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If you are an aspiring or new Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Product Manager; you will take away a lot from these conversations!
Copyright: © Vivek Khattri
Welcome to another episode of The Agile Coach! We have a special episode for you today as we bring some of the best moments of our amazing guest, Adam Miner, Founder of Miner Legacy Group and Agile Coach at Huntington National Bank.
Tune in for some valuable nuggets of insight and information in our past two interviews with Adam!
HIGHLIGHTS
“Number one is that I have to be the ultimate example of being transparent. Part of this is about not necessarily playing the bureaucratic, political game in organizations. My personality and style with my teams is not to be the stubborn optimist. If something is going wrong and it's on fire, I'll empathize with that and I'll say this is not a good situation to be in.”
-Adam on fostering transparency in teams
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In this episode of The Agile Coach, Pabitra talks about identifying the anti-patterns for the different roles in a scrum team. She dives deep into the usual anti-patterns observed for anyone in a product owner role so you can identify these and get rid of them as early as you can. Tune in to find out the common signs of these anti-patterns and the most effective solutions you can apply.
AGILE HIGHLIGHTS
AGILE MOMENTS
Pabitra - When product owners step into the role of a scrum master:
“If they take the role too seriously and don't necessarily understand that a scrum master is not necessarily a project manager or manager for the developers, this can backfire and they mind end up being more controlling and interfering more than helping the team.”
Pabitra - A solution for backlogs not being ready:
“As a product owner, you always want to be thinking ahead. If the development team is working on starting user stories for whatever time box your company may have, you want to be thinking about the next sprint or iteration.”
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A TEAM THAT GROWS TOGETHER, STAYS TOGETHER
In this special episode of The Agile Coach, Pabitra goes solo to discuss the 5 stages of team development. As a scrum master, it is very important to be intact with your team and Pabitra is here to help you. Tune in to find out which stage is most crucial, and how you can get more ideas and feedback from your team.
AGILE HIGHLIGHTS
AGILE MOMENTS
Pabitra - The most crucial stage of a team
“Second is storming stage two of the five and it's considered the most critical and also the most difficult stage to go through. It can be riddled with conflicts such as individual personalities and working styles really clashing within the team.”
Pabitra - Empower your team and let them be heard
“Instead of thinking you have to have all the answers and give it to them, empower them to come up with your own answers, and do it as a team to facilitate those conversations. That way the team feels like they're being heard. And they feel like they can come and share their ideas and feedback.”
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Welcome to another episode of The Agile Coach, and today will be special, as we will be bringing you some of the best moments of our guest, Matthew Philip, Senior Director, Agile Coaching and Kaizen Lead at Pfizer.
Tune in and find out what’s the best moment in our interview with Matt, and watch out for more highlights in the coming episodes.
HIGHLIGHTS
“The idea of focusing on outcomes to me is really putting the most important thing out there and saying, it's also a way of acknowledging that we don't know we work in a complex environment, and it's essentially putting us in a mindset of experimentation and hypothesis making.” -Matthew on focusing on outcomes and not outputs
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Welcome to another episode of The Agile Coach, and today we are back with Laurin Lukas Stahl, as he and Vivek continue to discuss more details about product management, what it’s like to onboard as a new PM, understanding product market fit, and the importance of making mistakes and making it a learning opportunity.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Laurin - On-boarding as a new product manager:
“The first 90 days are crucial to how you're going to basically get on-boarded to the new company, to a new product that you're working on. So when I was a new product manager starting out in that company, before I even had any leadership and strategic responsibilities, I really wanted to get an understanding.
Laurin - Defining Product Market Fit:
“It basically means you need to define the metric for your price, about what you based on what the nature of the product is, what product market fit would mean for you.”
Laurin - Mistakes are part of the game:
“You shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes, because otherwise, you will only try to make safe changes that don't change the game, then you'll just start optimizing and trying to improve metrics by a little bit because you're afraid to make big changes that could have a big impact.”
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ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A CAREER IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT? Then this is the episode for you!
Learn what is a product manager and his/her role in the business as a whole, the ins and outs of this job in terms of day-to-day tasks, and its dynamics with the product management team.
Today we have Laurin Lukas Stahl on board. Laurin is the Head of Product at Trality and is a great source of insight into product management. Meet Laurin and learn more from him in this latest episode of The Agile Coach.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Laurin - Defining a product manager:
“The product manager that is working on a specific product or feature in a specific scope, that's the person who's supposed to have all the information available to make the right decisions on how the product is supposed to be taken for.”
Laurin - Role of a product manager:
“Make all the decisions and have all the information available, while always trying to get as much value out as possible with as little resources as possible. So basically, how can I drive the product forward as efficiently as possible.”
Laurin - Important attribute of a product manager:
“One thing is curiosity. So I really like to understand how things work and to take things apart.”
Laurin - Strategizing for a product:
“The number one thing is actually having a product strategy and making sure that everyone that works with the product is following and agrees with the same strategy.”
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In this episode of The Agile Coach, Vivek and Pabitra will go in-depth with explaining the difference between a Sprint Review and a Sprint Retrospective. Pabitra will be spilling all the juicy details from the definition, to how each of these two activities is executed.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Pabitra - Defining a Sprint Review:
“Sprint Review really is a more of an informal event that happens into the sprint and is really to showcase what the team has done over the sprint, really the product increment, what did they create.”
Pabitra - The need for databases:
“Even though the stakeholders might not understand the technicality of it, just talking about it and saying, we needed to create this database, or we needed to do this thing on the back end, and now because we have this, here is how it's gonna help.”
Pabitra - Defining a Sprint Retrospective:
“Sprint retrospective is a big deal for the team and also for the scrum master because that's one meeting that you solely are responsible for.
Pabitra - Keep it fresh and fun:
“You want to keep it spicy, you want to keep it fun and engaging, and so definitely restarts, research some things so that you can keep it fresh and keep alternating throughout.”
Pabitra - Don’t make it a blame game:
“We want to talk on how we improve on these different things, but we're not here to blame anybody, and so really putting that up there, it's definitely important.”
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IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PLAN.
Vivek and Pabitra will be sitting down today to discuss the ins and outs of sprint planning.
Tune in and learn how sprint planning is done, what challenges you may face and the best methods to use straight from our hosts, only here in the latest episode of The Agile Coach.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Pabitra - The importance of goal-writing:
“Coming up with goal-writing the goal based on what the team is committing to a lot of times it's not just like the user story, but the outcome is if we complete this set of a user story or this functionality.”
Pabitra - Why autonomy is needed in a team:
“We're trying to create self-organizing autonomous teams, and so if I don't give that autonomy to the team, we don't know what our capacity is yet.”
Pabitra - The purpose of backlog refinement:
“The way I see the purpose of backlog refinement is to look at the product backlog and create that shared understanding more than anything.”
Pabitra - Best way of doing a stand-up:
“The best method to conduct a stand-up, I found is to kind of walking the board. So instead of like calling on each person and making it seem like that person is giving a status.”
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Lynnea is back for another round in The Agile Coach. In this episode, Lynnea will be talking about Radical Self Awareness, where she and Vivek will be touching on The Drama Triangle, its roles, and how it is observed. Tune in and learn more about how this awareness can be used in your daily role.
Haven’t checked Part 1 with Lynnea Brumbaugh yet? Don’t miss Episode 58: CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP: What It Is, What It Does, How It’s Done, With Lynnea Brumbaugh (Part 1)
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
How Lynnea defines radical self-awareness:
“When life feels constricted, we start playing roles, we start putting on our masks, we show up not as our sort of glorious, amazing people that we actually truly are.”
Lynnea talks about the roles in the drama triangle:
“If there's a melodrama on stage, you've got a hero, you got a victim, and you got a villain. And those are the three main drama roles that the Drama Triangle place.”
Lynnea presents the 3 steps of observing the drama triangle:
“Step one would be we notice it and other people step, notice it in ourselves, and step three is stepping back and becoming curious becoming the observer of the drama. So it's always easier to detect ego behavior, like drama mask behavior in other people.”
How Lynnea defines a healthy state of being:
“A healthy expanded state of being means that our behaviors, and our thoughts and our emotions are literally responding to whatever is happening at this moment.”
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Last week we talked about minding emotions as a leader, this week, we will be talking about conscious leadership. And there’s no better way to do this than having Lynnea Brumbaugh in this latest episode of The Agile Coach. Lynnea is the CEO of Quantum Empowerment Academy, dedicated to its advocacy of transformational leadership. Tune in to Lynnea and Vivek as they unpack what conscious leadership is and how it helps leaders improve.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
How Lynnea defines conscious leadership:
“Conscious leadership is living from the present moments, like living in this moment. And then having the ability to lead other people from a deep place of this is now this is today, this is not what happened last week.
Lynnea on handling employee blind spots:
“Step one for blind spot awareness is taking a breath or two taking learning to take some conscious breaths.”
How Sagar sees organizations strive to innovate:
“Because when we work with our blind spots, we are by definition, tapping into our survival systems, that helped us to survive when we were little in the world.”
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