Scrum Master Real Talk Series: Yannick van der Wende Talks Building Teams, Psychological Safety and More!
In this episode - we kick off a new series - Scrum Master Real Talk, where Dave West interviews Scrum Masters in the field sharing what they really do!
In this episode Yannick van der Wende, a Scrum Master from the Netherlands working at Team Rockstars IT, shares his journey from a Microsoft.NET developer to a Scrum Master, highlighting his experiences at various organizations. He discusses the challenges of transitioning to a Scrum Master role, including managing dependencies in data teams at Ascent Energy and fostering psychological safety.
Yannick emphasizes the importance of understanding team dynamics, leveraging ADHD for quick problem-solving, and creating a neurodiverse environment. He advises new Scrum Masters to build psychological safety, understand team goals, and maintain transparency. Yannick also stressed the need for Scrum Masters to adapt to evolving team needs and leverage diverse perspectives for innovative solutions.
Transcript:
Lindsay Velecina 0:00
Steve, 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. Hello
Dave West 0:21
and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host. Dave West CEO, here@scrum.org
today's podcast is the scrum master Real Talk series. It's an episode in this series. This is a special series where you want to hear from scrum master sharing personal experiences and stories, whether it's overcoming obstacles, creative solutions to problems, or just critical lessons, what they've learned in fostering agility and helping agile teams today, we're super excited and lucky to have Yannick from the Netherlands. Yannick works for an organization called Team rockstars, it, and is currently working with an organization I've actually had some dealies with ascent energy in the Netherlands. They're the largest provider of electricity in the Netherlands, and doing some amazing stuff on digital transformation and really transforming their organization to be a technology or digital first enterprise, which is really, really exciting. So welcome to the podcast. Yannick, yeah, thanks, Dave. I'm happy to be here. It's great to have you, and I apologize I didn't dare say your surname for our listeners who are much smarter and more able to say words than me, your tell tell us your whole whole name. Yeah, this is fun because I work with, like a lot of international colleagues, so I also have to explain it a lot of times, but the My full name is unique from the event.
Yannick van der Wende 1:57
Wow. And that's, yeah, that's
Dave West 1:58
awesome. Very Dutch, very Dutch, and I'm obviously very English that I've lived in America so long. I'm kind of the worst of both worlds now. All right, so Well, thank you for that. Yannick, so let's, let's start talking about your journey. You know your scrum master journey? What experiences you've had along the way? Our listeners love to hear real life experiences of Scrum Masters that are having a lot of fun doing Scrum mastery.
Yannick van der Wende 2:27
Yeah, so the fun thing is, I've been working in it for about 12 years now, and I haven't always been a scrum master. I started out as a developer, specifically microsoft.net development, and I've always done consultancy work. I myself have ADHD, so I really like to be able to just
switch from project to project, learn a lot about a lot of things in the world. For example, I didn't know
how certain Pringle ships were made. But I found out, because of one of my projects, I actually went to one of the factories of it, because they had an IT problem, which is really cool. But after a certain amount of time, I believe around 10 years of working in it, doing development, I did a couple of stints of Yeah, developer, Scrum, master role, double role, which I don't recommend personally. Personally, I felt okay if I want to make a next step in my career, I either need to start specializing in technique,
or I stay the way I am and I'm just an okay, senior developer. And then I took a hard look at myself. I thought, Okay, what is the most fun I have in my development job? And it's actually solving people's problems.
And yeah, once in my last development assignment, I had a really nice scrum master
who was very open to also have a lot of discussions with me how to create a better scrum team. And sadly, at a certain point, yeah, that's the consultancy life as well. The project had to end, and I had to scale off. But I felt like, Okay, this is maybe the moment to also take a look at becoming a scrum master. So, yeah, I took the test. I did some studying.
I had a lovely ADHD hyper focus. So I studied so much that actually, within two months, I got PSM two
instead of just BSN one,
which was awesome. And I got my first project at light here, which was a really cool company.
They are. They wanted to make the first solar powered car. Yes, I've, I've worked with them a little bit as well. Really interesting company. They're talking about 1000 kilometers.
Dave West 4:59
Uh, extending the range of a battery to over 1000 kilometers. And they won multiple prizes, uh, around that. You know that when they take cars and put them in deserts and see how far they go, is really interesting story. Yeah, it was really cool story. But, yeah, I started there, and I learned I was the first scrum master there. So that was also interesting. They were very much in a skill up situation. They Yeah, they were like 80 people to 600 people in a couple of months. So there was a lot of things going on. And on my first day I came in, I met a lot of people.
Yannick van der Wende 5:38
And at the end of the day I was like, Okay, first time Scrum Master, can I meet my team? Then I basically got the response, yeah, we haven't hired your team yet.
And yeah, here did. This was also my point in time that okay, like all my experiences developer, I know SCRUM masters that are part of the team, what they need to do. What do I do without a team? So I was like, Okay, what's going on? What are you guys expecting from me? Well, we have some meetings with some higher ups and some other people, and we at least want you to explain scrum to them, see if they are interested. Okay, that's good. Oh yeah, it's actually good that you mentioned this. We want to hire a team, and we have two companies in the bidding, and they're going to show their bids tomorrow. Okay, sure, I'll join. So I'm in that bidding meeting, and both companies say, Yeah, we deliver a full team with a scrummers.
Well, what am I doing here? Right?
So I have a little bit of a rocky start I did not expect. But here I'm really happy with Hans, the manager there. I just went back to him and said, Is there a team that could use my help? And he said, Yes, I know a team. So went to that team. They were really struggling with the concept of Agile. They were, it was a really cool team as well, because they were building everything that was with the Android Auto and the buttons. And they were, yeah, they were all the user interface in the car. But then you had hardware, you had software, you had middleware. Everything had to combine. And yeah, I just joined their meetings, talked with people, asked them, Okay, what are the struggles you're hitting? And then after a week, I just stepped in, started explaining, okay, these are all your struggles. I think Scrum is at least a form of solution for this. Are you guys willing to try this with me? And they said, Yes. And basically, because we were in the scale up, this was a team of five people that turned into two teams of 10 people
that eventually I got asked, Hey, we have a team that is also reliant on them. Could you take them on as well? And eventually I ended up with seven teams under me and more of an agile coaching role than a real scrum master role. I actually taught two people to become a scrum master within those teams because I was too busy. And yeah, so after a year, I just had a very nice pressure cooker situation at lights here.
But sadly, I don't know if you know this, but
yeah, they went bankrupt at a certain point, and I was hearing some things in Grapevine, like, okay, as a consultant, you know when it's your time to go. So then I contacted team rocks. It asked them, Hey, I hear great things about ascent from other colleagues. Can I join them?
And they were like, Oh, we can try. Then I had a really nice conversation at ascent, and they said, Okay, when can you start? So that was really nice. And I started working with data teams, and I think as a developer.
Previously, I really
never thought about data. I didn't think about what's going to happen with this data once I put it in database. Didn't really care about it. Maybe I had to make a report once in a while. And there, I start working with people that do data massive skills like terabytes of data, lots of very intricate SQL statements and yeah. So yeah, I also had to really rethink, okay, what does agile mean for these teams? And
that was a very interesting situation where one of the teams I'm working with, started out having to work every three weeks and not delivering anything going to DevOps style, twice a day delivery.
Dave West 9:53
So the biggest challenge you think that you know with data is what dependence is. And yes, you know.
The fact that everything is dependent on everything else. So getting a getting a useful increment out frequently, getting it, you know, into production frequently, can be really, really challenging because of all those dependencies. Is that one of the biggest issues, yeah, it's, it's, it's completely dependent, like a lot of work as scrum master ideas make sure that all those dependencies are managed.
Yannick van der Wende 10:24
But also, if there's an impediment, or maybe somewhere there's a firewall change and then suddenly we can't get the data anymore.
But there's also one of the biggest, hardest things we are currently facing, is that we have a bit of a bottleneck going on that we have one team that's responsible for connecting to data sources, and we have that gets in the data lake, and that's all the raw data. And then we have a team that is responsible for creating the next step of that into data warehouse, and then you have a team that is focusing on reporting and analyzing the from based on data warehouse and yeah, if someone wants a new report or wants something added to the report, I've been in the situation that someone asked, Oh yeah, I have this one table I want added. Oh yeah, we take a look at it. That's not that much work.
We expect to be able to deliver this in 12 weeks, because it's such a staggered way handling things. And so as a Scrum Master, you're spending a lot of time trying to raise the transparency of the bottlenecks, as you called them, the things that are in that slow down and slow down delivery and make your teams less effective. Yeah. So one of the things that I love from the if you take a look at like the Kanban theory, which we you, if you combine it with Scrum, is Okay, start creating the board exactly as things are happening, like a lot of boards I in, the teams I joined at the end, it was just to do in progress, done
which works in certain situations. But if you want to find those bottlenecks, it becomes important to write out every step you're hitting and yeah, then even maybe put some whip limits on it. So one of the things we found out is that it took a lot of time
to set to get everything reviewed and back to the main
to the main branch, because,
for example, all if you have one source, all tables of that source were one in one file.
And then if you have the merge request, then you had a lot of things going on. That team was just getting really annoyed by using Git continuously.
So we invested with a team on breaking it up more so you could deliver faster. Just be able to deliver one table at a time.
And yeah, that took some time, but eventually it turned into, yeah, we take three weeks just to deliver one thing to deliver twice a day.
And yeah, that's really cool stuff to do, but a lot of the times it's also talking with other departments, other teams.
We have a cloud and system teams who are great at enabling everyone, but yeah, you do need to make sure that they talk to the right people at the right time to block things. So ultimately, the, you know, creating making things transparent, things like use of Kanban and queues, you know, exposing queues, which is how you're describing the sort of by making the the breaking the process into, you know, doing something and then waiting for the other thing to do something. Can Can really expose that, and then that allows you to introduce whip limits and and things like that the other and then the other thing is really providing that kind of interface to make sure the right meetings are happening across teams when there's heavy dependencies. Yeah, so do you think they're the
Dave West 14:10
as a role of a scrum master? Do you think that's the most what is the most challenging thing that you that you face on a regular basis? What is the thing that really, you know, making things transparent can be challenging. Dealing with other teams can be super challenging. But other other things that get in make your life really hard,
Yannick van der Wende 14:33
yeah, like on a professional level,
I think is important to know of if you ever want to be a scrum, you're in a lot of meetings. There's a lot of communication going on, and a lot of that communication is based on certain knowledge people receive from teams. And that's not always fully correct. 100% com.
Text, I think as a scrum master, the biggest challenge is to make sure that the right people are in the right room together at the right time. And that also means sometimes convincing a manager from a different department to make time for this, for this thing that is going on, because
the product owner says from the other team says, yeah, that's nice, but we also have our own priorities. And then it becomes also a escalation, okay, what does the highest priority? Then make sure the product owners talk with each other. Make sure the engineers talk with each other. And sometimes it's just fixing one line of code, but the way to get there. It's, yeah, it's sometimes just takes a full week just to make sure that the right people talk. And I think,
as a scrum master, you are in all those meetings so your team doesn't, don't have to,
Dave West 15:54
yeah, that's interesting that you so you've made decisions, because there's many ways of solving these problems, some of them, isn't making empowering the team to solve these problems, but you're saying that the often it is the case that you can, and I guess it's classic servant leadership, right? But you can take the burden of some of this communication collaboration on top to allow your team to actually be doing real work, because ultimately, that's your success is measured by the effectiveness of the team, right, how much value they're actually delivering. And therefore, sometimes you'll end up getting them to do stuff, help, you, know, collaborate, communicate, etc. Sometimes you'll take that burden, maybe bringing one person in to support something is, would that describe how you how you deal with that challenge? Yeah, exactly. So one thing I ask a lot in my job is, okay, I think I understand you. Let me summarize. Is this correct? Yes, okay, if I get you the right person, what should they be able to do?
Yannick van der Wende 17:05
And then I get, like, a list of, okay, they should have the right to do this. They should have to be ability to unblock us on this and this and this. Okay. Now, with this information, I'll go up and I'll see what I can do for you.
And I think my experience as a developer really helps here, because on a certain level, I understand better what the problems are. But sometimes it's also bit of a curse,
because sometimes I see my developers make choices where I as a developer, in my experience, it hit those choices as well and made the same choices. So understand why they are making it, but I also know it probably won't work.
And
yeah, my personal biggest challenge here is then to let them feel in a safe way,
because sometimes I really need to sit on my hands and let them experience that failure and see why it doesn't work. You can explain it, but that learning experience is something as long as it's not critical enough, you should let them do it.
Dave West 18:13
Yeah, critical or expensive those two, those two things tend to be, tend to tend to be important. So you and I get your frustration, though it is funny sometimes, you know, I used to, I used to have a real job. Now I'm a CEO, but the that there's times where I think I know best, and I want to coach my teammates, mentor them to do it the way that I think. And it turns out, actually, I don't always know best. And it's, I mean, this is sort of classic. As you get older, you have to sometimes realize that, yeah, they have to either fail themselves, or you actually aren't always right. So that's good as well, yeah, to sort of, and it's always that balance, yeah, and it's all about balance, right? So, all right. So a lot of our listeners on the scrum master journey that they've started embarked on it, if it maybe they're just beginning that journey. What advice would you give a new Scrum Master?
Yannick van der Wende 19:18
Yeah. So any new Scrum Master, I advise make sure you're fully interested in what your team is building, even if you don't understand it, ask questions, how do things work? Why do they work the way they work? And I think
building psychological safety is a really tough thing, and it is something that you will probably feel at a couple of times. And I think
the scrum values are a very good understanding of what creates a psychological, safe environment.
And by living up to those values, by being open.
When you fail by being aware of your own faults and asking the team, Hey, how can I improve this? For example, I had a session yesterday where I came out, everyone came out, frustrated. I thought I could set up a nice workshop, but it wasn't what the team needed, and it took two hours, and we didn't get where we wanted to go, but I just said to the team, okay, I misunderstood what you guys needed. Sorry. What do you need? And then they said, Yes, but because of the way we did this workshop, which makes sense, that we did it this way, we actually found out we are already aligned on this part, and we actually just need to start drawing things out. So we actually also don't need you for that. We're just gonna plan a meeting after this, after you have had lunch, and we're just gonna draw the things out we want to discuss. And if we don't need you, we'll come back to you. I just
light it up a bit, because I felt down on the fact that I didn't prep well enough. I misunderstood the assignment. I didn't think I was doing it right,
but by being open about that feeling, being clear like being transparent on this and being respectful for to the team as well, because it was easy enough to just think, come on guys. You guys know this is what you wanted. Let's do this. Why are you guys taking so long getting annoyed that you guys now it's about being also respectful to them and say, Hey, I messed this one up. How can I improve that creates this environment in which it's okay to feel as a person, also feeling communication, feeling things and improve, and that's the start, and that builds a strong team. And once they get in that groove of always improving, always being open and respectful, then you can also look at processes, and once your team is Yeah, so effective, you start hitting anything that's outside of the team, and then you can actually start saying, hey, our team is being blocked because you guys don't have your stuff together. Let's have a talk about how you guys are doing things to make sure that we don't get blocked anymore. Yeah, so it's interesting that you started, you know, as a new scrum master, thinking a little bit about values, thinking and investing time, thinking about how you create an environment that that allows teams to be
Dave West 22:36
focused, respectful, you know, inclusive and safe. I mean, the values really focus on safety and focus that's that's kind of what the those values really embody and and I think spending time thinking about, how do you create that environment, and being mindful of the actions that you take, for instance, the actions that you described, and this the action of, oh my gosh, this, this meeting didn't go well. I'm to blame. Let's you know, by presenting that vulnerability, that that honesty to the team, it creates the feedback, you know, and the environment where they feel that they can do to do the same, which is which I think is really, really, really interesting.
Yannick van der Wende 23:27
Yeah, I also have another example that
one team I recently started working with
was on a lot of pressure. We were in migrations period. There was a lot of pressure. Lot of things were not going well. Like every day, there was a new escalation. Things were going on. And I myself, yeah, I taught English myself by watching a lot of TV.
One of them was South Park. Oh, and not sure that can teach you English, but yes, okay, yeah, not, not really nice English. Let's keep it at that. And
so at a certain point, when you have escalations going on every day, you start to cuss a little, right? And one of the developers actually came up to me during a meeting and said, Hey, I am a very religious person. Would you please stop cussing with God?
Yeah, I think everyone can probably think what I said.
And I said in that moment, I just stood still, let the silence be there for a minute, and say you're absolutely right. I am very sorry. I will try to do better. Thank you for saying this. Thank you for just saying something I am doing that is making you feel uncomfortable,
and that was all I had to do in that meeting. But you could see in the team A.
Yeah, they were all under that pressure. They were all feeling it. They were all understanding why I was saying it. But on the other hand, it made a safe space to just say, Yeah, we're still professionals, even if that thing is going wrong, even if everything is burning, we'll get there
Dave West 25:20
and we'll pick it up. Yeah, it's interesting. We talk about@scrum.org The Platinum Rule, do unto others not as you expect to be done onto, but do unto others as they expect to be done onto, as they need, you know? Yeah, so, and the only way you can do that is by frequently asking the question, you know, how did I show up at that meeting? Is there anything I could have done better? Is this something that I can, I can present in a different way, act in a different way that would, that would make you more more effective? The other thing that you say, I just want to just one of the interesting that you said, Know, the business that teams in, I think, and care about it, take an interest in it. Or one of the big changes in the scrum guide in 2020 was the fact that Scrum, everybody in the scrum team is ultimately accountable for delivering value, not just the developers, you know. So that change was really inspired by people like you saying the most effective SCRUM masters are ones that care deeply about the product that we're building. And, you know, making that more obvious, the fact that you're not there, you're not measured by, I don't know, Team happiness or team morale or anything like that. You're actually measured by the success of the team delivering value to customers, you know, the increment, etc. And it's important to build that connection with the problem everybody in the scrum team, but particularly the scrum master, because of that, you know, that sort of importance of everybody caring about the pursuit that they're on, as it were, I thought that was, that was an interesting reflection. So as much as being a scrum master is a set of unique skills that connection to the to the the ultimate customer and the ultimate product is, is an important one. Yeah, I always tell my teams, I'm not your dad. You don't have to fully report to me anything like that. I may be in a leadership role, but I'm not your dad. I trust you guys to do the right thing. I am here to help you get the right things done,
yes, but parental responsibility model which a lot of people in management, let alone Instagram mastery, think you know I'm telling people what to do, and I'm your parent almost in the office, is it only goes so far. Ultimately, it doesn't create an environment where self management happens, where ownership happens, and where innovation comes
Yannick van der Wende 27:58
exactly and yeah, one of the coolest thing we also are doing at ascent is, like I mentioned to you already, beforehand, I have ADHD, so we're also building something like a neurodiverse community within the Yeah, within the company, where we're also focusing on Making it more safe, or also within Scrum teams. So we also go to the scrum master community, the product owner community, talk about people that are neurodiverse and what they need from certain meetings. Because, yeah, that's also where we think our next step in unlocking things is going to be because in the IT world, there is a lot of neurodiversity going on. You have a lot of people that are in like certain spectrums or ADHD or even dyslexia, people think differently, and it's very much represented. And I think that is something that is going to be very interesting within ascent, is how we're going to make a IT company that also takes all these kind of things into account. I think it's creating an environment so everybody can be their best self, right and delivering the most value to the organization, or appreciating that they're not right for this organization, they need to be somewhere else.
Dave West 29:17
Funny you should mention. So we call it a superpower. So I'm dyslexic, and I have two amazing kids that are
dyslexic dysgraphia as well Tourette's ADHD. So we call it unlocking the superpower, because ultimately, getting diverse perspectives to getting different ways of thinking about problems, is a superpower that allows you to build things that are just amazing. Remember, Einstein, dyslexic, Richard Branson, dyslexic, you know you and you add HD, HD to it. There's all of these amazing people we want to build into teams to deliver amazing things.
Yannick van der Wende 30:00
Things to customers, and Scrum Master is a key accountability for making making that happen. Yeah, and I love, I love my ADHD, but it also, even if it is superpower like my superpower is, I'm able to read a room instantly I know. I see all things going on. I see how people are feeling at the moment. I just see and feel it and but yeah, it also has drawbacks, right? So one of the things as a scrum master, you also are expected to create structure and to plan meetings, all these kind of things. I'm just very honest on that that's not my strong suit. I Yeah, if you ask me, Hey, can you plan a meeting? Yeah, and I walk away and have another meeting. I completely forget I needed to do it. And then eventually someone asked, Hey, do we have room for this? Oh, let me check.
So I am honest with my team on that as well, and I asked them to help me with that. So even though it's actually my job,
it's my responsibility. I ask others who I know are better in these kind of things to help me
get these things done. Help, yeah, keep reminding me if I forget something, and I think that's also part of the values, right, being open about where your weaknesses lie. There's interesting a lot of conversations at the moment, because the use of generative AI and AI in general that it that the question is, will we still need teams in the future? And I think the point that you raised is, and it's exactly spot on. I think the power of teams isn't the fact that individually, they need each other to deliver valuable increments. It's not that they need each other the but the value is accelerated and amplified with each other the so even though, in the future, yes, with the use of CO pilots, etc, you will not need as many people to working together affect to effectively deliver a working product, but you will, if you want to deliver the more innovative products need to take advantage. And it sounds awful to say it like that the different perspectives and the superpowers of all these people to bring them together to effectively
deliver to deliver value in an initiative way. So, and that's where Scrum Master is a crucial element to, you know, you're sort of like that. George Martin, if you remember the Beatles, you know, the the Beatles were an amazing band, but they would not have been anything without a George Martin, you know, they worked together and and, and they were very he was very diverse. Obviously, he wasn't from Liverpool, and he wasn't working class, and he'd been exposed to lots of different kinds of music. And He came into the Beatles and helped them to to be the most, you know, to become the first pop band ever, as it, as it were, which is, which is really interesting. Oh, I could talk all day about these topics as I as I'm sure you have you too. You could too, and I'm sure our listeners would love to listen, but at some point, we unfortunately have to go, and this is the point. Thank you for sharing your thoughts today on what it's like to be a scrum master. As part of our scrum master Real Talk series. I'm, you know, I every time I talk to a scrum master about their journey and how they got to the place they are and what they really focus on, I always learn something new, as I'm sure our listeners do as well, or have as well. So thank you for spending the time today.
Dave West 33:44
Thank you for inviting me. It was a lovely talk,
and thank you for listening to today's scrum to all community podcast. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share with friends, and, of course, come back and listen some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests. You know, today we talked about Scrum mastery, which is a fantastic and important, often undervalued accountability.
But tomorrow, we could be talking about product ownership and the future of product so come back. Listen to some more about professional Scrum, product thinking and, of course, agile. Thank you for your time. Scrummorg.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai