Professional Scrum Trainer Spotlight - Pawel Felinski's Journey to Scrum Mastery

In this PST Spotlight Episode, PST Ryan Ripley interviews Pawel Felinski about his journey into Scrum. Pawel shares how he became a Scrum Master and the initial challenges he faced, including the misconception that Scrum Mastery is simple, and the importance of practical experience over theoretical knowledge. Pawel emphasizes the value of mentorship, learning from peers, and more! Tune in for some great advice. 

Transcript

Lindsay Velecina  0:00  
welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Ryan Ripley  0:19  
Hi everyone. I'm Ryan Ripley with Agile for humans and professional scrum trainer with scrum.org I'm stepping in as a guest host for episodes highlighting the experiences of other scrum.org professional scrum trainers. I hope you enjoy getting to know these amazing people. All right, welcome to another episode of becoming a scrum master. I'm your host. Ryan Ripley, joining me today is Pavel, uh, fellow PST from across the pond. But before that was a Scrum Master, I'm assuming. So, yeah, definitely not assuming all PSTs are versed in scrum master activities, product ownership. So definitely a scrum master. And so we're going to jump right into it. I'm into it. So can you share the story of how you first encountered scrum What motivated you to become a scrum master? Was there a particular moment experience, what really sparked this? What's likely going to be a lifelong journey Scrum and Scrum mastery. So what did that look like?

Pawel Felinski  1:21  
I think my journey wasn't wasn't very popular. I think not many people would would connect that. But these days, over 15 years ago, in Eastern Europe, where I come from, I believe I never checked, we had zero Scrum Masters in our country, and it was simply, and I used to be programmer and a project manager in German, heavy metal, waterfall, traditional project management kind of company. And it was Accident Incident in the happy circumstances that company got merged with another one, if it was very agile, and there was a bigger project, bigger initiative to transform our German party to be more agile. We had nobody to hire, simply as Scrum Masters. First of all, I think the company wouldn't afford to hire so many people. Our corporation was many 1000s of people only in my country, and it was a global corporation. There were not a lot, or literally zero, hard to say right now, Scrum Masters available job market, so we needed to learn it from scratch. What inspired me to become a scrum master? It's good question, because typically I answer coincidence. I was there somebody had to pick it up. But from the perspective of time, I think it's simply at that moment in my career, but also that moment of the organization. It simply, it makes sense. It was something that I intuitively think, thought that, yeah, that makes sense, and it would be useful, helpful for our team, for our department.

Ryan Ripley  2:56  
Very cool. So it seems like Right place, right time, someone gave you the opportunity to jump in. That seems to be a thread, right? Definitely,

Pawel Felinski  3:04  
we had support globally as a company, support of very famous people who visited us. I remember clay Rahman, for instance, and if you have a very well recognized names, but it was a global company, and Craig visited us, maybe for two days a year, all the rest we needed to discover on our own. And believe me, we did read books these days, books were, I think they were longer than what you would find nowadays. What is written at the one, I think there was longer so classical kind of books, but reading a book without any practical context didn't make a lot of sense. So I think it was subjective discovery. What we did cool.

Ryan Ripley  3:48  
And so was there a specific project or situation where you had the Eureka or light bulb moment, something that just made you appreciate or see the true power and potential of Scrum? And if so, could you describe that?

Pawel Felinski  4:04  
I recall one situation which is perhaps not what you're asking directly for, but that was a situation where, for the first time, I was asked as a still project manager, now, wanna be agile project manager, technically scrum master these days, I was asked by head of our project managers, very senior traditional project manager, to tell him what Scrum is. And I did my best. Was a one hour long speech or conversation. He said, it's interesting. And he said, That's really nice. But could you tell me, where do you have the sprint plan? Sprint plan? I ask, what plan for sprints, like, what you will do in each of the sprints from now till the end of the year? And I thought, no, that's completely wasted one hour. But it was a very eye opening moment. But the fact that I understand something and it makes sense doesn't mean that it will be very. Are easy to implement with others because of their habits, because of their perspective. And know how? That's when I fought role, as we used to say these days, of a scrum master. That sounded very easy, right? Few things to do, to lead, a few meetings, and that's it. It's actually way deeper, way more difficult, and that's how my professional journey with Scrum mastery started.

Ryan Ripley  5:25  
I think that's great. And so as you've progressed through this journey of Scrum Master, how is your perception and execution of the scrum master role, or accountabilities, as we say, Now, how is that kind of how has that evolved, and are there aspects of the scrum master role or accountabilities that you view differently now compared to when you first started? Oh,

Pawel Felinski  5:49  
definitely, there was, there was a lot of there's a lot of mistakes, of beginners I was proud of during first year or so, of my and my journey as a scrum master. Of that all our Scrum Masters, whenever they run retrospectives, it take them one hour or even 90 minutes. Why was done in 15 any pros? Thank you. One more and one per person. Put it in the Excel file online. Any cons, any minuses or deltas? Find any actions? Come here. Thank you. Bye. Awesome retrospective. Very efficient, absolutely rubbish. I know it from distance. So there's a lot of cargo called at the moment, but what we created, somehow, I mean, Scrum Masters in our department, even though the company is what you would name nowadays, Community of Practice, or a chapter of Scrum Masters. We learned from each other, and we did a lot of great stuff, including, for instance, impediments workshop very good, I think, very useful practice. But nowadays, somehow, somehow forgotten that we had a lot of checkpoints to validate with our peers, whoever what we do make sense, and if it didn't make sense, we were empowered to change it a bit. Our organization supported us in that way. So after having a lot of making a lot of mistakes, initially, I think we learned from each other and definitely grew up what was again happy coincidence, nothing but we really planned was that quite early my journey, we reached out to professional teachers of professional coaching, professional training or professional facilitation, because definitely these skills were what we missed. Were missing. I was a project manager, but just few years earlier, programmers absolutely no skills in terms of facilitation, coaching and training, and we were allowed to experiment a lot. I was running various different training sessions on topics but not necessary. I was expert these days, but at least I was allowed to do it for my peers, collect feedback and learn how to teach, if we are talking about that stance only, definitely a full step by step. I think the final moment was my discussion many years later with Ginter ferhan. I think it was my PS before I became a professional scrum trainer, this day soon, years ago already, I asked him, could you please tell me what is your favorite technique for running retrospectives? He started me, I don't know any tactics, I thought, but what do you do? We just sit down and talk. And when I took another thought about it, it was very powerful and actually difficult technique of having a powerful coaching conversation with people, where all these standard stages of retrospective that we know from from books, they exist via there, but actually it's all under your control, the perspective of process control as as a coach, it requires a lot of skills, and now this is my way of running retrospective. Frankly speaking, if I have to do it from time to time, let's sit down and talk. It requires a lot of awareness, also self awareness, not only situational awareness, but on the other side. You don't have to hide behind a technique, but this, but it's safe somehow, because what to prepare, how to run it. What is step one? Step two. Step three is great. But first more,

Ryan Ripley  9:07  
yeah, I think that's of course, Gunther always has those prophetic comments that he makes that just make you think for a month, there was a LinkedIn article posted recently of I think Ryan Lata put it out there that the three column retrospectives are destroying your teams. And I think he's right. And then you see every day where you've got the new Harry Potter retrospective, or the new Star Wars retrospective or and I think someone, one of the influencers out there, posted one based on Tinder. It's just, it's getting ridiculous when I think Gunther is absolutely right, sit down and have a conversation and a powerful I love that. That's such a great and that's, I think that's a really good evolution of the maturity of a scrum master. Like, first it's what went well, what didn't, what could be changed. And then it's. Oh, I put Harry Potter or Star Wars on top of the three column, and then I matured into, let's just have a good coaching conversation, and we don't have to have the formats and the nonsense. And I like that a lot. I really appreciate that. And of course, always appreciate advice, whether directly or indirectly, from Gunther, it's hard to go wrong talking to him.

Pawel Felinski  10:23  
I think that in general, one of the key sector factors for Scrum Masters and agile professionals in general is to have a mentor. Yeah, one or many, or at least what I named on the job training. You can read many books, can many training sessions, but it's actually real life, real situation. I know a few Scrum Masters would approach me and ask, what should be my next steps? And my advice quite often is, if you used to be a scrum master for last five years in big corporations, try small software house right now, or other way, if you were in that industry, try the other one. Find your place, but also taste different flavors, because that would be your toolkit, but also confidence and some in the future, you were way more effective no matter where you will find out yourself.

Ryan Ripley  11:12  
Great. So you've done this, but maybe you've got another thought here. What advice would you give to some someone who's aspiring to be a scrum master? So they haven't started yet, but they want to. Is there a particular mindset, skill or habit that you believe is crucial for success in this role, or to fulfill the accountabilities?

Pawel Felinski  11:33  
I always find this question very difficult. If you ask me about this scrum master, very easy. If you ask me about the product owner, My piece of advice would be, first of all, find a mentor or a company where Scrum is really good, because you will learn from others. Reach out to local communities. I am so thrilled when I observe Agile Coach camp community my entire country in Poland, they meet few times a year. We didn't have it 15 years ago. We didn't have a community, a place where we could reach out to peers and discuss different topics. For instance, the next technique of running retrospectives. So reaching out to people who know and they know how to do it right, that would be essential. One the Secondly, sort of humility. But perhaps in these different words, be aware, situational awareness, that would be my theme. Good Scrum Master enters rooms and sees more than the rest. Also perhaps tricky. Learn waterfall in many cases, no matter if it's inside your organization or at the edge between your organization customers, you will meet people that work in that traditional approach. Let's name it, label it with waterfall, if you want to be effective working with them, understand what's that. My very early findings were that many companies that didn't want to because they said it's wrong. I didn't do waterfall right either. There are some steps, there are some processes how to do the waterfall. They didn't do it correctly. So it's a very a lot of systemic problems over there. I don't want to say, no, your enemy, because that's not the kind of conversation. But if you want to be effective, you need to understand the organization you're working and you're working with love

Ryan Ripley  13:23  
it now. I appreciate that. One last question for you on with your what should be the start of your evening? I think, what is the one book that every scrum master should read?

Pawel Felinski  13:37  
People were people were by Tom DeMarco. It's a book. It's like software part, where it's people were, because it's book from 1980s or so. So I believe some concepts that are written there are perhaps from late 1970s you read it. There's no single word about Scrum or agile, but a lot about self management, self organizations, how to motivate people, how bad it is to put people in tiny boxes, in open space. Everything that we rediscovered later, I think coming back to classics, it's very essential. I would start with that

Ryan Ripley  14:16  
great people, where is a great recommendation? Classic book. Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

Pawel Felinski  14:25  
Yeah, I'm good. Thank you very much. Was it was pleasure speaking with you.

Ryan Ripley  14:29  
Oh, Pablo, it's great to finally meet you, and I appreciate you doing this, and I hope we have many more chances to talk in the future. Me too. Thank you. All right. Take care. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai