Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner
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Every week day, Certified Scrum Master, Agile Coach and business consultant Vasco Duarte interviews Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches from all over the world to get you actionable advice, new tips and tricks, improve your craft as a Scrum Master with daily doses of inspiring conversations with Scrum Masters from the all over the world. Stay tuned for BONUS episodes when we interview Agile gurus and other thought leaders in the business space to bring you the Agile Business perspective you need to succeed as a Scrum Master. Some of the topics we discuss include: Agile Business, Agile Strategy, Retrospectives, Team motivation, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement, Scaling Scrum, Lean Startup, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Paper Prototyping, QA in Scrum, the role of agile managers, servant leadership, agile coaching, and more!

  1. 8시간 전

    BONUS: Flawless Execution — Translating Fighter Pilot Precision to Business Results | Christian "Boo" Boucousis

    BONUS: Flawless Execution — Translating Fighter Pilot Precision to Business Results In this powerful conversation, former fighter pilot Christian "Boo" Boucousis reveals how military precision translates into agile business leadership. We explore the FLEX model (Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief), the critical difference between control-based and awareness-based leadership, and why most organizations fail to truly embrace iterative thinking. From Cockpit to Boardroom: An Unexpected Journey "I learned over time that it doesn't matter what you do if you're always curious, and you're always intentional, and you're always asking questions." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian's path from fighter pilot to leadership consultant wasn't planned—it was driven by necessity and curiosity. After 11 years as a fighter pilot (7 in Australia, 4 in the UK), an autoimmune condition ended his flying career at age 30. Rather than accepting a comfy job flying politicians around, he chose entrepreneurship. He moved to Afghanistan with a friend and built a reconstruction company that grew to a quarter billion dollars in four years. The secret? The debrief skills he learned as a fighter pilot. By constantly asking "What are you trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is there a gap?" he approached business with an agile mindset before he even knew what agile was. This curiosity-driven, question-focused approach became the foundation for everything that followed. The FLEX Model: Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief "Agile and scrum were co-created by John Sutherland, who was a fighter pilot, and its origins sit in the OODA loop and iteration. Which is why it's a circle." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The FLEX model isn't new—fighter pilots have used this Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief cycle for 60 years. It's the ultimate simple agile model, designed to help teams accelerate toward goals using the same accelerated learning curve the Air Force uses to train fighter pilots. The key insight: everything in this model is iterative, not linear. Every mission has a start, middle, and end, and every stage involves constant adaptation. Afterburner (the company Christian now leads as CEO) has worked with nearly 3,800 companies and 2.8 million people over 30 years, teaching this model. What's fascinating is that the DNA of agile is baked into fighter pilot thinking—John Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, wrote the foreword for Christian's book "The Afterburner Advantage" because they share the same roots in the OODA loop and iterative thinking. Why Iterative Thinking Doesn't Come Naturally "Iterative thinking is not a natural human model. Most of the time we learn from mistakes. We don't learn as a habit." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Here's the hard truth: agile as a way of working is very different from the way human beings naturally think. Business leadership models still hark back to Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 book on scientific management—industrial era leadership designed for building buildings, not creating software. Time is always linear (foundation, then structure, then finishing), and this shapes how we think about planning. Humans also tend to organize like villages with chiefs, warriors, and gatherers—hierarchical and political. Fighter pilots created a parallel system where politics exist outside missions, but during execution, personality clashes can't interfere. The challenge for business isn't the method—it's getting human minds to embrace iteration as a habit, not just a process they follow when forced. Planning: Building Collective Consciousness, Not Task Lists "Planning isn't all about sequencing actions—that's not planning. That's the byproduct of planning, which is collectively agreeing what good looks like at the end." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Most people plan in their head or in front of a spreadsheet by themselves. That's not planning—that's collecting thoughts. Real planning means bringing everyone on the team together to build collective consciousness about what's possible. The plan is always "the best idea based on what we know now." Once airborne, everything changes because the enemy doesn't cooperate with your plan. Planning is about the destination, not the work to get there. Think about airline pilots: they don't tell you about traffic delays on their commute or maintenance issues. They say "Welcome aboard, our destination is Amsterdam, there's weather on the way, we'll land 5 minutes early." That's a brief—just the effect on you based on all their work. Most business meetings waste 55 minutes on backstory and 5 minutes deciding to have another meeting. Fighter pilots focus entirely on: What are we trying to achieve? What might get in the way? Let's go. Briefing: The 25-Minute Focus Window "You need 25 minutes of focus before your brain really focuses on the task. You program your brain for the mission at hand." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The brief is the moment between planning and execution when the plan is as accurate as it'll ever get. It's called "brief" for a reason—it's really short. The team checks that everyone understands the plan in today's context, accounting for last-minute changes (broken equipment, weather, personnel changes). Then comes the critical part: creating the mission bubble. From the brief until mission end, there are no distractions, no notifications. If someone tries to interrupt a fighter pilot walking to the jet, the response is clear: "I'm in my mission bubble. No distractions." This isn't optional—research shows it takes 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus before your brain truly locks onto a task. Yet most business leaders expect constant availability, with notifications pinging every few minutes. If you need everyone to have notifications on to run your business, you're doing a really bad job at planning. Execution: Awareness-Based Leadership vs. Control-Based Leadership "The reason we have so many meetings is because the leader is trying to control the situation and own all the awareness. It's not humanly possible to do that." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   During execution, fighter pilots fly the plan until it doesn't work anymore—then they adapt. A mission commander might lead 70 airplanes, but can't possibly track all 69 others. Instead, they create "gates"—checkpoints where everyone confirms they're in the right place within 10 seconds. They plan for chaos, creating awareness points where the team is generally on track or not. The key shift: from control-based leadership (the leader tries to control everything) to awareness-based leadership (the leader facilitates and listens for divergences). This includes "subordinated leadership"—any of the four pilots in a formation can take the lead if they have better awareness. If a wingman calls out a threat the leader doesn't see, the immediate response is "Press! You take the lead." This works because they planned for it and have criteria. Business teams profess to want this kind of agile collaboration, but struggle because they haven't invested in the planning and shared understanding that makes fluid leadership transitions possible. Abort Criteria: Knowing When to Stop "We have this concept called abort criteria. If certain criteria are hit, we abort the mission. I think that's a massive opportunity for business." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   There are degrees of things going wrong: a little bit, a medium amount, and everything going wrong. When everything's going wrong, fighter pilots stop and turn around—they don't keep pressing a bad situation. This "abort criteria" concept is massively underutilized in business. Too often, teams press bad situations, transparency disappears, people stop talking, and everyone goes into survival mode (protect myself, blame others). This never happens with fighter pilots. If something goes wrong, they take accountability and make the best decision. The most potent team size is four people: a leader, deputy leader, and two wingmen. This small team size with clear roles and shared abort criteria creates psychological safety to call out problems and adapt quickly. The Retrospective Mindset: Not Just a Ritual "A retrospective isn't a ritual. It's actually a way of thinking. It's a cognitive model. If you approached everything as a retrospective—what are we trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is it not going where we want? What's the one action to get back on track?" — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   The debrief—the retrospective—is the most important part of fighter pilot culture translated into agile. It's not just a meeting you have at the end of a sprint. It's a mindset you apply to everything: projects, relationships, personal development. Christian introduces "Flawless Leadership" built on three M's: Method (agile practices), Mindset (growth mindset developed through acting iteratively), and Moments (understanding when to show up as a people leader vs. an impact leader). The biggest mistake in technology: teams do retrospectives internally but don't include the business. They get a brief from the business, build for two months, come back, and the business says "What is this? This isn't what I expected." If they'd had the business in every scrum, every iteration, trust would build naturally. Everyone involved in the mission must be part of the planning, briefing, executing, and debriefing. Leading in the Moment: Three Layers of Leadership "Your job as a scrum master, as a leader—it doesn't matter if you're leading a division of people—is to be aware. And you're only going to be aware by listening." — Christian "Boo" Boucousis   Christian breaks leadership into three layers: People Leadership (political, emotional, dealing with personalities and overwhelm), Impact Leadership (the agile layer, results-driven, scientific), and

    43분

  2. 1일 전

    When Product Owners Facilitate Vision Instead of Owning It | Alidad Hamidi

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

    15분

  3. 2일 전

    Maximizing Human Potential as the Measure of Success | Alidad Hamidi

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

    13분

  4. 3일 전

    The Tax Teams Pay for Organizational Standards | Alidad Hamidi

    Alidad Hamidi: The Tax Agile Teams Pay for Organizational Standards Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "If you set targets for people, they will achieve the target, even if that means destroying the system around them." - W. Edwards Deming (quoted by Alidad)   The tension is familiar to every Scrum Master working in large organizations: leadership demands standard operating models, flow time metrics below specific numbers, and reporting structures that fit neat boxes. Meanwhile, teams struggle under the weight of context-insensitive measurements that ignore the nuanced reality of their work. Alidad faces this challenge daily—creating balance between organizational demands and what teams actually need to transform and thrive.   His approach starts with a simple but powerful question to leaders: "What is it that you want to achieve with these metrics?" Going beyond corporate-speak to have real conversations reveals that most leaders want outcomes, not just numbers. Alidad then involves teams in defining strategies to achieve those outcomes, framing metrics as "the tax we pay" or "the license to play." When teams understand the intent and participate in the strategy, something surprising happens—most metrics naturally improve because teams are delivering genuine value, customers are happy, and team dynamics are healthy.   But context sensitivity remains critical. Alidad uses a vivid analogy: "If you apply lean metrics to Pixar Studio, you're gonna kill Pixar Studio. If you apply approaches of Pixar Studio to production line, they will go bankrupt in less than a month." Toyota's production line and Pixar's creative studio both need different approaches based on their context, team evolution, organizational maturity, and market environment. He advocates aligning teams to value delivery with end-to-end metrics rather than individual team measurements, recognizing that organizations operate in ecosystem models beyond simple product paradigms.   Perhaps most important is patience. "Try to not drink coffee for a week," Alidad challenges. "Even for a single person, one practice, it's very hard to change your behavior. Imagine for organization of hundreds of thousands of people." Organizations move through learning cycles at their own rhythm. Our job isn't to force change at the speed we prefer—it's to take responsibility for our freedom and find ways to move the system, accepting that systems have their own speed.   Self-reflection Question: Which metrics are you applying to your teams without considering their specific context, and what conversation do you need to have with leadership about the outcomes those metrics are meant to achieve?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Alidad Hamidi   Alidad is a strategic advisor in human-centred transformation, focused on organisational design for autonomy, ownership, and impact. A recovering Agility Coach, he draws on years across delivery and coaching roles to help build organisations truly fit for humans—resilient, adaptive, and designed for people, not just processes.   You can link with Alidad Hamidi on LinkedIn. You can also visit his website at desirablefutures.group.

    19분

  5. 4일 전

    When a Billion-Dollar Team Becomes Invisible | Alidad Hamidi

    Alidad Hamidi: When a Billion-Dollar Team Becomes Invisible Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Most of the times, it's not teams that are self-destructive or anything... Simple analogy is when a flower is not blooming, you don't fix the flower, you fix the soil." - Alidad Hamidi   The team sat on the sidelines, maintaining a large portfolio of systems while the organization buzzed with excitement about replatforming initiatives. Nobody seemed to care about them. Morale was low. Whenever technical challenges arose, everyone pointed to the same person for help. Alidad tried the standard playbook—team-building activities, bonding exercises—but the impact was minimal. Something deeper was broken, and it wasn't the team.   Then Alidad shifted his lens to systems thinking. Instead of fixing the flower, he examined the soil. Using the Viable Systems Model, he started with System 5—identity. Who were they? What value did they create? He worked with stakeholders to map the revenue impact of the systems this "forgotten" team maintained. The number shocked everyone: one billion dollars. These weren't legacy systems gathering dust—they were revenue-generating engines critical to the business. Alidad asked the team to run training series for each other, teaching colleagues about the ten different systems they managed. They created self-assessments of skill sets, making visible what had been invisible for too long. When Alidad made their value explicit to the organization, everything shifted. The team's perspective transformed. Later, when asked what made the difference, their answer was unanimous: "You made us visible. That's it." People have agency to change their environment, but sometimes they need someone to help the system see what it's been missing. Ninety percent of the time, when teams struggle, it's not the team that needs fixing—it's the soil they're planted in.   Self-reflection Question: What teams in your organization are maintaining critical systems but remain invisible to leadership, and what would happen if you made their value explicit? Featured Book of the Week: More Time to Think by Nancy Kline Alidad describes Nancy Kline's More Time to Think as transformative for his facilitation practice. While many Scrum Masters focus on filling space and driving conversations forward, this book teaches the opposite—how to create space and listen deeply. "It teaches you to create a space, not to fill it," Alidad explains. The book explores how to design containers—meetings, workshops, retrospectives—that allow deeper thinking to emerge naturally among team members.   For Alidad, the book answered a fundamental question: "How do you help people to find the solution among themselves?" It transformed his approach from facilitation to liberation, helping teams slow down so they can think more clearly. He first encountered the audiobook and was so impacted that he explored both "Time to Think" and this follow-up. While both are valuable, "More Time to Think" resonated more deeply with his coaching philosophy. The book pairs beautifully with systems thinking, helping Scrum Masters understand that creating the right conditions for thinking is often more powerful than providing the right answers. In this segment, we also refer to the book Confronting our freedom, by Peter Block et al.    [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Alidad Hamidi   Alidad is a strategic advisor in human-centred transformation, focused on organisational design for autonomy, ownership, and impact. A recovering Agility Coach, he draws on years across delivery and coaching roles to help build organisations truly fit for humans—resilient, adaptive, and designed for people, not just processes.   You can link with Alidad Hamidi on LinkedIn. You can also visit his website at desirablefutures.group.

    16분

  6. 5일 전

    When Silence Becomes Your Most Powerful Coaching Tool | Alidad Hamidi

    Alidad Hamidi: When Silence Becomes Your Most Powerful Coaching Tool Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I purposefully designed a moment of silence. Staying in the anxiety of being silenced. Do not interrupt the team. Put the question there, let them come up with a solution. It is very hard. But very effective." - Alidad Hamidi   Alidad walked into what seemed like a straightforward iteration manager role—what some use, instead of Scrum Master. The organization was moving servers to the cloud, a transformation with massive implications. When leadership briefed him on the team's situation, they painted a clear picture of challenges ahead. Yet when Alidad asked the team directly about the transformation's impact, the response was uniform: "Nothing."   But Alidad knew better. After networking with other teams, he discovered the truth—this team maintained software generating over half a billion dollars in revenue, and the transformation would fundamentally change their work. When he asked again, silence filled the room. Not the comfortable silence of reflection, but the heavy silence of fear and mistrust. Most facilitators would have filled that void with words, reassurance, or suggestions. Alidad did something different—he waited. And waited. For what felt like an eternity, probably a full minute, he stood in that uncomfortable silence, about to leave the room.   Then something shifted. One team member picked up a pen. Then another joined in. Suddenly, the floodgates opened. Debates erupted, ideas flew, and the entire board filled with impacts and concerns. What made the difference? Before that pivotal moment, Alidad had invested in building relationships—taking the team to lunch, standing up for them when managers blamed them for support failures, showing through his actions that he genuinely cared. The team saw that he wasn't there to tell them how to do their jobs. They started to trust that this silence wasn't manipulation—it was genuine space for their voices. This moment taught Alidad a profound lesson about Open Systems Theory and Socio-Technical systems—sometimes the most powerful intervention is creating space and having the courage to hold it.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you designed a moment of silence for your team, and what held you back from making it longer?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Alidad Hamidi   Alidad is a strategic advisor in human-centred transformation, focused on organisational design for autonomy, ownership, and impact. A recovering Agility Coach, he draws on years across delivery and coaching roles to help build organisations truly fit for humans—resilient, adaptive, and designed for people, not just processes.   You can link with Alidad Hamidi on LinkedIn. You can also visit his website at desirablefutures.group.

    16분

  7. 11월 7일

    From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role | Karim Harbott

    Karim Harbott: From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Strategic, Customer-Obsessed, and Vision-Driven   "The PO role in the team is strategic. These POs focus on the customer, outcomes, and strategy. They're customer-obsessed and focus on the purpose and the why of the product." - Karim Harbott   Karim believes the industry fundamentally misunderstands what a Product Owner should be. The great Product Owners he's seen are strategic thinkers who are obsessed with the customer. They don't just manage a backlog—they paint a vision for the product and help the entire team become customer-obsessed alongside them.  These POs focus relentlessly on outcomes rather than outputs, asking "why are we building this?" before diving into "what should we build?" They understand the purpose of the product and communicate it compellingly.  Karim references Amazon's "working backwards" approach, where Product Owners start with the customer experience they want to create and work backwards to figure out what needs to be built. Great POs also embrace the framework of Desirability (what customers want), Viability (what makes business sense), Feasibility (what's technically possible), and Usability (what's easy to use). While the PO owns desirability and viability, they collaborate closely with designers on usability and technical teams on feasibility.  This is critical: software is a team sport, and great POs recognize that multiple roles share responsibility for delivery. Like David Marquet teaches, they empower the team to own decisions rather than dictating every detail. The result? Teams that understand the "why" and can innovate toward it autonomously.   Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner paint a compelling vision that inspires the team, or do they primarily manage a list of tasks? The Bad Product Owner: The User Story Writer "The user story writer PO thinks it's their job to write full, long requirements documents, put it in JIRA, and assign it to the team. This is far away from what the PO role should be." - Karim Harbott   The anti-pattern Karim sees most often is the "User Story Writer" Product Owner. These POs believe their job is to write detailed requirements documents, load them into JIRA, and assign them to the team. It's essentially waterfall disguised as Agile—treating user stories like mini-specifications rather than conversation starters. This approach completely misses the collaborative nature of product development.  Instead of engaging the team in understanding customer needs and co-creating solutions, these POs hand down fully-formed requirements and expect the team to execute without question. The problem is that this removes the team's ownership and creativity. When POs act as the sole source of product knowledge, they become bottlenecks.  The team can't make smart tradeoffs or innovate because they don't understand the underlying customer problems or business context. Using the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility-Usability framework, bad POs try to own all four dimensions themselves instead of recognizing that designers, developers, and other roles bring essential perspectives. The result is disengaged teams, slow delivery, and products that miss the mark because they were built to specifications rather than shaped by collaborative discovery. Software is a team sport—but the User Story Writer PO forgets to put the team on the field.   Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner engaging the team in collaborative discovery, or just handing down requirements to be implemented?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

    13분

  8. 11월 6일

    Don't Scale Dysfunction—Fix the Team First | Karim Harbott

    Karim Harbott: Don't Scale Dysfunction—Fix the Team First Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "How do you define the success of a football manager? Football managers are successful when the team is successful. For Scrum Masters it is also like that. Is the team better than it was before?" - Karim Harbott   Karim uses a powerful analogy to define success for Scrum Masters: think of yourself as a football manager. A football manager isn't successful because they personally score goals—they're successful when the team wins. The same principle applies to Scrum Masters. Success isn't measured by how many problems you solve or how busy you are. It's measured by whether the team is better than they were before.  Are they more self-organizing? More effective? More aligned with organizational outcomes?  This requires a mindset shift. Unlike sprinters competing individually, Scrum Masters succeed by enabling others to be better.  Karim recommends involving the team when defining success—what does "better" mean to them? He also emphasizes linking the work of the team to organizational objectives. When teams understand how their efforts contribute to broader goals, they become more engaged and purposeful. But there's a critical warning: don't scale dysfunction! If a team isn't healthy, improving it is far more important than expanding your coaching to more teams.  A successful Scrum Master creates teams that don't need constant intervention—teams that can manage themselves, make decisions, and deliver value consistently. Just like a great football manager builds a team that plays brilliantly even when the manager isn't on the field.   Self-reflection Question: Is your team more capable and self-sufficient than they were six months ago, or have they become more dependent on you? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Systems Modeling with Causal Loop Diagrams "It shows how many aspects of the system there are and how things are interconnected. This helps us see something that we would not come up with in normal conversations." - Karim Harbott   Karim recommends using systems modeling—specifically causal loop diagrams—as a retrospective format. This approach helps teams visualize the complex interconnections between different aspects of their work. Instead of just listing what went wrong or right, causal loop diagrams reveal how various elements influence each other, often uncovering hidden feedback loops and unintended consequences.  The power of this format is that it surfaces insights the team wouldn't discover through normal conversation. Teams can then think of their retrospective actions as experiments—ways to interact with the system to test hypotheses about what will improve outcomes. This shifts retrospectives from complaint sessions to scientific inquiry, making them far more actionable and engaging. If your team is struggling with recurring issues or can't seem to break out of patterns, systems modeling might reveal the deeper dynamics at play.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

    14분
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Every week day, Certified Scrum Master, Agile Coach and business consultant Vasco Duarte interviews Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches from all over the world to get you actionable advice, new tips and tricks, improve your craft as a Scrum Master with daily doses of inspiring conversations with Scrum Masters from the all over the world. Stay tuned for BONUS episodes when we interview Agile gurus and other thought leaders in the business space to bring you the Agile Business perspective you need to succeed as a Scrum Master. Some of the topics we discuss include: Agile Business, Agile Strategy, Retrospectives, Team motivation, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement, Scaling Scrum, Lean Startup, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Paper Prototyping, QA in Scrum, the role of agile managers, servant leadership, agile coaching, and more!

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