Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner

Rebecca Cyr: Motivating Scrum Teams with User-Centric Approaches, Product Owner Best Practices 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: Motivating Teams with User-Centric Approaches, PO Best Practices In this segment, Rebecca shares an inspiring example of a Product Owner (PO) who excelled by focusing on the end-users' needs and facilitating direct communication between the team and users. Through live interviews and feedback sessions, the PO enabled the team to achieve quick wins and foster innovation. This approach created a motivated and empowered team. 
The Bad Product Owner: Directive POs and Team Demotivation In this segment, Rebecca discusses common anti-patterns of Product Owners (POs), such as being overly technical or directive, which can demotivate and disempower teams. She shares a story of a friction-filled relationship between a PO and a team, emphasizing the importance of POs agreeing on the problem to be solved and allowing the team to develop solutions. 
 
[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 Rebecca Cyr
Rebecca Cyr is an experienced agile coach and scrum master, passionate about helping teams deliver value through agile principles and practices while learning, growing, and having fun together. Connecting people through deft facilitation is her superpower, as is storytelling as the language of learning.
You can link with https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccacyr/.

Rebecca Cyr: Evaluating Product Value, Metrics for Scrum Masters and Product Owners 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.
In this success episode, Rebecca emphasizes the importance of driving positive change both within the team and the organization. She discusses metrics such as fun, trust, and motivation, and the challenges of ensuring the Product Owner (PO) helps the team deliver value. Rebecca shares tips on evaluating value and focusing on product-related metrics. What does success mean for Scrum Masters, and how can you measure it effectively?
Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: I Like/I Wish/I Wonder In this segment, Rebecca shares her favorite retrospective format: "I Like/I Wish/I Wonder." This simple, non-confrontational format encourages team members to provide feedback in a positive and constructive way. Rebecca highlights the importance of preparing for retrospectives by considering the team's context and emotional state. Discover how this format can help reduce conflict and promote open communication in your retrospectives.
[IMAGE HERE] Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox! 
 
About Rebecca Cyr
Rebecca Cyr is an experienced agile coach and scrum master, passionate about helping teams deliver value through agile principles and practices while learning, growing, and having fun together. Connecting people through deft facilitation is her superpower, as is storytelling as the language of learning.
You can link with https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccacyr/.

Rebecca Cyr: Engaging with the C-Suite, A Key Strategy in Change Leadership for Scrum Masters 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.
In this episode, Rebecca discusses her experience leading a group of Scrum Masters through a difficult organizational change. Eight months into their agile journey, they realized the need for more influence and created an Executive Action Team (EAT). This gave them direct access to the CTO and enabled more significant changes in the organization. Rebecca emphasizes the importance of using data to support change initiatives and empowering teams to solve their own problems. How can you leverage executive support and data to drive agile transformations? Listen to find out!
 
[IMAGE HERE] As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.
 
About Rebecca Cyr
Rebecca Cyr is an experienced agile coach and scrum master, passionate about helping teams deliver value through agile principles and practices while learning, growing, and having fun together. Connecting people through deft facilitation is her superpower, as is storytelling as the language of learning.
You can link with https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccacyr/.

Rebecca Cyr: Transforming Agile Team Dynamics with Structured Feedback, And The Critical Importance of Feedback Delivery 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.
In this episode, Rebecca shares a story about a team that struggled with "terminal niceness," avoiding necessary feedback in an effort to maintain an artificial harmony. By introducing a feedback format learned from a seminar, Rebecca helped the team communicate more openly and effectively. The transformation led to better team dynamics and a more collaborative environment. Listen in to learn what was the format that helped Rebecca transform this team’s take on feedback.
Featured Book of the Week: Radical Candor by Kim Scott Rebecca discusses how "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott transformed her perspective on feedback. Initially wary of feedback due to past negative experiences, Rebecca learned that feedback is a crucial part of professional growth for her and her teams. She highlights key insights from the book, such as the importance of constructive one-on-one feedback and how it can be a positive tool rather than just criticism. Listen in to discover how "Radical Candor" reshaped Rebecca’s approach and why feedback is essential in agile environments.
 
[IMAGE HERE] Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!  
 
About Rebecca Cyr
Rebecca Cyr is an experienced agile coach and scrum master, passionate about helping teams deliver value through agile principles and practices while learning, growing, and having fun together. Connecting people through deft facilitation is her superpower, as is storytelling as the language of learning.
You can link with https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccacyr/.

Rebecca Cyr: The Penny Game Debacle, A Collaboration Change Gone Wrong And Other Lessons For Scrum Masters  
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.
In this episode, Rebecca shares a story about working with a high-profile team struggling to finish their work within the sprint boundaries. Rebecca found out that the company had not provided sufficient agile training for the teams, which ultimately resulted in too much work-in-process, and other anti-patterns. Rebecca discusses her efforts to help the team focus and collaborate better, only to face resistance from the team's manager. She shares a failed attempt to use the Penny Game to help the team understand flow and collaboration, but this only resulted in conflict. Rebecca emphasizes the importance of understanding team dynamics and gaining consent before trying to build trust. Listen to this episode, and learn how you can navigate similar challenges and foster better team engagement.
 
[IMAGE HERE] Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story - How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.
 
About Rebecca Cyr
Rebecca Cyr is an experienced agile coach and scrum master, passionate about helping teams deliver value through agile principles and practices while learning, growing, and having fun together. Connecting people through deft facilitation is her superpower, as is storytelling as the language of learning.
You can link with https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccacyr/.

BONUS: Mastering Work Intake For Agile Teams with Tom Cagley and Jeremy Willets 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.
In this BONUS episode, Tom and Jeremy discuss the main ideas from their latest book on agile transformation and work intake management: Mastering Work Intake: From Chaos to Predictable Delivery. They share some of the main the challenges teams face when trying to adopt agile practices and offer practical strategies for improving work intake processes.
The Trigger for the Book "Most people who try to transform and be agile don't do it well. They fail multiple times because they say 'yes' to everything, which is a lack of control on work intake."
Tom emphasizes that many teams struggle with agile transformation, often due to poor management of work intake. He has built a career helping teams that have attempted and failed at this multiple times. The main issue is that they end up saying "yes" to every request, leading to a chaotic work environment, lots of work started, and very little finished.
"We got started during the pandemic. We looked at many books on the topic and saw that it wasn't tackled very well. 'Actionable Agile' and 'Why Limit WIP' by Jim Benson inspired us."
Defining Work Intake and avoiding common mistakes "We are drowning in work. We use metaphors to define work intake and see that work always finds a way to get done. Initially, we titled this book 'Work Entry' because of the idea that work is pushed to people, who naturally say 'yes' because they want to help."
"Work has a way of getting started. Recently, I had water in my basement. I didn't know where it came from, but the water found a way in. We see this over and over at work. Work just gets in, often because saying 'no' feels career-limiting."
Tom likens unmanaged work intake to water leaking into a basement—inevitable and hard to control. This analogy underscores how work finds its way into a team's backlog, often because rejecting tasks seems risky.
"Jumping the queue is a very common mistake. Important work always gets done, but we don't always go through the process of identifying what's truly important. This leads to 'fast switching' between tasks and 'neglected WIP.'"
Tom highlights the mistake of allowing work to bypass proper prioritization, leading to constant context switching, which makes teams slow, and neglected tasks which rarely or never get completed.
"The goal conflict anti-pattern is another issue. Much of work intake is about the relationships that lead to decision-making."
Jeremy discusses how conflicting goals and poor relationship management can lead to self-defeating work intake processes.
Key Strategies for Managing Work Intake, and Avoiding the Over-Planning Anti-pattern "In the book, we present patterns to handle intake management and discuss the Product Owner's (PO) role. The PO is critical for managing work intake in Scrum, requiring discipline from both the PO and the team."
Jeremy outlines the importance of having a disciplined Product Owner to manage work intake effectively.
"The problem of team design often causes issues. Many teams work on features while supporting systems that deliver value to customers. This lack of focus is problematic. Building a solid DevOps framework is crucial."
"Agility means flexibility. We need to prioritize and select work more frequently, getting feedback often to determine if the work is necessary. Refer to 'Lean Startup' for more insights."
Jeremy advocates for flexibility and frequent prioritization over rigid, upfront planning.
"Mapping who is involved in work intake decisions is key. Understanding the feedback loop and how it's integrated into decision-making helps manage work intake better."
Tom emphasizes the importance of understanding decision-making proce