What do you do, when your product owner has too much on her plate and seems eager to take on more? An overworked product owner likely isn't a healthy contributor. Questions can go unanswered, feedback opportunities are missed, and team safety or delivery success may take a hit. This can undermine everybody's effort to improve. So, what can you do? How can you coach them and help them maintain the sustainable pace that most helps the product and the team?

Join us if you are a product owner or work with one. Have you been successful in helping the product side of the house manage their workload? Are you struggling with this situation? Have you learned the hard way how to coach in this situation? We'd love for you to join us to share your experience and discover new approaches.

Serving a team as a scrum master while simultaneously playing another role (dev, qa, product owner, etc) can be challenging.

How do you manage things if: - The team has identified one or more blockers, but you have other work that you really need to get done. - You are focused on something else (some head twisting dev work, perhaps) when your product owner has questions about how to write a particular story. - You are in the middle of facilitating a contentious retrospective topic and you'd like to add your opinions to the discussion.

Are you a scrum master who also has other responsibilities on the team? Have you watched others try to do it? What helped? What made it hard? Join us for our discussion of this important topic at the Westside Cafe Lunch.

Many of our agile methods can increase conflict. Collaboration means conflict. Any time we try to solve problems different opinions emerge on what to do. Transparency can trigger insecurities and conflict. Experimenting and failing/learning rapidly is not intuitive to our society and is bound to generate some friction.

The stance we take when faced with conflict can help the team create something new, or it can add to the tangle. What do you do to help yourself stay present in the midst of conflict? What in-the-moment facilitation or coaching tools do you use when conflict is bubbling?

Join us and share your stories about conflict, what you have tried and what you have learned. Hope to see you Friday April 27th for a lively discussion on conflict management within agile teams.

How purely should a team follow their chosen agile process?

If you've ever struggled with holding the line on practices that don't support your agile journey, or you feel like most agile processes are too rigid and -need- to be modified; join us for an in-depth lunchtime discussion.

You've just started your agile transformation, or perhaps a couple of years into it, then feel the tug back into the way things have "always been done." The arguments seem logical. Should you change your process to match your company or should you stick to your agile process? What disadvantages are there for making Agile fit into a company’s needs?

Maybe you are doing project work instead of product work. Perhaps your industry is heavily regulated or hardware centric. It's unclear how pure agile would fit your situation. Is ‘some’ Agile better than none or is it dangerous? How do you identify when you are losing the benefits of Agile as you try to adapt it to your situation?

Or possibly you are just the opposite, you've been successful when others were sure agile wouldn't work! Come and learn from your peers about when and how to protect your agile practice.

This month we will focus on the Product Owner Role in Agile.

Understanding the role of the product owner can be challenging—it’s complex, poorly defined and has a 1000 different masters.

In this lunchtime gathering, we'll discuss the product owner role and ways we can work effectively with them. What do we do when there is distance between the team and the product owner? Is it possible to delegate some of their responsibilities to someone closer? Can technology help?

Share your practical experiences, techniques, and ideas on product ownership, diving beyond the theoretical to real-world solutions.

Working from a backlog of small, well thought out, user stories helps the team create value and show progress. Join us in discussing how to move from large features / epics / stories to small actionable user stories.

Once again, someone has brought you a blob of a feature. They want you to start on it in a near sprint. What do you do? What processes help you decompose your feature? What flow of events do you prefer to a last minute drop?

Whether you are a master story splitter or new at story writing, we hope you can join us. Share your experience, or bring you questions and scenarios and we'll all walk away with new ideas to try!

What's it like where you work?

Do the beliefs, attitudes, practices and behaviours of your team or company help you do your best work? Have you found that your organization's culture is holding back your agile transition? Every company has its challenges, and frustration can easily happen, but what positive actions can we take to generate change? Who has seen benefits in nurturing positive values and trends in your org culture, to bolster your path to agility?

We'll be back in our normal location in what promises to be a juicy discussion on positive ways to change culture.