1:1 Interviews to Map Your Team's Current State + 11 Templates
Determine The Current State of Your New Scrum Team With Ease
👋 Hello, I’m Vibhor, and welcome to the 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter, the “Winning Strategy.” Every week, I answer one reader question about Agility, Products / Processes, Role-based Skills, Jobs and anything else that you need answered about your Career Growth. You can send me your questions here.
Note: Today's solution comes straight from the trenches. These templates were designed and used by me during my tenure in various organizations. I have obtained the necessary permission to share them with you. Please feel free to use them and provide your valuable feedback so that I can improve them further.
On to this week’s question!
Q: Hi Vibhor. Thanks for all the knowledge you’re imparting it’s unbelievable. I have a straightforward question. Can you provide the steps to conduct initial 1:1 interviews to find where the team currently stands? I am an Agile Coach with 5 years experience. But my question is for Scrum Masters.
Thanks for the question.
Let's look into a scenario to understand the situation a little better.
Imagine you're assigned to a new team as a Scrum Master within your existing company or a new company that just hired you.
You're asked to improve the performance of this Scrum team. But before you can effectively guide them, you need to understand:
where they currently stand
what process they’re following
what are their pain points
what are the learning gaps
This is where initial 1:1 interviews with each team member become crucial.
Each of these 1:1 conversations will help you piece together a complete picture of the team's dynamics, their individual strengths, weaknesses, and how they've been collaborating.
But that’s not it. You won’t just gather facts.
You’ll use this opportunity to build trust and rapport with the team members. You will ask questions to understand:
their perspectives on the team's processes,
what's been working well, and
what challenges they face.
By the end of these interviews, you will have gathered a wealth of information that will not only help you assess the current state of your Scrum team but also enable you to customize your approach to meet their specific requirements and effectively address their challenges.
Note: The new year 2024 is coming up with Case Studies where every other week, I will guide you on how to use your observation, data gathered during interviews etc., to customize your Scrum approach. Each of these case studies is inspired by the real life experiences of me and the wonderful colleagues I worked with in the past.
These case studies will train you to align and customize Scrum to suit your company and team’s needs. I am excited. Are you?
In today’s post, I will provide you with 6 steps, along with accompanying templates (11 in total).
These templates will help you learn and apply these tactics to successfully complete this 1:1 knowledge-gathering exercise.
Let’s get started.