Hi Miro Heroes 

Anna here, your Community Manager.

This April, it’s all about Agile! We want to celebrate all the individuals, teams, and companies that prioritize their customers and are learning how to respond to change.

I’m super excited to share our conversation with @Nhi Tran, a Scrum Master based in Stockholm, Sweden. Nhi is a prominent Miroverse Creator and longtime Miro Community Member who authored many popular templates including Retrospective - Chinese New Year, Mood Check In, and Retrospective - Stress and Recharge.

We sat down with Nhi to talk about her passion for helping teams do their best work and get some tips & tricks for aspiring Miroverse Creators, and I’m excited to share her wisdom with the Miro Community. 

Nhi’s Miroverse pro tip:

• Use Miro IconFinder to make your board look beautiful and add more intricate details to your frames. When Nhi starts building any template, she always looks for relevant icons first and then plays with other elements on the board like shapes, frames, and colors. 

Want to continue the conversation?

• To learn more from Nhi, join her at How to run fun retrospectives in Miro  on April 28, 2022. 

• If you have a question for Nhi about Scrum or building templates, add it to the thread below. 

• If you have a favorite Scrum template (either from Miroverse or your own), post it in the thread as well!

Full Q&A with Nhi Tran:

Please, tell us about your background. How did you start working as a Scrum Master?

I graduated in 2021 and I have a degree in business analytics. During my internship last year, I found some gaps that the team needed to cover and was trying to provide some support.  So I was asked by the product owner to try out this new role. 

I took the SAFE certification for Scrum Masters two months after that. I tried out the role for six months and I just loved it! After some additional training, I was asked to work as a Scrum Master on the same team. 

What do you like most about your current role? 

I love that it’s all about working with the team very closely and enabling my teammates’ growth. I'm passionate about collaboration and providing people with support that they need. That's something that you don't get when you're working as a business analyst. You interact with a lot of people, but then you have no impact on their growth or their processes.

What does your typical day look like? What are the most common challenges you see?

I work with a development team that is based in Finland, so we all work remotely. We adopted several Agile ceremonies, but the most important one is probably our daily standup. We meet every day in the morning. It helps me identify blockers. Then I focus on helping individuals to solve their issues and make sure they can achieve their goals.

One of the biggest challenges I see is creating space for focused work. We work for a big corporation so sometimes developers can get overwhelmed by meetings and admin tasks. So I try to help them free up some time for what really matters.

What’s your favorite Miroverse template you created?

I really love Retrospective - Chinese New Year! I built it during the pandemic. I was planning on going to Southern Sweden and celebrating Chinese New Year with my family. I wasn't able to do that because of the pandemic. So when Chinese New Year started, I decided to have a retrospective with the team to celebrate this holiday. So I created a board and put a lot of effort into it. Having so much fun at work really helped me to feel better and my team really appreciated this as well. 

Any tips for those who are just starting out and building their first template?

I love using Miro IconFinder because it has so many funny icons. When I started building Retrospective - Chinese New Year, I found a lot of nice icons of dragons, pandas, lanterns and other traditional symbols of China. The only icon I couldn’t find was a fortune cookie, so I googled an image and used it. Then I decided I would mostly use red and yellow for all the frames since these colors are most common during New Year celebrations (I picked custom colors to my personal palette). So it was perfect.  

When I start building any template, I always look for relevant icons first and then play with other elements on the board like shapes, frames, and colors. 

What would you recommend to someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience as a facilitator?

Before each retrospective session, I create an agenda and add all the time blocks so everyone understands the purpose of the meeting and its structure before we even start. I also always try to incorporate some fun activity before every meeting. It can be a quiz, an icebreaker, or something else. It helps me warm everyone up so they are more comfortable with giving and receiving feedback.

We’re also big fans of your Retrospective - Stress and Recharge. Can you please tell us a bit more about it?  

I created this board during my internship after our team went through a very difficult iteration. A lot of people were feeling super stressed and I didn't want to spend another retro talking about engineering and product development. So I decided to focus on stress management and my manager was on board with that.

It went really well because people were showing their emotions and talking about how we can provide stress relief in the future. I also invited a health coach and she gave us a lot of recommendations on how to avoid burnout. At the end of the session, each person came up with a list of personalized action items to help each team member deal with stress. When it comes to creating a good work environment, health is the biggest priority.