectives—that allow deeper thinking to emerge naturally among team members.   For Alidad, the book answered a fundamental question: "How do you help people to find the solution among themselves?" It transformed his approach from facilitation to liberation, helping teams slow down so they can think more clearly. He first encountered the audiobook and was so impacted that he explored both "Time to Think" and this follow-up. While both are valuable, "More Time to Think" resonated more deeply with his coaching philosophy. The book pairs beautifully with systems thinking, helping Scrum Masters understand that creating the right conditions for thinking is often more powerful than providing the right answers. In this segment, we also refer to the book Confronting our freedom, by Peter Block et al.    [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Alidad Hamidi: When Silence Becomes Your Most Powerful Coaching Tool Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I purposefully designed a moment of silence. Staying in the anxiety of being silenced. Do not interrupt the team. Put the question there, let them come up with a solution. It is very hard. But very effective." - Alidad Hamidi   Alidad walked into what seemed like a straightforward iteration manager role—what some use, instead of Scrum Master. The organization was moving servers to the cloud, a transformation with massive implications. When leadership briefed him on the team's situation, they painted a clear picture of challenges ahead. Yet when Alidad asked the team directly about the transformation's impact, the response was uniform: "Nothing."   But Alidad knew better. After networking with other teams, he discovered the truth—this team maintained software generating over half a billion dollars in revenue, and the transformation would fundamentally change their work. When he asked again, silence filled the room. Not the comfortable silence of reflection, but the heavy silence of fear and mistrust. Most facilitators would have filled that void with words, reassurance, or suggestions. Alidad did something different—he waited. And waited. For what felt like an eternity, probably a full minute, he stood in that uncomfortable silence, about to leave the room.   Then something shifted. One team member picked up a pen. Then another joined in. Suddenly, the floodgates opened. Debates erupted, ideas flew, and the entire board filled with impacts and concerns. What made the difference? Before that pivotal moment, Alidad had invested in building relationships—taking the team to lunch, standing up for them when managers blamed them for support failures, showing through his actions that he genuinely cared. The team saw that he wasn't there to tell them how to do their jobs. They started to trust that this silence wasn't manipulation—it was genuine space for their voices. This moment taught Alidad a profound lesson about Open Systems Theory and Socio-Technical systems—sometimes the most powerful intervention is creating space and having the courage to hold it.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you designed a moment of silence for your team, and what held you back from making it longer?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Ben Day is a seasoned software consultant and fractional CTO. With over two decades of experience, he brings a blend of hands-on coding expertise, strategic clarity, and people-focused coaching to help companies — from startups to Fortune 500s — deliver high-quality software faster and with less friction.   As the founder of Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc., Ben offers training, coaching, and architectural guidance rooted in Agile, Scrum, Azure DevOps, and GitHub best practices. He's a Microsoft MVP, a certified Professional Scrum Trainer for over 15 years, and a sought-after speaker who favors storytelling over slide decks.   Topics of Discussion: [2:30] The overlap between music and coding, with Ben explaining the empathy required in both fields. [4:22] Jeffrey mentions the Sunday Sounds app, which allows users to create custom instruments using AI prompts. [6:45] The process of creating Slide Speaker and how Slide Speaker takes screenshots of each moment in a PowerPoint presentation and generates MP4 files. [13:01] Technical details of SlideSpeaker. [16:18] Event-based scaling. [17:10] How SlideSpeaker can be used for internal training presentations and compliance-approved content. [26:06] The opportunity for even more voice models and the ability to create your own custom voice, accent, and tone. [28:11] Ben talks about creating videos that help absolute beginners grasp C#. [32:45] What's next for Ben and Slidespeaker?   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Benjamin Day Consulting Benjamin Day LinkedIn Benjamin Day YouTube SlidespeakerAI     Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Karim Harbott: From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Strategic, Customer-Obsessed, and Vision-Driven   "The PO role in the team is strategic. These POs focus on the customer, outcomes, and strategy. They're customer-obsessed and focus on the purpose and the why of the product." - Karim Harbott   Karim believes the industry fundamentally misunderstands what a Product Owner should be. The great Product Owners he's seen are strategic thinkers who are obsessed with the customer. They don't just manage a backlog—they paint a vision for the product and help the entire team become customer-obsessed alongside them.  These POs focus relentlessly on outcomes rather than outputs, asking "why are we building this?" before diving into "what should we build?" They understand the purpose of the product and communicate it compellingly.  Karim references Amazon's "working backwards" approach, where Product Owners start with the customer experience they want to create and work backwards to figure out what needs to be built. Great POs also embrace the framework of Desirability (what customers want), Viability (what makes business sense), Feasibility (what's technically possible), and Usability (what's easy to use). While the PO owns desirability and viability, they collaborate closely with designers on usability and technical teams on feasibility.  This is critical: software is a team sport, and great POs recognize that multiple roles share responsibility for delivery. Like David Marquet teaches, they empower the team to own decisions rather than dictating every detail. The result? Teams that understand the "why" and can innovate toward it autonomously.   Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner paint a compelling vision that inspires the team, or do they primarily manage a list of tasks? The Bad Product Owner: The User Story Writer "The user story writer PO thinks it's their job to write full, long requirements documents, put it in JIRA, and assign it to the team. This is far away from what the PO role should be." - Karim Harbott   The anti-pattern Karim sees most often is the "User Story Writer" Product Owner. These POs believe their job is to write detailed requirements documents, load them into JIRA, and assign them to the team. It's essentially waterfall disguised as Agile—treating user stories like mini-specifications rather than conversation starters. This approach completely misses the collaborative nature of product development.  Instead of engaging the team in understanding customer needs and co-creating solutions, these POs hand down fully-formed requirements and expect the team to execute without question. The problem is that this removes the team's ownership and creativity. When POs act as the sole source of product knowledge, they become bottlenecks.  The team can't make smart tradeoffs or innovate because they don't understand the underlying customer problems or business context. Using the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility-Usability framework, bad POs try to own all four dimensions themselves instead of recognizing that designers, developers, and other roles bring essential perspectives. The result is disengaged teams, slow delivery, and products that miss the mark because they were built to specifications rather than shaped by collaborative discovery. Software is a team sport—but the User Story Writer PO forgets to put the team on the field.   Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner engaging the team in collaborative discovery, or just handing down requirements to be implemented?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Karim Harbott: Don't Scale Dysfunction—Fix the Team First Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "How do you define the success of a football manager? Football managers are successful when the team is successful. For Scrum Masters it is also like that. Is the team better than it was before?" - Karim Harbott   Karim uses a powerful analogy to define success for Scrum Masters: think of yourself as a football manager. A football manager isn't successful because they personally score goals—they're successful when the team wins. The same principle applies to Scrum Masters. Success isn't measured by how many problems you solve or how busy you are. It's measured by whether the team is better than they were before.  Are they more self-organizing? More effective? More aligned with organizational outcomes?  This requires a mindset shift. Unlike sprinters competing individually, Scrum Masters succeed by enabling others to be better.  Karim recommends involving the team when defining success—what does "better" mean to them? He also emphasizes linking the work of the team to organizational objectives. When teams understand how their efforts contribute to broader goals, they become more engaged and purposeful. But there's a critical warning: don't scale dysfunction! If a team isn't healthy, improving it is far more important than expanding your coaching to more teams.  A successful Scrum Master creates teams that don't need constant intervention—teams that can manage themselves, make decisions, and deliver value consistently. Just like a great football manager builds a team that plays brilliantly even when the manager isn't on the field.   Self-reflection Question: Is your team more capable and self-sufficient than they were six months ago, or have they become more dependent on you? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Systems Modeling with Causal Loop Diagrams "It shows how many aspects of the system there are and how things are interconnected. This helps us see something that we would not come up with in normal conversations." - Karim Harbott   Karim recommends using systems modeling—specifically causal loop diagrams—as a retrospective format. This approach helps teams visualize the complex interconnections between different aspects of their work. Instead of just listing what went wrong or right, causal loop diagrams reveal how various elements influence each other, often uncovering hidden feedback loops and unintended consequences.  The power of this format is that it surfaces insights the team wouldn't discover through normal conversation. Teams can then think of their retrospective actions as experiments—ways to interact with the system to test hypotheses about what will improve outcomes. This shifts retrospectives from complaint sessions to scientific inquiry, making them far more actionable and engaging. If your team is struggling with recurring issues or can't seem to break out of patterns, systems modeling might reveal the deeper dynamics at play.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

On this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Dave West welcomes Professional Scrum Trainer Bogdan Onyshchenko to explore the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM). They discuss how APOM offers a holistic, principle-based approach for product organizations—going beyond Scrum to address team motivation, vendor management, strategic decision-making, and more.Bogdan shares insights on the importance of transparency, frequent delivery, and self-organization. The episode also gets into balancing prescriptive advice with flexible principles, understanding the “why” behind agile practices, and using APOM as a practical tool for improving outcomes and value delivery.Listeners will gain practical guidance on applying APOM in their own organizations and learn how this evolving model continues to support teams and leaders in delivering value effectively.Learn more about APOM. Topics covered:Defining the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM)Practical Applications of APOMBalancing Prescriptive and Principle-Based ApproachesThe Importance of Understanding the "Why"Operating Models vs. Frameworks

Karim Harbott: You Can't Make a Flower Grow Faster—The Oblique Approach to Shaping Culture Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "How can I make a flower grow faster? Culture is a product of the behaviors of people in the system." - Karim Harbott   For Karim, one of the biggest challenges—and enablers—in his current work is creating a supporting culture. After years of learning what doesn't work, he's come to understand that culture isn't something you can force or mandate. Like trying to make a flower grow faster by pulling on it, direct approaches to culture change often backfire.  Instead, Karim uses what he calls the "oblique approach"—changing culture indirectly by adjusting the five levers: leadership behaviors, organizational structure, incentives, metrics, and systems. Leadership behaviors are particularly crucial.  When leaders step back and encourage ownership rather than micromanaging, teams transform. Incentives have a huge impact on how teams work—align them poorly, and you'll get exactly the wrong behaviors.  Karim references Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, which demonstrates how changing organizational structure and leadership philosophy can unlock extraordinary performance. He also uses the Competing Values Framework to help leaders understand different cultural orientations and their tradeoffs. But the most important lesson? There are always unexpected consequences. Culture change requires patience, experimentation, and a willingness to observe how the system responds. You can't force a flower to grow, but you can create the conditions where it thrives.   Self-reflection Question: Are you trying to change your organization's culture directly, or are you adjusting the conditions that shape behavior?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Karim Harbott: Why System Design Beats Individual Coaching Every Time Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "You can't change people, but you can change the system. Change the environment, not the people." - Karim Harbott   Karim was coaching a distributed team that was struggling with defects appearing constantly during sprints. The developers and testers were at different sites, and communication seemed fractured. But Karim knew from experience that when teams are underperforming, the problem usually isn't the people—it's the system they're working in. He stepped back to examine the broader context, implementing behavior-driven development(BDD) and specification by example to improve clarity through BDD scenarios.  But the defects persisted.  Then, almost by accident, Karim discovered the root cause: the developers and testers were employed by different companies. They had competing interests, different incentives, and fundamentally misaligned goals. No amount of coaching the individuals would fix a structural problem like that.  It took months, but eventually the system changed—developers and testers were reorganized into unified teams from the same organization. Suddenly, the defects dropped dramatically. As Jocko Willink writes in Extreme Ownership, when something isn't working, look at the system first. Karim's experience proves that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is stop trying to fix people and start fixing the environment they work in.   Self-reflection Question: When your team struggles, do you look at the people or at the system they're embedded in? Featured Book of the Week: Scaling Lean and Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde "This book was absolute gold. The way it is written, and the tools they talk about went beyond what I was talking about back then. They introduced many concepts that I now use." - Karim Harbott   Karim discovered Scaling Lean and Agile Development by accident, but it resonated with him immediately. The concepts Craig Larman and Bas Vodde introduced—particularly around LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)—went far beyond the basics Karim had been working with. The book opened his eyes to system-level thinking at scale, showing how to maintain agility even as organizations grow.  It's packed with practical tools and frameworks that Karim still uses today. For anyone working beyond a single team, this book provides the depth and nuance that most scaling frameworks gloss over. Also worth reading: User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn, another foundational text that shaped Karim's approach to working with teams.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Karim Harbott: The Day I Discovered I Was a Scrum Project Manager, Not a Scrum Master Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I was telling the team what to do, instead of helping the team to be better on their own. There's a lot more to being a Scrum Master than Agile—working with people is such a different skillset." - Karim Harbott   Karim thought he had mastered Scrum. He had read the books, understood the framework, and was getting things done. His team seemed to be moving forward smoothly—until he stepped away for a few weeks.  But, when he returned, everything had fallen apart. The team couldn't function without him constantly directing their work. That's when Karim realized he had fallen into one of the most common anti-patterns in Agile: the Scrum Project Manager.  Instead of enabling his team to be more effective, he had become their bottleneck. Every decision flowed through him, every task needed his approval, and the team had learned to wait for his direction rather than taking ownership themselves. The wake-up call was brutal but necessary.  Karim discovered that pushing project management responsibilities to the people doing the work—as David Marquet advocates—was far more powerful than being the hero who solves all problems. The real skill wasn't in telling people what to do; it was in creating an environment where they could figure it out themselves. Geoff Watts calls this servant leadership, and Karim learned it the hard way: a great Scrum Master makes themselves progressively less necessary, not more indispensable.   Self-reflection Question: Are you enabling your team to be more effective, or have you become the person they can't function without?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Darryl Wright: The PONO—Product Owners in Name Only and How They Destroy Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Collaborative, Present, and Clear in Vision   "She was collaborative, and that meant that she was present—the opposite of the MIA product owner. She came, and she sat with the team, and she worked with them side by side. Even when she was working on something different, she'd be there, she'd be available." - Darryl Wright   Darryl shares an unusual story about one of the best Product Owners he's ever encountered—someone who had never even heard of Agile before taking the role. Working for a large consulting company with 170,000 staff worldwide, they faced a difficult project that nobody wanted to do. Darryl suggested running it as an Agile project, but the entire team had zero Agile experience. The only person who'd heard of Agile was a new graduate who'd studied it for one week at university—he became the Scrum Master. The executive sponsor, with her business acumen and stakeholder management skills, became the Product Owner despite having no idea what that meant.  The results were extraordinary: an 18-month project completed in just over 7 months, and when asked about the experience, the team's highest feedback was how much fun they had working on what was supposed to be an awful, difficult project. Darryl attributes this success to mindset—the team was open and willing to try something new.  The Product Owner brought critical skills to the role even without technical Agile knowledge: She was collaborative and present, sitting with the team and remaining available. She was decisive, making prioritization calls clearly so nobody was ever confused about priorities. She had excellent communication skills, articulating the vision with clarity that inspired the team. Her stakeholder management capabilities kept external pressures managed appropriately. And her business acumen meant she instantly understood conversations about value, time to market, and customer impact.  Without formal training, she became an amazing Product Owner simply by being open, willing, and committed. As Darryl reflects, going from never having heard of the role to being an inspiring Product Owner in 7 months was incredible—one of the most successful projects and teams he's ever worked with.   Self-reflection Question: If you had to choose between a Product Owner with deep Agile certification and no business skills, or one with strong business acumen and willingness to learn—which would serve your team better? The Bad Product Owner: The PONO—Product Owner in Name Only   "The team never saw the PO until the showcase. And so, the team would come along with work that they deemed was finished, and the product owner had not seen it before because he wasn't around. So he would be seeing it for the first time in the showcase, and he would then accept or reject the work in the showcase, in front of other stakeholders." - Darryl Wright   The most destructive anti-pattern Darryl has witnessed was the MIA—Missing in Action—Product Owner, someone who was a Product Owner in Name Only (PONO). This senior business person was too busy to spend time with the team, only appearing at the sprint showcase. The damage this created was systematic and crushing. The team would build work without Product Owner engagement, then present it in the showcase looking to be proud of their accomplishment.  The PO, seeing it for the first time, would accept or reject the work in front of stakeholders. When he rejected it, the team was crushed, deflated, demoralized, and made to look like fools in front of senior leaders—essentially thrown under the bus. This pattern violates multiple principles of Agile teamwork. First, there's no feedback loop during the sprint, so the team works blind, hoping they're building the right thing. Second, the showcase becomes a validation ceremony rather than a collaborative feedback session, creating a dynamic of subservience rather than curiosity. The team seeks approval instead of engaging as explorers discovering what delivers customer value together. Third, the PO positions themselves as judge rather than coach—extracting themselves from responsibility for what's delivered while placing all blame on the team.  As Deming's quote reminds us, "A leader is a coach, not a judge." When the PO takes the judge role, they're betraying fundamental Agile values.  The responsibility for what the team delivers belongs strictly to the Product Owner; the team owns how it's delivered.  When Darryl encounters this situation as a Scrum Master, he lobbies intensely with the PO: "Even if you can't spare any other time for the entire sprint, give us just one hour the night before the showcase." That single hour lets the team preview what they'll present, getting early yes/no decisions so they never face public rejection. The basic building block of any Agile or Scrum way of working is an empowered team—and this anti-pattern strips all empowerment away.   Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner show up as a coach who's building something together with the team, or as a judge who pronounces verdicts? How does that dynamic shape what your team is willing to try?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Welcome to a special edition of The Easier, Better, for Construction Show (EBFC Show)!

Darryl Wright: The Retrospective Formats That Actually Generate Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "My success is, how much have I helped the team achieve what they want? If what they want is to uplift quality, or to reduce their time to market, well then, my success is helping them achieve that." - Darryl Wright When Darryl enters a new organization, he's often told his success will be measured by percentage of Agile adoption or team maturity assessment scores. His response is direct: those are vanity metrics that show something for its own sake, not real success. True success requires multiple measures, carefully balanced to prevent gaming and to capture both the human and business dimensions of work. Darryl advocates balancing quantitative metrics like lead time and flow efficiency with qualitative measures like employee happiness and team self-assessment of productivity. He balances business outcomes like customer satisfaction and revenue with humanity metrics that track the team's journey toward high performance. Most importantly, Darryl believes his success metrics should be co-created with the team. If he's there to help the team, then success must be defined by how much he's helped them achieve what they want—not what he wants. When stakeholders fixate on output metrics like "more story points," Darryl uses a coaching approach to shift the conversation toward outcomes and value. "Would you be happy if your team checked off more boxes, but your customers were less happy?" he asks. This opens space for exploring what they really want to achieve and why it matters. The key is translating outputs into impacts, helping people articulate the business value or customer experience improvement they're actually seeking. As detailed in Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart, comprehensive dashboards can track value across multiple domains simultaneously—balancing speed with quality, business success with humanity, quantitative data with qualitative experience. When done well, Agile teams can be highly productive, highly successful, and have high morale at the same time. We don't have to sacrifice one for the other—we can have both. Self-reflection Question: If your team could only track two metrics for the next sprint, what would they choose? What would you choose? And more importantly, whose choice should drive the selection? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4 L's and Three Little Pigs Darryl offers two favorites, tailored to different contexts. For learning environments, he loves the 4 L's retrospective: Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For. This format creates space for teams to reflect on their learning journey, surfacing insights about what worked, what was missing, and what they aspire to moving forward. For operational environments, he recommends the Three Little Pigs retrospective, which brilliantly surfaces team strengths and weaknesses through a playful metaphor. The House of Straw represents things the team is weak at—nothing stands up, everything falls over. The House of Sticks is things they've put structure around, but it doesn't really work. The House of Bricks represents what they're solid on, what they can count on every time. Then comes the most important part: identifying the Big Bad Wolf—the scary thing, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about but everyone knows is there. This format creates psychological safety to discuss the undiscussable. Darryl emphasizes two critical success factors for retrospectives: First, vary your formats. Teams that hear the same questions sprint after sprint will disengage, asking "why are you asking me again?" Different questions provide different lenses, generating fresh insights. Second, ensure actions come out of every retro. Nothing kills engagement faster than suggestions disappearing into the void. When people see their ideas lead to real changes, they'll eagerly return to the next retrospective. And don't forget to know your team—if they're sports fans, use sports retros; if they're scientists, use space exploration themes. Just don't make the mistake of running a "sailboat retro" with retiring mainframe engineers who'll ask if you think they're kindergarten children. For more retrospective formats, check out Retromat. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Darryl Wright: Why AI Adoption Will Fail Just Like Agile Did—Unless We Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "People are looking to AI to solve their problems, and they're doing it in the same way that they previously looked to Agile to solve their problems for them. The problem with that is, of course, that Agile doesn't solve problems for you. What it does is it shines a light on where your problems are." - Darryl Wright The world has gone AI crazy, and Darryl sees history repeating itself in troubling ways. Organizations are rushing to adopt AI with the same magical thinking they once applied to Agile—believing that simply implementing the tool will solve their fundamental problems. But just as Agile reveals problems rather than solving them, AI will do the same. Worse, AI threatens to accelerate existing problems: if you have too many things moving at once, AI won't fix that, it will amplify the chaos. If you automate a bad process, you've simply locked in badness at higher speed. As Darryl points out, when organizations don't understand that AI requires them to still do the hard work of problem-solving, they're setting themselves up for disillusionment, and in five or twenty years, we'll hear "AI is dead" just like we now hear "Agile is dead." The challenge for Scrum Masters and Agile coaches is profound: how do you help people with something they don't know they need? The answer lies in returning to first principles. Before adopting any tool—whether Agile or AI—organizations must clearly define the problem they're trying to solve. As Einstein reportedly said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." Value stream mapping becomes essential, allowing teams to visualize where humans and AI agents should operate, with clear handovers and explicit policies. The cognitive load on software teams will increase dramatically as AI generates more code, more options, and more complexity. Without clear thinking about problems and deliberate design of systems, AI adoption will follow the same disappointing trajectory as many Agile adoptions—lots of activity, little improvement, and eventually, blame directed at the tool rather than the system. Self-reflection Question: Are you adopting AI to solve a clearly defined problem, or because everyone else is doing it? If you automated your current process with AI, would you be locking in excellence or just accelerating dysfunction? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Darryl Wright: The Agile Team That Committed to Failure for 18 Sprints Straight Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "As Deming said, a bad system will beat a good person every time." - Darryl Wright Darryl was called in to help a struggling team at a large energy retailer. The symptoms seemed straightforward—low morale, poor relationships, and chronic underdelivery. But as he asked questions, a heartbreaking pattern emerged. The team had been "committing" to 110 story points per sprint while consistently delivering only 30. For 18 sprints. When Darryl asked why the team would commit to numbers they couldn't possibly achieve, the answer was devastating: "The business needs that much." This wasn't a problem of skill or capability—it was learned helplessness in action. Sprint after sprint, the team experienced failure, which made them more despondent and less effective, creating a vicious downward spiral. The business lost trust, the team lost confidence, and everyone was trapped in a system that guaranteed continued failure. When Darryl proposed the solution—committing to a realistic 30 points—he was told it was impossible because "the business needs 110 points." But the business wasn't getting 110 points anyway. They were getting broken promises, a demoralized team, stress leave, high churn, and a relationship built on distrust. Darryl couldn't change the system in that case, but the lesson was clear: adult people who manage their lives perfectly well outside work can become completely helpless inside work when the system repeatedly tells them their judgment doesn't matter. As Ricardo Semler observes in Maverick!, people leave their initiative at the door when organizations create systems that punish honest assessment and reward false promises. Self-reflection Question: Is your team committing to what they believe they can achieve, or to what they think someone else wants to hear? What would happen if they told the truth? Featured Book of the Week: Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart Darryl describes Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart as a treasure trove of real-life experience from people who have "had their sleeves rolled up in the trenches" for decades. What he loves most is the authenticity—the authors openly share not just their successes, but all the things that didn't work and why. One story that crystallizes the book's brilliance involves Barclays Bank and their ingenious approach to change adoption. Facing resistance from laggards who refused to adopt Agile improvements despite overwhelming social proof, they started publishing lists of "most improved teams." When resisters saw themselves at the bottom of these public lists, they called to complain—and were asked, "Did you have improvements we didn't know about?" The awkward pause would follow, then the inevitable question: "How do I get these improvements?" Demand creation at its finest. Darryl particularly appreciates that the authors present at conferences saying, "Let me tell you about all the things we've stuffed up in major agile transformations all around the world," bringing genuine humility and practical wisdom to every page. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Darryl Wright: When Enthusiasm Became Interference—Learning to Listen as a Scrum Master Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Wait stands for Why Am I Talking? Just ask yourself, wait, why am I talking? Is this the right moment for you to give an idea, or is this the right moment to just listen and let them have space to come up with ideas?" - Darryl Wright   Early in his Agile journey, Darryl was evangelically enthusiastic about the principles and practices that had transformed his approach to leadership. He believed he had discovered the answers people were seeking, and his excitement manifested in a problematic pattern—he talked too much. Constantly jumping in with solutions, ideas, and suggestions, Darryl dominated conversations without realizing the impact. Then someone pulled him aside with a generous gift: "You're not really giving other people time to come up with ideas or take ownership of a problem."  They introduced him to WAIT—Why Am I Talking?—an acronym that would fundamentally shift his coaching approach. This simple tool forced Darryl to pause before speaking and examine his motivations. Was he trying to prove himself? Did he think he knew better? Or was this genuinely the right moment to contribute? As he practiced this technique, Darryl discovered something profound: when he held space and waited, others would eventually step forward with insights and solutions.  The concept of "small enough to try, safe enough to fail" became his framework for deciding when to intervene. Not every moment requires a Scrum Master to step in—sometimes the most powerful coaching happens in silence. By developing better skills in active listening and learning to hold space for others, Darryl transformed from someone who provided all the answers into someone who created the conditions for shared leadership to emerge.   In this episode, we refer to David Marquet's episodes on the podcast for practical techniques on holding space and enabling leadership in others.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you caught yourself jumping in with a solution before giving your team space to discover it themselves? What would happen if you waited just five more minutes?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

You often hear from people that going on a hunting safari is a trip of a lifetime, and it certainly is, but what you rarely hear from people is that they got a once in a lifetime trophy! This story recaps that exact trophy, a true once in a lifetime trophy.   **NOTE**  I did mention in the intro of episode that there is a video of this particular hunt, well I was unaware at the time that the video has not yet been released. So, I would suggest following the link to the This Is Africa TV YouTube channel and I am sure they will release the video soon. Link below https://www.youtube.com/@ThisisAfricaTVshow

Alex Sloley: How to Coach POs Who Treat Developers Like Mindless Robots In this episode, we refer to the previous episodes with David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around! The Great Product Owner: Trust and the Sprint Review That Changes Everything Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "She was like, oh my gosh, I've never seen this before, I didn't think it was possible. I just saw you deliver stuff in 2 weeks that I can actually use." - Alex Sloley In 2011, Alex worked with a client organization creating software for external companies. They needed a Product Owner for a new Agile team, and a representative from the client—who had never experienced Scrum—volunteered for the role. She was initially skeptical, having never witnessed or heard of this approach. Alex gently coached her through the process, asking her to trust the team and be patient. Then came the first Sprint Review, and everything changed. For the first time in her career, she saw working product delivered in just two weeks that she could actually touch, see, and use. Her head exploded with possibility. Even though it didn't have everything and wasn't perfect, it was remarkably good. That moment flipped a switch—she became fully engaged and transformed into a champion for Agile adoption, not just for the team but for the entire company. Alex reflects that she embodied all five Scrum values: focus (trusting the team's capacity), commitment (attending and engaging in all events), openness (giving the new approach a chance), respect (giving the team space to succeed), and courage (championing an unfamiliar process). The breakthrough wasn't about product ownership techniques—it was about creating an experience that reinforced Scrum values, allowing her to see the potential of a bright new future. Self-reflection Question: What practices, techniques, or processes can you implement that will naturally and automatically build the five Scrum values in your Product Owner? The Bad Product Owner: When Control Becomes Domination Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "They basically just owned the team. The developers on the team might as well have been mindless robots, because they were being assigned all the work, told how much work they could do in a sprint, what the work was." - Alex Sloley In 2018, while working with five interconnected Product Owners, Alex observed a Sprint Planning session that revealed a severe anti-pattern. One Product Owner completely controlled everything, telling the team exactly what work they would take into the Sprint, assigning specific work to specific people by name, and dictating precisely how they would implement solutions down to technical details like which functions and APIs to use. The developers were reduced to helpless executors with no autonomy, while the Scrum Master sat powerless in the corner. Alex wondered what caused this dynamic—was the PO a former project manager? Had the team broken trust in the past? What emotional baggage or trauma led to this situation? His approach started with building trust through coffee meetings and informal conversations, crucially viewing the PO not as the problem but as someone facing their own impediment. He reframed the challenge as solving the Product Owner's problem rather than fixing the Product Owner. When he asked, "Why do you have to do all this? Can't you trust the team?" and suggested the PO could relax if they delegated, the response was surprisingly positive. The PO was willing to step back once given permission and assurance. Alex's key lesson: think strategically about how to build trust and who needs to build trust with whom. Sometimes the person who appears to be creating problems is actually struggling under their own burden. Self-reflection Question: When you encounter a controlling Product Owner, do you approach the situation as "fixing" the PO or as "solving the PO's problem"? How might this reframe change your coaching strategy? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Alex Sloley: Why Sticky Notes Are Your Visualization Superpower in Retrospectives Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Like the smell, the vibe is something you feel. If you're having a successful impact on the organization or on teams as a Scrum Master, you can feel it, you can smell it. It's intangible." - Alex Sloley Alex introduces a compelling concept from Sumantra Ghoshal about "the smell of the workplace"—you can walk into an environment and immediately sense whether it smells like fresh strawberries and cream or a dumpster fire. In Australia, there's a cultural reference from the movie "The Castle" about "the vibe of the thing," and Alex emphasizes that as a successful Scrum Master, you can feel and smell when you're having an impact. While telling executives you're measuring "vibe" might be challenging, Alex shares three concrete ways he's measured success. The key insight is that success isn't always measurable in traditional ways, but successful Scrum Masters develop an intuition for sensing when their work is making a meaningful difference. Self-reflection Question: Can you articulate the "vibe" or "smell" of your current team or organization? What specific indicators tell you whether your Scrum Master work is truly making an impact beyond the metrics? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Sticky Notes for Everything Alex champions any retrospective format that includes sticky notes, calling them a "visualization superpower." With sticky notes, teams can visualize anything—the good, the bad, improvements, options, possibilities, and even metrics. They make information transparent, which is critical for the inspect-and-adapt cycle that forms the heart of Scrum. Alex emphasizes being strategic about visualization: identify a challenge, figure out how to make it visual, and then create experiments around that visualization. Once something becomes visible, magic happens because the team can see patterns they've never noticed before. You can use different sizes, colors, and positions to visualize constraints in the system, including interruptions, unplanned work, blocker clustering, impediments, and flow. This approach works not just in retrospectives but in planning, reviews, and daily scrums. The key principle is that you must have transparency in order to inspect, and you must inspect to adapt. Alex's practical advice: be strategic about what you choose to visualize, involve the team in determining how to make challenges visible, and watch as the transparency naturally leads to insights and improvement ideas. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

AI is forcing organizations to rethink how they operate. In this insightful conversation, Dave West and Yuval Yeret discuss the emerging need for a new organizational “operating system” that integrates AI into strategy, structure, and execution. They highlight the role of product thinking, OKRs, and continuous improvement in turning AI from hype into real business value.

Alex Sloley: Coaching Teams Trapped Between Agile Aspirations and Organizational Control Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "The team says, oh, we want to try to do things this way, and the org keeps coming back and saying stuff like, no, no, no, you can't do that, because in this org, we don't allow that." - Alex Sloley Alex shares his current challenge working with a 10-person pilot Scrum team within a 1,500-person organization that has never done Agile before. While the team appears open-minded and eager to embrace agile ways of working, the organization continuously creates impediments by dictating how the team must estimate, break down work, and operate. Management tells them "the right way" to do everything, from estimation techniques to role-based work assignments, even implementing RACI matrices that restrict who can do what type of work. Half the team has been with the organization for six months or less, making it comfortable to simply defer to authority and follow organizational rules. Through coaching conversation, Alex explores whether the team might be falling into learned helplessness or simply finding comfort in being told what to do—both positions that avoid accountability. His experimental approach includes designing retrospective questions to help the team reflect on what they believe they're empowered to do versus what management dictates, and potentially using delegation cards to facilitate conversations about decision-making authority. Alex's key insight is recognizing that teams may step back from empowerment either out of fear or comfort, and identifying which dynamic is at play requires careful, small experiments that create safe spaces for honest dialogue. Self-reflection Question: When your team defers to organizational authority, are they operating from learned helplessness, comfort in avoiding accountability, or genuine respect for hierarchy? How can you design experiments to uncover the real dynamic at play? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Alex Sloley: When Toxic Leadership Creates Teams That Self-Destruct Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "They would take notes at every team meeting, so that later on they could argue with team members about what they committed to, and what they said in meetings." - Alex Sloley Alex recounts working with a small team where a project manager created such a toxic environment that one new hire quit after just eight hours on the job. This PM would belittle team members publicly, take detailed notes to use as weapons in contract negotiations, and dominate the team through intimidation. The situation became so severe that one team member sent an email that sounded like a suicide note. When the PM criticized Alex's "slide deck velocity," comparing four slides per 15 minutes to Alex's one, he realized the environment was beyond salvaging. Despite coaching the team and attempting to introduce Scrum values, Alex ultimately concluded that management was encouraging this behavior as a control mechanism. The organization lacked trust in the team, creating learned helplessness where team members became submissive and unable to resist. Sometimes, the most important lesson for a Scrum Master is recognizing when a system is too toxic to change and having the courage to walk away. Alex emphasizes that respect—one of the core Scrum values—was completely absent, making any meaningful transformation impossible. In this segment, we talk about “learned helplessness”.  Self-reflection Question: How do you recognize when a toxic environment is being actively encouraged by the system rather than caused by individual behavior? What are the signs that it's time to exit rather than continue fighting? Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Alex describes his complex relationship with The Goal by Goldratt—it both inspires and worries him. He struggles with the text because the concepts are so deep and meaningful that he's never quite sure he's fully understood everything Goldratt was trying to convey. The book was difficult to read, taking him four times longer than other agile-related books, and he had to reread entire sections multiple times. Despite the challenge, the concepts around Theory of Constraints and systems thinking have stayed with him for years. Alex worries late at night that he might have missed something important in the book.  He also mentions reading The Scrum Guide at least once a week, finding new tidbits each time and reflecting on why specific segments say what they say. Both books share a common thread—the text that isn't in the text—requiring readers to dig deeper into the underlying principles and meanings rather than just the surface content. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Alex Sloley: The Sprint Planning That Wouldn't End - A Timeboxing Failure Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Although I knew about the steps of sprint planning, what I didn't really understand was the box of time versus the box of scope." - Alex Sloley Alex shares a critical learning moment from his first team as a Scrum Master. After six months in the role, during an eight-hour sprint planning session for a four-week sprint, he successfully completed the "what" portion but ran out of time before addressing "how." Rather than respecting the timebox, Alex forced the team to continue planning for another four hours the next day—blowing the timebox by 50%. This experience taught him a fundamental lesson: the difference between scope-boxing and timeboxing. In waterfall, we try to control scope while time slips away. In Scrum, we fix time and let scope adjust. Alex emphasizes that timeboxing isn't just about keeping meetings short—it's about limiting work in process and maintaining focus. His practical tip: use visible timers to train yourself and your teams to respect timeboxes. This mindset shift from controlling scope to respecting time remains one of the most important lessons for Scrum Masters. Self-reflection Question: How often do you prioritize completing a planned agenda over respecting the timebox? What message does this send to your team about the values you're reinforcing? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Scrum Theatre and the Agile IllusionImagine your team having a perfect stand-up. Everyone's smiling, and it seems like everything is going smoothly. Everyone says that they do not have any blockers for today and that all's well. Each person on the team is relaxed, and your Scrum Master is grinning from ear to ear.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Stop the Madness!  You've coded like a rockstar, but the sprint clock is ticking, and QA is still pounding away!  This episode tears down the biggest myth in Scrum: the phantom finish line.Is it "done" or is it "done-done with a big D"?  We're dropping the truth bomb: it's either done, or it's not done!  Period.  Get ready to smash the silos, ditch the "I'm done my bit" mindset, and transform your team into a Done-Achieving Machine!Discover the root causes of that agonizing sprint-end stall, why starting the next sprint is the LAST thing you should do, and how shifting to M-shaped individuals is your team's superpower.  Learn practical, high-impact strategies for Product Owners and Development Teams to size work effectively, eliminate iterative waterfall, and ensure every feature is truly shippable and usable.

In this special episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Dave West sits down with Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, to celebrate 30 years since the initial introduction of Scrum at OOPSLA 1995, from which the paper, The Scrum Development Process was based.Ken reflects on the origins of Scrum, the cultural challenges faced during early adoption in large organizations, and the critical importance of transparency, honesty, and teamwork. He shares insights into how Scrum has influenced software development practices such as DevOps and continuous delivery, and offers his perspective on AI as a tool to support—rather than replace—human teams.From early pioneers to the modern evolution of Scrum, Ken shares stories, lessons, and hopes for the future: that Scrum will continue helping people and organizations achieve fulfillment, innovation, and success.Join us for a thoughtful, candid conversation with one of the foundational voices of Agile.

BONUS: The Evolution of Agile - From Project Management to Adaptive Intelligence, With Mario Aiello In this BONUS episode, we explore the remarkable journey of Mario Aiello, a veteran agility thinker who has witnessed and shaped the evolution of Agile from its earliest days. Now freshly retired, Mario shares decades of hard-won insights about what works, what doesn't, and where Agile is headed next. This conversation challenges conventional thinking about methodologies, certifications, and what it truly means to be an Agile coach in complex environments. The Early Days: Agilizing Before Agile Had a Name "I came from project management and project management was, for me, was not working. I used to be a wishful liar, basically, because I used to manipulate reports in such a way that would please the listener. I knew it was bullshit." Mario's journey into Agile began around 2001 at Sun Microsystems, where he was already experimenting with iterative approaches while the rest of the world was still firmly planted in traditional project management. Working in Palo Alto, he encountered early adopters discussing Extreme Programming and had an "aha moment" - realizing that concepts like short iterations, feedback loops, and learning could rescue him from the unsustainable madness of traditional project management. He began incorporating these ideas into his work with PRINCE2, calling stages "iterations" and making them as short as possible. His simple agile approach focused on: work on the most important thing first, finish it, then move to the next one, cooperate with each other, and continuously improve. The Trajectory of Agile: From Values to Mechanisms "When the craze of methodologies came about, I started questioning the commercialization and monetization of methodologies. That's where things started to get a little bit complicated because the general focus drifted from values and principles to mechanisms and metrics." Mario describes witnessing three distinct phases in Agile's evolution. The early days were authentic - software developers speaking from the heart about genuine needs for new ways of working. The Agile Manifesto put important truths in front of everyone. However, as methodologies became commercialized, the focus shifted dangerously away from the core values and principles toward prescriptive mechanisms, metrics, and ceremonies. Mario emphasizes that when you focus on values and principles, you discover the purpose behind changing your ways of working. When you focus only on mechanics, you end up just doing things without real purpose - and that's when Agile became a noun, with people trying to "be agile" instead of achieving agility. He's clear that he's not against methodologies like Scrum, XP, SAFe, or LeSS - but rather against their mindless application without understanding the essence behind them. Making Sense Before Methodology: The Four-Fit Framework "Agile for me has to be fit for purpose, fit for context, fit for practice, and I even include a fourth dimension - fit for improvement." Rather than jumping straight to methodology selection, Mario advocates for a sense-making approach. First, understand your purpose - why do you want Agile? Then examine your context - where do you live, how does your company work? Only after making sense of the gap between your current state and where the values and principles suggest you should be, should you choose a methodology. This might mean Scrum for complex environments, or perhaps a flow-based approach for more predictable work, or creating your own hybrid. The key insight is that anyone who understands Agile's principles and values is free to create their own approach - it's fundamentally about plan, do, inspect, and adapt. Learning Through Failure: Context is Paramount "I failed more often than I won. That teaches you - being brave enough to say I failed, I learned, I move on because I'm going to use it better next time." Mario shares pivotal learning moments from his career, including an early attempt to "agilize PRINCE2" in a command-and-control startup environment. While not an ultimate success, this battle taught him that context is paramount and cannot be ignored. You must start by understanding how things are done today - identifying what's good (keep doing it), what's bad (try to improve it), and what's ugly (eradicate it to the extent possible). This lesson shaped his next engagement at a 300-person organization, where he spent nearly five months preparing the organizational context before even introducing Scrum. He started with "simple agile" practices, then took a systems approach to the entire delivery system. A Systems Approach: From Idea to Cash "From the moment sales and marketing people get brilliant ideas they want built, until the team delivers them into production and supports them - all that is a system. You cannot have different parts finger-pointing." Mario challenges the common narrow view of software development systems. Rather than focusing only on prioritization, development, and testing, he advocates for considering everything that influences delivery - from conception through to cash. His approach involved reorganizing an entire office floor, moving away from functional silos (sales here, marketing there, development over there) to value stream-based organization around products. Everyone involved in making work happen, including security, sales, product design, and client understanding, is part of the system. In one transformation, he shifted security from being gatekeepers at the end of the line to strategic partners from day one, embedding security throughout the entire value stream. This comprehensive systems thinking happened before formal Scrum training began. Beyond the Job Description: What Can an Agile Coach Really Do? "I said to some people, I'm not a coach. I'm just somebody that happens to have experience. How can I give something that can help and maybe influence the system?" Mario admits he doesn't qualify as a coach by traditional standards - he has no formal coaching qualifications. His coaching approach comes from decades of Rugby experience and focuses on establishing relationships with teams, understanding where they're going, and helping them make sense of their path forward. He emphasizes adaptive intelligence - the probe, sense, respond cycle. Rather than trying to change everything at once and capsizing the boat, he advocates for challenging one behavior at a time, starting with the most important, encouraging adaptation, and probing quickly to check for impact of specific changes. His role became inviting people to think outside the box, beyond the rigidity of their training and certifications, helping individuals and teams who could then influence the broader system even when organizational change seemed impossible. The Future: Adaptive Intelligence and Making Room for Agile "I'm using a lot of adaptive intelligence these days - probe, sense, respond, learn and adapt. That sequence will take people places." Looking ahead, Mario believes the valuable core of Agile - its values and principles - will remain, but the way we apply them must evolve. He advocates for adaptive intelligence approaches that emphasize sense-making and continuous learning rather than rigid adherence to frameworks. As he enters retirement, Mario is determined to make room for Agile in his new life, seeking ways to give back to the community through his blog, his new Substack "Adaptive Ways," and by inviting others to think differently. He's exploring a "pay as you wish" approach to sharing his experience, recognizing that while he may not be a traditional coach or social media expert, his decades of real-world experience - with its failures and successes - holds value for those still navigating the complexity of organizational change. About Mario Aiello Retired from full-time work, Mario is an agility thinker shaped by real-world complexity, not dogma. With decades in VUCA environments, he blends strategic clarity, emotional intelligence, and creative resilience. He designs context-driven agility, guiding teams and leaders beyond frameworks toward genuine value, adaptive systems, and meaningful transformation. You can link with Mario Aiello on LinkedIn, visit his website at Agile Ways.

Renee Troughton: Analytics From Day One and Four Other Principles of Great POs Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Product owners who think about their products as just a backlog that I prioritize, and I get some detailed requirements from stakeholders, and I give that to the team... that's not empowering the team. And it's probably leading you to building the wrong thing, just faster." The Bad Product Owner: The Backlog Manager Without Vision Renee describes a pattern of Product Owners who don't understand product management—they lack roadmaps, strategy, and never speak to customers. These POs focus solely on backlogs, prioritizing detailed requirements from stakeholders without testing hypotheses or learning about their market. Taking an empathetic view, Renee notes these individuals may have fallen into the role without passion, never seeing what excellence looks like, and struggling with extreme time poverty. Product ownership is one of the hardest roles from a time perspective—dealing with legislative requirements, compliance, risk, fail-and-fix work, and constant incoming demands. Drowning in day-to-day urgency, they lack breathing space for strategic thinking.  These POs also struggle with vulnerability, feeling they should have all answers as leaders, making it difficult to admit knowledge gaps. Without organizational safety to fail, they can't demonstrate the confidence balanced with humility needed to test hypotheses and potentially be wrong. The result is building the wrong thing faster, without empowering teams or creating real value. Self-reflection Question: Are you managing your Product Owners' workload and supporting their strategic thinking time, or are you allowing them to drown in tactical work that prevents them from truly leading their products? The Great Product Owner: Analytics from Day One and Market Awareness "They really iterated, I think, 5 key principles quite consistently... the one thing that did really shape my thinking at that time was... Analytics from day one." Renee celebrates a Chief Product Owner who led 13 teams with extraordinary effectiveness. This PO consistently communicated five key principles, with "analytics from day one" being paramount—emphasizing the critical need to know immediately if new features work and understanding customer behavior from launch. This PO demonstrated deep market awareness, regularly spending time in Silicon Valley, understanding innovation trends and where the industry was heading. They maintained a clear product vision and could powerfully sell the dream to stakeholders.  Perhaps most impressively, they brought urgency during a competitive "space race" situation when a former leader left with intellectual property to build a competing product. Despite this pressure, they never allowed compromise on quality—rallying teams with mission and purpose while maintaining standards. This combination of strategic vision, market knowledge, data-driven decision-making, and balanced urgency created an environment where teams delivered excellence under competitive pressure. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Renee Troughton: From Lower-Order to Higher-Order Values in Scrum Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "If you, as a senior leader, demonstrate vulnerability, it creates real magic in an organization where others can open up and be their authentic self." Renee defines success for Scrum Masters through deeply human values: integrity, holding her truth, being compassionately authentic, caring, open, honest, listening, and vulnerable. She emphasizes that vulnerability as a senior leader creates transformative magic in organizations, allowing others to bring their authentic selves to work. Drawing on Byron Katie's "Loving What Is" and Frederick Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations," Renee explains that many corporate organizations focus on lower-order values like results and performance, while more autonomous organizations prioritize higher-order values rooted in the heart. When having conversations with people, Renee connects with them as human beings first—not rushing to business if someone is struggling personally. Success means seeing people completely for who they are, not as resources to be changed or leveraged. The foundation for collaboration, empowerment, and autonomy is trust, respect, and safety. Renee emphasizes that without these fundamental values in place, everything else implodes. She demonstrates how vulnerability, active listening, and accepting people where they are creates the fertile ground for successful teams and organizations. Self-reflection Question: Do you demonstrate vulnerability as a leader, creating space for others to bring their authentic selves to work, or do you hide behind a professional facade that prevents genuine human connection? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Themed Retrospectives (Monopoly, Sports, Current Events) "It gave a freshness to it. And it gave almost like a livelihood or a joyfulness to it as an activity as well." Renee recommends themed retrospectives like the Monopoly Retro or sports-themed formats that use current events or cultural references (aka metaphor retrospectives). While working at a consultancy, they would theme retrospectives every week around different topics—football, news events, or various scenarios—using collages of pictures showing different emotions (upset, angry, happy). Team members would identify with feelings and reframe their week within the theme's context, such as "it was a rough game" or "we didn't score enough goals." The brilliance of this approach is covering the same retrospective questions while bringing freshness, creativity, and joyfulness to the activity. These metaphorical formats allow teams to verbalize things that aren't easily expressible in structured formats, triggering different perspectives and creative thinking. The format stays consistent while feeling completely new, maintaining engagement while avoiding retrospective fatigue. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Renee Troughton: Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "For the actual product teams, it's not a problem for them... It's more the downstream teams that aren't the product teams, that are still dependencies... They just don't see that work until, hey, we urgently need this." Renee brings a dual-edged challenge from her current work with dozens of teams across multiple business lines. While quarterly planning happens at a high level, small downstream teams—middleware, AI, data, and even non-technical teams like legal—are not considered in the planning process. These teams experience unexpected work floods with dramatic peaks and troughs throughout the quarter. The product teams are comfortable with ambiguity and incremental delivery, but downstream service teams don't see work coming until it arrives urgently. Through a coaching conversation, Renee and Vasco explore multiple experimental approaches: top-to-bottom stack ranking of initiatives, holding excess capacity based on historical patterns, shared code ownership where downstream teams advise rather than execute changes, and using Theory of Constraints to manage flow into bottleneck teams. They discuss how lack of discovery work compounds the problem, as teams "just start working" without identifying all players who need involvement. The solution requires balancing multiple strategies while maintaining an experimentation mindset, recognizing that complex systems require sensing our way toward solutions rather than predicting them. Self-reflection Question: Are you actively managing the flow of work to prevent downstream bottlenecks, or are you allowing your "downstream teams" to be repeatedly overwhelmed by last-minute urgent requests? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Renee Troughton: The Hidden Cost of Constant Restructuring in Agile Organizations Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Trust and safety are the most fundamental foundations of a team to perform. And so you are just breaking the core of teams when you're doing this." Renee challenges us to look beyond team dysfunction and examine the "dirty little secrets" in organizations—leadership-driven anti-patterns that destroy team performance. She reveals a cyclical pattern of constant restructuring that occurs every six months in many organizations, driven by leaders who avoid difficult performance management conversations and instead force people through redundancy rounds. This creates a cascade of fear, panic, and victim mindset throughout the organization. Beyond restructuring, Renee identifies other destructive patterns including the C-suite shuffle (where new CEOs bring in their own teams, cascading change throughout the organization) and the insourcing/outsourcing swings that create chaos over 5-8 year cycles. These high-level decisions drain productivity for months as teams storm and reform, losing critical knowledge and breaking the trust and safety that are fundamental for high performance. Renee emphasizes that as Agile coaches and Scrum Masters, we often don't feel empowered to challenge these decisions, yet they represent the biggest drain on organizational productivity. Self-reflection Question: Have you identified the cyclical organizational anti-patterns in your workplace, and do you have the courage to raise these systemic issues with senior leadership? Featured Book of the Week: Loving What Is by Byron Katie "It teaches you around how to reframe your thoughts in the day-to-day life, to assess them in a different light than you would normally perceive them to be." Renee recommends "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie as an essential tool for Scrum Master introspection. This book teaches practical techniques for reframing thoughts and recognizing that problems we perceive "out there" are often internal framing issues. Katie's method, called "The Work," provides a worksheet-based approach to introspection that helps identify when our perceptions create unnecessary suffering. Renee also highlights Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication" as a companion book, which uses language to tap into underlying emotions and needs. Both books offer practical, actionable techniques for self-knowledge—a critical skill for anyone in the Scrum Master role. The journey these books provide leads to inner peace through understanding that many challenges stem from how we internally frame situations rather than external reality. We have many episodes on NVC, Nonviolent Communication, which you can dive into and learn from experienced practitioners.  [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Renee Troughton: How to Navigate Mandatory Deadlines in Scrum Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "I said to the CIO at the time, we're not going to hit this. In fact, we'll be... I can actually tell you, we're gonna be 3 weeks late... And he said: ‘Just make it work!'" Renee shares a powerful story from her work on a mandatory legislative compliance project where reality clashed with executive expectations. Working with a team new to Agile, she carefully established velocity over two sprints and projected the delivery timeline. The challenge intensified when sales continued promising bespoke features to clients while the deadline remained fixed. Despite transparently communicating the team would miss the mandatory date by three weeks, leadership demanded she "just make it work" without providing solutions. Renee found herself creating a misleading burn-up chart to satisfy executive confidence, while the organization played a dangerous game of chicken—waiting for another implementer to admit delays first. This experience taught her the critical importance of courage in conversations with leaders and the need to clearly separate business decisions from development team responsibilities. Sometimes the best we can do is provide transparency and let leaders own the consequences of their choices. In this episode, we refer to the seminal book on large projects: The Mythical Man Month, by Frederick Brooks. Self-reflection Question: When faced with unrealistic demands from leadership, do you have the courage to maintain transparency about your team's reality, even when it means refusing to create false artifacts of confidence? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Scrum Has Become a Nice Term to Hide Bad ManagementOnce a wise man said: Fire all Scrum Masters and your non-technical managers who run your IT departments, and watch your productivity to boost up! In most cases, all you need is to hire highly-experienced Tech Leads and show trust in them. Communicate with them and share your insights, answer their questions, and provide them with what they need, including but not limited to the budget, time, ad-hoc specialist consultants, and coaches who would work for them to improve their non-technical skills. The rest, they will figure out themselves.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

How to Engage Busy Stakeholders - Mike CohnWe often find ourselves reliant on others outside the team.For example, an agile team may get stuck waiting for feedback on the latest features or input on what to build next because a key stakeholder has never shown up for a sprint review. Without that stakeholder's feedback, the team is impeded: unable to determine if what they've created is what's needed.The team nags, pleads, and cajoles. But still they're left waiting because stakeholders are often busy, and they just can't (or won't) find the time.You've tried moving the sprint review meeting to more convenient times. You've sent agendas that make it clear the stakeholder's most desired feature is the one being discussed in the review.But time and time again, something comes up at the last minute and the stakeholder is a no show.In these instances, it's time to take the meeting to them. When a stakeholder won't (or can't) show up for the team, it's time for a different approach: Schedule time on the stakeholder's calendar for a meeting a few days before sprint planning.Use that block of time to work together on what the team needs.Schedule a Non-Meeting Meeting Tip within the Tip: Want more help with team dynamics and stakeholder management? Try my free Scrum Team Reset training. It's three videos from me that will help you find new ways to take your team from good to great. When I schedule the meeting, I'll sometimes be very clear what the meeting is about: “I want to go over such-and-such with you before the review.” Other times, I'll be more vague: “I need to chat about the project.”Use whatever language you need to secure time on the person's calendar. Why? Because we are all more willing to cancel appointments with ourselves than we are to cancel an appointment with someone else. By putting time on their calendar that they're reluctant to cancel, you've secured enough time for them to actually do the work. Get the To-Do to DoneDuring the meeting, explain to them the work you need them to do (look at the feature and give feedback or clarify how the feature should work.) Then, use the time to step through the implementation (or plan) with them.This results in two things: the team gets the information it needs. The stakeholder finds that the thing they've been putting off really wasn't so bad once they focused on getting it done. Why This WorksWhen stakeholders show an inability to get work or answers to you at appropriate times, it's time to intervene. Maybe they're worried their time will be wasted in a review where their feature is one of many being discussed.Maybe “review the xyz feature” has been on their to-do list and keeps getting bumped down. Or maybe they haven't actually scheduled a specific time to work on it.No matter the reason, the work the team needs done is not happening. And your best chance of helping the stakeholder do that work is to schedule time with the stakeholder directly. And then use that time to make it happen.Should stakeholders be able to do this on their own?Sure.But we all struggle at times. My experience is that after doing this a handful of times with a stakeholder, most stakeholders will form a new habit and be able to continue without you.In other cases, you and the stakeholder will discover it actually is more efficient when done together, and you'll keep a recurring meeting on their calendar that isn't the review. That's perfectly fine, too.Stakeholders are often busy. And that can cause them to take longer to respond than a fast-moving agile team might like. Finding creative solutions that keep the team moving (even if it's not something Scrum prescribes) is the best way to help advance a team from good to great,How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Tom Molenaar: When Product Owners “Eat the Grass” for Their Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Vision Catalyst "This PO had the ability to communicate the vision and enthusiasm about the product, even I felt inspired." Tom describes an exceptional Product Owner who could communicate vision and enthusiasm so effectively that even he, as the Scrum Master, felt inspired about the product. This PO excelled at engaging teams in product discovery techniques, helping them move from merely delivering features to taking outcome responsibility. The PO introduced validation techniques, brought customers directly to the office for interviews, and consistently showed the team the impact of their work, creating a strong connection between engineers and end users. The Bad Product Owner: The Micromanager "This PO was basically managing the team with micro-managing approach, this blocked the team from self-organizing." Tom encountered a Product Owner who was too controlling, essentially micromanaging the team instead of empowering them. This PO hosted daily stand-ups, assigned individual tasks, and didn't give the team space for self-organization. When Tom investigated the underlying motivation, he discovered the PO believed that without tight control, the team would underperform. Tom helped the PO understand the benefits of trusting the team and worked with both sides to clarify roles and responsibilities, moving from micromanagement to empowerment. In this segment, we refer to the book “Empowered” by Marty Cagan. Self-reflection Question: How do you help Product Owners find the balance between providing clear direction and allowing team autonomy? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]