Global Scrum Gathering London 2018: Recap Part 1 – Teams, ScrumMasters and Product Owners
After my premiere last year, I again visited the one of two yearly Global Scrum Gatherings in Europe. Again it’s been incredibly inspiring even though not one single session topped last year’s Closing Keynote by Lyssa Adkins. Nonetheless I want to share the outlines of the sessions I joined at this Global Scrum Gathering and add some more in-depth information or links.
This post will focus on the Teams, ScrumMaster and Product Owner track, whilst the second post (Global Scrum Gathering London 2018 Recap Part 2) will focus on culture, values, leadership and scaling.
I’ll start with overcoming fear of rejection when asking questions – which is something I would have wished for during the first two years of my ScrumMaster career. Intercultural aspects of teams is something I learned about quite early, but it’s even still growing in importance in our modern international work setups. The third talk was super valuable for me, as what I do is moderating meetings and workshops or facilitating collaboration various ways: Learning about the core protocols was great!
Last but not least I’ll write about my conference highlight from the viewpoint of a PO: Jeff Patton’s session will help me support Product Owners in their line of work.
What I learned from 100 Days of Rejection – Jia Jiang
Creating better ScrumMasters
Key takeaways of the talk were, that often rejections are a result of the ask not meeting the other parties needs (duh!). Another advice was to offer alternatives after a rejection. People are more open to a second ask, as they’ve already declined the first.
The best one though:
Just ask! If you’re not asking, you’re already rejecting yourself! Be fearless*!
*not shameless
As a ScrumMaster, this is an important quality. We want to improve things. Often our requests are rejected. Should we stop asking though? Of course not! ScrumMasters should continuously improve:
- Themselves (hard, but at least you get less rejections)
- Teams (harder, as your peers might reject some of your ideas)
- Organizations (hardest, as you might meet the fiercest resistance)
Keep asking!
The Cultural Factor in Scrum Teams – Fabian Schwartz
Creating better ScrumMasters
The title of Fabian Schwartz’ session was misleading: It wasn’t so much about team culture, as I had expected, and more about (inter!)cultural factors of teams. We learned about Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory
| Low Power Distance | PDI | High Power Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Collectivism | INV | Individualistic |
| Feminine | MAS | Masculine |
| Low Uncertainty Avoidance | UAI | High Uncertainty Avoidance |
| Short term Orientation | LTO | Long term Orientation |
| Restraint | IND | Indulgence |
and particularly how (higher) Power Distance decreases productivity whilst (higher) Individualism increases productivity. On a bell curve multicultural teams are both the least and the most effective. Least, when their cultural differences impede collaboration. Once these differences have become accepted (and used!), the facilitation of which is a ScrumMasters job, they quickly become the most effective.
We quickly got to work ethics (not as an intercultural factor!), but as an important factor within teams. With a simple example Fabian Schwartz showed how essential it is to deal with the free riders:
| ∅ Performance | Free Rider | Average Performer | High Performer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| 2.7 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| 2.2 | 1 | 2.7 | 3 |
High-performance Teams: Core Protocols Psychological Safety and EI – Richard Kasperowski
Creating better Teams
Richard Kasperowski started with asking the audience to describe the best team they’ve worked with in one word. The predominant term was: TRUST.
Then he delivered the in my opinion best session of this Scrum Gathering, since it was
- inspiring (yes, others did inspire, too)
- insightful (yes, I also learned from other sessions)
- immediately actionable (applying the core protocols in an offsite 2 weeks after the conference is awesome!)
Positive Bias → Freedom → Check in → Personal Alignment → Investigation → repeat
Be a Balanced Product Leader, Not a Feature Broker or Product Dictator – Roman Pichler
Creating better Product Owners
- I sooo very much agree with everything he said and
- none of it was new to me
As Roman Pichler is a fierce champion of spreading good Product Ownership, his session was about POs and their struggle between being a mere Feature Broker (proxying empowered people’s requests without adding value) or becoming a Product Dictator (deciding every single thing oneself). Both extremes of the scale don’t yield the best outcomes. Balanced Product Ownership is key:
- Feature Brokers need to empower themselves
- Product Dictators need to empower others
Here are my sketch notes:
Experimentation – Jeff Patton
Creating better Product Owners
Jeff Patton is just legend. User Story Mapping has become a widely spread agile practice and his equally named book is even recommended in Product Owner Trainings.
At this Scrum Gathering he hosted a session where the agenda had just stated “Experimentation”. Nothing more. One word. Still (and rightfully so) he attracted an audience big enough to get the room quite crowded. His blow-by-blow account on Product Development started with Kent Beck’s quote of the first user story he encountered:
“I type in the zip code and it automatically fills in the city and state without me having to touch a button!”
audience workshop participants work actively on the exercises provided.
Not only the content (Product Ownership from scratch, User Story Essentials), but also the way it was presented was amazing. Jeff was drawing whilst speaking, so the audience could visually follow him every single step of the way.
In the practical exercises we were filling
- one Opportunity Canvas
- our Learning Plan for given opportunity
In an attempt to make even clearer how important it is to learn what users want and to learn how to build a product people are willing to pay for, he said:
#SGLON18 "The faster you build crap, the more crap you get." — @jeffpatton #Agile #productownership
— Robert Kalweit (@EU_GamerAgilist) October 10, 2018
So let’s stop (only!) measuring Velocity. Let’s start measuring our Learning Velocity. Here are amazing sketch notes of Jeffs session:
Sorry took me way longer as thought. But I wanted to share it with you so here it is. #SGLON18 pic.twitter.com/bUeq29waVE
— Anna Rudat (@missesany) October 19, 2018
Because we ran out of time (aka we couldn’t finish all the scope) for the session, he recommended two books on the topic (he didn’t recommend his book, but I added that for completeness):
Here’s my full curriculum – what hasn’t been addressed in this post will be covered in the next one, so stay tuned!
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday |
|---|---|---|
| 😉 | What I learned from 100 Days of Rejection – Jia Jiang Creating better ScrumMasters |
Keynote: The Psychology of Creating a High Performing Culture – Damian Hughes Creating better ScrumMasters |
| The Cultural Factor in Scrum Teams – Fabian Schwartz Creating better ScrumMasters |
ING’s leaders, what were they willing to give up? – Leonoor Koomen Creating better Leaders |
Be a Balanced Product Leader, Not a Feature Broker or Product Dictator – Roman Pichler Creating better Product Owners |
| High-performance Teams: Core Protocols Psychological Safety and EI – Richard Kasperowski Creating better Teams |
Agile Culture: The Number One Leadership Challenge – Sabine Canditt, Rickard Jones Creating better Leaders |
Experimentation – Jeff Patton Creating better Product Owners |
| Delivering a High-Performance Agile Organization – Michael Sahota Creating better Leaders |
Teal, is it time to reinvent organizations? – Tobias Mayer, Antoinette Coetzee, Simon Powers Fishbowl |
Scaling Scrum – Jeff Sutherland, John McFadyen, … Fishbowl |
Questions? Remarks, comments? Let’s discuss below!