The Liberators Podcast The Liberators

“How do I prevent my high-performing team from burning out?” is a question that recently came up in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a positive situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team, you know how exhilarating it can be. But paradoxically, it's also a place where people for people to lose themselves in their work together and collapse under the strain — as I did.In this episode, we apply an evidence-based perspective to this questio...

We're back!How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both?This was the research question of an academic study we performed with Prof. Daniel Russo. This study has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal "Transactions on Software Engineering". This episode provides a non-technical overview of our investigation,...

The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives.One such perspective is motivation. Scrum is deeply rooted in insights from academic research into what motivates people and teams to become high-performing. And while those roots are strong, they are also mostly invisible and unknown to practitioners.I...

“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.”The improvement actions that come out of Sprint Retrospectives and other reflective practices are weak when there is no sense of scope, no sense of timeline, and no sense of who is involved. Interestingly, this creates a clear connection with something else that good Agile teams spend a lot of time on: refi...

What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more - or less - effective?In this episode, we explore scientific research that investigated Product Owners. We also share some of our own research. Read the transcript here:https://bit.ly/2XXBaZ7Or download do-it-yourself workshops to encourage shared produc...

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those were purely personal experiences. We also explored some actual research into these questions and found more nuanced results.We wonder: w...