Goal Clarity—The Missing Piece in Agile Team Performance | Anamaria Ungureanu

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode Summary: "Goal Clarity—The Missing Piece in Agile Team Performance" featuring Anamaria Ungureanu

Release Date: July 28, 2025

In this insightful episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte engages in a profound conversation with Anamaria Ungureanu, an accomplished Agile Evangelist with extensive experience driving transformations in industries such as aviation and automotive. Anamaria shares her journey, challenges, and effective strategies for enhancing Agile team performance through goal clarity.

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Guest Introduction: Anamaria Ungureanu

Anamaria Ungureanu is a seasoned Agile Coach and Scrum Master who has collaborated with prestigious firms like IBM and Airbus. Her expertise lies in coaching executives and teams in frameworks like SAFe and Scrum, conducting assessments, customizing workshops, and facilitating Agile tool adoption, including Jira and Miro.

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Anamaria’s Journey to Scrum Mastery

[02:12] Anamaria recounts her transition from traditional project management to Agile practices:

"One day I popped up in an Agile workshop and really mapped up with my values, covering values and principle manifesto, lean thinking. This was the spark that helped me continue the journey from project management to Agile."

Her alignment with Agile principles led her to embrace the role of a Scrum Master, where she thrived in complex environments by fostering team alignment with Agile values.

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Facing Team Engagement Challenges

[03:31] Anamaria shares a pivotal experience from her "Journey 1" program:

"I worked with a team on implementing a platform. Initially, they were excited but soon became quiet and disengaged, struggling to deliver on commitments and losing trust with key stakeholders."

Despite the team's surface-level normalcy, their inability to meet their commitments highlighted deeper engagement issues.

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Identifying Indicators of Disengagement

[05:14] The host highlights the commonality of such scenarios, to which Anamaria elaborates on specific indicators:

[05:45] "Some indicators for me are silence when they say it's fine without being fine, lack of constructive conflict, and reduced collaboration and discussions."

These signs pointed to a lack of genuine engagement, which was detrimental to the team's performance and value delivery.

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Strategies to Enhance Engagement and Goal Clarity

[06:07] Anamaria outlines her approach to addressing these challenges:

• Raising Open Questions: During iteration planning, she prompted the team with questions like, "Is this clear enough? Are you confident about delivering this program?" to encourage deeper thinking beyond mere task estimation.

• Focusing on 'Why' and 'What': Emphasizing the importance of understanding why the team is undertaking a task and what they aim to deliver, fostering a stronger connection to the product goals.

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Collaborating with the Product Owner

[08:59] Anamaria emphasizes the crucial role of collaboration with the Product Owner in driving team engagement:

• Story Mapping and Affinity Mapping: She facilitated workshops to help the team visualize their work and prioritize tasks effectively.

• Gemba Walks: Encouraging Product Owners to engage directly with teams, especially those in different time zones, to better understand requirements and improve communication.

"We managed to help the product owner connect better and understand the requirements, which in turn improved communication with the team." [10:55]

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Holistic System Approach and Key Takeaways

[10:55] The host commends Anamaria's comprehensive approach:

"Scrum Masters need to look at the whole system, engage with everybody, and bring different approaches to align and define clear protocols that are also engaging."

Key Takeaways:

1. Goal Clarity is Crucial: Ensuring that teams understand the why and what behind their tasks enhances engagement and performance.

2. Active Engagement Practices: Facilitating open discussions and encouraging constructive conflict can uncover underlying issues and foster a more collaborative environment.

3. Collaboration with Product Owners: Effective communication and strategic workshops with Product Owners are essential for aligning team efforts with product goals.

4. Holistic Coaching: Addressing both team dynamics and broader organizational practices leads to sustainable Agile transformations.

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Conclusion

Anamaria Ungureanu’s experiences underscore the importance of goal clarity in Agile team performance. By identifying signs of disengagement and implementing strategic coaching techniques, she successfully transformed a struggling team into a cohesive, value-driven unit. Her holistic approach serves as a valuable blueprint for Scrum Masters aiming to elevate their teams' Agile practices.

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Notable Quotes:

• "One day I popped up in an Agile workshop and really mapped up with my values, covering values and principle manifesto, lean thinking." [02:12]

• "Some indicators for me are silence when they say it's fine without being fine, lack of constructive conflict, and reduced collaboration and discussions." [05:45]

• "We managed to help the product owner connect better and understand the requirements, which in turn improved communication with the team." [10:55]

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of Anamaria Ungureanu's insightful episode on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, providing valuable lessons on fostering Agile team performance through clear goal alignment and active engagement strategies.

Transcript

[Vasko]

Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership and it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership, that's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.

[Podcast Host]

Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And for this week we have joining us from France, Anna Maria Unguriano. Hey Anna Maria, welcome to the show.

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

Hello. Hello. Thank you for inviting me, I'm excited.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you here. So for all of you to know a little bit more about Anna Maria. She's an agile evangelist driving transformations across it, the airline industry, automotive industry. She delivers projects with firms like IBM, Airbus and others and coaches executives to teams in SAFE and Scrum, leads assessments, customizes workshops and does other important projects also with agile adoption, like focusing on tool adoption like Jira or digital whiteboards like Miro. So Annemarie, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

Thank you, thank you for the intro. So throughout my journey of exploring, learning and continuous improvement, one day I pop up in an agile workshop and really map up with my values, covering about values and principle manifesto, lean thinking. So, so this was the spark which helped me to continue the journey from what I did that time more than 10 years ago on the project management to go to the agile journey. So I quite soon started fitting in a role in a Scrum Master in a team which really worked in a complex environment and I could help them to improve by aligning with the values and principle of a job.

[Podcast Host]

Very good. And of course all of those early stories inform what we learn later on and sometimes in a difficult way. Today's Fail Monday here on the podcast. So we definitely want to explore one of Those stories, Ana Maria. So share with us a story of a difficult moment that you had as a Scrum master. We'll dive into the takeaways and the conclusions later on, but start by telling us that story.

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

Indeed. In my Journey 1 program, I worked with the team on implementing a platform. And it was a team excited to work with, but short enough I found that they were very quiet, very not engaged in the collaborating and delivering the value, those iterations. So working with them as learning experience in the beginning, I presume that, okay, everything is fine, because they were quite, you know, fine, you know, everything is good. But we saw at the end that they could not deliver on what they committed. They could not keep up with the, you know, trust to the key stakeholders to delivering value. So we learned that we start to, you know, engage more. And I needed to have discussion with the teams to train the teams, understand, you know, was the issue in the beginning, provide the environment. It was important for them because the issue at that context was they didn't understand the goals. Okay. So I had a discussion with the product owner, with the team, rephrasing, what are the goals, the strategy for what we are doing and the end goal of our program, and helped a lot the team because they connected and managed to deliver incrementally and iteratively.

[Podcast Host]

When you think about that story, it's a story that I think many of us will find familiar. A team that is kind of stepping back, maybe waiting to be told what to do, not really trying to understand in detail what the goals are or where we want to be, but rather just doing the normal work. And at first everything seems kind of normal because, you know, they are hitting their cycles and so on. But there's. I think what you just described is a very clear sign. There's a lack of engagement.

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

And that's a very important marker. So for you in that particular team, what were their behaviors that told you that, okay, this is not because everything is fine. They're stepping back because they are not engaged. What were the things that you observed and came to your mind as, okay, this is a lack of engagement.

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

Some indicators for me is silence. One, okay, when they say it's fine without being fine, silence without challenges, the status vote, you know, now also having a constructive conflict. My experience helps to be engaged with the goal of our program, of our product. Okay. And the third, the collaboration, the discussion. Okay, based on the missing. The collaboration between the team. The discussions were, for me, some indicators that could, you know, impact the product and the delivering value. So with These points I as my approach coaching the teams, you know, I start to raise questions and help them to be open. Like open questions based on our product. Let's see, it is clear enough. Are you confident about this to deliver the program? For example, as a technique, the iteration planning. I raise the questions already to know what we will deliver, what will demo. Guys, you know what we will demo at the iteration review. It's a way of helping them to think, okay, what we will deliver. Okay. Not just focusing on taking the user stories. So as a technique, okay, let's estimate the stories. Boom, we are done. I know what I need to do now. For me, two elements to connect the team with the product is why we are doing this, what are the goals, what should deliver, what you'll demo. I'm trying to raise the question and helping the team to connect.

[Podcast Host]

And when we try to do that kind of the. Perhaps one of the steps is to kind of focus on the behaviors that we expect the team to have. Right. Like we expect the team to be engaged to ask those questions, to have that constructive conflict. But one other thing that you did which I think is very useful and worthy of highlighting. Highlighting is the collaboration with the product owner. Because the way the product owner engages with the team can bring that engagement out of the team as well. Right. So what were the things that you actually did with the product owner? To really create that ability for the product owner to communicate the goals in a clear way, but also to get the team to start engaging.

[Anna Maria Unguriano]

In my support for the team and for the product owner. I had discussing and in fact fascinating facilitating workshop like story mapping a good exercise for helping the team to visualize the work complementing with the vote doting affinity map which helps to ensure that they are aligned on top items which we want to deliver in the next iterations based on the priority. Okay, so one technique, one tool. We work and I coach the product owner to know how to what involves the exercise the steps of, you know, for example that it's not necessary to do this for all the items, all the requirements, but especially for those new where we have a lot of unknowns based on our cone of uncertainty. And it's important for the team to visualize, you know, the task and associated stories to deliver those steps. So yes, I work with the team with these tools. In addition, for me it's important the Gemba work another practice important which helps the product owner yes. To go and see, go and collaborate. Don't say for example, we work today with teams in different time zones And I have this use case where a product owner was in one country and a team different country. It's quite challenging. Okay, this is the situation, context we need to face on and we managed to help the product owner somehow to go and see and to be able to connect better, to understand what are the requirements and then to know better how to communicate to the team.

[Podcast Host]

That's such a beautiful story of how Scrum Masters really need to look at the whole system, engage with everybody, and really bring different approaches to try to get, in this case, the team and the product owner to kind of orient, align and also to define clear protocols that are also engaging. So thank you very much for sharing that story with us, Ana Maria.

[Vasko]

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[Podcast Host]

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[Vasko]

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[Podcast Host]

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