Thanks for sharing your thoughts, John. You are right: Sometimes, it’s the Scrum Master or agile coach who fails to adequately support the team. If that’s the case, you may want to use my feedback framework to share your perspective with the individual. Alternatively, you may want to have a conversation in a sprint retrospective, assuming that the session is well prepared and facilitated and free from blaming and accusing the Scrum Master. Hope this helps!

Thank you for your feedback Alfred. I agree that the advice is applicable to line managers: Effective leadership is about embracing the right mindset and acting in helpful, supportive ways IMO.

Thank you for sharing your feedback and experience Julio. I fully agree: When a development team struggles, there is often something the product owner can and should do differently to help the team. It’s therefore important not to quickly judge the dev team and assume that an issue is entirely the team’s fault. Instead, product people should be willing to reflect on their own behaviour and be open to change it. It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.

Another retrospection item I believe the Product Owner can take upon himself to inquire whenever it notices these under-performance issues is to check if he/she is taking the necessary actions to help the Team [really] understand the overall Product goal, strategy, and roadmap, so that in turn they can fully comprehend the Sprint Goal. I’ve seen situations where Teams struggle to even agree on a Sprint Goal. On these situations, there are more things that meet the eye at the Product Ownership/Management level that need to be addressed in order to obtain the commitment from the Development Team, which is not just for them to provide the effort size of Product Backlog Items.

Great stuff as always!