Podcasts about scrum master toolbox

BONUS: Unlocking the Secrets to Thriving Workplaces and Agile Leadership with Vasco Duarte In this insightful BONUS episode, Vasco Duarte is interviewed by Bill Fox for an episode on the Forward Thinking Workplaces Podcast. Vasco is a visionary leader in agile and lean software development. Vasco shares his revolutionary approach to fostering innovation, creating dynamic workplaces, and leading teams to success. His strategies are designed for leaders looking to elevate their organizations by focusing on people, purpose, and efficient work processes. Tune in for practical advice on how to unlock your team's full potential and thrive in today's fast-paced work environment. Creating Environments for Natural Innovation “Innovation is a natural human quality; it flourishes when you don't make an effort to prevent it.” Vasco emphasizes that innovation isn't something leaders need to force. Instead, it happens organically when the right environment is in place. He encourages leaders to shift away from rigid structures and towards creating motivating spaces where creativity can thrive. By doing this, teams naturally become more innovative and solutions-driven. “The only way innovation does not happen naturally is if we make an effort to prevent it from happening.” Motivated Individuals: The Key to Project Success “Build your projects around motivated individuals and trust them to deliver their best.” Vasco highlights the importance of centering projects around motivated individuals, giving them the trust and support they need to succeed. According to him, leaders should focus on empowering people, unleashing their full potential. When teams feel trusted and valued, they bring more energy and creativity to their work. “If you trust people and give them the space to perform, they will achieve things you didn't expect.” The Power of Community and Purpose “Aligning purpose with autonomy and mastery leads to engaged and high-performing teams.” Drawing from Dan Pink's model of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, Vasco stresses the role of community and clear purpose in building engaged teams. He explains how people are naturally motivated when they understand the purpose of their work and have the freedom to master their skills. This alignment creates a strong sense of belonging and shared goals within the team. “When people have a sense of community and purpose, they bring their best selves to work.” Defining Boundaries to Foster Innovation “Clear boundaries create a flexible framework where innovation can thrive.” Vasco believes that well-defined boundaries are essential to encouraging innovation. Far from being restrictive, these boundaries offer a structured yet flexible framework that helps teams feel secure while exploring new ideas. When teams know the limits but also have room to experiment, they perform better and innovate faster. “Boundaries are not barriers; they provide the structure that allows innovation to flow freely.” Streamlining Processes with "#NoEstimates" “Focus on delivering value efficiently by reducing waste in your processes.” One of Vasco's most transformative ideas is his “No Estimates” approach to software development, which encourages focusing on value and reducing waste. This method ensures that teams spend their time wisely, enhancing productivity without the guesswork of traditional estimations. It's all about respecting everyone's time and effort while delivering maximum value. “Stop wasting time on estimates and start focusing on delivering real value to your customers.” Leadership Aligned with Employee Purpose “Leaders must understand and align with the purposes of their employees to drive team success.” Vasco shares valuable leadership advice, urging leaders to connect with their team members on a deeper level. By understanding employees' individual purposes and goals, leaders can foster more meaningful and productive collaborations. Open communication is key to building cohesive, high-performing teams that are aligned with the organization's vision. “When leaders align with their team's personal goals, they unlock higher levels of performance and engagement.” Real-World Insights from Industry Practitioners “Learning from practitioners in the field brings fresh, actionable insights.” Through his podcast, Vasco shares real-world insights from a wide range of industry practitioners. These stories highlight different approaches and solutions that have been successfully applied in various sectors, providing listeners with diverse perspectives on innovation and agile leadership. “Every practitioner I speak with offers a unique lens on solving the challenges of modern work environments.” About Vasco Duarte Vasco Duarte is an agile thought leader, podcast host, and one of the pioneers behind the “#NoEstimates” movement. With years of experience in lean and agile software development, Vasco helps teams and organizations improve productivity, efficiency, and innovation through dynamic leadership and strategic processes. He is also the host of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, where he shares insights from industry practitioners on agile leadership, team dynamics, and efficient workflows. You can link with Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn.

0:25 Bonus Episode Intro 1:10 Chad and Jeff Intros on Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast 2:37 From Frantic and Stressful to Strategic and Focused Backlogs 4:19 Task-based backlogs... 5:53 Focused and strategic backlog 9:40 Moving from tasks to impacts  and outcomes (product goals) 10:37 Decomposition or recomposition? 12:45 Scrum teams are expensive 14:34 Why do we do product backlog refinement? 15:30 REFINEMENT TIP: Talk time 16:03 REFINEMENT TIP: Questions and summaries 16:40 REFINEMENT TIP: Diverge/merge cycles 17:30 Practical facilitation for refinement session 19:56 Tools for strategic product ownership 24:21 Strategy, focus, tradeoffs 28:30 Solution vs problem statements 30:47 Track dependencies 33:00 Flat product backlog 33:54 Impact and outcome statements 39:05 The Agile Wire 39:39 Agile Songs 40:50 The Lean Startup 41:50 Product Owner Summit (https://productownersummit.org) Check out the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast at https://scrum-master-toolbox.org Connect with us at the following places: Wisconsin Agility Training: https://wisconsinagility.com/training Advising: https://wisconsinagility.com/advising Merch: https://wisconsinagility.com/merch Jeff Bubolz Jeff Bubolz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbubolz/ Jeff Bubolz Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffBubolz  Chad Beier Chad Beier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadbeier/ Agile Songs YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@agilesongs Agile Songs Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@agilesongs/shorts Agile Songs Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileSongs The Agile Wire Web: https://theagilewire.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YKEHJtcJXZ55ohsUOvklI Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-agile-wire/id1455057621  Agile Wire Clips: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLl0ryedF7y7HWTsbur4ysdpUcY7tniSG Agile Wire Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileWire  Make sure you subscribe to the channel! #Scrum #Agile #ProfessionalScrum #Kanban #BusinessAgility

In this BONUS episode, we interview Greg Mester, the host of the 5AM Mester Scrum Podcast. How did the Scrum Master Toolbox and the 5AM Mester Scrum podcast get started? Find out in this show! About Greg Mester and the 5AM MesterScrum podcast Greg is an Agile Coach, Breaker of Blockers, Facilitator of Spectacular Communications, Inspirer of Performance Acceleration, Mentor of Awesome People and Champion for Happy Teams. He focuses on building Better Communications, Products (Material or Data) and Productive Teams. You can link with Greg Mester on LinkedIn and connect with Greg Mester on Twitter.

#5amMesterScrum Show 875 Live & Edited version - Special Scrum Master Toolbox w/ Vasco Duarte - Today's topics: (1) Special Show.  This podcast is slightly edited as we had some problems with the audio.  Good thing I recorded it also  Please like and subscribe and share 5amMesterScrum.  Please send me your topics.   You are are doing Great Please Keep on Sharing. 5am Mester Scrum 5am Mester Scrum Show 875 went live on Youtube, LinkedIn and Facebook Tuesday 10/4/2022 from Philadelphia, PA  Happy Scrumming, Social Media: - search 5amMesterScrum or #5amMesterScrum  and you should find us and if not please let us know LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok     Podcasts: (search 5amMesterScrum) 

#5amMesterScrum Show 871 Live - Getting Over Fear - Today's topics: (1) Listening to how my kid's baseball coach talks getting over the fear of getting hit by a ball and thinking about how fear keeps people from achieving (Study, Practice, Do) and (2) Events coming Up: Joint Podcast with Scrum Master Toolbox 10/4 at 6am, AI Today in November, AOS Nov 2n - 4th and IIBA Philadelphia Oct 19, 2022.  A busy Fall 2022. Please like and subscribe and share 5amMesterScrum.  Please send me your topics.   You are are doing Great Please Keep on Sharing. 5am Mester Scrum 5am Mester Scrum Show 871 went live on Youtube, LinkedIn and Facebook Wednesday 9/28/2022 from Philadelphia, PA  Happy Scrumming, Social Media: - search 5amMesterScrum or #5amMesterScrum  and you should find us and if not please let us know LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok     Podcasts: (search 5amMesterScrum) 

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Organized, and able to communicate the value and “why” for the stories in the backlog Great Product Owners are able to keep everyone in the loop and engaged with the product development process. They share the “why” for the product ideas they want to move forward, they share the value of what is being done, and what was delivered in the previous sprint, but they are also organized and structured about their work, including the use of the Getting Things Done method which we talked about on the Tuesday episode.  In this segment, we also refer to the Coach Your Product Owner e-course that we produced here at the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, to help you work with the Product Owner.  The Bad Product Owner: The PO that “knows it all”  This PO thought they had nothing to learn. They acted as if they knew everything, even better than the team! This type of PO's are more likely to want to “replace” the team and do things themselves, effectively killing collaboration in the process.  Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We've put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO's collaborate. About Jeroen de Jong Jeroen started his career as a self-employed jack-of-all-trades in IT and is passionate about Agile. He is determined to keep learning and to share his knowledge with others. You can link with Jeroen de Jong on LinkedIn and connect with Jeroen de Jong on Twitter.

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. From the Visionary PO to the PO that was down in the weeds of an overly long backlog, we discuss two contrasting examples of a sense of clarity and focus in the PO role.  The Great Product Owner: Speaking both technical and stakeholder language Great PO's combine a great product Vision (and the ability to communicate it), with savvy stakeholder management and communication. Additionally, a great PO is able to work with the team to understand when it is time to “pay down” some technical debt, and makes the case towards the stakeholders.  In this segment, we refer to the Scrum Master Toolbox's Compelling Product Vision e-course (FREE when you sign-up), and the Tetris game.  The Bad Product Owner: The anti-pattern of long backlogs One of the main tools for PO's is the Backlog (both Sprint and Product Backlogs). However, many PO's aren't able to use that tool effectively. In this segment, we talk about the PO that was not able to keep the backlog short, and explore how Scrum Masters can help PO's manage the Backlog effectively, as if it was a garden.    [IMAGE HERE] Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We've put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO's collaborate. About Nancy Beers Nancy says she is here to change the world one game at a time. She plays with people to learn or unlearn things. This can either be hard skills or soft skills (aka. Human skills) You can link with Nancy Beers on LinkedIn and connect with Nancy Beers on Twitter.

Welcome to Episode 41 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is such a pleasure to have Mr Vasco Duarte on the show with us today. Vasco helps companies generate customer-centric products and get their processes to a level of performance they thought was impossible. Vasco does this by focusing product development teams on the end-to-end life-cycle of their products. From Concept to Cash and Back!Vasco is the Author of the book "No Estimates" and daily podcast host at the Scrum Master Toolbox. Vaso gives back to the community every day to improve the IT and product industry worldwide. Proudly brought to you in association with S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.Product owners can get better outcomes by engaging with sales. Vasco is training product owners to start with their customer's vision for the product, rather than their own or their company's vision. One of the advantages that product owners get from engaging with sales teams is hearing their customers language. The wrong type of interaction - sales led development without the whyVasco talks about interactions between salespeople and product owners. The wrong type of interaction is when a salesperson says, "Here's the list of features you need to develop for my customers".  The right type of interaction - collaboration and engagementThe salesperson could be a great source of insight for the product owner.  Great product owners will engage the salesperson to understand the context around that list of features: why are they being requested?Salespeople have an incredible mindset in intuitively understanding the customer's business model. Vasco believes that when a product owner can tap into this mindset, they can amplify the customer's business model. But, unfortunately, the majority of the products out there are a burden on customers. They impose tasks or models on the customer rather than help them succeed. Key TakeawaysFocus on how we can serve - Focus on serving other teams in our business as well as external customers, establishing a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement and innovation.Minimal viable experiment - provides a simple, fast way to test our theories on how we can improve and learn from this. The MVE concept is about developing the minimal viable approach to product development or improvement to share with a customer and gain their thoughts and feedback. Quotes16:05min There's only one phrase in your customer's mind. And that phrase is there all the time. And the phrase goes like this. What have you done for me lately? And they ask that question from your product every single time they interact with your product. And your product needs to shout that answer all the time. What have you done for me lately? Right? And, of course, it has to be designed with that question in mind, right? We don't add features to a product. We solve problems for a customer.LinksBrad - Brad is proud to support many Australian businesses. You can find him on LinkedIn here. If you'd like to speak to him about how he can help your business, call him on 0402 448 445, or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Our website is www.bradjeavons.comVasco - LinkedIn and the Scrum Master Toolbox.SA Partners

Join me with Vasco Duarte who runs Oikosofy a coaching company in Finland and is also behind the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. Vasco is the author of a fascinating book called No Estimate's. Vasco and I chat about the challenges of estimating complex business application software, particularly in the CRM and ERP domains, and how the No Estimates movement and the method covered in his book can help business applications teams construct collaborative contracts with their customers and never deliver late again. At the end of this podcast episode I give details on how you can win one of 14 copies of Vasco's book, the No Estimates book.Our discussion coversThe #noestimates movement and how the approach addresses the frustration of unreliable and late delivery on software projects.Alternatives to traditional estimation methodologies.Using the Extreme Contracts approach to create a win-win situation between vendors and customers.Educating Product Owners who may have never been involved in software development.Blink estimates, or rethinking what is delivered in a sprint to deliver customer value as quickly as possible.The "Clinton process" Spike concept centred on solving a problem for the customer with the aim of delivering a solution in a very short time frame.ResourcesVasco Duarte on LinkedInNo Estimates book Scrum Master Toolbox PodcastExtreme Contracts - Jacopo RomeiAgile Estimating and Planning training Mike Cohn Maarten Dalmijn on Medium.comScrum Master Toolbox Product Owner e-course Neil Killick Blink Estimation The Clinton Process - Clinton Keith on “No estimates and set-based design” – Blog postRaphael Branger on LinkedIn Spike concept from extreme programming Kent Beck on LinkedIn Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedInAmazing Applications podcast page on PodchaserScrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery AcademyAgile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery AcademySupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/amazingapps)

For the holidays, three veteran podcasters came together to talk about the state of agile, and where to focus on the road ahead!  Thanks to Ryan Ripley, host of "Agile For Humans" and co-author of "Fixing Your Scrum", Vasco Duarte of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast and author of "No Estimates", and Laurens Bonnema for bringing us all together! Ryan Ripley at Agile For Humans (www.agileforhumans.com): Vasco Duarte at Scrum Master Toolbox - (https://scrum-master-toolbox.org): My most sincere thanks to these gentlemen for bringing their world-famous insights to the Badass Agile podcast.  Much thanks and respect for all you do. ***JOIN THE FORGE*** Our online leadership immersion experience is taking names for a December 2020 Cohort. Sign up for more info here: https://badassagile.com/the-forge/****** Don't forget to join us in the Badass Agile Listener Lounge on Facebook for member exclusives, livestreams and previews! https://www.facebook.com/groups/badasslistenerlounge/ We're also on YouTube!  Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf6I_bii9oUSI8fkN1BOk6g ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us (contact@badassagile.com) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.

For the holidays, three veteran podcasters came together to talk about the state of agile, and where to focus on the road ahead!  Thanks to Ryan Ripley, host of "Agile For Humans" and co-author of "Fixing Your Scrum", Vasco Duarte of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast and author of "No Estimates", and Laurens Bonnema for bringing us all together! Ryan Ripley at Agile For Humans (www.agileforhumans.com): Vasco Duarte at Scrum Master Toolbox - (https://scrum-master-toolbox.org): My most sincere thanks to these gentlemen for bringing their world-famous insights to the Badass Agile podcast.  Much thanks and respect for all you do. ***JOIN THE FORGE*** Our online leadership immersion experience is taking names for a December 2020 Cohort. Sign up for more info here: https://badassagile.com/the-forge/****** Don't forget to join us in the Badass Agile Listener Lounge on Facebook for member exclusives, livestreams and previews! https://www.facebook.com/groups/badasslistenerlounge/ We're also on YouTube!  Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf6I_bii9oUSI8fkN1BOk6g ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us (contact@badassagile.com) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.

For the holidays, three veteran podcasters came together to talk about the state of agile, and where to focus on the road ahead!  Thanks to Ryan Ripley, host of "Agile For Humans" and co-author of "Fixing Your Scrum", Vasco Duarte of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast and author of "No Estimates", and Laurens Bonnema for bringing us all together! Ryan Ripley at Agile For Humans (www.agileforhumans.com): Vasco Duarte at Scrum Master Toolbox - (https://scrum-master-toolbox.org): My most sincere thanks to these gentlemen for bringing their world-famous insights to the Badass Agile podcast.  Much thanks and respect for all you do. ***JOIN THE FORGE*** Our online leadership immersion experience is taking names for a December 2020 Cohort. Sign up for more info here: https://badassagile.com/the-forge/ ****** Don't forget to join us in the Badass Agile Listener Lounge on Facebook for member exclusives, livestreams and previews! https://www.facebook.com/groups/badasslistenerlounge/ We're also on YouTube!  Follow the podcast, enjoy some panel/guest commentary, and get some quick tips and guidance from me: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf6I_bii9oUSI8fkN1BOk6g ****** Our mission is to create an elite tribe of leaders who focus on who they need to become in order to lead and inspire, and to be the best agile podcast and resource for effective mindset and leadership game. Contact us (contact@badassagile.com) for elite-level performance and agile coaching, speaking engagements, team-level and executive mindset/agile training, and licensing options for modern, high-impact, bite-sized learning and educational content.  

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.  In this mega-episode on change, we have Jeff Campbell (long time contributor to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast) and Scott Rosenblatt (engineering lead at Meltwater) share their experience with agile adoption in a large organization. About Scott Rosenblatt and Jeff Campbell Scott is a seasoned business leader who is passionate about communication, collaboration, and transparency in organizations. He sits on the senior management team at Meltwater where Jeff has been consulting for 6 years. You can link with Scott Rosenblatt on LinkedIn and connect with Scott Rosenblatt on Twitter.  Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility.  He is the author of actionable agile tools, which you can get on Amazon and directly from the author at bit.ly/aatbook As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organizations both small and large. You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter. You can also learn more about Jeff Campbell’s work at his company’s website.

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.   Willem-Jan has a background in Project Management, and in his company, the leadership asked the teams to move away from Project Management and embrace Agile. That led Willem-Jan on a learning journey, to understand and apply Agile ideas in his work. In the process, as it usually happens, a team got fixated on the “velocity” metric. In this episode, we explore what can happen when teams get fixated on “velocity”, and what Willem-Jan learned to avoid that anti-pattern in the future. In this episode, we refer to W. Edwards Deming, a precursor to Lean, and later Agile through his work.  Featured Book for the Week: The Scrum Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen In The Scrum Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen, Willem-Jan found an explanation for Scrum that made things click. This led him to explore the ideas behind “complexity” and to start to understand why “the plan” wasn’t always the thing to follow.  The Scrum Pocket Guide is authored by Gunther Verheyen who’s been on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast before.   About Willem-Jan Ageling As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum. You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling on Twitter.

Vasco Duarte is the host of The Scrum Master Toolbox which is the largest podcast on Scrum Master topics. Both Jeffs had the opportunity to be guests on his show in their career and it was finally time to bring him on. Find all the show notes and links at https://www.theagilewire.com

This is a BONUS episode on the topic of #NoEstimates. The Agile Wire podcast hosts Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski interview Vasco Duarte. Some of you might have heard about #NoEstimates, and want to know more, and for others, it might be the first time you hear about it. Either way, in this episode we talk about the origins of #NoEstimates and why you may want to consider it when helping your teams.  This is a shared episode with a fellow Agile podcast The Agile Wire, where hosts Jeff Maleski and Jeff Bubolz interview Agile practitioners. Both Jeff Maleski and Jeff Bubolz have been guests here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast.   About Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski Jeff Bubolz is a speaker, trainer, and agile coach. He has been a Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team member. Jeff has worked with enterprise companies to small start-ups. His goal is to end human suffering in organizations, by nudging people to be the change they want to see in the world.   You can link with Jeff Bubolz on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Bubolz on Twitter.   Jeff Maleski is passionate about working with and building up both individuals and teams using ideas from Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 and Dan Pink’s Drive. When leading project teams, Jeff strives for empirical based planning and forecasting, continuous learning, and delivering high quality software products that exceed expectations. Jeff believes in leading by actions and focusing on building relationships with others.   You can link with Jeff Maleski on LinkedIn.

Vasco Duarte has grown businesses from 0 to 10 million and from 300K to 5 million. He is the owner of the #1 Scrum podcast - Scrum Master Toolbox. Vasco has worked in the software industry since 1997, and he’s been a Agile practitioner since 2004. He's one of the leaders and catalysts of Agile methods and Agile culture adoption at Avira, Nokia and F-Secure. In this episode, Vasco talks about the importance of eliminating guesswork and his step by step process for creating high-demand products. INSIDE THE EPISODE: [01:06] How Vasco discovered Agile & how he uses it in product development [07:24] Vasco talks about how he made 20,000 in the first 7 days with his first online product [10:28] Vasco’s step-by-step process for creating high-demand products [16:00] Understanding the numbers behind a successful product [20:41] Sources that Vasco learned from that made the biggest impact [22:47] What the future looks like for Vasco Get your cheatsheet for Vasco’s episode at unstoppablebusiness.com/podcast

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Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.  You only know a good team when they are under pressure. It’s easy to “follow the process” if you have a lot of time, and little pressure. However, as a Scrum Master, you know you’ve done good work when the team sticks to the process (and even improves it) when they are under pressure. I advocate using self-imposed pressure to get better, I’ve written and recorded a video about that based on my own experience as a runner. The same is true in your work as a Scrum Master!  Featured Book of the Week: Agile Actionable Metrics For Predictability by Dan Vacanti In Agile Actionable Metrics For Predictability by Dan Vacanti, Darren found the inspiration to start using and learning from metrics. It also got Darren started on Probabilistic Forecasting, a method he uses regularly.  In this segment, we also refer to Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, and to Scrum Mastery, but Geoff Watts. Both Diana Larsen and Geoff Watts have been guests here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast.    About Darren Smith Darren, aka the Naked Scrum Master, has been helping teams and organizations be better than they were by exposing dysfunction and helping people to remove obstacles from their path so they can be happier and more fulfilled in their working lives. You can link with Darren Smith on LinkedIn and connect with Darren Smith on Twitter.   

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.  From the Great communicator to the Absent PO, we discuss two contrasting patterns in the PO role. Which one is your PO more like?  The Great Product Owner: The Great Communicator Great Product Owners are often good at communicating at all levels of the organization. They understand enough the technology and have a keen interest in how the customers and users experience the product they are in charge of. Finally, we talk about the critical role PO’s have in managing stakeholders. We also talk about the concept of BizDevOps, an approach that encourages collaboration between developers, operations staff and business teams. The Bad Product Owner: The Absent Product Owner In a previous survey I ran with you, the audience for this podcast, we found out that one of the most common, and most difficult PO anti-patterns was that of the Absent Product Owner. In this segment, we explore Rik’s experience with that anti-pattern, and how Scrum Masters can help their PO’s step out of that anti-pattern. In this segment, we also explore a possible practical solution to coach the PO: the Sprint Checklist, which is freely available here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast website.   [IMAGE HERE]Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.   About Rik Pennartz Rik is an agile coach, who's worked during the last years at the Volksbank, the Dutch Railways and ABN AMRO bank. Rik also teaches various agile courses such as Professional Scrum Master, DevOps fundamentals and Leading SAFe. You can find Rik Pennartz at the Cap Gemini Academy. You can link with Rik Pennartz on LinkedIn and connect with Rik Pennartz on Twitter. 

Sooner or later, Scrum Masters will face the micro-management anti-pattern. What should Scrum Masters do in that case? In this episode, we talk about the anti-patterns that can emerge in a team that is subject to micro-management and some of the tools that Scrum Masters can use in those situations.  We discuss the Game of Trust and the Niko Niko Calendar.  Featured book for the Week: Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts Geoff Watts has been a past guest of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, and is also the author of Scrum Mastery: From Good To Great Servant-Leadership. In that book, Dirk found out about servant leadership and how that could change his approach to the Scrum Master role.  In this segment, we also mention Scrum for the people by Tobias Mayer and Product Mastery by Geoff Watts. About Dirk Fabricius Dirk has worked in jobs with IT focus for 20 years. He has had the roles of Project Lead, Developer (Backend), Product Owner and Scrum Master. He’s also been a Teacher in Public Schools for 7 years. You can link with Dirk Fabricius on LinkedIn.

In this Futurebuilders podcast together with Vasco Duarte and our daring host Teemu Uotila we will find out: How software can grow your business? Designing more impactful approach to software project management? How #NoEstimates can help you improve and transform software into a business growth factor? Vasco Duarte is an agile coach and strategist. He is managing partner at Oikosofy and he is the host of "Scrum Master Toolbox" podcast. Vasco is also the author of the controversial book #NoEstimates – how to measure project progress without estimates.  

Melissa Perri on Deliver It, Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond on Agile Uprising, Michael Sippey on Product Love, Ryan Jacoby on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Phil Abernathy on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 29, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MELISSA PERRI ON DELIVER IT CAST The Deliver It Cast podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Cory Bryan. They discussed Melissa’s book Escaping The Build Trap and what motivated her to spend three years writing it. Melissa says she wrote it because she found herself answering the same questions about product management over and over again. They talked about what the build trap is (project-oriented, no product managers, spinning up teams for CEOs that prioritize work, never talking to customers, and getting rewarded for shipping features) and how demoralizing it can be. They talked about Stephen Bungay’s The Art Of Action and his notion of the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap, and Melissa told a story of how she applied these concepts for a client by introducing ways to address these gaps by learning how to communicate strategic intent. Melissa says she always hears from her clients that their CEOs and leaders care about points and velocity but she says that this is only because they have don’t know how else to measure success. When you give them goals that they can relate to, they no longer need to latch onto points and velocity. I particularly liked what Melissa said about getting leaders to work together as a team by getting rid of individual goals. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri/id966084649?i=1000434062102 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri JENNY TARWATER, LAURA POWERS, LINDA PODDER, AND CHERYL HAMMOND ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond with host Chris Murman. They talked about the Women In Agile community and events and what they have learned so far. Cheryl said that they have learned that there is interest among all genders to learn about Women In Agile and get involved in the pre-conferences. Laura learned that it was giving her an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Linda described being a recipient of what Laura has been paying forward and Jenny talked about meeting people through these events who helped her both professionally and personally. She also described how the huge number of attendees of the main conference that Women In Agile is attached to makes her feel lost and how the pre-conference helps her ease into the conference community. They talked about the Launching New Voices program and how it provides a stage and mentoring on how to give a talk to create a more diverse body of speakers. Linda was a protégé in the 2017 program and she described how it taught her not only how to present her topic but also taught her the psychology behind it so that she could help her audience internalize her message. Laura described being a mentor in the program and I loved what she said about authenticity. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/women-in-agile-2019/id1163230424?i=1000434352507 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/women-in-agile-2019 MICHAEL SIPPEY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Michael Sippey with host Eric Boduch. Michael Sippey became VP of product at Medium after spending some time running product for LiveJournal at SixApart and at Twitter. He was also one of the first bloggers. They talked about how many of these early blogging technologies developed into today’s modern social media platforms and how Michael wishes he could have thought more about the downsides of the technologies and planned for them. This led to a discussion of scenario planning and the the natural tendency towards optimism that product people have. They talked about the history of Twitter and some of the reasoning behind the restrictions Twitter introduced in their API in 2012 and some of the improvements Medium is making now to prevent amplification of low quality content. Then they got into a discussion of hypotheses and hypothesis testing as being fundamental to product management. Michael encourages his product managers to have hypotheses that are bold enough that the users are going to notice and that will drive enough change that it is worth the development time to pursue it. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses/id1343610309?i=1000434598454 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses RYAN JACOBY ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Ryan Jacoby with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco started by by asking Ryan about his book, Making Progress - The 7 Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader. Ryan described the seven responsibilities as: 1) define progress, 2) set an innovation agenda, 3) create and support teams that build, 4) cultivate the ingredients of successful innovation (customer insights, well-defined problem statements, strategic questions, and ways of communicating evidence of what works and what doesn’t), 5) give great feedback, 6) inspire progress, and 7) reward progress. Vasco asked about how Scrum Masters can contribute to innovation. Ryan suggests picking some of the techniques they discussed, applying them to your team, and then sharing them widely. He then referenced Teresa Amabile’s work on finding out what makes people happy and work. He says that by helping your team make progress, you will be improving morale and people’s job satisfaction. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-7-responsibilities-innovation/id963592988?i=1000434879127 Website link: http://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-the-7-responsibilities-of-an-innovation-leader PHIL ABERNATHY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Phil Abernathy with host Shane Hastie. Phil talked about how happier employees make for happier customers. For producing happier employees, he starts with purpose, autonomy, and mastery as popularized by Dan Pink and he adds fairness. He distinguishes between fairness and equality. He says employees don’t expect equality — there are different levels of capability, maturity, experience, and salary but this is not seen as unfair. They then talked about org structures, going back to Conway’s law and how it relates to complexity. Phil talked about the KPI-driven organizations today that take anything that is not working and put a vice president in charge of it. This leads to things like having a head of “digital.” He asks, “What’s the difference between the IT department and this new digital department?” Nobody can explain it. He says that this obfuscation of accountability and responsibility is at the heart of complex structures and that instead we should copy the great companies. They all have small, simple, loosely-coupled teams delivering a service to a direct customer group, internal or external. Phil says people confuse empowerment and self-direction with no management and no direction. He says there needs to be a hierarchy, but it should be flat, with spans of control over ten. He has a metric he calls the bureaucracy mass index, which is the ratio of enablers such as managers to total employees. A healthy BMI is typically around 10% and in some companies he sees BMIs as high as 45%. He says healthier BMIs lead to happier customers and happier companies. Regarding the structure of the work itself, Phil says too many companies he works with are overloaded. The reason for the lack of prioritization is a lack of strategic clarity: there’s a digital strategy, an innovation strategy, IT transformation strategy and no one can figure out the real strategy. A simple strategy that can be explained in three to five bullet points does not exist. He then got into a description of OKRs and how they are developed collaboratively. The companies who get these right, he says, don’t have a prioritization problem. Last, he adds leadership style because structuring the organization and structuring the work is not enough. A good leadership style, he says, is based on an agreed set of values like trust, respect, transparency, courage, and experimentation. Every organization says they have these values but they don’t all practice them. He says it comes down to holding people accountable. He references Patrick Lencioni’s work on having trust at the foundation and he connected this to accountability and results. He says that the courage of senior leadership to call people out for breaking the values is the deciding factor. He then related this all to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. This interview is only twenty minutes long, but Phil doesn’t waste a single word. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-bureaucracy-mass/id1161431874?i=1000435046419 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-and-the-bureaucracy-mass-index FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Cal Newport on Coaching For Leaders, Becoming Mr. Why on Troubleshooting Agile, Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf on Agile For Humans, Thai Wood on Greater Than Code, and Jeff Campbell on Scrum Master Toolbox. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 15, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CAL NEWPORT ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Cal Newport with host Dave Stachowiak. Cal talked about the inspiration for his new book Digital Minimalism having come from readers of his previous book Deep Work who liked what that book had done for their work lives and asked, “What about my personal life?” Dave and Cal talked about competitive Rock, Paper, Scissors, and how the top competitors in that sport are so good at understanding and taking advantage of the way our brains work. This took them to the main point of the book, which is that technologies like social media are not understood by our brains in the same way as true social interaction, so we can be interacting on social media all day long and still feel lonely. Dave asked about the impact the modern tendency to replace face-to-face conversation with virtual connection such as email, text, and social media likes, can have for leaders. Cal described the scenario in which a person in a leadership position with a remote component to it reads, say, an email and can’t put a finger on the emotional affect — she can’t tell whether the author of the email is really angry with her or really happy. He says we need the complex, social-processing part of the brain that relies on analog cues such as the back-and-forth of hearing a voice or seeing body language. It is how we understand people, connect with people, and coordinate with people towards common goals. Taking this kind of conversation out of the picture makes it difficult to be a leader. Dave asked what Cal learned from his readers and blog followers. Cal said he was surprised to learn from his readers and followers the degree to which digital distraction was filling a void for them. He had assumed that simply reducing or taming the digital distractions would allow us to immediately get back to the things we know are more important. He learned instead that, for a lot of people, it is unclear what they are going to do next once they have taken the lightweight distraction out of their lives. He says he is much more sympathetic now about the difficulty of figuring out what you want to do instead of just mindless swiping in every down moment. In the book, he asks people to take a 30-day period to limit social media use and he said, “People are often surprised by how little they miss things like Facebook during this process and also surprised by how much they’re at a loss to figure out what they should be doing instead.” iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/400-how-to-reclaim-conversation-with-cal-newport/id458827716?i=1000432139932&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/400/ BECOMING MR. WHY ON TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE The Troubleshooting Agile podcast with hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick spent an episode talking about someone they call “Mr. Why.” Squirrel told a story about a client who would get orders from on high that said, “Thou shalt do it this way.” He would also get orders with explanations that do not make any sense such as investors making technical decisions. Squirrel calls this client “Mr. Why” because most people in these types of environments eventually stop asking the why. The challenge for this client is not that he doesn’t ask why but that he only asks himself. Squirrel said that he tells Mr. Why that we want to be opposite of lawyers, who are carefully trained never to ask the question, “Why?” Jeffrey said that he thinks the legalistic type of question is the model that people often think is the proper way to analyze a situation: legalistically building a case rather than collaboratively trying to get to answers and this could be why people fall into communication patterns in which their goal is to win rather than to jointly discover. To me, this sounds exactly like the difference between constructive and deconstructive criticism described in the book, How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. The constructive criticizer is making an airtight case about the behavior he or she is criticizing even when doing so constructively, while the deconstructive criticizer is seeking to jointly discover the truth with the help of the recipient of the criticism. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-mr-why/id1327456890?i=1000432455338&mt=2 SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/becoming-mr-why GARY PEDRETTI AND JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf with host Ryan Ripley. Ryan asked a question that he hears a lot: how do we do UX activities and product discovery within a sprint? Gary says that from the developer community, he hears that design work takes too long. From the designer community, he hears that they think their work is strategic and sprints feel tactical or that they think developers don’t really care about design. Jeff pointed out that the fundamental values and principles of Scrum and UX are the same, but melding the processes in a way that respects both Scrum and UX has proved elusive for a lot of organizations. They talked about a 2007 paper by Desirée Sy and Lynn Miller on staggered sprints that was misunderstood as a series of mini-waterfalls. I believe Jeff was referring to the article named Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design. Jeff explained that they were actually describing two kinds of work being done by the same team, not by separate groups of designers and developers communicating by handoff.  Jeff described experimenting with his team’s processes back in 2008-09 and settling on a process in which designers were part of the Scrum team with engineers and product managers and work was prioritized not just on what needed to be delivered but also on what the team was trying to learn. Gary talked about how the separation of designers from the rest of the team is similar to the separation of database people and application architects from the rest of the team because of a belief that the work of the database designer or application architect needed to be completed before the work of the rest of the team could begin. In each case, people discovered patterns that overcame this limitation, like the patterns of Ambler and Sadalage’s Refactoring Databases book and the patterns of evolutionary or emergent architecture. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/id991671232?i=1000433513601&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/ THAI WOOD ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thai Wood with hosts Jessica Kerr, Sam Livingston-Gray, John K Sawers, and Avdi Grimm. They started with a discussion of resilience engineering and how it spun off of human factors and brought in cognitive systems. Jessica said that old-style human factors got mired in Taylorism whereas cognitive systems is about making systems that work with people in the way that people naturally work. Thai had gotten into tech coming from emergency medicine as an EMT. Jessica asked what he brought to software development from his EMT days. Thai responded that, in medicine, you are trained about burnout, how to identify it, and what resources are available to help with it. In software, despite similar stressors and similar problems, burnout is not talked about that much. Jessica asked Thai how to distinguish between reliability and resilience. Thai said that resilience encompasses the ability to continually adapt to change, whereas reliability might be consistently performing within the same state. He also said that he thinks of robustness as being able to survive certain inputs but not necessarily being able to adapt to them. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/121-emergency-communication-with-thai-wood/id1163023878?i=1000431679618&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/emergency-communication JEFF CAMPBELL ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Campbell with host Vasco Duarte. This episode was the first to be done in a Q & A format. The question for this episode was: Have you been able to break through the proverbial IT gate and start talking about wider Agile adoption together with management? Jeff answered that being able to communicate with management is probably one of the most important factors to success. He told the story of working at a company that went out of business. Reflecting on this period of his career, he arrived at the idea that, if he was unable to convince management that a particular behavior or practice was important, then that was his failing and not theirs. His recommendation for a person looking to influence management is that they should start doing public speaking and teaching. Exposure to teaching, he says, teaches you to be able to express yourself multiple different ways which is critical because not everybody comes to understand a topic the same way. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-q-jeff/id963592988?i=1000431928436&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-qa-with-jeff-campbell/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Andy Hunt on Greater Than Code, David Sohmer on SPAMCast, Josh Seiden on Scrum Master Toolbox, Tim Herbig on The Product Experience, and Wyatt Jenkins on Product Love. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 1, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ANDY HUNT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Andy Hunt with hosts Janelle Klein, Avdi Grimm, and Jessica Kerr. Andy talked about the origin of his book The Pragmatic Programmer and his workshops on iterative and incremental development where he has students play Battleship while making all their shots upfront. He talked about one of my favorite iteration strategies, the walking skeleton, which he introduced back in 2000 in the same book. He talked about the need people have to be given an estimate and how it comes from a cognitive bias to have closure. He also talked about why scaling Agile doesn’t work at a lot of places: people are ignoring the context that made Agile work for the pilot teams. He suggests that instead of trying to “lock it down”, you should “open it up.” iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/120-expect-the-unexpected-with-andy-hunt/id1163023878?i=1000431206698&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/expect-the-unexpected DAVID SOHMER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process and Measurement Cast podcast featured David Sohmer with host Tom Cagley. David started by saying that a key ingredient for an agile or lean transformation is to first help the organization understand the “why” of the transformation because things are going to get worse before they get better by design and when that happens, it is good to have already discussed the “why” so that the focus can always be on how to fix the problems that come up rather than falling back to the old way of doing things. This deeply resonated with me because I have seen people fall back to the old ways of working even after half-heartedly trying and even actually succeeding with more agile ways of working because their expectations were so different from reality, especially about the amount of work they would have to put in to see results. David also talked about the shift away from individual contributors and toward self-organizing multi-skilled teams and how this can be controversial in organizations that have weak teams and strong individual contributor heroes. He says part of the trick is getting people who actually want to be T-shaped rather than specialists. He went on to talk about intermediary groups who are not on the business side or the technology side but want to be the handoff between the two and create the documentation and have control and power in the organization and are quite destructive to the relationship between technology and the business. He talked about the things he aimed for during the transformations he has done such as ensuring XP technical practices are part of the transformation and he listed the things he tried to avoid. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-536-executives-view-agile-transformations/id213024387?i=1000430995898&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-536-an-executives-view-of-agile-transformations-an-interview-with-david-sohmer JOSH SEIDEN ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Josh Seiden with host Vasco Duarte. Josh talked about how, in the early days, there was a focus on producing beautiful deliverables: wireframes, research reports, personas and other work on paper that teams had to interpret and act on. He described Lean UX as way of working in the UX problem space with less focus on deliverables and more focus on results. Josh described the “lean” in Lean UX as coming from knowing that the work we do with technology is filled with uncertainty, so the best way forward in those environments is to test our assumptions continuously. The activities of Lean UX then become: declaring assumptions, writing hypotheses, and thinking about your work as tests and experiments to help you learn. The people doing the work of Lean UX, he says, are small, cross-functional, colocated, collaborative teams that minimize handoffs and get different points of view that build on each other’s ideas. Vasco asked Josh how he defines the minimum viable product. Josh prefers the Eric Ries definition in which it represents the least amount of work that one can do to learn what one needs to learn next. Vasco also asked Josh what he means when he uses the word experiment. Josh clarified the difference between an experiment in the product development sense from simply abdicating decision-making. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-toolbox-for-product-owners/id963592988?i=1000431422661&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-a-toolbox-for-product-owners-and-agile-teams/ TIM HERBIG ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Tim Herbig with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. They discussed Tim’s new book, Lateral Leadership, and what he means by the title. He describes it as how to lead and influence people without formal authority. From conversations Tim had with product people, not many of them are aware that they have a leadership responsibility, but the implicit expectation from the environments and the stakeholders is that they step into leadership responsibility. He talked about how he recommends product people attend developer community-of-practice meetings to listen, learn how to ask better questions, show that they care, and gain credibility. Randy asked about warning signs of ineffectiveness as a lateral leader. Tim said a big warning sign is when people become resigned to just ask for more granular specs to simply get their job done. He says that this would show an unhealthy hierarchy in the team. Another potential warning sign is whether your peers feel safe about opening up about what really makes them struggle at work in the environment you have created. Lily asked about what tools Tim uses to set the mission or goal for the team. He referenced Stephen Bungay’s mission briefing idea from The Art Of Action. Tim likes the mission briefing because it helps you develop a shared language together and it lets product teams and the people within them have the autonomy to succeed in their specific job by improving the clarity you create up front. Randy compared the Bungay Mission Briefing framework to Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree concept. Lily asked whether the mission briefing is defined by just the product manager and team or other stakeholders as well. Tim says that, in the early stages of an idea, he uses it to capture his own thoughts. He may then do another iteration with the team in which he holds back his input. Then he runs it by his boss and boss’s boss to ensure there is alignment and buy-in. Lily asked about what happens when you don’t get alignment. Tim started his answer by distinguishing between alignment and agreement. He then quoted Jeff Bezo’s statements on being able to disagree and commit. He sees reaching alignment as something that would allow you to get started with an idea that you can adjust along the way. He says alignment is much easier to obtain when you don’t feel the need to also get agreement before you start anything. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-product/id1447100407?i=1000431209799&mt=2 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/03/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-the-product-experience/ WYATT JENKINS ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Wyatt Jenkins with host Eric Boduch. After a discussion of Wyatt’s career journey from disc jockey to product manager at Shutterstock, Optimizely, and now Patreon, they got into a discussion about the why and how of market-testing your features and ideas. For Wyatt, such tests are about understanding customers better and de-risking product ideas before rolling them out. Some of Wyatt’s favorite kinds of tests are the price tests that were popular at Shutterstock. Eric related how pricing seems to be particularly challenging for product managers. They got into a discussion of pricing tests like the painted door test and what to do for the customers who signed up for a service at prices lower and higher than the final chosen price at the end of the test. Eric asked what Wyatt would recommend to a product manager wanting to learn about pricing. Wyatt recommended the book Monetizing Innovation and he recommended reading up on the stories of the companies that have had some of the most successful pricing changes and some of most disastrous ones. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/wyatt-jenkins-joins-product-love-to-discuss-pricing/id1343610309?i=1000431181574&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-wyatt-jenkins-svp-of-product-of-patreon/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Courtney Eckhardt on Greater Than Code, Teresa Torres on Product Love, Johanna Rothman on Developer On Fire, Jeff Patton on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Jeff Gothelf on Scrum Master Toolbox. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two weeks period starting January 7, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. COURTNEY ECKHARDT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Courtney Eckhardt with hosts John K Sawers, Sam Livingston-Gray, Jamey Hampton and Coraline Ada Ehmke. It was great to hear another conversation that built upon the human factors conversations with Steven Shorrock and John Allspaw in previous episodes. I like how Courtney highlighted the importance of good communication in incident response by helping us picture what the lack of good communication looks like from the customer’s point of view. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/id1163023878?i=1000426093173&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/12/19/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/ TERESA TORRES ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Teresa Torres with host Eric Boduch. I felt that, while A/B testing is a powerful and useful technique, Teresa makes a great point that it is not appropriate in all circumstances and she lists several other techniques that teams should consider when doing product discovery. I also liked the bloodletting metaphor. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/teresa-torres-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000425622664&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-teresa-torres-product-discovery-coach-and-writer-of-product-talk/ JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON DEVELOPER ON FIRE The Developer On Fire podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Dave Rael. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone make a distinction between management and leadership. I always felt that it let managers off the hook. I feel that a manager needs to be a good leader to do his or her job well and vice versa. Johanna captured that sentiment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering/id1006105326?i=1000426413335&mt=2 Website link: https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering JEFF PATTON ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Vasco Duarte. Jeff talked about how, when he got into software development, he quickly learned that building software was about making as many people as happy as you could while still making money. When he found himself on XP and Agile teams in the first decade of the 2000s, he felt something was missing. When he later fell in with product people, he realized that the missing piece was product thinking. They discussed how Jeff came up with user story mapping and Jeff cited three books that emphasize product thinking: Inspired, Escaping The Build Trap, and Inspired. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/product-owner-role-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/id963592988?i=1000426507266&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-patton-shares-his-view-on-the-product-owner-role-and-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/ JEFF GOTHELF ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco asked Jeff about the key ingredients in Agile transformations that get organizations to continuously think about how the product they’re creating relates to the business and the market. Jeff gave a great answer that finished with an example of how even a change in the name of the team changes the way that the team thinks of themselves and their mission. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-redefine-measure-success-for-software-development/id963592988?i=1000426560415&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-gothelf-on-how-to-redefine-the-measure-of-success-for-software-development/ Feedback Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus