I Love Data—Why Success for a Scrum Master Means Doing the Hard Measurement Work | Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan Fashanu: I Love Data—Why Success for a Scrum Master Means Doing the Hard Measurement Work

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes .

 

"You don't get better by not trying to be better." - Vasco Duarte (channeling Olaitan's own discipline)

 

For Olaitan, success as a Scrum Master comes down to two things—team effectiveness and team health—and he refuses to guess at either. Twice a year, in what he calls his winter and summer cycles, he runs a structured team health check survey to capture how confident people feel, whether they hold each other accountable, and whether psychological safety is real or theatrical. Between those checkpoints, he runs constant one-on-ones—and not just with developers. QAs, designers, the PO. Everyone gets the conversation. He pulls outside-in feedback from customers and partner teams too, because effectiveness measured only from the inside is fiction. "I love data. Maybe it's my background in mathematics. I love looking at patterns, comparing things." The work is real, the load is real—but for Olaitan, refusing to do it is the same as refusing to grow.

 

Self-reflection Question: If you had to prove to yourself today that your team is genuinely effective and healthy, what data would you actually have—and what would you only be guessing at?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start / Stop / Continue (and a twist Vasco offers Olaitan)

Olaitan's go-to is the simple Start / Stop / Continue <span style= "font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; te