What I have learned at a Coaching Retreat

Last week I attended the Scrum Coaching Retreat Copenhagen (edit: renamed to Agile Coaching Retreats in 2019), spending a few days with other people of the agile tribe - developers, product people, scrum masters and coaches. A retreat is a format where the participants define their own agenda by pitching for topics and finding / building teams to work on these topics. Some topics were dealing with daily work of a coach, giving tools or defining the profession of “Agile Coach”, others have been dealing with problems of scaling Scrum and agile work-styles in bigger companies up to full enterprise transformations.

The newly formed groups went through 4 sprints in 2 days, each sprint ending with a demo of the “work item” at the all-hands review bazaar.

My groups was working on a deck of cards which helps Scrum team members to reflect their current situation and pointing them to a possible direction on their “journey”. Our sprint-to-sprint progress is documented here:

The Scrum Practitioners Journey

Apart from the things that have been crafted with all the interesting discussions and the subject-specific learnings, I made some learnings on the “meta”-level:

• Always have a clear product vision and some mid-term roadmaps or objectives. Especially when there’s a rush in delivery, the time invested in thinking of a vision pays out.
• Have a strong, dedicated and enabled product owner who speaks for the customer and provides guidance towards the product vision.

If you have the opportunity to visit a SCR (next Europe-based is in London 2018), don’t hesitate! It’s very intense but also a lot of fun!

Pics:

• Visual recording of the event by Aneta Radon