Meena Venkataraman: Knowing When to Step Back, a Scrum Master superpower

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 segment, Meena shares how, as a scrum master, she strives to step back once the team is self-sufficient. 

Meena mentions that it is important to make sure that there is no unhealthy dependency between the team and the scrum master. To do this, the scrum master needs to ensure that they are not the only one who can resolve conflicts and that the team is communicating effectively with stakeholders. 

The success of a scrum master is also measured by whether the team is delivering a quality product. Meena provides several tips for scrum masters, including making sure that it's not about them, and observing the behaviors of the team to determine if they can self-manage.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Simple and effective conversation focused formats

In this segment, Meena shares that when it comes to retrospectives, she prefers to focus on simplicity and creating conversations with the team. She emphasizes the importance of creating insights and actions with the team, rather than just generating data. Meena shares a tip to ask questions that crystallize insights and anchor them in the agile principles.

She also shares a story about observing a retro led by someone else where there was a lot of data but no actionable insights. Meena emphasizes that retros are great places for scrum masters to coach and that it's not about the format, but rather about anchoring questions in the agile principles.

In this segment, we refer to a shared whiteboard tool named MURAL.

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About Meena Venkataraman

Meena is an Agile & Lean coach who helps organizations and teams transition to Agile ways of working. She is passionate about the neuroscience behind team dynamics and is interested in organizational design and the application of Agile principles across different business domains. Meena enjoys speaking at conferences and is an avid learner.

You can link with Meena Venkataraman on LinkedIn.