Podcasts about Ken Schwaber

Jeff is the co-creator of Scrum and a leading expert on how the Scrum framework has evolved to meet the needs of today's business. The framework he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. However, Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for several other industries, including finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom.   As the CEO of Scrum Inc. Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum. He continues to share best practices with organizations around the globe and has written extensively on Scrum rules and methods. With a deep understanding of business process — gleaned from years as CTO/CEO of eleven different software companies — Jeff is able to describe the high-level organizational benefits of Scrum and what it takes to create hyperproductive teams.   Topics of Discussion: [:35] Introduction of Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum. [3:47] Jeff Sutherland's background: His experience at West Point and lessons in making work visible. [5:19] Fighter pilot experiences that influenced the operational side of Scrum. [6:02] Transition to the Air Force Academy and work in AI at Stanford. [7:38] Learning complex adaptive systems and the origin of Agile from complex systems theory. [8:30] How complex systems theory impacts Scrum and Agile teams today. [9:25] Jeff's first experiences applying Scrum in the banking industry. [11:25] The development of Scrum and the 2001 Agile Manifesto. [12:57] Making work visible and organizing teams, from West Point to Toyota to the Agile Manifesto. [13:23] Fast forward to 2024: Issues in Scrum and Agile practices, including sprint lengths and backlog grooming. [14:34] Jeff's new book: First Principles in Scrum and its relation to Scrum technology stacks. [16:23] Building autonomous systems: Lessons from radiation physics, AI, and complex adaptive systems. [19:16] The influence of autonomous robots on the creation of Scrum. [21:14] Discussion of Scrum and AI, leading to “Extreme Agile.” [22:47] Predictions for the future of Scrum and Agile: Teams becoming 30 to 100 times faster by 2030. [23:37] Example of AI in action: Developing a system to handle expense reports using Scrum principles. [29:37] Challenges with AI-generated code and the need for strong software architecture knowledge. [33:24] The importance of following Scrum “by the book” to achieve hyperproductivity. [35:30] Jeff's closing advice on adapting to extreme agile to stay competitive by 2030.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo “How the Agile Manifesto Came To Be” Become a beta tester for Jeff Sutherland's AI software project for expense reports: support@quickaireports.com   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve In Your Career video podcast series, we dive into the art of making your coaching stick and what it means to be truly effective in your Agile role. We'll explore how to show your value as an Agilist, maintain your confidence, and keep evolving in a world where Agile can become status quo. Join us as we unpack strategies for staying relevant, pushing the envelope, and sustaining not just teams, but your own career.   About the Featured Guest Follow Jess Brock on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnbrock/) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile. About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

On this episode of the Women in Agile podcast, Emily Lint sits down with Paula Susman to discuss people managers and agile transformations; what is and is not necessary as an Agilist to help managers transform and how do you set yourself and managers or leaders up for success in the long run to let go of command-and-control. About the Featured Guest Paula Susman is an accomplished and solutions-driven Agile Coach with 8 years of multifaceted experience in Agile transformations, process improvement and team management. Proven track record of success in blending and building highly evolved teams with Agile approaches within the SDLC.  Follow Paula Susman on LinkedIn The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Aspire and Achieve In Your Agile Career podcast series, Emily Lint speaks with Anne Monteiro about her global transitions in coaching and product management. Together they explore how to navigate uncertainty in your Agile career and identify business areas that align with your skills as well as how to identify emerging trends to stay on the top of your game in the product management and coaching space.    About the Featured Guest Anne Bravieira Monteiro is an expert in Agile methodologies, project management, and product development. As a Product and Agile Coach at HelloFresh with over ten years at IBM, Anne led agile transformations to boost team performance and customer satisfaction. Anne advocates for diversity, openness, and empathy believing these values are key to overcoming challenges and is passionate about creating tech products that simplify life.   Follow Anne Bravieira Monteiro on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/anne-bravieira)   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode, we discussed what sustainability truly means and why agilists are uniquely positioned to lead impactful sustainability initiatives. Joined by Joanne and Ann Marie, we explored their journeys into agility and sustainability, as well as two key World Work initiatives: The Week and the Sustainability Incubator Project.   About the Featured Guests Ann-Marie Kong: Ann-Marie Kong is a facilitator, coach, practitioner, change agent, avid learner, and community grower. She serves as WIA World Work Awareness into Action Program Director facilitating The Week and inviting Agilists to join us to get to a tipping point soon. She is living her life's purpose, shifting from a life of success to a life of service, and making a difference by sharing enduring love.    Follow Ann-Marie Kong on LinkedIn  Joanne Stone: Joanne is in their third year leading the Agilists for Sustainability movement. She founded Sustainability Incubator Projects, We Hope Magazine, and the Agilists4Planet Conference, which showcases the inspiring stories of Agilists in sustainability. Other facts: she practices laughing meditation and loves being with her two dogs and four daughters.  Follow Joanne Stone on LinkedIn   Reference(s) World Work on Women in Agile: https://womeninagile.org/world-work/    The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Renae Craven and guest Shena Goorawa explore the importance of adapting to tough situations and embracing new challenges to grow your career. We discuss the importance of resilience and how leaning on your support crew can help you through the toughest challenges.   About the Featured Guest Shena, an Agile Delivery Team Lead, began her career in 2006 in the call center industry. After a retrenchment in 2011, she transitioned to IT, starting in testing. Since 2012, Shena has excelled in agile roles, including agile trainer & Head of Agile Test Competency Centre, SA. Despite a layoff in 2020, she now leads Agile Delivery Managers in the FinTech industry, driving innovation and growth. Follow Shena on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shenagoorawa/) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 13 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaecraven/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode, Emily chats with Lyssa Adkins and her newest venture with the Women in Agile community: World Work. We dive into what this program is, why it matters, and how it can mobilize the agile community to serve the world beyond the workplace. Let's uncover why agilists are uniquely positioned to be a force for good and create a ripple effect of positive impact.   About the Featured Guest Lyssa Adkins is an internationally-recognized thought leader and the author of Coaching Agile Teams which has sold over 75,000 copies. Lyssa's focus is inspiring the worldwide network of agilists to see the devastating planetary challenges we are already experiencing as an opportunity to express their agile superpowers to make a massively positive impact.   Follow Lyssa Adkins on LinkedIn Follow Lyssa on Instagram (@lyssaadkins)   Reference(s) Women in Agile World Work: https://womeninagile.org/world-work/    The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Renae Craven unpacks guest Rebecca Murphy's career journey and how she found herself in Tech after completing her Literature degree.   About the Featured Guest Rebecca fell into tech after realising that not everyone who graduates with a Literature degree gets a column at the Guardian. She has worked in roles spanning Product Management, agile coaching and leadership across the mobility, ecommerce, and publishing industries, building everything from user-facing products to backend, internal services. All while supporting agility, with a little a. Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaamir/)   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 14 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaecraven/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

How do you navigate a bumpy job market with an agile mindset? Join Brian and leadership coach Mark Kilby as they explore practical strategies for staying prepared, leveraging your network, and taking ownership of your career during uncertain times. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, Brian Milner and Mark Kilby explore how to approach the challenges of today’s unpredictable job market with an agile mindset. Drawing on insights from Mark’s extensive career as a leadership and career coach, they discuss how preparation, adaptability, and proactive networking are essential to staying ahead. Mark emphasizes the importance of treating your career like a product, continuously iterating and inspecting trends to navigate change effectively. The conversation also delves into the power of maintaining strong professional relationships, keeping your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date, and using experimentation to explore new career paths. Whether you're facing a career transition, considering your next step, or simply looking to stay prepared, this episode offers actionable advice to help you take ownership of your professional journey. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mark Kilby From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver by Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mark Kilby is a leadership and career coach specializing in helping leaders and teams thrive in complexity. Passionate about building more inclusive and effective organizations, he draws on years of experience guiding professionals through organizational change, remote work transitions, and sustainable growth, all with a focus on fostering trust, collaboration, and long-term success. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back and this is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and today I've got a friend that I have seen talk several times at conferences, we were talking, I don't think I've actually crossed paths with him personally yet, but Mr. Mark Kilby is here. Welcome in Mark. Mark Kilby (00:21) Thank you, Brian, and glad that we finally had a chance to meet virtually face to face at least. Brian (00:26) Right? Right? Yeah. And today's world, you know, that's actually saying a lot. You know, that's kind of the default. Mark is a leadership and career coach and has been, you know, a speaker at multiple Agile conferences over the years. He has a book that he co-authored called From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And he has spoken on lots of different topics. Mark Kilby (00:31) Yes it is. Brian (00:51) But when we talked about having him on, we talked about a topic that I know is very topical here. For some of you, maybe, know, kind of right in the meat of where you are at the moment, but really starting to think about this bumpy job market a little bit and how to navigate that with an agile mindset. You know, this agile stuff is not just stuff we talk about in working with a team, but it actually is a way of thinking about you know, doing anything. give me kind of your description there, Mark. When you think about, you know, navigating a bumpy job market with an agile mindset, how does that look different from others? Mark Kilby (01:27) So, well, it. The best way to think about this is whether you get this out of college at career placement or you're working with a career coach later on, it's always plan out your route and just follow the steps. Well, it's kind of hard over the last couple of years to say what the right steps are because so much has happened. And you and I were talking just before we hit the record button about one of the things that gets a little bumpy here in Florida, and we call those hurricanes. And I've learned over the many years living in Florida that you can prepare for hurricanes, but you can't prepare for exactly what happens. And so it's kind of the same way these days with our careers. You can maybe get certain certifications, you may get the right resume, the right LinkedIn profile, but if... If you're not paying attention to how the market shifts, and I think many people have been caught off guard with the latest market shifts, you can be in a world of hurt. how do do the prep to weather that storm? So that's kind what I'm focusing on these days. Brian (02:42) That's awesome. That's awesome way to look at it. Cause I think you're right. know, like I know I personally have gone through a couple of, you know, layoff periods in my career and, you know, it's never something when it hits, well, at least I shouldn't say this in my experience, I absolutely were completely prepared for, they were a little bit of a shock when they happened and Mark Kilby (02:51) yeah. Brian (03:05) first one much more so than the second one. I think you learn something from each time something like that happens. But you mentioned kind of the way the market is shifting and the way things are changing a little bit and trying to be prepared. So I wanna follow that for a little. So when you talk about navigating kind of a bumpy job market and the shifts and being prepared, how do you prepare for the unknown? For things that you don't really know what's coming or you don't really know how things are shifting. How do we do that? Mark Kilby (03:38) Yeah. Well, it's paying attention to some of the longer term trends. mean, 100 years ago, know, kind of fall into the hurricane example. We had no way to predict these. And now we've got a little better way. have models to kind of guess and it's still guessing. So, but at least we have a sense of, OK, how big is it going to be? You know, how big is the change that's going to happen? How do we prepare for it? Do we stay in place? Where we're at? Is it time to move and do something else? So it's kind of the same way with our careers these days. I'm gonna guess, not everyone's gonna have the visual, but with the amount of gray on the podcast right now, you could probably relate to this. Our parents probably stuck in the same job. most of their life. I learned early on, especially in tech, the changes that happen rapidly. Matter of fact, the place where I went as a summer intern shut down the next year. The whole plant went poof. But my parents were like, how can you? It's such a great place. This company's been around for decades. But I could tell that the winds were changing. Something was shifting there. So I learned to look at, right, how is the business doing? How is the market doing for the business? And what does that mean for me? So it really helps that we kind of build up our own little model to predict, you know, how is my job going to be here in the next year or so? Even five years ago, I saw early indicators that Azure coaches, scrum masters, we're going to be at risk. But the job market was going to turn. think several people could tell that. But I mean, we had so many that were going into that, that the set of roles and we were also, you we we were seeing some failures as well as successes with transformation. And I remember, so I actually had Ken Schwaber in my, as my my Scrum instructor, I remember him saying, know, Scrum will not solve your problems. It'll make them highly visible. But guess who gets blamed? The person who made it visible. you know, as, as agile coaches and Scrum masters, you know, were the, those folks in particular are always navigating a tightrope. You know, what, what do you, you know, what do you make visible, both the good and the bad? And if, if you're dealing, Brian (05:55) Yeah. Right. Mark Kilby (06:17) with cultures that are more focused on short-term kind of improvements and not looking at the longer term. How are people staying engaged? How are the steam aligned so they can do to deliver business value? You know, if that's not a focus of the organization, then it's that job, that role is going to be probably misunderstood and was. And so when things start going bad, fingers start getting pointed. It's like, okay, maybe we don't need these folks. And we've seen that for the last couple of years in particular, but we were getting early indicators well before that, well before the pandemic hit. So that shift was gonna happen. So we can model some of this is my point. Brian (07:01) Yeah. I like that. Go ahead. Well, I was going to go straight to that. I I like the comparison there with the hurricane. And I was thinking as you were talking about that, why are we better at it now? I would kind of presuppose it's because of the amount of data. But the more data we have, over the years, the better we are. And that if we've suddenly, magically, for whatever reason, lost all our historical data of hurricanes and what they do, then I would imagine we'd be back to square one of not really being able to predict very well about where they go. So translating that over into our careers, I love that comparison. And I love what you're pointing to to say, you can see indicators, can look at the trends, you can see how's the business doing. So that's kind of one of the things I want to ask you about a little bit is, especially here in this agile world, I know there's, I've heard lots of talk about, is this overall an agile thing that is on a decline or is this really more driven as an economy at large that's going through problems. And so we're kind of trickling down from that and feeling that. if I'm an employee for a company, what I'm trying to navigate then and figure out is I want to see trends for our business on the whole, but I also am trying to... Mark Kilby (08:38) Mm-hmm. Brian (08:40) fit that in with what the overall economy is and the market out there to see, is this just an overall thing for all of businesses right now and for the full economy or is this specifically something to do with our business that is kind of a, I would think a bigger warning sign than to start to get more prepared. Mark Kilby (08:59) Well, going back to the hurricane metaphor again, there's multiple things that impact that. It's the same thing for our jobs. So it's what data do you need to gather? And you pointed out to some of that. So what's happening with the company? What are you seeing in press releases? What are you seeing in commentary on your organization? I'll give an example of a company that no longer exists. So can safely speak about this company. So a company I was at early in my career and was well known in the Java programming space. They actually hosted a lot of Java sites at the time. They were also at the top of the, not the AI boom, but what was called the internet boom, know, dot com boom way back. And they went through the same Friends that a lot of companies did spending a lot of money Not pulling not pulling in revenue and it was very public how much they were spending When it became obvious that they bought like very expensive real estate office real estate in in Boston Harbor area and they bought very expensive real estate elsewhere You don't have to be a financial wizard to figure out like all right if they're spending all this money and and we're seeing pundits in other news sources say, yeah, we're not sure about this company. And you're seeing a lot of that. You might start to wonder as an employee, like, I wonder if I am really safe here. Is it time to hunker down or is it time to move? So you've got to gather your own data about your company, your industry, and even the broader economy. If you ignore that, you kind of ignore it at your own peril. We have to be the product owners of our own career. Brian (10:47) Mm, I love that. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Well, so shifting gears a little bit, because I think we obviously are not going to, we're soothsayers or anything. We can't foretell the future exactly. And there's always going to be things that kind of catch us off guard. There's the unknowns and that's Mark Kilby (10:48) Yeah. Yeah. Brian (11:10) Partly what we talk about a lot in Agile is just the idea that you can't know everything upfront. So you got to be prepared. You got to have a system that works for you that kind of allows for those unknowns to come along and then allows you to adjust as you're going through. So that's kind of where I want to go next then is if we accept the fact that, we have indicators and they can give us an indication about the job market or about our company. And we have to kind of assess those independently to see if it's time to move or we should be ready for something to happen or not. Once that threshold is crossed, once we make that decision, or it's made for us, then we're into a whole other world. And we talk about this being a bumpy job market. Well, it's bumpy on both sides of that threshold. So how would that apply to you? After you've crossed that threshold, how do we use Agile and an Agile mindset to navigate the task and the hardships of trying to find the next thing? Mark Kilby (12:16) Well, there's even a little bit before that. So that's OK, but a great question. And I'll come back around to it. So just as you're starting any agile project or program, there's some setup. There's some prep that you have to put in place. And I'm going to tie back to the hurricane metaphor here also. There are seasons for that prep sometimes. So think about the season you're in. Brian (12:18) Okay, sorry. Mark Kilby (12:41) month to month, quarter to quarter, and maybe you're wrapping up a big program, that would be a great time to update your resume and your LinkedIn. Not waiting until you're out of a job, but go ahead and just like, you know, I think I'm going to update. And people will say, but I don't want other people to know that I've updated my LinkedIn profile. There's an option for that. You can shut that off so that doesn't happen. But you want to get in that, that there's prep seasons like, okay, if something were to happen, what do I need to do? What do I, what, what I need to have ready? So keeping that resume up to date, keeping that LinkedIn profile up to date, then looking at, okay, I I've kind of doing these, these cycles of, of prep and also reflection on past work. Maybe I want to think about what was the work I enjoyed that I want to amplify through. LinkedIn, resume, and maybe even talk about a LinkedIn and kind of be broadcasting a little bit. I really enjoyed this project we just finished up. That gets you a little bit out there. And I can already hear the introverts cringing. But if you talk about the ideas, what you learned as an introvert, that works for me. Brian (13:47) Hahaha. Mark Kilby (13:56) I mean, that's how I got into remote work because I found interesting ideas and concepts to talk about. And that's how I got known by that. I looking to make a job switch? No. But I was broadcasting, hey, this is the kind of stuff I really enjoy doing, hoping to attract others who are also interested in that. And yes, it did lead to new job opportunities. So I got hired in 2014 because of the stuff I posted in LinkedIn around those times. So it's kind of doing that inspect and adapt, inspecting, where am I currently as I wrap up a big significant chunk of work? How do I capture some of that? What do I want to reflect? And what do I want to kind of make transparent about what I liked about that? Then let's say the winds turn and things get a little bumpy. Well, if you've... If you've been kind of connecting people, connecting with people online, if you've been kind of talking about, this is kind of things I do, it's much easier to go out there and say, hey, I'm looking for a new opportunity. You've seen what I've talked about online. What ideas, what do you have network? What do you have community? So it makes it much easier if you do some of that prep work and kind of reflect and inspect into that. Brian (15:20) Yeah, I'm getting a connection there too. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but I'm getting kind of a connection because I know in the agile world, we're all about how teams work together and just kind of that whole mindset of the best architectures, designs, right? The best stuff comes from a group of people working alongside each other. And I'm connecting that a little bit to what you just said, because you're talking a lot about how you're reaching out to the community through your LinkedIn profile and through post and other things. And that feels a little like you're kind of teaming, like you're teaming up with the network that you've made to try to solve this big problem that you have. Mark Kilby (16:05) And from a career standpoint, we team in different ways. mean, how many of us have been to courses, conferences, we've met people that we've kind of connected with, or we've talked about some great ideas, like, yeah, let's stay connected, let's talk more about that. How often do you follow up with those people? Do you like forget until the next conference? Do you maybe check in every six months? Maybe a little sooner? Maybe say, hey, what kind of projects are you working on based on that idea we talked about? Reach out to those connections that you made. of just not to keep them warm, but just to say, hey, what are you working on? How does it compare to what I'm working on? Let's just talk about that. Let's do some more reflection on that. Brian (16:49) I think that's great advice because I hear what you were saying earlier and agree. It's kind of a struggle when you're working at a company and you're not really sure yet whether you're moving on or you're not and no one has told you anything. But you're starting to feel the signs and you're starting to look around and say, maybe it's time, but it's not right for me to just blast it. It's not right for me to go to LinkedIn and... Mark Kilby (17:02) Mm hmm. Yeah. Brian (17:15) Because you don't want the boss or coworker to see that and say, what's going on? You don't want that to happen. But I think you're right. There's more subtle ways you can do that by just starting to connect to key people in your network. And I like that phrase. I like being able to say, hey, what's going on in this area? Or what have you done in this area that we talked about when we last connected? I think that's a great approach to that. Mark Kilby (17:40) because it's so much easier to ask for help when you need it then, rather than if you haven't talked to that person in five years since you saw them in a conference. But if you stayed in touch and just talked about, hey, here's some things I'm dealing with at work, how about you? What are you coming across? What are you learning? What are you trying? Or what are you struggling with? And if they know you're struggling, then they might say, hey, you know, I heard of this opportunity. And that's where the network helps you. That's where the team helps you out. Brian (18:12) Yeah. They always say that, you know, like that's the, that's your strongest avenue to, to another job is, is, you know, a personal connection and inroad, to the company. Cause you bypass all the, you know, all the silly AI stuff of scanning through resumes and do you have the right keywords and all that stuff? which, know, that's a whole other thing. but, you know, if you do, I think you're right. If you can make that personal connection. Mark Kilby (18:34) Mm-hmm. Brian (18:39) your resume can go to the top of the pile. You skip the initial vetting, you go to the interview, and once you get the interview, then you're golden from that point forward. Yeah, I love that. That's a great approach and I like the idea of continuing to maintain that network. But I will tell you, from my first layoff to my second layoff and how I kind of approach things was very, very different. And I'm kind of curious how this fits in with what you advise people as well, because I know my first layoff, I got a little snowed by certain people where I started to make strong connections. I started to go through energy process with people and they're in the full recruitment mode at that point, because they don't know if it's going to be you or somebody else. if you get to be... you know, one of the finalists, they're interviewing you, but they're also recruiting you. And I know I made that mistake early in my career of just thinking, well, I'm close. I'm close with these things. So I don't need to worry about continuing to do the day-to-day hard work of reaching out and making new connections and starting the process new. Because I don't want to lead them on. I don't want anybody to think that I'm, you know, interested when I'm so close with this other one over here. Mark Kilby (19:45) yeah. Brian (19:54) And yeah, I learned pretty quickly that's a mistake. know, those things, there's no promises. And you know, you gotta keep turning that crank every day of sending things out. So how does that fit in a little bit with the strategy? Mark Kilby (19:58) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well. Well. mean, to map it back to Azure concepts, you never prepped just one thing on the backlog. You're looking at what are some things that might pop up in this next sprint or this next phase of work? What is it that we might consider, but we're gonna make the final decision when it's time to make that decision? So you can't be in that stage as you talk about those final conversations and you're still doing the dance with them. It's like. You're confirming is this the right place and they're confirming are you the right one to bring in? That's not the decision point. The decision point is when the offer is made. So you've got to get some other things. You got to keep some other things going in the backlog. Keep it going, keep it going. And I would say even once you've accepted that offer, you might wait a week. because I've had some colleagues where they've gone in, they've gone through those interviews and maybe everything wasn't as advertised in the position. I think some of us have been in that where you go and it's like, this is not the job I signed up for. So keep those other connections warm for a week or two, just in case, just in case. Brian (21:24) Yeah, that's great advice. I tell a story sometimes to people in the classes about how there was a job I went to that's interviewed and they were asking me all sorts of agile questions. They wanted me to come in because of my agile expertise. I get in and unfortunately for me, it took a few months before it became clear that they were actually hearing the word agile from their division leader. And the division leader was not using capital A Agile. They were using small a Agile and saying, we just need to be faster. But he would throw out the word Agile. And so they heard Agile and thought, well, we need to know about this Agile thing. And yeah, that was not a good fit. That was not as advertised. I wish I had found that out earlier. But you make the decisions when you cross that threshold. Well, this is good advice. And I'm kind of curious then as well, you know, maybe taking it back a higher step because, you know, maybe I'm not in the place where I'm trying to decide, is it time to leave? But, you know, part of navigating a job market is also navigating a career and trying to understand what's the right next path for me or what's the right next step to get to the next level of where I think I should be in my career. How would you kind of apply an agile mindset to that kind of a process? Mark Kilby (22:44) So I will say, since I started with extreme programming, I'll bring in another concept, the spike. How do you set up an experiment where you can explore, is this possible or not? So let's say you're an individual contributor and you're wondering, should I take on a management? Brian (22:51) Okay. Mark Kilby (23:04) How can you experiment with that? So are you a member of any volunteer organizations? Can you lead an effort and see what that looks like to coordinate people? To actually maybe plan a budget to get some event going? What would that look like for you? What does it look like when not everybody's cooperating? Because when you deal with volunteer teams, it gets way more interesting than it works sometimes. Because you're really trying to appeal to their motivation. You can't fire them if they're a volunteer usually. So if you look for how can I experiment with what's next? And is there some way I can lean into some of the same activities? And then when I go and apply for that management position, say, yeah, I've run some of these things at my church or at this community center, and I've organized this, I've set the budgets for that. So you're already demonstrating some of the possibilities. You're trying to decide, this something that I enjoy, that I will benefit from, that I can lean into that next phase of my career? Brian (24:12) Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's really great. Well, this topic is, I think, so topical for a lot of people and, well, just about everyone. Because we're all at some stage of our career, and we're all at some stage of our relationship with the place we're at at the moment. I think we all have to be aware. I think we have to keep our eyes open and ears open. And like you said, try to find those sources of data that can clue me in as to what my situation is and maybe what I need to be prepared for. Is the hurricane coming my way or has it turned? Mark Kilby (24:44) Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Brian (24:48) Before I let you go though, I do want to take just a second here before we wrap things up. Because I mentioned your book earlier, the book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And I know you've done lots of talks and research on distributed agile teams far before COVID happened. So I guess I'll ask you what What do you think has changed today in the years since COVID, when things now things have started to settle a little bit more? How has the nature of distributed teams shifted in just the past few years? Mark Kilby (25:25) Well, I think we're seeing some of those shifts even in the last couple months with the call away from hybrid to fully back in the office. We've seen it with Amazon, we saw it with Dell, we're seeing it with others. So I think we're seeing the companies and the management that was looking at what's next, what's possible, and those that are like, no, we like things the way they work. I assume that we're going to see many existing hybrid setups go away. I see, I think there's very few that are going to survive. There have been some other companies that have gone fully remote, but I think we're going to see a lot more of return fully to the office because it's really hard to live in both spaces at once to be in the office and be remote. It's, it's just too difficult. We probably didn't amplify that enough in the book. That's the one thing that Johanna and I, we've talked many times about updating the book and it's like, no, not yet. It's not quite time. Let's let this phase pass. But I think we're going to see things go back to almost 2018 where there's some companies that are doing well remote. And it's not just startups because there's companies, thousand, 2000 employees that are functioning well, fully remote, but it takes a different mindset. Brian (26:29) Yeah. Mark Kilby (26:49) around how do you connect, do you keep people engaged, how do you keep them motivated. So all those things that we were all forced to answer during the pandemic, some of these companies have been answering that a little bit more, I would say thoughtfully rather than being forced to answer them. Brian (27:09) That's a nice way to look at it. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, mean, so much road has passed our tires from when you guys started that. I mean, you wrote that prior to COVID, right? Yeah. Yeah, talk about a great timing. mean, you guys were really visionary looking ahead there. I'm sure there's no way you could have known there was going to be a massive pandemic, but yeah. Mark Kilby (27:20) Yeah, yeah, it came out late 2018. No, no. Brian (27:32) It was very timely when that happened to have that knowledge available for folks. Mark Kilby (27:36) Yeah, were, well, I want to add, we were never in the mindset that every organization should go remote. That was never ever our intention. But for those who wanted to go remote, that's what that book was for. Brian (27:44) Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And you know, I know that's not our, not really what we, we focused on the, the podcast here, but I did want to just kind of dip into that a little bit for folks, just in case that is a topic that's of interest to anyone here listening as well. If you're really looking for information in that area, strongly encourage that book for, for you again, from chaos to successful distributed agile teams. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can find it so they can, you know, find your work and. to follow up and any last thoughts here before we close it out? Mark Kilby (28:26) Yeah, so I would say whatever you're struggling with, step back from that. I don't care if it's remote work. I don't care if it's a career challenge, but step back and look at what are the patterns that you're seeing and how can you inspect and adapt for those patterns. That's an agile mindset. Brian (28:47) I love that. Yeah, it tends to follow that if we put to practice these things we're teaching, you know, and talking about and trying to do in our organizations now and kind of apply that to other areas of our life that, you know, we're going to see similar results. So, I really appreciate you coming on. this has been a great conversation. And, and, as I said, I know, Mark, there's going to be lots of people listening who are just going to eat this up because, you know, if you're in that position, You know, you're looking for any kind of help that you can get. So I hope this is really helpful to folks and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge in this area. Mark Kilby (29:22) Thanks, Brian, for having me on. Brian (29:25) Absolutely.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Emily List and guest Katie Rose Kaufman share advice on how to find the next step in your career journey as an early career individual including understanding what you like, what you can bring to a role and how you can transfer your skills into new roles. About the Featured Guest Katie Rose Kaufman has 7 years of experience as an artist and as an agilist. Katie Rose went to college thinking she would be a photographer. But after running a business, going back to school to get her MBA, 2 internships, 1 conversion, and 2 more full time jobs later, Katie Rose found her calling as the glue that holds teams together. She leads teams and trains in continuous improvement and learning! Follow Katie Rose Kaufman on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/katierosek/) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this podcast conversation, we discussed vision journey mapping, what it is and how it can help your team, organization, or yourself to vision for the future…whatever that future may be. From setting yourself and your teams up with the emotional capacity to have the conversation, to working through negative manifestations, to creating a self-paced plan, this episode will leave you jumping to craft your vision board. About the Featured Guest Temi has 15+ years of industry experience in product, project & change management and business analysis across the United Kingdom & North America. She has worked in start-ups, scale-ups and matured enterprises within B2B, B2C. She is a Maxwell certified leadership coach, a behavioral consultant and an executive coach. She works with technology organizations on team transformation. Follow Temi Bolaji-Jegede on LinkedIn References: Value List Template | Miroverse (To identify your values) Visioning Journey Map Template | Miroverse https://tinyurl.com/energyemotionsmc: A masterclass on building your emotional capacity masterclass (understanding the emotion & energy connection) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile. About our Host: Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

Melissa Perri is the founder of Product Institute, author of Escaping the Build Trap, and host of the Product Thinking Podcast. She has worked with startups, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between to help them build better products and level up their product teams. In our conversation, we discuss:• The history of the product owner role• The differences between product owners and product managers• How to transition from product owner to product manager• The evolution of and problems with the SAFe framework• How large non-tech companies can improve their product practices• Much more—Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-owners-melissa-perri—Where to find Melissa Perri:• X: https://twitter.com/lissijean• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/• Website: https://melissaperri.com/• Product Institute: https://productinstitute.com/• Podcast: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Melissa's background(02:12) The rise of the product owner role(06:37) Understanding Agile and Scrum(08:27) Challenges in Agile transformations(10:41) The history of the product owner role(13:58) The Scrum Guide(15:43) Product owner responsibilities(21:01) Adopting Scrum in organizations(26:21) The origins and implementation of SAFe(35:20) Why Melissa doesn't recommend SAFe(40:33) Advice for implementing a digital transformation(49:12) An example of SAFe adoption(51:27) The value of experienced product leaders(56:53) Career paths for product owners(01:04:14) Transitioning from product owner to product manager(01:06:41) Be careful relying on certifications(01:11:43) Evaluating existing product owners(01:16:55) Final thoughts on Agile and product management—Referenced:• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value: https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X• Lean UX: https://leanuxnyc.co/• Scrum: https://www.scrum.org/• What is Extreme Programming? https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/• Capital One: https://www.capitalone.com/• The Agile Manifesto: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/manifesto• Ken Schwaber on X: https://x.com/kschwaber• Jeff Sutherland on X: https://x.com/jeffsutherland• Kanban: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban• What is a kanban board?: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/boards• Ron Jeffries's website: https://www.ronjeffries.com/• Jeff Patton on X: https://x.com/jeffpatton• The Scrum Guide: https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide• OpenSky: https://www.openskycc.com/• SAFe: https://scaledagileframework.com/• Dean Leffingwell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanleffingwell/• Capital One scraps 1,100 tech positions: https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-tech-positions-source-2023-01-19/• Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-theater-marty• Marty Cagan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/• Jeff Gothelf on X: https://x.com/jboogie• Shruti Patel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shruti-patel-32bb573a/• Product Thinking Podcast: Mastering Product Focus: Balancing Legacy and Innovation with Shruti Patel: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/2024/9/25/episode-190-mastering-product-focus-balancing-legacy-and-innovation-with-shruti-patel• Melissa Douros on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadouros/• Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/• Athenahealth: https://www.athenahealth.com/• McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Renae Craven chats to Natalia Juszkiewicz about how she became a Scrum Master, how she learnt about the role, and how it fits into an organization. About the Featured Guest Natalia is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach with over 10 years of experience, including 3 years managing other Scrum Masters. Natalia values partnership and openness, specializing in team building and gaining new perspectives from working with top-level management. As a mentor in the Women in Agile program, Natalia met three wonderful women. In her free time, Natalia enjoys reading crime novels. Follow Natalia on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/natalia-juszkiewicz-949b6aa5) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile. About our Host Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 13 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaecraven/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Emily Lint and guest Theresa Given talk about their experiences with job layoffs and what they have learned about themselves through those times.   About the Featured Guest Theresa Given discovered Scrum and Agile ten years ago. She has been exploring and experimenting since. Tere enjoys the world of possibilities; she's tried each Scrum accountability, tested multiple Agile practices, worked in varied industries across public, private and non-profit sectors. Currently, she coaches new Scrum Masters to explore their role and achieve greater efficacy with their teams.   Follow Tere on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresagiven/)   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host   Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve podcast, host Emily Lint and guest Allison Pollard introduce the Agilists: Aspire and Achieve video podcast series. Allison shares the background of the Women in Agile Mentorship program and how the program is helping those involved with their Agile careers.   About the Featured Guest Allison helps engineering managers, team leads, Scrum Masters, and technology leaders have more productive interactions with their bosses, their peers, and their team members. Allison is an experienced coach and consultant who understands juggling delivery, change, and people.   Allison is the Program Director for the Women in Agile Mentoring series.   Follow Allison on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonpollard/) Reference(s) Women in Agile Mentorship program: https://womeninagile.org/mentorship/   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host   Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Mike Cohn reveal the keys to achieving lasting success with Agile methodologies. From embracing experimentation and fostering a culture of continuous improvement to improving communication with consistent vocabulary, they offer practical, relatable insights for Agile practitioners at all levels. Overview Brian and Mike discuss the essential ingredients to Agile success, touching on the power of experimentation, the need for flexible coaching, and building a culture of continuous improvement. The conversation dives deep into the importance of effective communication within teams, especially through user stories and consistent vocabulary, ensuring that Agile teams stay aligned. With personal anecdotes and actionable tips, this episode provides a roadmap for anyone looking to excel with Agile. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mike Cohn Essential Scrum by Ken Rubin Agile & Scrum Glossary #85: Effectively Managing Dependencies with Ken Rubin Dependencies Are Killing Your Agile Flow at Scale by Ken Rubin Creating a Software Engineering Culture by Karl Wiegers Private Scrum & Agile Training Agile For Leaders Working on a Scrum Team Classes Story Writing Workshop Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today we have our favorite back with us, Mike Cohn is here. Welcome back, Mike. Mike (00:12) Thanks, Brian. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody. Brian (00:15) So happy when Mike can make time and be with us here on the show. Obviously Mike has a lot of wisdom and experience to share with us. So we wanted to bring him in because we were talking about doing an episode titled The Secret Staggile Success. I remember back in the day in the 80s, was a movie called The Secret to My Success. There was a really obscure movie. was Michael J. Fox. Yes, it was Michael J. Fox. Mike (00:37) Michael J. Fox? Yeah, so it's not that obscure. Brian (00:41) But I still hear that theme song in my head. when we talked about this title, that's what I thought about. But we wanted to talk about maybe some hidden things or things that aren't as immediately apparent to people that are crucial to being successful when you go agile or if your teams are working in an agile way. So let's just open things up, Mike. What's one of the things you had thought about when we talked about this? Mike (01:10) think the number one secret to Agile success for me is being willing to experiment, to try new things. And if you think back, Agile itself, Scrum itself, began as experiments. They were probably teams going, know, this waterfall stuff we've been doing doesn't work. Let's try something different. Somebody else went, yeah, let's do something unusual, and let's try iterating or something. And so Agile itself began as experiments. And yet I see teams kind of get stuck in the mud and not willing to experiment. And I think that's to their detriment. We want to try things out. And silly, trivial examples, try different sprint links. Don't do a one -week sprint link and go, Agile doesn't work. It's not for us. No. Brian (01:52) Yeah. Mike (01:59) Maybe one week sprints are for you. Try a three week iteration or I try something different. And I think the the idea of experimentation is how we come up with new ideas. It's how we learn. It's how we get better. And so if you're going to succeed, you better have that that focus on experimentation. Brian (02:19) Yeah, there's a surprising number of Scrum Masters I've encountered that I'll hear stories about how they run the same exact retrospective, every single retrospective. And I just think, what are you doing? How can you be trying to communicate this and teach the team that this whole thing is based on doing little small experiments and seeing what the result is, when you're not willing to try something new in just how you run a retrospective? So yeah, I completely agree. I think the key there for me is demonstrate it. If you want them to pick up on that, then do it yourself. Mike (02:56) worked with a company years ago that fired their scrum master for basically for being too rigid. He had read something in Ken Schwaber's second book, and I don't want to pick on Ken's book, but he has this wacky sentence in there, and there are wacky sentences in my books, right? So somebody can go find those, and I mean, I get it. But anyway, Ken wrote that the daily scrum must be conducted left to right, starting with the person on the left of the scrum master. And it's like, what? Why is this mandatory? It must be left to right. Anyway, this guy read that in the book and insisted that the Daily Scrum be left to right, starting with the person on left of the Scrum Master. And his team knew that was insane, right? It's just nuts. And so they would mess with him. They would do things like he would call on the person to his left and the person on the right would start talking. he would point to the person on the left to start and they were standing in a semi -circle. They would move, right? So the person on the left was no longer on the left. And they were just messing with him over this. And he would just get mad and insisted it had to be left right because the book said so. And I don't know what it was with him, but he was just stuck on this. Ultimately ended up getting fired for it. Yeah, I heard this story because I ran into him at a conference and I saw him there and he Brian (04:14) Wow. Mike (04:20) looked a little down. It's like, you know, said his name and how are you doing? And he told me this story. And he said, you know, he'd gotten better since then. But, you know, don't get stuck on things. It's just not the it's just not a very agile mindset. Brian (04:34) Yeah. I mean, if you can't, no matter what it is too, I think that if you can't point to what you hope to achieve from doing it that way, or what's the purpose behind us doing it that way, that's questionable part of your process to just say, I can't point to any reason why this, any good that this thing does going left to right person by person, but. Ken said we should do it. I guess, no, I mean, if there's no reason, if you don't see the benefit in it, why would we do that? Mike (05:07) Knowing Ken, I think he was just trying to make it easier for people. Here's one less thing you got to think about. Start on your left and go around the room. But the way it's written and the way this guy interpreted it was like, shalt go left to right. It's like you've got to be willing to, I think, out the way that a known proven way start out that way. So yeah, go ahead and start left to right. It says so. I don't know any different. Might as well go this way. Brian (05:17) You Mike (05:35) But then experiment, learn, figure it out for yourselves. I I can't think of a successful company or team that I've worked with that ever quoted this Scrum Guide at me, right? You know, they may start out exactly the way a Scrum Guide says, or my favorite is Ken Rubin's Essential Scrum Book, start out in a known proven way, but then experiment, make agile your own. Don't throw away the important stuff, and that's why you have to start in a known proven way, but as you get experience, experiment, throw things out. Brian (05:46) Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I think that's a really good one. So a good one to start us off. Thanks for that. Mike (06:12) Yeah, that's, that's what I'm buying. Brian, can I ask you for one of your secrets to agile success? Brian (06:17) Sure. Well, and this one I know it's going to be a little, know, boy, it'd be nice if I could do that, but I, you know, we can't do that. And I understand that this is not going to be for everyone, but one of the things that I think is important is to have some kind of a coaching presence. Now, just to be clear about this, this doesn't mean that you have to, you know, fight tooth and nail to hire some outside consultant or anything like that. I understand budgets are tight and there may not be an ability to do that. But I think if I, you know, if you're a scrum master, then I think that having the ability to continue your learning journey and grow is really important and, and having someone you can go and bounce things off of. So if you can't have someone, if you, if you can't have someone on staff or someone there that's an outside consultant that can help you and coach you through the early stages, I think that could be really, really helpful. And to me, it's an accelerator. I think that kind of thing is something that can really, yes, we will go through training. We understand kind of the basics, but then the coach is sort of like pouring gasoline on that fire to say, now we're going to go from zero to 60 and I'm going to help you get there because I know the pitfalls to look out for and I know how to get you there. But if you don't have that ability, I think it's important to maintain some of those mentorship relationships that you can find through different community groups. Mike (07:18) Mm Brian (07:44) Maybe you'd find some kind of a weekly meetup or a monthly meetup or something that you could go to. Even if it's just a meetup of peers, right? There's not someone that you would say, that person's been in this for 10 years. No, we're all kind of in the same place. But if we can meet up in their network of my peers and let's talk about what's going on at your place, I'll talk about what's going on at my place, and we can share with each other and... help each other find the best solutions. Even that level, I think of coaching is really imperative and can really make an impact on how successful your implementation is. Mike (08:25) I think you're right. I think back to the earliest days of Agile, and at least of Agile training. And I'm thinking back to when I was teaching public courses on Agile in 2003, 2004, 2000, actually, the early days. One of the big benefits of the class, beyond whatever learning somebody had in the class, one of the big benefits was just feeling like you weren't alone in the world. And I remember people describing a problem, whatever it was. Like, my bosses aren't on board with this. and somebody would describe a problem and then somebody else in the class would just merely sympathize. Right. Yeah, mine too. I'm struggling with that too. That was like one level of support that was awesome. It was even better if there was somebody in the class who said something like, yeah, we had that problem and here's what we did. Right. But these were not people who were any smarter than each other. It wasn't like the person who'd worked through the problem was that much smarter. They probably just had a six month head start and Having that ability to go into a class and hear that you weren't alone and that your problems were not that unique was extremely valuable for people even way back then when there were not a lot of people doing this. Brian (09:32) Yeah, and I've said this before, and I probably said this to you, Mike, but one of the things I think people love the most when they come to the advanced classes that we offer is really being able to get sympathy from others, the camaraderie of talking to somebody else and saying, yeah, I've gone through that. It's not, I tell people at beginning of the class, it's Mike (09:48) Mm -hmm. Brian (09:59) likely not going to be a teaching point that sticks with you as much as it's going to be hearing from your peers and actually getting to learn from each other that's going to stick with you as much through those classes. to me, I think that's one of the reasons why those classes are so much fun is because I learned from the people who come to them. Mike (10:20) absolutely, absolutely. Some of what you're describing is why we set up our Agile mentors community years ago. Agile mentors community, not just the podcast, is a community we have where people who take one of our courses get a free membership. I hired a consultant to kind of give me advice on some business stuff years ago. he used the try. And I asked him, hey, we're thinking about starting this community. What do you think? I don't remember if he said do it or don't, but I do remember a term he used. He called it a continuity program. And it was a way to continue a relationship with people who taken our courses. And like I said, we give it away free to people who take classes because we know that a class isn't enough to get people successful, but it's a start. It gets people over some hurdles. It gives them the foundations of the education they need. But they're going to have ongoing questions. And our community has been wonderful because we have so many good people in there who helped each other out. And again, they're often somebody who's just six months ahead in their journey, helping somebody who's right behind them or, you know, there's somebody just in a similar industry and can sympathize or give advice on how they worked through a problem. Brian (11:29) Yeah, that's awesome. So we talked about experimentation, we talked about coaching. Mike, what was another one that was on your list? Mike (11:36) One for me is to focus more on practices than frameworks. The frameworks get all the attention. Should we do Scrum or should we do Kanban? Should we do extreme programming, going back a little bit more when that was extremely popular, still around, but not as popular? Should we do safe? And so people focus on their frameworks because they're these big, visible things. And I think what we want to do more is pick the right practices for us. Now, that's not to diminish frameworks. I think the frameworks are good. They're a good starting point. But I've said for years, if I have a team and they start with Scrum or if they start with Kanban, if they're doing the good old inspect and adapt thing, they're going to end up in the same place. They're going to invent the right Agile for them. And very likely, that's going to be some elements of Scrum, some elements of Kanban, perhaps some elements of Safe if it's big. I don't think it matters all that much where you start. I think it's worthy of some consideration. But if you're inspecting and adapting, you're going to end up in the same place. And that means that Agile needs to be thought of more as a set of practices rather than we do Scrum or we do Kanban. Brian (12:49) Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And, and, you know, we've talked about the kind of that concept before of, you know, trying to fit the right practices in place. I know when even on this podcast, when we talked about scaling and then couple of those episodes, we talked about how, you know, it may be better for you to, to, find the unique collection of practices that fits your situation. because, know, a lot of these frameworks, they're designed to handle everything. They're designed to handle any possible scenario and. Mike (13:14) Mm -hmm. Brian (13:18) You're not going to encounter every possible scenario. You're going to encounter the ones that are only particular to you. Yeah. Mike (13:24) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've thought that there's I don't want to do this. I've never taken the time to really run this as an initiative. But I felt like there are a core set of practices that kind of everybody should do be iterative, right? know, inspect and adapt, right? Those type of things. But then there's a set of practices that are good for startups, let's say there's another set of practices that are good for people in the banking industry. Right. And that everybody in the banking industry should be doing a certain set of practices, and those will differ a little bit than perhaps every company in the game industry. And so there's these set of practices out there that can be grouped, but they do also need to be kind of tailored and hand -chosen for your particular organization. Brian (14:11) Yeah, yeah, I like that kind of the idea like a template, right? I mean, like when you use the template on a software program, that's a starting place, but you're expected to kind of customize it a little bit to your specific needs. Yeah, I like that. Mike (14:25) Yeah, wouldn't it be great if you're a startup and somebody said, here are the 20 practices you really got to do if you're to be successful as a startup. Here are the 10 you should think about, and then the rest, see if you like them. Same thing, bank. the bank, might have 30 practices you start with. Ivar Jakobson, who's the inventor of use cases, part of the unified method back with Bucin Rumba. He's had an initiative going on the last handful of years where he talks about method prisons and that the practices are all kind of locked up in these methodology prisons like Scrum and Kanban and everything else. And he talks about like free the practices, right? Let the practices loose of these method prisons and let people just more readily select the set of practices that are best for them. Brian (15:15) Love it. Yeah, I love it. That's a great concept. Mike (15:17) Yeah, I think it's a great, it's a great approach. It's got some traction, but it's something that more people need to hear and do. Brian (15:22) Yeah, I think that there's also maybe some stuff mixed in there with what you were saying that I've heard from the heart of Agile people. There's a lot of good stuff that's overlapped there as well. So that's awesome. Mike (15:32) Absolutely. What's another secret you can reveal Brian? Brian (15:37) Sure. Now, this is a big one, but what I would say is maybe moving in a different direction, the idea of how important the culture is and just setting the right culture even more so than trying to get things like time boxes correct. I was talking with a friend of mine at a conference recently and one of the things we kind of discussed was that whole inspect and adapt process, how important that just getting that ingrained into the DNA of what the team does. And Mike, like you said earlier, if they have that inspect and adapt built into who they are, then the practices come. The practices will actually kind of coincide with those because they'll find the right things to do. Like you said, they'll end up at the same place, right? They'll end up at the things that really are important to them. But I've seen lots of places where they go straight to the rule book and want to implement all the rules as quickly and possibly as they can. If the teams don't understand, when something goes wrong, when something does not happen the way that we thought it should, then that's a target to inspect. and dig in and find out why it happened that way, and then find a new way of doing it. I've told the story in classes before that I've encountered multiple situations, scenarios where I've worked with teams where they'll be doing something that they've identified as a problem. They've said, hey, yeah, this is wrong, this doesn't work. well, that's what I'm saying. Mike (17:26) Why are they doing it then? Brian (17:32) They'll identify something and say, yeah, that's not good. We need to do something else. But then they'll stop and say, all right, so let's really, we want to find the right thing to do to replace that with. So let's take the next two months and really investigate, find, and then we'll come back and we'll change in two months over this new thing. And my advice to them is always, so you're gonna just intentionally do the wrong thing for two months? Right. Mike (17:59) for two more months. Brian (18:01) You know, like you should try one of the other possibilities because you could get lucky and that could be the first thing you try. You know, and oftentimes it is something that is better because your gut instinct is usually pretty good about that kind of stuff. So yeah, try it. Something's not going well, all right? Then we're not doing that again, right? We're gonna try something new, whatever that is, and we're gonna try something new and then we'll do the same thing at the end of the next sprint. Mike (18:27) Mm -hmm. Yep. One of my favorite comedians, this guy named Bob Newhart died early, he was earlier this year. And he has this one comedy routine that he does where he's a psychiatrist and somebody walks into his office and she describes some problem he has. And he's like, okay, I'm going to give you the advice. It boils down to two words. And she goes like, should I take notes? Should I write the two words down? It's like, nope, you'll remember them. And he just looks her really like stern in the eye and says, stop it. Brian (18:54) you You Mike (18:59) She has a phone question. He's like, just stop it, right? Whatever you're doing, just stop it. And which is like just hilarious, right? Imagining, you know, some psychiatrist or therapist giving the advice of just stop doing whatever it is you're doing. But it's so reminiscent of what I've seen with agile teams, right? And with what you're describing here, you know, we're doing the wrong thing. We need to change, but we're going to stall looking for the perfect answer instead of just stopping and figuring out something, right? Just try something different. Brian (19:28) Yeah. And if our culture is a culture of always inspecting and adapting, then like you said, we'll end up at the right place because when something's wrong, we'll change it. And we won't just sit on something that we, I don't know how many times I've seen the organizations where you talk to people and take them out for a beer and they'll say, well, here's the real problems. everyone knows what the problems are. So why not fix it? Why not change it? Mike (19:41) Mm -hmm. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard in a lot of organizations. You and I both do sessions where we'll talk to executives, right? And to me, it's a really fun, like 90 minute training session that we have because the way we deliberately set that up was to talk about the benefits of agile. So we get people kind of interested, right? you know, those benefits. But then we tell them why it's going to be hard and what they're as executives, what was leaders, what they're going to have to change. And what I find is when we do that, if the leader starts arguing with me, because I tell them, look, here's going be hard. You're going to have to change this. You're going have to stop doing this. If they start arguing with me, we'll change that behavior if we get those benefits, then we know we've got them hooked and they want to be agile. But if I say agile's great, here are hard things you're going to have to change personally. And they're like, yeah, that'd be hard. We probably wouldn't make those changes. I don't want to go anywhere near working with that company. They're not going to succeed. They don't have a culture that's going to make those changes. And so I love doing those executive sessions because we hear it's just so instant, it's instant feedback on whether this company has a chance of being successful or not. Brian (21:06) Love him. Is there another one on from your list, Mike (21:10) One that I want to add is a little bit more about not just having one team be successful, but if you're working to get a set of teams, your department, your group, something like that. I think it's really important to have a consistent vocabulary across teams. Because we're talking about this idea of continuous improvement. And if your team and my team are using words differently, how do we share ideas back and forth? And that sharing of ideas is really important. if we don't have a consistent vocabulary, think it's hard to do. I worked with a team a couple years ago. I worked with this team, and I'm there for like two or three days. I think I'm there on the second day. And they've been using the words sprint and iteration interchangeably, just both words. And I'm sure you've encountered that. It's kind of normal. I think it kind of depends on if you grew up in the Scrum world, you call them sprints. If you grew up more generically agile, you call them iterations. They're using both words. And the second day I'm in a meeting and somebody says, well, yeah, that's how we do it in a sprint, but it's totally different when we're in an iteration. And I'm like, huh? What's the difference? And the guy had a really great answer. He said, a sprint is when we're working overtime and iteration is when we're going at a sustainable pace. That actually, there's a lot of logic to that. It's kind of a cool idea. I could see that. Brian (22:17) Ha ha ha. Mike (22:37) But I could tell by looking around the room that others were surprised as well. They'd been using the words interchangeably too. They didn't know there was this specific meaning that, I don't know, three Algel coaches had decided three years ago, this is how we use the words. But it wasn't part of, to your word, moment ago, culture. It wasn't part of their culture. And so some teams were calling them sprints, some teams were calling them iterations, and it was just creating a lot of confusion. when we found out that there were different meanings and different rules for whether you were in a sprint or iteration. So. Brian (23:08) Yeah. It reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon I saw a while ago, or it's been several years now, it was about, were talking to their big dumb boss, right? And they were saying, yeah, we're in the middle of a project and we're about halfway through, but we need, you know, six more months to complete this. All right. What's the project you're working on? We're taking all of our website addresses and we are transforming them into URLs. Right. Yeah. It's yeah. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, the boss didn't know the difference, right? Mike (23:37) That's a nice project, right? That's my assignment next month. Yeah, the vocabulary just creates confusion. like how Ken Rubin, I mentioned him earlier, the author of Essential Scrum, my favorite book on Scrum. You've had him as a guest before. I love how he writes his books. He starts out, I just start out, I just plunge in. just like, just start writing. And I have an outline, but I just start writing. Ken sits down for seriously months, I think it is. Brian (23:39) Right. Right. Mike (24:07) and defines a glossary, right? Here's how I'm gonna use certain words. then he, man, if he says a word means a certain thing, he uses it that way every single time. And he has a wonderful, agile glossary on his website, inolution .com. And so he's like defined every kind of agile word you could look for. He's got it defined there. But that's how he starts, right? So he defines all these words. And then if he writes a book and he... Brian (24:10) Wow. Mike (24:33) wants to use the term sprint, he knows exactly how he's going to use it. That's an easy one, but he will define all those words so they're clear up front. We do these working on a Scrum team classes for companies, which is a of a private whole team training class. And some of the feedback we get is that it really helped them get their vocabulary consistent. It allowed them to talk about ways to improve that were challenging until they had a common vocabulary. What is a Scrum master? What are the responsibilities of a Scrum Master? And that's not just defining the word sprint, but it's defining a more complex word and saying, what does it really mean? But if you don't have agreement on what a Scrum Master is or who is on the team or things like that, it's really hard to talk about that across a larger group. And so that, to me, is one of the secrets to Agile success is that consistent vocabulary. Brian (25:25) Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that class because one of the things that that that we do periodically when we are not here every time. One of things that we do when we have one of those classes is I'll meet with their with a company in advance and have a conversation about what is it that you really want to get out of this. And one of the most consistent things that I hear over and over again from companies that come to us is we want consistent vocabulary. We want a consistent language that people use across this so that When we say something, means the same thing across all our teams. Mike (25:58) I think it's become more of an issue the last, I don't know, five, 10 years or whatever it is because we've got so many people that know Agile by now, right? But of course, they were trained by different people. They were trained in different ways. And so they'll be coming to it and using terms slightly differently. I'm going give a little example here. Velocity, right? Velocity can really mean two different things to people. Velocity can mean the amount of forward progress you made. in a sprint, right? How much forward progress did we get? Instead, velocity could mean capacity to do work. How much work did we get done in the last sprint? And forward progress, capacity to do work are slightly different things, right? And if we don't have agreement on that term, we're going to get into those fights about, bugs count towards velocity, right? Well, if you're using velocity to mean capacity to do work, yeah, bugs should count. If you're using velocity to mean forward progress, no. Bugs shouldn't count. And defining velocity, having that conversation with the team, once you get that figured out, a whole set of problems go away. All those discussions about what gets points, they all go away instantly. But most teams don't think to have that conversation. And they will have some team members using velocity one way, others another way. Important to get that defined. It's not hard, but it's important to get that consistency. Brian, do you have another secret, or have we revealed all the secrets? Brian (27:24) Yeah, I got one more. I got one more. you might, you know, if you're listening this far, you may notice that I have a sickness. I picked all C words. I don't know why, but that's just what I had to do. But my last C word was communicate. And really just the idea here was, you know, if you've ever gone to see a youth sports team, you know, a kid's soccer, kids basketball, whatever, right? If you ever go to see any of those things, one of the things that you will hear over and over screamed from the sideline from the coaches is, talk to each other. And it's a really important part of learning how to play that sport is, hey, I've got a call for the ball. I've got to let everyone else know, hey, here's what I need. And I think that's an important part of Scrum as well. Scrum is a team sport. It's a... Mike (28:02) Haha. Brian (28:19) You know, I apologize to people in classes and say, apologize for the sports analogy, but scrum is a sports analogy. You know, it comes from rugby and, it's, it's intentionally there as a team sports so that people can, can recognize and look at that and say, yeah, we're not, we're not playing golf, right? We're, we're, playing this as a team altogether at the same time with the same goal. And so you got to talk to each other. You got to have communication. I know, you know, Mike (28:24) Yeah, itself, Brian (28:47) One of the main ways that we try to help that here at Mountain Goat is when we talk about things like user stories. That's a main tool that the teams will use in their communication back and forth between the business and the developers. And I know in your Better User Stories course, we go in detail about that. And we also have this thing that we do occasionally called a story writing workshop that's kind of more coaching, where we'll sit down with people and kind of Mike (29:01) Mm -hmm. Brian (29:17) actually work through stories that they're writing to help them effectively communicate what they're trying to get across to the developers. Any communication takes practice. Any relationship, the communication grows and gets better the more you do it. Mike (29:36) I think it's a good point about using user stories as an example, because one of the user story mistakes people make is to think that user stories exist to document an agreement. They don't. They exist to facilitate a conversation. And then the conversation is where we're going to figure out the specific needs and things like that. Yeah, maybe we could document that. It's got to be documented for various reasons. in many organizations, but the story itself is there's a reminder to have a conversation, right? It's not there to document an agreement, which is different from things that came before, like a use case or IEEE 830 document, right? Those did document agreements. User stories, they're there to make sure we talk. Brian (30:13) Right, right. Those were in essence contracts, right? I mean, they were, you shall do this, the system shall and whatever. But yeah, user stories, not that. I love the way that you put that and I've said that for years as well. It's a placeholder for the conversation. Mike (30:28) Well, let's add one more C then. didn't realize you were on a C theme here. So let's add one more secret to Agile success with a C. Crack the whip, right? Yell at your team, make them work harder, right? That's the secret to Agile success. I shouldn't say that because you'll pull that out as a little clip. crack the whip on your Agile team. That's how you get them successful, right? Brian (30:30) Hahaha! Hahaha. I can guarantee you that's gonna be the cold open here for our show. It's Mike Cone saying, the secret is cracking the whip. I love it. Well. Mike (30:59) So there was a great book by a guy named Carl Weigers on culture. is like creating a software engineering culture. And he has these little gray boxes in there. There are things not to do, right? Don't do this. But the boxes don't say don't do this, right? You have to have read like the intro to like, hey, don't do the things in the gray boxes. But he also has like anti -patterns in there. And I just remember being a, a, I think it was a director, VP at the company. And I showed it to one of the directors. I'm like, man, look at this. He's got guys highlighted all the things to do in the boxes here. And he was like, really? We should do that? Okay. And he was like, ready to go do these things. I was like, no, no, no, these are the things not to do. So you gotta be careful with things like crack the whip, right? It's, you know, a direct quote. It sounds pretty horrible. It's a joke. It's like, hopefully people understand. So. Brian (31:42) That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, I think everyone who's, you know, listening to this would understand that, right? Would understand that that's a joke, but and just in case. Mike (31:56) As a guy who had the whip cracked on me as a young developer, I've always been a very much do not crack the whip. I'd rather I'm always after people's energy rather than their time. Right. It's kind of like we do four day work weeks, right? I'd rather have energy than time. And so, don't think cracking the whip is the way to succeed. Brian (32:15) Yeah, I'm in the same boat. remember having a boss once that used to take me into the server room to yell at me because he could raise his voice in there and nobody would hear it. So, that was fun. Right, right. Well, this has been great, Mike. I really appreciate you making time for this. And I think everyone's going to get a of good tips out of this. Mike (32:23) You I gotta remember that. Great, thanks for having me, Brian. Bye.

Jeff is the co-creator of Scrum and a leading expert on how the framework has evolved to meet the needs of today's business. The framework he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. However, Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for several other industries, including finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom.   As the CEO of Scrum Inc., Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum. He continues to share best practices with organizations around the globe and has written extensively on Scrum rules and methods. With a deep understanding of business processes — gleaned from years as CTO/CEO of eleven different software companies — Jeff is able to describe the high-level organizational benefits of Scrum and what it takes to create hyperproductive teams.   Topics of Discussion: [:35] Introduction of Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum. [3:47] Jeff Sutherland's background: His experience at West Point and lessons in making work visible. [5:19] Fighter pilot experiences that influenced the operational side of Scrum. [6:02] Transition to the Air Force Academy and work in AI at Stanford. [7:38] Learning complex adaptive systems and the origin of Agile from complex systems theory. [8:30] How complex systems theory impacts Scrum and Agile teams today. [9:25] Jeff's first experiences applying Scrum in the banking industry. [11:25] The development of Scrum and the 2001 Agile Manifesto. [12:57] Making work visible and organizing teams, from West Point to Toyota to the Agile Manifesto. [13:23] Fast forward to 2024: Issues in Scrum and Agile practices, including sprint lengths and backlog grooming. [14:34] Jeff's new book: First Principles in Scrum and its relation to Scrum technology stacks. [16:23] Building autonomous systems: Lessons from radiation physics, AI, and complex adaptive systems. [19:16] The influence of autonomous robots on the creation of Scrum. [21:14] Discussion of Scrum and AI, leading to “Extreme Agile.” [22:47] Predictions for the future of Scrum and Agile: Teams becoming 30 to 100 times faster by 2030. [23:37] Example of AI in action: Developing a system to handle expense reports using Scrum principles. [29:37] Challenges with AI-generated code and the need for strong software architecture knowledge. [33:24] The importance of following Scrum “by the book” to achieve hyperproductivity. [35:30] Jeff's closing advice on adapting to extreme agile to stay competitive by 2030.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! How the Agile Manifesto Came To Be   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

In 2023 the US saw an all-time high workforce participation rate for mothers with young children, as well as the narrowest gender gap for workforce participation in history. However, women remain underrepresented in leadership roles, but why? In this episode Emily and Anne discuss the part that existing job structures and parental expectations present that continues to create barriers for career growth. They talk about the current statistics around this continuing conversation and what we can do as female leaders to balance this always tipping scale between being a leader, being a mother, and being a wholly fulfilled individual, first and foremost.   About the Featured Guest Anne Shoemaker is a career strategist and executive coach, leveraging her 20+ years of experience to guide executive and aspiring executive women to leadership roles across various industries. Through personalized coaching, dynamic speaking engagements, and interactive workshops, Anne equips women with the tools they need to unlock their potential and achieve new levels of impact and fulfilment. Follow Anne Shoemaker on LinkedIn Follow Anne Shoemaker on Instagram @careeradvisoranne   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode I chat with Becky Kuzma, a fast friend I made while at the Agile 2023 conference. Her talk on “How to Foster Neurodivergent Teams”  inspired me and many others at the conference to look at the landscape of neurodiversity in the workplace with a different lens. Lots has been learned recently about neurodiversity and how it contributes to a more diverse and inclusive workplace as well as providing a lot of opportunities for individuals to consider their strengths in this traditional world, more than their weaknesses. As Emily and Becky, both diagnosed with ADHD later in life, discuss this topic we invite you to arrive with an open heart and an open mind as we dive deep in this hot business topic.  About the Featured Guests Becky Kuzma is a "people-first" Agile Coach, she believes that the key to business agility starts with supporting and empowering employees. She pairs her background in biology with her experience as an Agile Coach to create a customized approach for organizations to achieve their desired business outcomes. She has worked with organizations in the education tech space in addition to non-profit biomedical research. Follow Becky Kuzma on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/becky-kuzma/) Reference(s) The Community Round Table (https://communityroundtable.com/)  The Community Club (https://www.community.club/) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile. This will get you entered to a monthly drawing for a goodie bag of Women In Agile Org swag! About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

How can AI and coaching work together? We know its impact on our world and large enterprises, but can it simplify your day-to-day and enhance your Agile coaching? Join Emily Lint and Alysia Silberg as Alysia guides you on leveraging AI for your business and daily routines, helping you reclaim your time and boost effectiveness with tools that might seem out of reach. About the Featured Guest Alysia Silberg is the Founder and CEO of UnemployableAI harnessing AI to drive growth, scalability and profits for companies. She is the Founder & General Partner of Street Global, a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Alysia's award winning book, Unemployable: How AI Transformed my Work and Life, details her inspiring life story and is a guide to infinite success.   Follow Alysia Silberg on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alysiasilberg/ ) Follow Alysia Silberg on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlysiaSilberg ) Follow Alysia Silberg on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/Alysiasilberg/ ) Reference(s) Forbes Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2023/05/30/unemployable-its-not-what-you-may-think/?sh=3dc95f0a28ad CEO Magizine: https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/innovation-technology/alysia-silberg-ai-investor/  The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile. About our Hosts Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode host Renae Craven chats all things Professional Development with guest Theresa Given, exploring different ways to assess growth opportunities and then how to plan for those opportunities. About the Featured Guest Theresa Given discovered Scrum and Agile ten years ago. She has been exploring and experimenting since. Theresa enjoys the world of possibilities; she's tried each Scrum accountability, tested multiple Agile practices, worked in varied industries across public, private and non-profit sectors. Currently, she coaches new Scrum Masters to explore their role and achieve greater efficacy with their teams. Follow Theresa on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresagiven/) Reference(s) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Hosts Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 14 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaecraven/).  About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this PST Spotlight episode, PST Ryan Ripley interviews PST Ralph Jocham about his Scrum journey and experience. Introduction and Background: Ralph Jocham, a PST and product management expert, shared his journey to becoming a Scrum Master. He started in the early 2000s with extreme programming and eventually transitioned to Scrum Mastery after discovering Ken Schwaber's book on Scrum in 2001.Evolution of the Scrum Master Role: Ralph discussed how his perception of the Scrum Master role evolved over time. He initially was more demanding and directive but later embraced servant leadership and eventually found a balance between guiding and coaching his team.Advice for Aspiring Scrum Masters: Ralph emphasized the importance of enjoying the process of helping others succeed, being prepared for both praise and blame and having a mindset similar to a sports coach, focusing on team success rather than personal recognition.

In this episode Renae and Sally talk about the inspiration behind her #stopbadagile bird aviary and how they reflect what Sally has learnt along the way.   About the Featured Guest Sally Sloley is an agile coach who specializes in visual solutions. She started her career as a web developer at Microsoft HQ. She loves being part of the agile community, helps organize conferences, and speaks about lean and agile around the world. She started #stopbadagile on LinkedIn in 2023 to help shine a light on the things being sold as agile but aren't.   Follow Sally on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallysloley/) https://sallysloley.com/   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 14 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaecraven/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

For this podcast discussion, Emily Lint and Kate Arms combined their two favorite loves: Psychology and Agile by discussing the Theory of Positive Disintegration and how it impacts the way we transform. Could hard transformations and struggles help us to actually grow better?    About the Featured Guest   Jessica Katz is a trainer, mentor and coach through Liberated Elephant. Jessica is passionate about working with individuals, teams, leaders, and organizations to help people discover and nurture their authentic selves. With this knowledge, Jessica helps them uncover solutions that move them forward on their journey. Her methodology is informed by Agile values, principles, and practices. Follow Jessica Katz on LinkedIn  The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn.   About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

Proft Streams BookTranscript:Agile FM radio for the agile community. Today I'm thrilled to have Luke Holman with me in the podcast here of Agile FM and I can't believe After all these episodes I had so far I haven't had you on the show, which is a big miss. You are a renowned expert in agile methodologies an author. And I think a lot of people know you from the innovation games which is a framework for collaborative decision making problem solving.You have experience that dates back way, way back into the 1990s, pre Agile, but also I heard recently that you were involved in the 2003 Agile conference. So yeah, a while back. Welcome to the show, Luke. [00:00:46] Luke Hohmann: Joe, I am so happy to be here. I've known you through the community. We've seen each other at conferences.And so it's a, it's quite an honor to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to participate. Thanks [00:00:58] Joe Krebs: Yeah, no, absolutely. We could talk about the innovation games and fill an entire show, but today we could, but today we want to talk a little bit about value profit stream, the agile community as often. This is the recordings taking place on the 25th of June, 2024 is a little bit in a turmoil. The Agile community as a whole, there seems to be some different kind of directions people are going, looking at the roles. It's maybe a good time to talk about what value is, how we can present value because at the end of the day is, it's like, how do we sell agility within an organization or for organizations?[00:01:44] Luke Hohmann: I think it'd be a good thing to talk about. There, there's so many aspects of this that are interesting, but let's try a few. And I'll also talk about the rule of self interest in the Agile community. When we talk about value we think about it in terms of our Profit Streams book and our Profit Streams work as What are the set of tangible and intangible benefits that a product or service we use solution as the single term for product and service or any blend thereof.So it's just a little easier because we're here to solve problems for our customers. So we think of both the tangible and intangible benefits. And for the tangible benefits, we help companies create mathematical equations that capture the benefits. And we often work with our clients because technical people are good at being efficient in terms of doing things like saving time.But the reality is most companies don't need to save time. They need to have the time converted into a metric that they can understand for their business purposes. One of the examples we use in our book, and it's been proven in many of our client engagements, Is we were working with a trucking company, and they were going to be buying software that saved their drivers time.So drivers in the trucking industry have to keep detailed logs of their hours of service to make sure they're taking breaks, etc. And this solution enabled the data to be acquired automatically by connecting into the engine bus. And they knew if the truck was on and if it was moving and all that kind of technological internet of things capability that we love.And there's so many things that we can do. So the company that we were working for, and this was Qualcomm had the solution. They went to the trucking organizations and said, Hey, we can save you 20 to 30 minutes a day in driver time. And Joe, we were able to prove this. Absolutely through, the data, like the data was very clear.And the trucking company's executive said we don't really care about that. Because our drivers are union and they are paid for eight hours. So saving me 30 minutes of a driver's time doesn't actually save me money. It doesn't do anything for me. So we had to go back to the drawing board with Qualcomm and find out how to reroute drivers using the new systems so the trucking companies could deliver another package or two in a day because that's how they made money through package delivery.Or the other part of this would be the intangible side and intangible benefits can be quantified on the intangible side for challenging deliveries. We were able to allocate more time in the driver's schedule so that customer satisfaction improved. And as customer satisfaction improved, we would see less churn among customers.Oh, my package was delivered well. I want to use this company again. My, my package was delivered without any breakage. I want to use this company again. So the first step of value is to actually take a step back and try to quantify the tangible and intangible aspects of value. And then I'll just real quickly, I'll finish that off.The second of the determination of value is what we call direct and indirect benefits. A direct benefit is something that you will recognize as a benefit and it materially affects your purchase or use decision. An indirect benefit is something that you recognize, you'll say, yes, the benefit exists, but it doesn't influence you.And I'll give you a kind of a standard example. My wife and I were out shopping for a new car. I cared a lot more about the styling and color. She just doesn't care about that. And and she would readily agree yeah, that's a good looking car, but it doesn't affect my purchase decision.Whereas I was, hey, that's a really good looking car. I think I bought it. And so now let's take it into the business context. The solutions that we're creating, which are often very sophisticated, there's a collection of benefit. It's not a single benefit. And collection of benefits, you create a network of how the customer perceives those benefits.So let's go back to a trucking company that is focused on customer satisfaction is not going to really care about the not care as much. I shouldn't say they care. They don't care at all, but they're not going to care as much about like driver satisfaction. But let's say you're a trucking company and a part of.The world where it's hard to attract drivers. Now your network of benefits might emphasize driver satisfaction. So understanding not just what benefits are, but how a given market segment is going to perceive the collection of benefits is really the foundation of our approach, and then from there, what we do is from the benefits, We can derive the customer return on investment model.We can derive your pricing and packaging model. We can help you develop your solution so that you know that you're building a sustainable offering. And I'll close with this Joe. The foundation of profit streams is sustainability. If you're running a business, Or frankly, if you're running a household, you have to have a positive flow of cash coming into your business or your house, right?We can't, other than the government who prints money, right? Like a business has to have a profit to survive, to sustain itself. Now, in some cases, profits can be misused or we can have unsustainable business practices. But if you look at true sustainability involves.Three related areas. One is your solution itself has to be sustainable over time as your customers evolve as their needs evolve Your solution has to evolve to be relevant and to meet their needs So with the first part of this is solution sustainability The second part of this is economic sustainability Are you charging a price that will keep your company in business?But are you also factoring in your customers total cost of ownership? So that your customer perceives what you're selling to them as a good value something they want to keep The relation going right? We want to have economic sustainability and then the third kind of sustainability is relationship sustainability when we Sell software.We're not actually selling software. We're selling a license to use the software So the distinction is that i'm holding in my hand a pen You If I sell you my pen, I've transferred rights to you. You now own the pen. You can do what you want with it. I don't sell you software. I license software for you to use.So there's a license agreement and that license agreement determines our relationship as the provider to the customer. There's other relationships that matter. Every software package that is created has technology and licenses associated with it. So the provider is in licensing work, and there's relationships that they need to maintain.And of course, the kind of the capstone of all of these things is our relationship to society and to other parts of the world. Of the global infrastructure in which we live. And what I mean by that is if you're in Europe, you need to honor GDPR. If you're in the United States, you have to honor California CCPA.If you're selling certain kinds of fintech software, you might have to be PCI or SOX two compliant. If you're in the healthcare industry, you'll have to be HIPAA compliant. If you're in the education industry, you have to be. FERPA and COPA compliant. So the idea of compliance to us is part of that relationship.What is the relationship your company wants to have with various regulatory agencies? Are you going to try and be an organization that honors those relationships and fulfills your compliance requirements? Or are you going to be an organization that's going to try and skirt those requirements? And perhaps engage in questionable or provably unethical behavior, and so all of that is what comprises profit streams.[00:10:42] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is it's very interesting. And as you were elaborating on this, especially on the economics, sustainability It's interesting, right? Because I think we all have seen situations as a consumer before where we felt like I need a certain service or a product, but I felt like this was too, too expensive.I've felt abused based on a very specific situation I'm in and I'm requiring a service or a product. I feel like everybody can relate to that. So finding that kind of fair spot, yeah. In terms of sustainability, I can totally see that as well as the other ones as well. So I think that's a great example.Now, if somebody hears the word profit stream, at least the first thing that came to mind for me said, what's the difference to value stream, right? [00:11:24] Luke Hohmann: That's a great question. And we should know the distinction between a profit stream and as a value stream. I credit this to my friend Avi Schneider who is well known in the scrum community.Avi, after reading the book, he said, Luke, I've come to learn and realize that all profit streams are value streams, like all squares are rectangles. But not all rectangles are squares. So the distinction that I like to talk about Joe is that typically a profit stream is going to be more aligned to what SAFe calls an operational value stream and the development value stream of SAFe would be a cost center.So now let's look at value streams and let's look at specifically operational value streams. We think of profit streams as those operational value streams that are generating revenue for a company. And so not all value streams generate revenue. For example, there are value streams provided by. Government entities that don't provide revenue, but provide services that maintain our society, which we need, and those are fantastic.But not all not all value streams are profit streams. And that's a good distinction. When the other thing that's interesting, and I give a talk on this. Is when we look at value streams, especially the operational value stream, you start to find that. We have a starting condition and we go through a sequence of steps and we get an ending benefit.Actually map in your operational value stream. When revenue occurs, you'll find that many things are costs until the very end. It's like value streams are rainbows, right? The pot of gold is at the end. And so you really have to make sure that you're understanding the steps in that operational value stream.And what we work on with our clients is that we try to help them understand the economic sustainability of looking at that sequence of flow to make sure that you are generating enough revenue at the end to support the whole flow and looking at ways you might be able to pull revenue sooner so that you can sustain yourself.[00:13:45] Joe Krebs: All right. How do you respond to somebody who is like possibly interested? Here's the word profit stream. Obviously I see dollar signs and signals and cha-ching and all of those kinds of things. For an agile audience out there who might say, Hey, but what about the team spirit? And what about sustainability of a team's, fun and learning environment?Aren't they contradictory to this? I guess the answer to that is no, right? But it's the, [00:14:14] Luke Hohmann: of course, all of those, Joe and for the listeners, Joe and I were chatting before the podcast we often do. And one of the things that I really find disappointing in the agile community is a lot of agile people seem to have this kind of disdain for management or this disdain for leadership.[00:14:32] Joe Krebs: And I think of it exactly the opposite. Business leaders over the last 20, 25 years have shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into agile practices and transformations between the training and the tooling and the infrastructure. And they've gotten benefit from agile. I'm very proud of all the things that software people do.Earlier today I was getting a blood test. And I walked in and there was a kiosk and you just typed in your phone number scanned your driver's license and you were checked in. Software people did that. And I think what we do as software people is really cool. Yeah. Hardware and software. We designed a solution that was amazing.And of course, Joe, we want to have sustainable practices, not just in our business relationships with our customers, but true sustainability means sustainability with our employees, with our practices. With what Kent Beck wrote about very early in the community with XP, like XP is about sustainability.So to say that profit is antagonistic to sustainability is to have a very flawed understanding of what sustainability is and or what profit is. I've been a serial entrepreneur. I've started and run and sold a couple of companies. And it's really a lot of fun when you're an entrepreneur and you can give out bonus checks because you had a great year Yeah, it's not so fun when you had a bad year and you're cutting salaries or you're doing other You know doing a layoff or whatever.And so for the people in the agile community who talk about humanness of our developers my response is Yes, heck yes, we, those are things that promote sustainability. Those practices, the training the better tooling, the better computers, they require money, they require a profit.And most of us work for a for profit company. It is, I think it's pretty above average that people would be working for profit rather than for the non profit sector. Should we go a little concrete about some data points, metrics, because I don't want to I'm just going to say the word.We really don't have to go down that path at all in this kind of conversation. I think we have debunked the word velocity as a metric or something like that. I don't think we have to talk about that. But what are. Measurements, like if somebody would say, Hey, this sounds very interesting. Definitely trucking sounds good, but I'm in a totally different domain.In terms of this, I would what's a good starting point for people to say, like, how do I measure these profit streams from an IT perspective or, Yeah. [00:17:18] Luke Hohmann: And Joe if I'm not answering the question in the way that you're intending the question that's okay.I started as an engineer and for everyone listening, Joe and I had a really, a geeky out moment when I, when we started, but I started as an engineer. And then I became a manager of engineer and then I became, vice president and all that kind of stuff. And I was always trying to create the best solution for my customers.And along and in that journey, I found product management. I thought, Oh, wait a minute. Product managers are the people who are designing the solution and working with designers on the user experience side. And they're in the center of the world of this thing called creating a great solution for customers.And through that. conversation, I started to realize, Hey, I'm responsible for creating a return on the investment of the company I'm working for. And from there, I started to learn the basics of finance. And I started to, understand how to read a balance sheet, how to read what is EBITDA what's the difference between CapEx and OpEx.What is the terms of the license agreement? What is, what can go wrong in a license agreement? If it's not crafted correctly for a company, how do I know if I'm making enough money, has my economic, let's go back to the engineers has my economic model factored in a pay raise for my team next year, because there's inflation and if there's inflation and I want to pay my developers more money, How do I manage that with my margins?Either my costs are going down, which might happen. And, maybe my software part of the solution is the same price, but my hardware margins are improving because I have cost of scale manufacturing. Maybe I don't, I'm a pure SAAS company and I'm picking up some lower costs because of hosting costs are dropping.How do I economically think about these elements? So the, what I would say is this is one of those areas where Agile has to do nothing more than embrace what has been existing for a long time, which is economic models Don Reinerson's work on flow. Looking at possibly throughput accounting, but educating ourselves, educate product managers, educate themselves on what's in our book, which is not just how do I economically model, but how do I actually. Set the price point. How do I determine the packaging of what features go in? What edition of my offering and do I charge? So those kinds of things are to me they're not taught as much as they should be in the agile community, but that's why we wrote the book. [00:20:10] Joe Krebs: Oh, absolutely. I agree with you.And I think indirectly you are answering the question, at least for me, right? Because I do see certain data points being captured within agile teams that are contradictory to what you're saying right now. These are like the velocity discussions and that are happening within teams. And then all of a sudden they happen on the leadership level, whereas you're saying, actually, some of those conversations are still existent as they were before agile, but they're still applying it.Just they have to be maps. I feel like you're having a much more adult mature kind of conversation about this. And I think we're actually experiencing within teams on the ground. [00:20:48] Luke Hohmann: Yeah I think the Agile community has gotten a little wrapped up around the Axel about, I helped form the first conference in the Agile Alliance series in 2003 with Alistair Coburn and Ken Schwaber and Rebecca Wirfs Brock and a few other people.And Todd Little, and let me tell you, no one at that conference was walking around arguing about the fine distinctions between output and outcome metrics and things like that. We both have a friend, Kenny Rubin, and he's written very beautifully about this. But trust me, in the very early days, we weren't arguing about those.It's like people drink fine wine and argue, Oh, are you getting black current or dark cherry flavors in the wine? No, just have a glass of wine and enjoy it. Um, and what's happening is we're forgetting that sometimes you do need to track certain basic metrics just as a mechanism Of I think consistency and let's say you're an athlete.Let's say you wanted to run a marathon. The number of miles you run in a week or the total miles that you've run in training for American a marathon could be a vanity metric. Oh, but at the end of the day, it's also the truth that you're not going to go run 26 miles if you didn't train And a training program is going to tell you how many miles you need to run Per week and if you're not tracking how many your miles you're running per week You're not going to hit your end goal of running the actual marathon So I think that so many other aspects of what we do, there's a very healthy way to look at velocity and velocity metrics and looking at flow metrics and unhealthy ways of looking at it and rather than throwing everything into a bucket of healthy and unhealthy, we should use the agile principles of retrospection.This metric and the way that we're using us, helping us advance towards our goals. Yeah. And it is, we should probably keep doing it. And if it's not, we should look at what we need to change. [00:22:52] Joe Krebs: Yeah. It's very interesting. I also, while we were talking about the marathon, I was also thinking yes, there's definitely mileage.This is an important piece, if part of your training program, but it's sometimes, and I don't know if that makes sense, I think sometimes we're measuring how many minutes we also have used for stretching, and yes, it is. a great technique to become a marathon runner, but I don't think from purely stretching, you're becoming a good marathon runner.I think it's together. And I think it's also for metrics like these things have to balance each other out. If you're having 90 percent stretching and 10 percent running, maybe that's the wrong [00:23:25] Luke Hohmann: that's where wisdom comes in. And that's where not always trying to invent everything from scratch, right?If you were, if you really were going to go run a marathon, you'd probably go talk with other runners. You'd probably go to some running websites that like runner's world that has reputable training plans. You'd get a sense of the balance of the metrics. So it's. It's very rare that one metric on a development organization is going to be the only metric that you needed.And again, this is where people start to it's good to have these discussions to calibrate. But it's like the definition of done, right? At the definition of done, you might say our definition of done is no stop ship bugs where stop ship is defined as P one and sev zero, like separate priority severity.Then you get into people who are like if I have no stop ship bugs, but I have a bunch of small bugs, can I still ship? And I'm like, I don't know like maybe no, maybe yes. What's the, we should have a conversation about that. And the metrics are designed to use to guide us into the conversations that are most beneficial, just like.So if I looked at a team that had velocity metrics, and they were reasonably consistent. And I saw an anomaly, like a dip. I, as a manager, if I didn't already know, I would go to the team and say, Hey, I noticed that your velocity dip, everything. Okay. And if the team says actually, no Joe went on a ski trip and broke his arm and our velocity dip, cause he was in the hospital.And we're all really worried about Joe. Wow, that stinks. Maybe we should send Joe some flowers or some get well, but now I know why velocity dipped. Yeah, and it was a special cause and it'll resolve itself. Um, now the other element could be our velocity dipped because we completely misunderstood the requirement and I'd be like, okay maybe we should toss that into a retrospective.There's so many good retrospective techniques. Maybe we should toss that into one of our retrospective techniques and see if that's a special cause or if there's some other potential issue that the team might be facing. And then the team goes, Oh yeah, no, we think we're okay. It was just this one time.We didn't really understand the requirements are no, we're actually in a new area of our solution and all of us are experiencing this new thing and we need more training or we need X to really get ahead of the issue. So metrics are important, right? We keep score, right? We keep track of things.[00:26:03] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? Because we, you mentioned before that there is this general amount of metrics. Don't want to repeat them necessarily, but these are like the business metrics. And these are the things that our businesses are already using on an enterprise level with or without agile.Why are we having such a hard time in the agile community to translate that? Obviously, your book will help in the translation of all of those things. But what do you think of the pitfalls? [00:26:29] Luke Hohmann: I actually think one of the pitfalls is how some of the agile methods have defined what a product owner is.You'll see agile methods say a product owner is responsible for value. Which is great, but then they don't define it. And so we've got a generation and I spent most of my formative business careers here in silicon valley, not all of it, but a lot of it So i'm used to a silicon valley style of a product manager Knowing how to run a spreadsheet knowing how to do pricing and being trained And what we're finding, I think, Joe, is that there's this tremendously large number of people who are associated with products, but don't have this training and pricing.They don't have this training and licensing. I'll, one of the things I do with my clients is I'll walk into a situation where they're, they need to, make an improvement economically. And I'll just go to the product managers and I'll say, when was the last time you read your own license agreement, your own terms of service on your website?And they'll be like, Oh yeah. never! Like, okay we should read it. And I'll give you an example of kind of the weird things that can happen in license agreements. We were working with a smaller company. And their license agreement with, so they served larger companies and it was a conversion company.I don't want to go much further than that. Yeah. They had a contract with a larger company that said every time the larger company made a request to the smaller company and the smaller company agreed to that request, their maintenance agreement would automatically extend for one more year. So every nine months, the big company would make a request to the small company.On a very small change, the small company would make a very small change. And then now they're saddled with a responsibility for another year of support. And I said, okay this two sentence clause in your license agreement is now costing you almost 300, 000 a year. Now for a big company, you may not notice it, but this was a company with less than 8 million in revenue.That's a noticeable number for a company with eight million right now. It's still a nice company. Don't it's not it's a very good business but i'm like this two line sentence in your license and the product manager was like wow I didn't know how to interpret that. I think we're seeing this challenge in the agile community because too many Organizations have allowed this skills of pricing and economic sustainability modeling to activity.Yeah, let's say you're, let's say you're agile. I don't care what flavor of agile you're using, pick one. I don't, there's so many, it's like going to the ice cream store. So you pick one and you're putting out more value at what point. Should you raise your prices because you've added so much value?At what point should you adjust your packaging? We work with a client who they kept on shoving features into their solution Which sounds great, right? But then their sales started to slow down and that the head of Product contacted me and said it's really weird luke Every time we're adding more features our sales team is telling us it's harder to sell that's a packaging problem because what's happening is people are saying Your solution now includes Features that are not relevant to me Therefore I want a lower price because i'm not using them.That's right And the right solution is to say okay now that our product has grown in sophistication We're gonna go take this market that wasn't segmented And we're going to make it a finer grain segmentation, and we're going to really understand the needs of these customers and take this wonderful platform we've built and offered these solutions or these features to this market segment, these features to this market segment.And after we did that work with that client. Their sales returned to a healthy growing number because people bought what was relevant for them. [00:30:49] Joe Krebs: This is awesome. Luke, we started off with also with a side comment or I might have started with this agile community being in some form of transition.Yes. And I want to end with this for our podcast as well. Now we talked a little bit more from the company's perspective, from the leadership level what I have noticed, and I don't know if you would share that thought is there's a lot of agile coaches in the transformation space and organizations, and they don't really know for sure if their work actually had an economic impact for the organization.Like they say like it feels better or it feels, we feel more profitable, but do we have evidence of what we had before to what we have now? How could profit streams help future coaching and coaches out there on, not from a product perspective, but more from a transformations perspective, how can profit streams help them to make a case for themselves to actually say, Hey, the agile community is alive and kicking.Why? Why? Because we are. Increasing the economic side of organizations by X, Y, Z, what kind of parameters would, what coaches need to tweak to say okay, these are like the parts of our puzzle where we can actually make a case for ourselves and say Hey, agile coaching is important. Agile teams are important.You call them the ice cream flavors. The agile processes out there are important for you to be successful for whatever is hitting your organization in the future. How would they use that kind of profit stream?[00:32:20] Luke Hohmann: I'm inspired by there's a gentleman that if you haven't had him on your podcast, you really need to get him.His name is Peter Green and he runs a company called Humanizing Work. He's a known in the Scrum community and he used to be one of the leaders at Adobe and Adobe's transition to more agile practices. And I remember that one of the metrics that Peter really tracked was just one thing, defects found in production.And remember I said that there was only, development teams need multiple metrics, but in this case, he was using the one metric that really resonated with his leaders and he showed his leaders how when defects in productions were reduced, customer satisfaction increased when customer satisfaction increased, renewals increased.The cost of customer care went down because there's fewer defects. And fewer upset customers, developer satisfaction went up because instead of fixing bugs, you're building new features. And so what he did was. He took the time to translate something that was just a number of defects found in production into how it expressed itself in a relevant profit oriented way.So my advice to the agile coaches out there is if you believe that you're creating a more effective, more efficient, more effective, doing the right things, more efficient, doing them effective, doing them well. If you think you're creating and contributing to this organization and, for example, I'm an agile coach and my team is quote unquote happier.What does that actually mean? What, we know that stable teams, like we have data on stable teams, that stable teams produce fewer bugs. That's an argument for stable teams. So what is the data that shows that coach is creating an economic impact that is relevant to the organization? And I am said this for decades.I am always concerned that people focus on trying to achieve the happiness of developers. When I think that the happiness of developers is an outcome of other elements, meaning if I'm a developer and I have Dan Pink, if I have reasonable autonomy, I have reasonable mastery, I, I have a purpose, right?Then I'm happy. But focusing on happiness doesn't mean I'm getting autonomy. Giving me autonomy, making sure I'm trained, making sure I have a purpose. Those and I definitely think that the many of the coaches I've seen, um, they don't always understand what the deeper opportunities might be.[00:35:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah. This is some awesome advice here. And I did not have Peter on the podcast and Peter, if you're listening to this, expect a call from me. Thank you, Luke. This was really insightful. And obviously I will share the book information for all the material on the show page of Agile FM, I just want to say thank you for sharing a very different view on things from what I had in the past in terms of guests and just chat a little bit about profit streams and make this really tangible for people of what they need to, establish within the organization to be successful and ready for the future.[00:35:42] Luke Hohmann: Yeah. And Joe, thank you. I'm going to leave just two more things for the listeners. I think they're important right now. We do think the agile community, many of us who've been there a while. And many of the leaders, we think the agile community is in some form of transition or some form of change, which means.It's up to you as a listener to decide what you think that future is and then work towards that future. A few years ago, my colleague Jason Tanner and I, we sat down and we were at an offsite and we said to ourselves, where do we really believe a future or part of the future of Agile has to be? And we decided that a part of the future of Agile has to be a return to the economics. of understanding profit and sustainability, and we acted accordingly, right? We wrote a book. We've got a partner program. We're doing consulting work. We're seeing our consulting business and profit streams is skyrocketing in terms of growth because we're finding that companies are going, wait a minute, You guys are right.You're We've invested in agile. How do we measure the return and how do we make sure that we're creating a profit? So and i'm not arguing that people have to buy into our perspective What I am saying is if you assert that the agile community is changing You can't just sit there and complain about it You have to decide what part of that future you want to create And what part of that future you want to be a part of and from there?You Your life will have purpose. Your life will have direction. And I think that's part of what's happening in the agile community right now. We're seeing this kind of Oh, what are what is our future? And where are we going to be? And how is it going to work as people are trying to decide? And I would invite people to reflect on their own and make a decision on their own about what they think that future is going to be, right?[00:37:40] Joe Krebs: Look, there's something very similar to what my kids are hearing in school every day. Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours. [00:37:47] Luke Hohmann: Oh, I love it. That's a great way to close. Luke, thank you so much.

In this podcast conversation, our host Emily Lint and Nita Ambedkar do not shy away from the controversial topic of failure in the Agile world. They discuss what failure might mean or look like for you and how it may be different from your peers, how you best find your center, and recover to continue to bring your best for the transformation to come.    About the Featured Guest Nita is an outgoing, confident , leader led by curiosity, and a let's do it attitude. She has 22+ yrs of experience in IT (tech and process). She has worked with MNC's, started her own IT consulting business, and is the board of director for DSAW. She teaches Zumba and yoga in her free time. Follow Nita Ambedkar on LinkedIn Reference(s) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this podcast conversation, we discuss navigating imposter syndrome and its relationship to knowing your own value. Having a strong supportive network and tapping into your own bravery is critical as you're pursuing success in your career. About the Featured Guest Carrie Driscoll, Agile coach and president of Reef Consulting, leverages 20+ years in project and operations management to drive growth and innovation. Her firm specializes in business agility coaching and digital transformations for Fortune 500 companies. She is a Scrum@Scaled Trainer, SAFe Program Consultant, Certified ScrumMaster, ICAgile Certified Professional, and is a dedicated speaker and mentor.   Follow Carrie Driscoll on LinkedIn    The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host: Leslie Morse is an agilist at heart. She was leveraging agile practices and appreciating agile principles long before she even knew what they were. Her agile journey officially started in 2010 and she never looked back. Her career has taken many twists and turns. She led a digital marketing start-up in college, was involved with replatforming Lowes.com while they adopted agile practices, provided training and coaching for agile transformation across a wide array of industries, and now serves as a Product Owner for Scrum.org. She is trained in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) and has been involved with Women in Agile since its original inception at Scrum Gathering 2013 in Las Vegas. You can follow Leslie on LinkedIn   About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode, PST Ryan Ripley guest hosts and interviews PST John Coleman about his journey to becoming a PST. Encountering Scrum: John Coleman first encountered Scrum while working in a factory in Ireland. Faced with increasing production capacity by 40% without additional floor space, he trained with Ken Schwaber in London and successfully implemented Scrum to manage the crisis.Eureka Moment: One pivotal moment for Coleman was realizing the power of the Sprint goal. It helped the team prioritize and manage work effectively, avoid extensive delays, and focus on achieving outcomes rather than just completing tasks.Advice for Aspiring Scrum Masters: Coleman emphasizes the importance of being a positive change agent. He advises aspiring Scrum Masters to be encouraging, manage resistance positively, and foster a collaborative team environment focused on continuous improvement.Evolving Scrum Master Role: Coleman discusses how his perception of the Scrum Master role has evolved. He highlights the shift from strict adherence to Scrum rules to a more flexible approach incorporating other frameworks like Kanban to achieve better results.

For this podcast discussion, Emily Lint and Kate Arms combined their two favorite loves: Psychology and Agile by discussing the Theory of Positive Disintegration and how it impacts the way we transform. Could hard transformations and struggles help us to actually grow better?    About the Featured Guest   Kate Arms is an Agile Coach once described as “our team's equivalent of Yoda.” She gave up programming as an act of teenage rebellion, but keeps coming back to tech, previously as a tech transactions lawyer. She holds a BA in Theatre and Biopsychology from Cornell University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is an international coach federation PCC and an ICAgile Expert in Enterprise Coaching.   Follow Kate Arms on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/katearmscoach/)   References:   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host   Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.  

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The fifteenth statement from Ken: "The role of enterprise management changes from telling people what to do to leading and helping everyone do their best to achieve goals. People aren't resources, and managers aren't bosses." Leadership Transition: In a Scrum environment, the role of enterprise management shifts from directive ("telling people what to do") to supportive, focusing on leading and helping team members achieve their best in reaching goals. This change emphasizes the importance of management's role in guiding and enabling rather than controlling. Goal Setting and Constraints: Setting strategic and specific goals is crucial in Scrum. These goals act as constraints that guide teams. Practical goal setting aligns with the overall company strategy and should be outcome-oriented. Management's role includes facilitating setting these goals and ensuring they align with broader company objectives. Redefining Productivity: Traditional productivity measures, such as presence at a desk or busyness, are seen as inadequate. Instead, the focus should be on the outcomes and impact on the customer. It's essential to shift from output (quantity of work done) to outcome (effectiveness and relevance of the work). People Over Resources: There is a significant mindset shift from treating people as resources to be exploited to valuing them as team members with the potential to contribute meaningfully. This involves moving away from micromanagement towards empowering self-managing teams, emphasizing skills development, and creating an environment conducive to productivity and creativity. Evidence-Based Management: Emphasizes using objective measures to assess progress towards goals and identify issues. It involves setting up boundaries and constraints, assisting in goal formulation, and removing obstacles that hinder team effectiveness. Managers are encouraged to partner with teams, aiding in eliminating impediments and focusing on long-term sustainable success rather than short-term outputs.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The fourteenth statement from Ken: "A team consists of people under pressure to do their best. Conflict is natural and the team needs to know how to deal with the conflict and have resources to draw on when needed." Natural Conflict in Teams: The episode discusses how conflict is a natural occurrence in teams, especially under pressure. This pressure can be constructive and lead to better performance if it's oriented towards clear goals, such as achieving Sprint and product goals in Scrum. Healthy vs. Unhealthy Conflict: They emphasize the difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict. Healthy conflict focuses on problem-solving and can be beneficial, while unhealthy conflict, which can escalate to personal fights, is detrimental. The key is to maintain focus on solving problems, not winning arguments. Role of Scrum Values in Managing Conflict: Scrum values like commitment are highlighted in managing conflict. These values support positive, natural conflict oriented towards team goals and problem-solving instead of destructive fights. Team Dynamics and Conflict Resolution: The hosts discuss the importance of recognizing when a discussion is veering away from productive conflict and turning into a personal fight. They stress the importance of team members being able to intervene, reset the focus on the problem, and avoid stubbornness in pursuit of being right. Balance Between Agreement and Conflict: They conclude that while conflict is necessary for progress, it needs to be balanced. Neither constant agreement nor continuous fighting is beneficial. A good Scrum Master, product owner, or team member should help maintain this balance, encouraging healthy conflict while preventing fights.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The thirteenth statement from Ken: "Self-managing teams are extremely productive. When they work closely with the customer to derive the best solution to a need, they and the customer are even more productive." Self-Managing Teams' Productivity: The episode emphasizes that self-managing teams are highly productive, especially when they work closely with customers to find the best solutions. This collaboration enhances productivity for both the team and the customer. Autonomy and Team Ownership: The discussion highlights the benefits of autonomy in team settings. Teams that own their work without constant oversight tend to produce higher-quality results. This autonomy is linked to increased productivity and satisfaction. Resistance to Coercion in Workplaces: Current trends show resistance to coercive work environments, where employees are forced into specific work arrangements. Organizations enforcing strict mandates often face challenges like talent loss, emphasizing the need for trusting professional teams to self-organize and manage their work. Customer Inclusion and Empathy: It is vital to include customers in the development process. Direct interaction between teams and customers fosters empathy and a deeper understanding of real customer needs, leading to more effective solutions. Skill Development for Teamwork: The episode underscores the importance of developing teamwork skills. Teams need to learn how to self-manage effectively. While this isn't an inherent skill for everyone, with the right coaching and environment, teams can achieve high levels of productivity and impact.

In this episode Renae and Sarah talk about the art of asking a dumb question and how modelling that helps others to feel more confident to ask their own ‘dumb' questions. About the Featured Guest Having spent most of her career in Human Resources and Learning and Development, Sarah came across Agile as a philosophy and way of working, and LOVED IT! She jumped ship and moved into a customer experience team working in agile philosophy, and has now become a Scrum Master. Follow Sarah on LinkedIn  The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org  Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg  Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Renae Craven has been coaching individuals, teams and organizations for over 14 years and has spent a lot of time investing in and formalizing her professional coaching skills in recent years. Renae's passion is leading and coaching organizations and as a Certified Team Coach with Scrum Alliance, she helps teams to find their rhythm and pace that balances learning with delivery. Renae established her own company NaeCrave Pty Ltd (www.naecrave.com.au) in 2020 and keeps herself busy with coaching and training delivery. Renae is also a certified BASI Pilates instructor and runs her own pilates studio in Brisbane, Australia. She has a YouTube channel called ‘Pilates for the Office Worker' which features short 5 minute guided sessions that anyone can incorporate into their day, especially those of us who have been sitting down for extended periods. Subscribe to her channel Crave Pilates. Renae has been organizing the Women in Agile group in Brisbane since 2018. You can follow Renae on LinkedIn.   About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The twelfth statement from Ken: "Managing a release or project to deliver only the highest value functionality and not deliver the rest optimizes value [and] is the job of product management and customers." The 12th episode of "Scrum is Hard and Disruptive" discusses the importance of delivering only high-value functionality in project management, emphasizing the role of product management and customer input. The hosts, Todd and Ryan, stress the need for product owners to say "no" to unnecessary features, highlighting the importance of avoiding waste and focusing on what's truly needed. They discuss using Evidence-Based Management (EBM) to validate the usefulness of features in production and advocate for objective decision-making in product development. The episode touches on the customer's responsibility in the development process, encouraging their involvement and accountability in deciding the essential features. The conversation also covers the importance of being ruthless in backlog management, akin to Steve Jobs with the iPhone, and the value of saying "not yet" to lower-priority items to maximize return on investment.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The eleventh statement from Ken: "Iterative, incremental development is much harder than waterfall development; everything that was hard in waterfall engineering practices now has to be done every iteration, which is incredibly hard. It is not impossible, but has to be worked toward over time." Iterative and incremental development in Scrum is more challenging than traditional waterfall development, requiring constant attention to engineering practices and frequent iterations. Extensive upfront design and architecture planning in waterfall development is believed to reduce future risks. However, software development often leads to outdated designs as customer needs and market conditions change over time. Scrum emphasizes quick decision-making on basic architecture, like frameworks and databases, while building the product incrementally. It demands disciplined, professional attention to ongoing architectural and design decisions in response to evolving customer demands. The Scrum approach challenges traditional development models like waterfall, where work often expands to fill the allotted time, leading to over-engineered solutions. Scrum requires a shift in mindset, focusing more on doing and building features rather than extensive planning and discussion. Adopting Scrum effectively requires gradual, sustained effort to improve engineering practices and architecture. Teams and organizations need to develop this skill set over time, including a solid understanding of their definition of "done" to reflect the maturity of their Scrum implementation.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The tenth statement from Ken: "Scrum is not a methodology that needs enhancing. That is how we got into trouble in the first place, thinking that the problem was not having a perfect methodology. Effort centers on the changes in the enterprise that is needed." Scrum's Nature and Misunderstandings: The discussion emphasizes that Scrum is not a methodology needing enhancement, as attempting to perfect it led to initial troubles. It's highlighted that Scrum is a framework, not a methodology, and should not be altered excessively. Scrum's Simplicity and Accessibility: When Compared to more complex methodologies and frameworks, Scrum's guide is concise (13 pages), making it easily understandable without the need for extensive training, unlike more elaborate methods that require significant learning and interpretation. Adaptability and Contextual Use of Scrum: The speakers discuss the importance of adapting Scrum practices based on specific team and project contexts. They share personal experiences where certain practices were effective in one situation but not in another, illustrating Scrum's flexibility and the need for situational awareness. Evolution of the Scrum Framework: The evolution of Scrum is discussed, noting that over time, the framework has become more streamlined, with a focus on removing unnecessary elements rather than adding new ones. This evolution aims to prevent dogmatic adherence to processes and encourage teams to focus on the intent of each Scrum event. Focus on Organizational Change Over Scrum Modification: The conversation shifts to the idea that efforts should be directed toward changing organizational structures and practices that hinder agility, rather than trying to improve Scrum itself. Emphasis is placed on overcoming organizational impediments to enhance the delivery of value to customers and gain competitive advantages.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The ninth statement from Ken: "The focus of using Scrum is the change from old habits to new ways of doing business. Scrum is not implemented or rolled-out as a process; it is used to foment change. " Podcast Focus: The podcast "Scrum is Hard and Disruptive" by professional scrum trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley explores a white paper published by Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, in 2006. They assess 15 statements about Scrum to see if they remain relevant 17 years later. Scrum's Purpose: The primary focus of Scrum is to facilitate a transition from old habits to new ways of conducting business. It is emphasized that Scrum should not just be implemented as a new process but should be used to instigate significant organizational change. Common Misconceptions: There's a critique of how many organizations misunderstand Scrum, often using it merely as a new process rather than a tool for real change. This leads to maintaining old habits instead of adopting genuinely new ways of doing business. Technology and Business Integration: A key point discussed is the need to stop viewing IT departments as separate from the rest of the business. In the modern world, where technology is central, IT should be integrated into the core business processes. Challenges of Implementing Scrum: The podcast underscores that implementing Scrum can be challenging and disruptive, as it requires significant changes in organizational behavior and mindset. The goal is to move beyond superficial adoption of Scrum as a process to deeply ingrained changes in how businesses operate.

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The eight statement from Ken: "The most serious impediments to using Scrum are habits of waterfall, predictive thinking over the last twenty to thirty years; these have spawned command and control management, belief that demanding something will make it happen, and the willingness of development to cut quality to meet dates. These are inbred habits that we aren't even aware of anymore."

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The seventh statement from Ken: "The use of Scrum to become an optimized product development and management organization is a change process that must be led from the top and requires change by everyone within the enterprise. Change is extremely difficult and fraught with conflict, and may take many years of sustained effort. Turnover of staff and management can be expected."

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The sixth statement from Ken: "The iterative, incremental nature of Scrum puts stress on the product development organization to improve its engineering skills and on the product management organization to optimize the return on investment of every release and project. The phrase, “That can't be done here” really means that it will be very difficult to do so. The gap between current practices and target practices is a measure of incompetence and competitive risk."

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The fifth statement from Ken: "Whenever an enterprise modifies or only partially implements Scrum, it is hiding or obscuring one or more dysfunctionalities that restrict its competence in product development and management."

Ryan and Todd look back at a 2006 post by Ken Schwaber, which covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The fourth statement from Ken: "An enterprise can use Scrum as a tool to become the best product development and management organization in its market. Scrum will highlight every deficiency and impediment that the enterprise has so the enterprise can fix them and change into such an organization."

Ryan and Todd look back at a post written by Ken Schwaber in 2006 that covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The third statement from Ken: 3. If waterfall suits current needs, continue using it. Here is the original white paper: https://www.verheulconsultants.nl/ScrumIsHardandDisruptive.pdf 

Ryan and Todd look back at a post written by Ken Schwaber in 2006 that covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The second statement from Ken: 2. Scrum is optimized for high yield product management and product development. Scrum is particularly appropriate for high risk, complex, large projects and can be used when other parts of the endeavor are hardware or even waterfall development. Here is the original white paper: https://www.verheulconsultants.nl/ScrumIsHardandDisruptive.pdf 

Ryan and Todd look back at a post written by Ken Schwaber in 2006 that covers 15 ways Scrum is both hard and disruptive. The first statement from Ken: 1. Scrum is a framework for iterative, incremental development using cross-functional, self-managing teams. It is built on industry best practices, lean thinking, and empirical process control. Here is the original white paper: https://www.verheulconsultants.nl/ScrumIsHardandDisruptive.pdf Join this channel to get access to the perks and exclusive videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZYWqpkc-YzAndAt90arxTA/join 

In this podcast conversation, we discuss what it truly means to “choose your own career” in the product management field as well as how to stay on that path as your most authentic self. Gabrielle has a drive for helping others see themselves to the roles that most align to their life and we hope this discussion will open new eyes to what it means to be in the product management field for new and developing Agilists. About the Featured Guest Gabrielle Hayes is a pioneer who transforms the product development industry by unlocking the untapped potential of professionals through empowerment and teaching how to harness a growth mindset. Her mission is to guide product professionals towards unlocking their full potential, fostering unshakable confidence, and achieving the lives they aspire to lead - in the career they love. Follow Gabrielle Hayes on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielleahayes/ ) The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared. Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile. About our Host:   Emily Lint is a budding industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.  Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

It's Lee here, your host from the Daily Standup Podcast, and I'm absolutely thrilled to share something extraordinary with you. We've just hit a milestone that's both humbling and exhilarating – our 1000th episode!

In this episode, our host Leslie Morse explores topics related to mentorship with our guest Dominika Bula. This episode was originally inspired by Dominika's participation as a mentor in the Women in Agile Mentorship program, sponsored by ICAgile. In addition to sharing tips and tricks for success in mentorship relationships, Dominika also shares details about a method of speed mentorship that can help you uplift the skills and capabilities of those around you.   About the Featured Guest Dominika Bula is a Senior Consultant working for SAP Signavio, she is also a Mentor with the Women in Agile Mentorship Program and one of the Women in Agile Europe Conference organizers. Dominika's daily job focuses on enterprise Agile Coaching.  She is Certified Scrum Master, PMI Agile Practitioner, SAFe Consultant and ProKanban trainer. Follow Dominika on LinkedIn Follow Dominika on Twitter @DomiBula    References & Resources Women in Agile Mentorship program, sponsored by ICAgile. (https://womeninagile.org/mentorship/) X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed by Deborah Ancona & Henrik Bresman AnitaB.org Mentorship Circles The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talented women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Leslie Morse is an agilist at heart. She was leveraging agile practices and appreciating agile principles long before she even knew what they were. Her agile journey officially started in 2010 and she never looked back. Her career has taken many twists and turns. She led a digital marketing start-up in college, was involved with replatforming Lowes.com while they adopted agile practices, provided training and coaching for agile transformation across a wide array of industries, and now serves as a Product Owner for Scrum.org. She is trained in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) and has been involved in with Women in Agile since its original inception at Scrum Gathering 2013 in Las Vegas. You can follow Leslie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliejdotnet).   About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this episode we unpack section 9 of the Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching;  Responsibility to the Profession. We uncover the thinking behind the section, its inclusion in the Code of Ethic and its application in coaching. Important Note: This podcast episode was filmed at the Agile 2024 conference so please excuse the background noise that occurred during the recording. About the Featured Guests Kerri Sutey is the Leading Change Portfolio Manager at ICAgile where she shapes learning journeys that help organizations build the leadership and coaching capabilities they need to achieve business agility.   Follow Kerri on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrisutey/)   John Barratt is passionate about helping organizations reach their full potential. He has developed a unique coaching style that combines the principles of business agility with other coaching approaches. John specializes in helping organizations simplify and become more resilient. He uses various methods, including outcome-based coaching and systemic modeling, to help clients achieve measurable results.   Follow John on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarratt1/) Follow John on Twitter @coachjohnuk (https://www.twitter.com/coachjohnuk)   Reference(s) Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/initiatives/agile-coaching-ethics/   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talented women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Host Leslie Morse is an agilist at heart. She was leveraging agile practices and appreciating agile principles long before she even knew what they were. Her agile journey officially started in 2010 and she never looked back. Her career has taken many twists and turns. She led a digital marketing start-up in college, was involved with replatforming Lowes.com while they adopted agile practices, provided training and coaching for agile transformation across a wide array of industries, and now serves as a Product Owner for Scrum.org. She is trained in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) and has been involved in with Women in Agile since its original inception at Scrum Gathering 2013 in Las Vegas. You can follow Leslie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliejdotnet).   About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.

In this podcast conversation we discuss with TD Bank executive leaders how Unconscious bias may be shaping your workplace and the products being built today. We tackle some hard truths as to how unconscious bias shows up in all different spaces in our lives while we take our experiences with unconscious bias and use them as fuel to make a better workspace for others.   About the Featured Guest Lina is a VP and executive product owner for TD Bank Group, Lina's focus is driving better outcomes for her clients, while supporting her colleagues in achieving their goals. As a woman, and visible minority in the financial industry, supporting her colleagues and clients has been anchored in diversity and inclusion and she set up a diversity network, later becoming the executive sponsor of TD's Visible Minority Group. Lina holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Western Ontario, a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from Carleton University, and an MBA from McGill Executive Institute. Shibani is a global executive with extensive experience working across multiple disciplines and geographies, holding several roles around the globe.   In her current role as Vice President, Executive Product Owner, she leads a team of technology professionals responsible for setting the strategic vision and agile implementation of innovative capabilities supporting end to end Customer shopping engagement journeys across the enterprise.    In 2022 and 2023, Shibani received international recognition as one of the top Outstanding LGBT+ Emerging leaders globally.   Follow Lina Abdelhussein on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/linahanna/) Follow Shibani Ahuja on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shibaniahujatd/)   Reference(s)   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.   Podcast Library: www.womeninagile.org/podcast Women in Agile Org Website: www.womeninagile.org    Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: www.twitter.com/womeninagileorg    Please take a moment to rate and review the Women in Agile podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. This is the best way to help us amplify the voices and wisdom of the talent women and allies in our community! Be sure to take a screenshot of your rating and review and post it on social media with the hashtag #womeninagile to help spread the word and continue to elevate Women in Agile.   About our Hosts Emily Lint is an industry leader in the realm of business agility. Energetic and empathetic she leverages her knowledge of psychology, business, technology, and mindfulness to create a cocktail for success for her clients and peers. Her agile journey officially started in 2018 with a big move from Montana to New Mexico going from traditional ITSM and project management methodologies to becoming an agile to project management translator for a big government research laboratory. From then on she was hooked on this new way of working. The constant innovation, change, and retrospection cured her ever present craving to enable organizations to be better, do better, and provide an environment where her co-workers could thrive.    Since then she has started her own company and in partnership with ICON Agility Services serves, coaches, and trains clients of all industries in agile practices, methodologies, and most importantly, mindset. Please check out her website (www.lintagility.com) to learn more. You can also follow Emily on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylint/).    About our Sponsor Scrum.org is the Home of Scrum, founded in 2009 by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber focused on helping people and teams solve complex problems by improving how they work through higher levels of professionalism. Scrum.org provides free online resources, consistent experiential live training, ongoing learning paths, and certification for people with all levels of Scrum knowledge. You can learn more about the organization by visiting www.scrum.org.