Podcasts about Scrum

Richard Brenner: Hypothesis-Driven Product Ownership, The Experimental Mindset Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Experimenter Richard describes great Product Owners as "experimenters" who understand that everything they do is a hypothesis requiring validation. The best POs establish feedback loops early, actively engage with users and clients, and approach product development with a scientific mindset. Richard shares an experience working with a "coaching PO" who excelled at involving everyone in defining what needed to be done.  This PO was inspiring and helped the team participate in both building and decision-making processes. Richard emphasizes that the relationship between PO and team must be a true partnership—not hierarchical—for success to occur. Great POs facilitate team involvement rather than dictating direction, creating an environment where collaborative problem-solving thrives. In this segment, we refer to the Role Expectation Matrix Retrospective, and the Product Owner Sprint Checklist, a hands-on coaching tool for anyone interested in helping PO's prepare and lead successful Sprints with their teams. The Bad Product Owner: The Tech Visionary Disconnected from Users Richard recounts working with a high-level sponsor, a medical doctor interested in technology, who hired multiple development teams (up to four Scrum teams) to build a product. While technically knowledgeable, this PO had very concrete ideas about both the technology and solution based on assumptions about client needs.  The team developed impressive technology, including a domain-specific language (DSL), and felt they were performing well—until they delivered to actual clients. Only then did they discover users couldn't effectively use the software, requiring a complete rethinking of the UX concept. This experience taught Richard the critical distinction between the customer (the sponsor/PO) and the actual end users, demonstrating how even technically sophisticated Product Owners can miss essential user needs without proper validation. Self-reflection Question: How might you help Product Owners in your organization balance their vision with the practical realities of user needs and feedback? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The Rebel News podcasts features free audio-only versions of select RebelNews+ content and other Rebel News long-form videos, livestreams, and interviews. Monday to Friday enjoy the audio version of Ezra Levant's daily TV-style show, The Ezra Levant Show, where Ezra gives you his contrarian and conservative take on free speech, politics, and foreign policy through in-depth commentary and interviews. Wednesday evenings you can listen to the audio version of The Gunn Show with Sheila Gunn Reid the Chief Reporter of Rebel News. Sheila brings a western sensibility to Canadian news. With one foot in the oil patch and one foot in agriculture, Sheila challenges mainstream media narratives and stands up for Albertans. If you want to watch the video versions of these podcasts, make sure to begin your free RebelNewsPlus trial by subscribing at http://www.RebelNewsPlus.com

What should Swayman take away from this season? He made it all about himself at the beginning of the season, then was not good during the season after getting his money. Very disappointing stuff. Everyone wants to hear Swayman be pissed off about his season. He was not good.

Richard Brenner: Contracting for Success,  Establishing Clear Agile Coaching Outcomes Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard reflects on his evolution in defining success as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. Initially, he believed that if his team was successful, he was successful—but soon realized this perspective was incomplete. Top management wanted tangible evidence of coaching impact, which became problematic without clearly defined metrics. Richard now advocates for establishing a coaching agreement at the beginning of any engagement, with both management and teams defining what success looks like for the coach. He emphasizes the importance of dual-sided accountability as a natural outcome of proper contracting, using metrics that matter to the organization such as flow metrics and outcome metrics to demonstrate coaching value. Self-reflection Question: How are you measuring your own success as a coach or Scrum Master, and have you created explicit agreements with both teams and management about what success looks like? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Solution Focused Retrospective Richard recommends the Solution Focused Retrospective from the book "Solution Focused Coaching for Agile Teams." While traditional retrospective formats from books like "Agile Retrospectives" typically open a topic and dig deeply into the problem space, the solution-focused approach suggests spending only a short time discussing problems before pivoting to designing the desired future state. This format focuses on identifying the next step and emphasizing what positive outcomes the team wants to achieve, rather than dwelling on what's wrong. Richard values this approach for its ability to maintain a positive, forward-thinking mindset within teams. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Richard Brenner: When Individual Performance Metrics Block Agile Transformation Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard shares an experience of implementing Agile methods in a large organization that initially showed promising signs with management "pull" for change. The transformation began well with cross-functional teams created through self-selection workshops. However, unexpected resistance emerged during the kick-off day, particularly from a line manager and his team. When investigating the source of this resistance, Richard discovered that the company's bonus structure was tied to individual performance metrics, fundamentally conflicting with Agile's team-oriented approach.  This insight led to developing a pilot for a team-focused performance management system. After three months, the team held a retrospective with all stakeholders, where management demonstrated remarkable leadership by empowering teams to redesign their structure when the initial setup wasn't working. This flexibility allowed even the most vocal critics to become part of the solution. Self-reflection Question: In what ways might your organization's reward structures be unintentionally blocking successful Agile adoption? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Scrum Fails When Product Owners Think They Are The BossI'm afraid that everyone interprets it differently, and that's the source of problems. For me, the word owner is misleading. As a Product Owner, you own nothing, though you may think you do.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Richard Brenner: How Small Signs of Cynicism Can Destroy Agile Team Cohesion Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard shares a powerful story about how team dysfunction often starts with small steps. During a joint retrospective with three agile teams, Richard witnessed a moment where a team member made a cynical comment toward a manager who was attempting to participate. This revealed a damaged relationship between management and the team, creating tension that Richard initially chose to ignore. Looking back, he would now immediately address such comments and tackle the "elephant in the room." Richard explains how seemingly minor behaviors like cynicism or passive-destructive actions (such as consistently being late to stand-ups) can significantly impact team health. He recommends establishing conflict resolution protocols early and using impact feedback without judgment to address these issues before they escalate. In this segment, we refer to Lysa Adkins' conflict resolution protocol.  Self-reflection Question: What small signs of dysfunction might you be overlooking in your team that could develop into larger problems? Featured Book of the Week: Solution Focused Coaching for Agile Teams Richard recommends "Solution Focused Coaching for Agile Teams" by Ralph and Veronika. This book describes the solution-focused approach to many common situations that Agile coaches face in their work. Richard values this resource for its practical guidance on addressing challenges through a positive, solution-oriented perspective rather than dwelling on problems. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Why Your Scrum Teams Are Failing - The Hard TruthAgile was presented to me as the ultimate project management approach — promising productivity, transparency, and value delivery in short bursts. However, many teams struggled to effectively implement and scale Scrum, missing the mark on its potential.Waterfall was declared a relic of the past — outdated, painfully inefficient, and completely incapable of keeping up with the demands of modern projects.The question wasn't which approach was better, but rather why teams were failing to embrace the very solutions meant to propel them forward.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Richard Brenner: Skipping the Vision, How Not to Introduce Kanban Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard shares an important learning experience from introducing Kanban to teams using a top-down approach. Without clearly articulating why the change was needed, team members questioned what they were doing wrong that necessitated change. Richard found himself unable to connect the organizational vision to the methodology shift, leading to resistance. He emphasizes the importance of first understanding the problem before applying Scrum or Kanban, defining what success looks like, and involving people early in the change process. Richard also recommends thorough contracting with client organizations to assess their current state and understand who is trying to change what, and why. In this episode, we refer to Kotter's book Leading Change. Self-reflection Question: How might your change initiatives be improved by spending more time defining the "why" before introducing new methodologies? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Tired of “What went well?” and “What didn’t”? Brian Milner is here to help you cook up retrospectives that actually get your team thinking, collaborating, and improving. From creative themes to actionable frameworks, this is your behind-the-scenes guide to better retros. Overview Do your retrospectives feel more “check-the-box” than game-changing? Brian Milner shares his full recipe for planning and facilitating retrospectives that actually matter. Whether your team is stuck in repetition, tuning out, or phoning it in, Brian’s step-by-step approach will show you how to bring structure, creativity, and energy back into the room. Brian walks you through the five essential components of a retrospective, including how to match formats to your team’s personality, align activities with Agile's three pillars (transparency, inspection, and adaptation), and spark meaningful change with every session. References and resources mentioned in the show: Stranger Things Retrospective Download Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby & Diana Larsen Retromat Blog: Overcoming Four Common Problems with Retrospectives by Mike Cohn Blog: Does a Scrum Team Need a Retrospective Every Sprint? By Mike Cohn #139 The Retrospective Reset with Cort Sharp Retrospectives Repair Guide Better Retrospectives 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. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, like we always do. And I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. Today we have with us, me, just me. Now, before you get frustrated with that or think we're copping out in some way, this is intentional. I wanted to have an episode to myself because and working through all this stuff around retrospectives, I thought that it might be good to take an episode here. And I kind of thought of it sort of like a cooking episode, right? Like if you watch a cooking show, you know, Gordon Ramsay show or something, they'll walk you through how they make something. And it's from start to finish. They show you the ingredients. They show you how everything's put together. And then you see this beautiful dish at the end. Well, I've often compared the way that you can format a retrospective to a little bit like a meal, because a meal has different courses in it. And a retrospective should have these themed areas or repeatable sections of it. And so I thought of it a little bit like making a meal. So I thought I'd just walk you through a little bit step by step. what I'm thinking here and how I would go about doing it. this is, you know, we're cooking up something special here. It's a kind of a recipe here that's, you know, equal parts creative and effective. It's a way to try to keep your retrospectives interesting, but also keep them to be solid and where you can have an actual outcome that comes from this. And you actually make definitive changes here with your team as a result. So there's a couple of retrospective courses that I have coming out where I go into detail about all these things, but I wanted to take an episode where I could walk you through and just have you kind of peer over my shoulder a little bit about how I might do this if I was going to create a retrospective for a team. So first starters, I think we have to understand that there is a menu to follow, right? And I kind of use this menu metaphor because one of the great things about when you go out and you have a meal at a nice restaurant is there's a repeatable pattern to it. You kind of expect that they're gonna bring you a drink first and then maybe you have, if it's a really fancy restaurant, maybe you have appetizers first or hors d'oeuvres even before appetizers, then you maybe have appetizers or not. Then you have a main course and maybe you have a salad even before the main course and then you have a a meal, and then you have some kind of a dessert afterwards, maybe even some kind of a cocktail at the end of the meal or coffee at the end of the meal. But there's sort of a pattern to it. And regardless of what restaurant you go to, you kind of repeat that same pattern. Now, I know that there's times you'll be, this is where the metaphor kind of breaks down a little bit, I get it. You may not have the same pieces every time. And what we're going to be talking about here as a retrospective pattern is that, yes, you should sort of follow the same pattern. You can't really get to, let's say, dessert. You can't just skip and go to dessert, right? You've got to go through this journey of the other sections so that you can end up at dessert and really fully appreciate it, right, and get the most out of it. So that's where this metaphor is a little bit of a, starts to break down a little tiny bit. But. I want to talk about here first why retrospectives matter and why they often go stale. I think they often go stale for a lot of reasons, but one of the chief reasons I've encountered when I work with teams is that the Scrum Master on the team really only has a small amount of formats and styles that they have to work with. They have a small little set in their toolbox. And they may even rotate through a few of them. But at the end of the day, it's kind of a small toolbox. There's only a few tools in there. And if I'm a team, if I'm a member of that team, you can imagine how I might get bored. And I might think this is not really worthwhile if I'm showing up every single time and I'm hearing the same exact questions. What did I do? What do we do well? What do we not do so well? Do I have any roadblocks? If I'm just asked that same thing every time, then I might not feel like this is a very worthwhile thing. Or I might get to the point where I feel like, gosh, I've answered the same question, you know, three sprints in a row. I just, got nothing more for you Scrum Master. I just, I can't dig any deeper. I've given you everything and it just feels like this is the, you know, groundhog day. We're doing the same thing over and over again, but nothing's really changing. So. I think it's important that we be able to switch things up, but it's not change just for change sake. That's why I think that having a structure of some kind can give you that pattern to fall back on that can make it effective, but then also can provide variety, can make it something that changes over time as you do this with your team. Doesn't mean that you can't ever repeat a format that you've used. I don't think that's a bad thing. I just wouldn't want to repeat the same, just handful, small little number of them over and over again. That's going to get repetitive and it's going to make people a little frustrated. The other thing is I think you have to match these to the personality of your team. Your team might be more outgoing or they might be more introverted. You might have people who prefer activities or little more, you know, kind of quiet activities or some that are more verbal, you know, require more discussion. That's really an individual thing for your team. So I think you have to think as you go through this, what's going to work for these people, right? For this set of individuals that I am working with. You know, I always say there's kind of a first commandment for Scrum Masters, know thy team. And I think that's really something that's important for us to grasp onto is we have to know our team. can't coach to the average. Right? We have to coach to the individual, to what we have on our team, because your team is unique. That set of individuals has never come together anywhere else in the world. Right? Those personalities. And what you want is to find out how to make that set of people work well together. Right? How do they work best together? Not how does every other team in the world work best or how does the average team work best? How does your team work best? Right? So with all of this is sort of setting this and saying that there should be a pattern. I do want to give the hat tip here and say that the Esther Derby Dinah Larson book on retrospectives is one I strongly recommend. In fact, pretty much my whole career as a trainer, I have said, when people say if there's one book, if I'm to be a Scrum Master, if there's one book that you would say would be really impactful to me from pretty much day one, I have pointed to that book. It's called Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby, Dinah Larson. And in that book, they lay out a pattern of kind of five phases that go through it. I'm going to distill it down because to me, it's sort of the three middle ones that are the most important. I will talk about the two on the ends here as well and kind of put that on top of these three. But sometimes I find people find it easier if they just remember what I'm gonna teach you here about the three that are in the middle. So in Scrum Master classes, we will talk often about how there's these three pillars of the Agile process or three pillars of empiricism. Empiricism says that we learn through experience. Well, I always say in class, it's not enough to just do the wrong thing over and over again. I gain a lot of experience by doing the wrong thing over and over, but I don't learn from it. And the three pillars are what's needed to make sure you learn from them. And I'm sure you've heard these before, but if you haven't, transparency, inspection, adaptation. Those are the three. Transparency meaning we're not going to be clouded about how we do the work. We're going to be very transparent, open about it. We're going to try to reveal how we work best as much as possible. Inspection, that we're going to actually take time and pause and try to figure out not just what happened, that would be transparency, right? What's the reality of what just happened? But inspecting says, why did this happen? Right? What's the root cause of it? I don't want to just deal with the symptoms, right? If we just try to cure the symptoms over and over again, we still have the same disease, we still have the same illness, and we're not really getting to the root cause. So inspection says, we're going to take time out to actually get to the root cause. And then adaptation, the last one, is probably the most important step here, because if you figure out what's wrong, but you don't ever do anything about it, well, we're doomed to have the same exact discussion again. So adaptation says, now that you know what the problem is, what are you going to try different? We may not even know exactly what the right thing to do is, but we got to try something. What we know for certain is what we did didn't work. That's the one thing we absolutely can't do again, is exactly what we did. We've got to try something new so that we move on, right? So that we find out more information and get closer to whatever our final solution is. So transparency, inspection, adaptation, those three actually serve as a good guideline or three phases you can think about for your retrospectives. There needs to be a transparency phase where you try to figure out what happened this last sprint. there needs to be an inspection phase where now that we know what happened, we got to ask the question, why did it happen? And we need to get to the root cause of why it happened. Now that we know what that is, then we have to move on to adaptation to say, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to take this knowledge we just gained and actually make a change? So we need activities around all three. And what I'm saying here to you is that can serve as your menu. I can do lots of different activities that would match these three areas. Now, I do, again, want to go back to the Esther Derby, Dinah Larson book, because their five phases adds one on the beginning, one on the end, which I actually do think are very helpful. The first one is kind of opening the retrospective. It's a way of trying to just start to get voices in the room. And this is something I will often do as well. Just a quick, quick exercise to just get people to start talking. And that's one of the ways you can start to get a quieter group to get involved is throw them something really easy to respond to right out of the gate. And then the last one is to close the retrospective. Closing the retrospective is a great way to then try to sum it all up and say, well, here's the takeaways, here's the things we're going to do about it, and we're going to move forward from here. Opening the retrospective to that introduction can also then review what you talked about at the end of the last. retrospective. You can say, here are the things that we decided, and let's talk about what's been done about them before you start to inspect the current retrospective. So given that, right, I know I'm going fast here, but you can rewind and listen back to this if you need to. But if you think about that, that you have these kind of phased approaches, and think of it like a menu, right? There's different courses to my menu. Well, I'm not going to serve the same meal every time. That would be boring. So I got to find out different things I can serve for each course of my retrospective. Now, here's where it gets interesting, right? Because there are lots of tools out there. And there's a website that I often recommend called RetroMAT. RetroMAT is a great site where you can go to, and it has those five phases. You can kind of scroll through different exercises for each of the five phases. they sort of have, you you can kind of mix and match and create your own menu based off of that. And doing that is absolutely free. Now they have paid things there as well. They're not a sponsor. I don't get any kickbacks or anything from them. But they have some paid activities as well as far as having things like Mural and Miro templates that you can use if you want to do that as well. So there's lots of things you can do there to thank them for what they put together. But there are times when Maybe you're trying to fit this to your team specifically, or you've grown tired of the exercises that you're used to, and you want to find some new dynamic to add into your retrospective. So what I'm going to do is kind of walk you through what I would do if I wanted to take some kind of a theme and create a new retrospective that's themed around a certain topic. Now I will say that this theme is gonna go just in one of our sections. So it's not going to go throughout it. I'm not gonna be that creative here with you on it, because I don't think you need to be. I don't think you need to have this, it's not like a theme to party, right? You can just take the theme and use it in one of the sections. So what would I do for something like this? Well, I'd start with, as I said, some way to kind of open the retrospective. And I like to have little quick activities as I said, that just get voices in the room. an example of things I've done in the past. Ask the team a quick question like, if this last sprint were a song title, what song title would you use to describe this last sprint? And people can use whatever kind of music they like, right? It doesn't matter. They can just call it any songs that they're familiar with. Or do movie titles. I've had a lot of fun in the past doing that with teams where I'll say, hey, shout out a movie title that might represent this last sprint. You just want to find something quick that people can shout out like one or two word answers, right? Or a small sentence in the case of a song title or movie title or something like that. But something that they can tie it into, right? And it doesn't have to be anything that makes perfect sense, right? It can be kind of crazy. It can be... You know, if this last sprint were a flavor of Starburst or, you know, an color, what color would it be and why? And just have people, you know, shout out whatever they think the answer would be. They might have to be a little creative with their answers when they do that. But that's okay. You're just giving them an opportunity to have a few voices start to enter the conversation. Don't force anyone, right? Don't force anyone to shout out, but give them an opportunity to. So I'm going to open the retrospective with some kind of fun, quick exercise like that. Probably won't take more than five minutes, okay? Then I want to move into that transparency section. And the way I frame transparency is what actually happened this last sprint? What was the reality of what happened this last sprint? So here's where I'm going to inject a themed kind of approach. And I just, I go through a couple of examples in our courses where I talk about doing this, but I picked a different one here for this podcast episode that I've put together right before this recording to try to walk you through a little bit of how I did this. So I tried to pick something that was a little more relevant to today. I know that this is popular and people are looking forward to the next season, which is about to come out. sometime soon, I know they've been shooting it, but I picked the theme, Stranger Things. And I just thought, what if my team, you know, had, I knew there were some people on my team really into Stranger Things, or what if I just knew they were aware of it, they knew what it was, and I wanted to have a theme built around this. So here's how easy it is to do this. I went to chat GPT, and I asked it to give me some, you know, putting together a retrospective that I want to theme it around stranger things. And give me some major themes from Stranger Things that might align to Some different ways of collecting information around what actually happened this last sprint. And. They gave me a long list of different things. And I read through these and kind of tweaked them, talked back and forth with it a little bit, kind of refined. And I distilled it down to five sort of themes or categories I thought would be fun and would kind of challenge the group to think along different lines of thought. So here's what I came up with with Chat GPT's help. My first category. I called running up that hill. And what I put for the prompt for this one is what felt like an uphill battle this sprint? Now just think about that, right? In traditional sprints, there's lots of things that are just, I'm essentially asking what was the obstacles? What were the hurdles in this sprint? But I'm getting them to think about it in little different way by saying, what was an uphill battle in this sprint? And even that subtle rewording, of that prompt can trigger people's brains to work in a different way and get them to think along different lines. If I just ask over and over again, you know, what was a blocker of this sprint or what blockers do we encounter this sprint? If I use those same words over and over, I get sort of immunized against them and I can't really think about anything new. But just phrasing it that little slightly different way, what felt like an uphill battle this sprint I think can really trigger some new ways of thinking. So that was my first category. The second one that I came up with, big theme here in Stranger Things, was the upside down. And I related it this way to say, what is completely upside down right now? What is the opposite of what it should be right now? Now here, I'm trying to get them to think about things that are not really going well, right? Things that are going the opposite direction that they should, and it's upside down from what should be the normal. Right? And again, we're just thinking along this theme of stranger things and I'm tricking their brains a little bit into thinking along a different line, right? To examine it from a different point of view. My third category that I thought would be fun was I titled Vecna's Curse. And what I prompted here for this one was what haunted the team this sprint or kept coming back up to bite us. And The idea here is to get them to think about things that were maybe decisions we wish we had made differently. These could have been decisions in the past. It didn't have to be a decision from this sprint. But what are those things that we felt kind of like was like Vecna's curse? It was just something that kept rearing its ugly head. And it was just a struggle for us to get around. My fourth one, just to have a little fun. I call the fourth one Surfer Boy Pizza. And what I put as a prompt on this one was, where did we bring the chill? Where did we bring the creative spin to a tough solution during the sprint? So here I'm wanting to celebrate good things, right? And I'm asking that in a funny way. So it brings some humor to it, puts them in a better mood, and also gets them to think along a maybe a little bit of a different line in this area to think, all right, well, what do we get really creative about? What do we have to be really creative about in this sprint? What kind of tough solutions did we really conquer? Did we really nail in this sprint? And I'm just theming around that loose theme of that surfer boy pizza from the last season. And then the last one, I couldn't have categories here without mentioning Hellfire Club. So the last one was Hellfire Club. And the prompt I put for it was, where could we bring more of kind of that Hellfire Club vibe, planning, teamwork, shared adventure, right? Just the fun. Where could we put more of that vibe into our team and to how we operate? Now, this is getting them to think about something that might otherwise be a little bit of a uncomfortable thing to think about, right? Because Now we're getting into interpersonal dynamics. We're getting into how the team actually works and fits together. And that's why I chose this theme, because I wanted it to be just kind of a, even maybe a sneaky back doorway of getting their brains to start to examine, yeah, what would have made this more fun? Or what would have made this, how could we have, I've asked often in retrospectives, what would it take for us to be the team that everyone else wishes they were on? Well, That's what I'm asking here, essentially. So I've got my five themes. And I even then went forward and created and kind of get some images for each one of those, like icons for each one of those things. Just created a board and mural for this and put each of those things up. Had a big block space next to each one where people could put Post-it notes. So what I would do here in the retrospective is I'd introduce this. I'd give them the prompts for each of the section and say, all right, let's take a few minutes. Everyone can add Post-its to any of these sections, but try to think through several of them and put several of them up here on the screen or physical board if we're in the same space. But take a few moments here to think through each category and see if there's anything that you can think of that you would add to each area. So we take, I don't know, five, 10 minutes to do that. normally time that, I just see when it starts to slow down. And there's generally a point there where you can kind of intuitively feel it and feel like, you know, the group's ready to move on. So whenever that time comes, I'll call a halt to it and I'll say, all right, now that we've done this, I want us to try to narrow down what's on the board. So let's give you each three votes. And I do this usually with dot voting or something along that line. where they have three dots they can place on three different sticky notes across all five categories. And what I tell them is find the three that are the most important of all the things here, what are the three that are most important and put your vote on those top three. And by doing this, having the team vote on it, then we surface the most important three out of the entire group, right? It's not to say we ignore the others, but we're going to try, we can't focus on everything in our time that we have. So, whether our top three, and then I start with the first one, right? So right now, all we've done is kind of the introduction of the sprint. We've done a transparency section. Now we move into the inspection. Now there's lots of different things you can do here, but what I put together for this retrospective was taking them through sort of a five whys activity. So I would take that first one, I'd have them examine it and look at it and say, all right, let's ask the question why five times for this one. Why did this happen? whatever they answer, then we say, all right, well, why did that happen then? And we ask why, it doesn't have to technically be five times, but you need to ask it enough to where you get down to something that you can say, yeah, that's definitely the root cause, right? That's what's underneath all this. All that followed it, all that came afterwards was all stuff that came as a result of us making that decision. So once we have our root cause, we can repeat that again for the other two. if we have time, but if we're starting to run out of time, I kind of watch my time box there. And once I realize we need to move into solutioning, then we'll move on into the adaptation portion. In adaptation, we just take each single one, and we kind of repeat this process of getting possible answers across the team. So for the number one issue that you guys identified, here's our root cause. Let's take some post-its here. or let's take some suggestions of what we might possibly do to counteract this in the next sprint. So we get those things that come up. Then we'll talk through each one, and we'll try to build consensus as a team as to the most important step to take. So for each item, I want what's the one most important thing to do. So we'll identify that, again, as time allows, I want to at least do the most important thing. If we have time for more than that, great, we'll get to the second and third. But I think it's so important to just, whatever the biggest, most important thing is, make sure you have an action item for that thing. And here's where I just caution you. It doesn't have to be, hey, we've knocked it out. We've cleared it. We've solved it in the next sprint. It just has to be that we've taken a step towards solving it, right? What's the old phrase, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Well, the same thing goes for our teams. And this is oftentimes why teams get stuck, is they just feel paralyzed. Hey, there's nothing we can do about this. It's such a huge issue. Well, that's not true. What's the next step you can take? So take the next step. Make sure that the team understands what it is. And make sure we understand who is going to be responsible for that. And do that for as many as you can get through. Then get to the closing the retrospective part of it. Kind of wrap up. Remind them, here's the journey we've taken, here's what we've uncovered, and here's what we're gonna do differently for next time. And now those items, they should go straight into your next sprint backlog, not product backlog, sprint backlog, right? They don't need to be prioritized because the product owner has been with you, they should have been with you in this meeting, it's the entire Scrum team. So the product owner has weighed in as well. This has been a team collective decision. So now those items should go into your sprint backlog, and you should do something about them in this next sprint. That's the whole concept of the Kaizen comes first, right? The good change should happen before we do anything else so we can get the benefit of it over a longer period of time. So that's kind of the idea here. And I wanted to give you that kind of really quick flyby to help you kind of see how to go about doing something like this, right? And I just picked one theme. I just picked Stranger Things because I thought it would be fun to work on. I thought it would be a fun kind of theme. And it might be fun for a team I was working with. But maybe that's not something that aligns to your team. Maybe your team has a bunch of people who are really into cricket. Well, do a cricket-themed one. Maybe you have a team that's around the Academy Awards time. And everyone's talking about, and now people don't do this as much anymore, but. Maybe they're all talking about who's going to Oscars this year or something. Well, do an Oscar-themed one. Or it can be around anything. Do it around award shows in general. It doesn't have to be just Oscars, but do it around any kind of award show. And you can pick up different themes. Again, if you're stuck, ask your favorite large language model and see what it comes up with. It's not all going to be gems that comes from that, but you can pick and choose and refine it, which is exactly what I did with my five themes for this. So I hope you see how easy it is to do that. It doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to be extremely creative to do this. You can make use of the tools that you have available to you. And as a Scrum Master, you can keep this fresh. You can tailor this to the team that you have. What is your team really into? What's the theme that they would really resonate with? Choose that. Go with that. Create a theme around that and see what they think about it. Afterwards, ask them, hey, did this work all right? Did you like this? I hope that's been useful to you. If you like this and you want to hear more like this, come to our website to mountngoatsoftware.com and check out our courses that we're launching actually this week, Better Retrospectives and the Retrospective Repair Guide. Those are the two that we really want to have you kind of think about. Come to our site, find out more about them. Better Retrospectives is all about just the expert level retrospectives course really gets into the heart of a lot of these issues at a very, very deep level. The retrospectives repair guide is taking the 10 most asked questions that we have about retrospectives at Mountain Goat Software and giving you really deep dives on how to solution those, how to problem solve those top 10 issues. And the great news for you is if you're listening to this in real time, right, when we've launched this, We're launching this as a two-for-one special. We'll not have that special again. So it's $99 that you get both of those courses. You don't have to pick and choose from them. You can give $99. They're prerecorded. You can watch them at your own pace. This is for people who want this knowledge, who want these answers. And I know when I was a Scrum Master starting out, there was a lot of, I followed a kind of the pattern that Mike established with his sprint repair guide. I bought that when I was coming up as a scrum master because I needed answers to some of the questions that he had in that scrum repair guide. Well, take a look at the 10 that we have for our retrospective repair guide. Maybe you'll find one of those things that's really tripping you up and maybe just getting the answer to one of those is going to be worth the money for you. I encourage you to go to our site, check it out. Don't miss this. It's a limited time cart that's opened. It's only going to be open for a week. So if you're listening to this when we launch it, don't delay, don't wait until next week. If you hear this next week, then you're running out of time. So make sure that you take advantage of the time that you have here so that you can get these two courses, two for the price of one here at our launch. Again, we won't do that again. So I hope you found this to be useful. It's just a little taste of the kind of thing that's in those courses for you. And if retrospectives are something that you're struggling with, or if retrospectives are something that you just feel like, man, it really could be more. It really could deliver more for my team. Check out these two courses. I really think they're gonna help a lot of teams out there. That's why we put them together. So that'll wrap it up. I hope you've enjoyed this and we'll talk to you next time. on another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.

We're in a season of disruption—political shifts, evolving policies, contracting delays, and social tensions are impacting how business gets done, especially in the federal space. If you're a small business owner or leader trying to make sense of how to stay relevant—or just stay open—you're not alone.In this episode, we're unpacking how to navigate the high-stakes environment of public sector contracting when the rules seem to keep changing. We'll explore how policy, politics, and procurement slowdowns intersect with real-world business survival.Then, we'll shift gears and talk about tangible strategies to pivot smartly—without losing your footing. Whether you're repositioning your offers, realigning with a new customer, or expanding to commercial markets, this conversation is your guide to pivoting with power, not panic.Guest Bio:Shaun Edens founded Lucky Rabbit in 2020 and has since led its growth into a trusted digital modernization partner for agencies like USCIS, OPM, CMS, GSA, and ED, as well as commercial clients like CrabPlace.com. With a background in senior roles at firms including CTEC, TechFlow, Enlightened, and Booz Allen Hamilton, he brings deep expertise in agile transformation, cloud migration, DevSecOps, and enterprise architecture.Shaun holds an MBA from the University of Illinois and a B.S. in Computer Science from Morehouse College. He's certified in SAFe, Scrum, Product Ownership, and AWS, and skilled in tools like ReactJS, Go, Python, and CI/CD pipelines. Focused on innovation and transparency, Shaun continues to lead Lucky Rabbit in delivering human-centered, secure digital solutions that drive real impact.Call(s) to Action:Help spread the word about Unveiled: GovCon Stories: https://shows.acast.com/unveiled-govcon-storiesDo you want to be a guest or recommend a topic that you would like to learn or hear about on the podcast? Let us know through our guest feedback and registration form.Links:Lucky RabbitLucky Rabbit BlueTechFollow Lucky Rabbit on LinkedInSponsors:The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests, and do not reflect the views or endorsements of our sponsors.Withum – Diamond Sponsor!Withum is a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm, helping clients to be in a position of strength in today's complex business environment. Go to Withum's website to learn more about how they can help your business! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Digital CS consultant Holly Goodliffe joins the Digital CX podcast to share her journey from the nonprofit world to tech leadership and discuss the evolving role of digital CS in complex, stakeholder-rich environments. She and Alex explore how simplifying digital engagement, deploying timely CTAs, and adopting a Scrum mindset can empower teams to drive smarter, scalable customer experiences.Chapters:Complexity, stakeholders, and collaboration  Navigating toes and turf wars  Building trust through shared strategy  Key traits of successful digital leaders  What Holly's clients are asking for now  Digital doesn't have to be daunting  Spotify Wrapped vibes for B2B  The data dilemma and simple starts  Omnichannel kindergarten vs. strategy  The art of simple, timely CTAs  Scrum mindset for digital execution  Staying smart with content and courage  Enjoy! I know I sure did…Holly's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollygoodliffe/ Thank you to our sponsor, QueryPal!QueryPal is an incredible platform for support leaders who want to optimize their operations! Support the show+++++++++++++++++Like/Subscribe/Review:If you are getting value from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review. Website:For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com. Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcspThank you for all of your support!The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

Tony Squires is joined by Nathan Hindmarsh, Wade Graham, and Brent Read on Triple M Saturday Scrum as they put their heads together to discuss the weekend of footy so far. The boys break down just how important Latrell Mitchell’s presence is for Souths in a brave win, whether or not the short trip down the M4 is too much for Penrith fans to make, and is the high tackle “reset” getting it right? Plus Believe It Or Not returns, Tony’s Quiz, and the team talk about where Perth’s future NRL bid lies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tony Squires is joined by Nathan Hindmarsh, Wade Graham, and Brent Read on Triple M Saturday Scrum as they put their heads together to discuss the weekend of footy so far. The boys break down just how important Latrell Mitchell’s presence is for Souths in a brave win, whether or not the short trip down the M4 is too much for Penrith fans to make, and is the high tackle “reset” getting it right? Plus Believe It Or Not returns, Tony’s Quiz, and the team talk about where Perth’s future NRL bid lies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zvonimir Durcevic: How Feedback Transforms Product Owners Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Embracing Feedback and Adapting Over Time  Zvonimir shares his experience with a Product Owner who demonstrated exceptional growth over a two-year period. What made this PO stand out was their willingness to receive feedback from the team and adjust their behavior accordingly. When the team expressed difficulty accessing the PO for questions and early feedback, the PO responded by rearranging their schedule to sit near the team part-time. Zvone emphasizes how these incremental changes, driven by openness to feedback, transformed this person into an exemplary Product Owner. The key insight: great Product Owners honor past practices while embracing necessary changes for the future. Self-reflection Question: How might your willingness (or reluctance) to accept feedback be affecting your development as a Product Owner? The Bad Product Owner: The Reluctant Subject Matter Expert In this segment, Zvonimir describes working with a Subject Matter Expert who was assigned the Product Owner role despite not wanting the responsibility. While this person excelled at documenting requirements from their extensive knowledge, they resisted taking on core PO duties. The organization assigned them the role but didn't push for proper adoption of responsibilities. Consequently, the team and Scrum Master were forced to assume PO duties to fill the gap. Although this arrangement functioned temporarily thanks to the team's capabilities and the SME's knowledge, it created an unsustainable situation where role accountability was unclear. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Zvonimir Durcevic: The Solution-Focused Retrospective for Agile Teams, Turning Problems Into Goals Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Zvonimir defines Scrum Master success as being explicit and intentional about defining and achieving goals. He references Richard Hackmann's model of team effectiveness as a framework to evaluate whether he's helping teams become truly effective. For Zvone, success comes from creating structures that provide teams with feedback about their performance and being explicit about the team's purpose through practices like chartering. By focusing on these elements, Scrum Masters can help teams build the foundation for sustainable success. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Problems Are Disguised Goals This solution-focused retrospective format, inspired by the work of Ralph Miata and Veronika Jungwirth, allows teams to briefly acknowledge problems before pivoting quickly to what they want to achieve instead. Zvonimir explains that while teams need space to express challenges, the format redirects energy toward envisioning a better future through solution-focused questions. The process includes validating problems, using scale questions (0-10) to assess current status, reviewing past attempts at reaching goals, and designing small experiments to move toward desired outcomes. This approach helps teams shift from problem-orientation to goal-orientation. Self-reflection Question: How might reframing your team's persistent problems as goals change your approach to addressing them? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

James Graham, Wade Graham & Anthony Maroon are in to talk the sin bin crackdown, preview the round, Wade defends the Sharks, the boys fire up over the Origin debate & we talk Latrell's move to the centres! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast,  host Dave West and Yuval Yeret, Professional Scrum Trainer and SAFe Fellow explore how the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) can enhance the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). They discuss the shift from a rigid "feature factory" approach to a dynamic "lab" environment that fosters experimentation and value discovery. Yuval highlights the need to evolve SAFe to better support product-oriented organizations, highlighting practical steps like the Portfolio Agility Trail Map. Tune in to learn how SAFe and APOM can work together and other considerations.

James Graham, Wade Graham & Anthony Maroon are in to talk the sin bin crackdown, preview the round, Wade defends the Sharks, the boys fire up over the Origin debate & we talk Latrell's move to the centres! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zvonimir Durcevic: From Command to Collaboration, An Agile Leadership Team's Transformation Story Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. In this episode, Zvonimir discusses his experience supporting a leadership team transitioning from a traditional command-and-control management style to a more collaborative approach involving people in change decisions. Drawing from EDGE Theory of Change (based on Arnold Mendel's work) and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) training, Zvone helped the leadership team understand what awaited them on the "other side" of this transformation. Through multiple half-day coaching sessions, he guided them in defining their new leadership identity and developing self-reflection skills. A critical element of this work was creating a conflict protocol that allowed leaders to discuss different perspectives constructively. Zvone emphasizes the importance of helping teams create a "third identity" – a new collective self that emerges through transformation. Self-reflection Question: What elements of your current leadership identity would you need to let go of to embrace a more collaborative approach to change? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

What do Spotify, Google Meet, and your expense report tool have in common? They could all delight your users—if you design for more than just function. In this episode, Dr. Nesrine Changuel breaks down the emotional motivators that transform average products into unforgettable ones. Overview What separates a good product from a great one? According to Dr. Nesrine Changuel, it's not just meeting functional needs—it's creating emotional delight. In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Nesrine, a former product leader at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft, to explore how emotional connection is the secret sauce behind the world’s most beloved products. They dive into Nesrine’s “Delight Framework,” reveal how seemingly mundane tools (like time-tracking software or toothbrush apps!) can create joy, and explain why delight isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a competitive edge. Whether you're a product owner, product manager, or just want to build better user experiences, this episode will change how you think about your backlog forever. References and resources mentioned in the show: Dr. Nesrine Changuel Product Delight by Dr. Nesrine Changuel Blog: What is a Product? by Mike Cohn #116: Turning Weird User Actions into Big Wins with Gojko Adzic #124: How to Avoid Common Product Team Pitfalls with David Pereira 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. Dr. Nesrine Changuel is a product coach, advisor, and speaker with over a decade of senior product management experience at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft, where she led major consumer products like Chrome, Meet, Spotify, and Skype. She holds a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Media Processing and Telecommunications and is based in Paris. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and today I have a very special guest with me. I have Dr. Nesrine Changuel with me. Welcome in Nesrine. Nesrine (00:14) Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. Brian Milner (00:16) I'm very excited to have Nesreen with us. I think this is going to be a really, really great episode for all of you product owners out there or product specialists, anybody who works in the product area. I think you're going to find this really interesting and you're going to want to bookmark this one. Maybe even come back to this a little bit. Nesreen is a coach, a speaker, particularly in the product area. She has previously worked at Google. She's worked at Spotify, at Microsoft, so no stranger to large enterprise, very high profile products that she's worked on in the past. She has a book coming out in May, so look for this book. It's called Product Delight. And that's really what we're going to be focusing on here is the concept of eliciting or generating kind of an emotional response to our product. I guess I'll start by, did you stumble upon this? What drew your interest to people's emotional response to products? Nesrine (01:19) Yes, so maybe I can share the story how I came to this topic and how I became so vocal about it. So in addition to being a product manager and leader over the last decade, I was always and I always enjoyed being a speaker. So I always wanted to go on stage and share insight. This is probably coming from my research background, because when I used to be a researcher, I traveled the world to go and present my research work and When I became a product manager, I kept this habit with me. So I always been on stage and I spoke about different topics like product discovery, product operation, different topics. Until one day I got reached out by a conference organizer and he said, Hey, Nisri, we want you on stage, but we have an idea for a topic for you. I'm not that used. Usually I come up with idea myself, but I said, okay, what do want me to talk about? And he said, Hey, Nusreen, you have been working for Spotify, for Microsoft, for Google Chrome and Google Meet, and we all admire those products and we consider them very successful products. What if you come and tell us what's the common thing that probably is there any common thing that made those products successful? Being an insider, being within those company, could you share with us something that you consider in common between those products? To be honest with you, I found it challenging at the same time interesting as an exercise. I was not, by the way, able at that time to answer the question, what's in common? So I sat down and I did the exercise myself and I started to think what was really in common? What made Skype Skype? What made Spotify Spotify and those Google products so successful? And I came to the following conclusion. I found that what made those products so successful is that they don't only solve for functional needs, but they also solve for emotional needs. So when we use a particular product, we use it for a certain functional need, but we also use it for an emotional need. And without even knowing that I have been doing it for more than 12 years, I came to the conclusion that, my God, during all those years, I have been focusing so much into users need from both angle, functional and emotional. So I came on stage and I spoke about that topic and from that day, I started to give it a name. I'm calling it emotional connection. I'm calling it product delight. And I'm here to share more about it as well. Brian Milner (03:50) That's awesome, yeah. I mean, I think we do hear a lot and we focus a lot on that functional kind of need, the way you differentiate there. think that's a good differentiation, functional and emotional kind of needs or motivators there. yeah, I mean, I've always heard, know, kind of that kind of general product advice is, you know, find the things that... people really, really have as huge needs, the things they would pay someone to do for them. And that's the key to success is finding those huge needs. But we're actually going beyond that to say, yeah, those are important. It's not to say that we should skip that, but it's when there's the emotional connection to a feature or to something that we do that really the light bulb kind of comes on for our customers. Is that kind of what your research is leading to? Nesrine (04:40) you're getting it right. Don't get me wrong. Of course you have to honor the functional needs and serve the functional feature, but the delight or the emotional connection happens when you go beyond exactly how you said it. Let me explain. If you serve only functional needs, you know what you get? You get satisfied users because they are asking for something and they are satisfied about what they are receiving. Now, Brian Milner (04:41) Okay, okay. Haha. Nesrine (05:05) If you surprise them by going beyond, by anticipating their need, by exceeding their expectation, you're not only satisfying them, you're surprising them in a positive way and delight is the combination of surprise and joy. Actually, the theoretical definition of delight is a combination of two emotions, surprise and joy. So going beyond, anticipate need and exceed expectation. is what we should aim for in addition to the functional needs. Brian Milner (05:35) That's awesome. Yeah, I use this example sometimes in, we use this example in the agile world to talk about, you know, the part of the agile manifesto that says customer collaboration over contract negotiation. And, you know, there's an example I use from my past where I used to work at a company that was very contract driven. And, you know, the thing that I always used to kind of take away from that was the very best we could ever do or hope to do. was to meet our customers' expectations. We could never, ever exceed it because we were only doing exactly what they told us to do. So I think this is a really important distinction here to make that just meeting the customer's needs, just meeting the minimal customer satisfaction bar, that's not going to keep you with loyal customers. That's not going to have repeat customers, or they're not going to tell their friends about, you know. That product did exactly what I hoped it would do. But it didn't really surprise me. It didn't really go beyond that. I know you talked about, because I've read your blog and a little bit of the discussion about this. So I know you talk about in the blog kind of the connection to Kano analysis. And I've always thought that's a really great way to try to determine things to target and go after. So talk to us a little bit about that, about Kano analysis and kind of what that uncovers and how that connects to what your research has shown. Nesrine (06:51) Yes. I love Kano by the way. I, I mean, that's one of the framework I have been considering throughout most of my product career. But this framework comes with a limitation and let me explain. So first of all, for those who are not very familiar with Kano, Kano is a visualization or categorization, let's call it. It's a categorization framework that allows to categorize features among different categories. One of them is must have. So these are the things that absolutely have to be in the product. Other that are performances, which are the more you have, the more satisfied users are, the less they less satisfied they are. And of course there are the delighters and delighters are those feature that when they are in the product, users are surprisingly happy. And when they are not, are not even the satisfaction is not even impacted. So the limitation of Kano is that it doesn't tell you how to achieve delight. Let me explain. I think we live in a world that everyone agree that we should delight our users. I mean, this, this concept is now globalized and everyone is talking about delighting users. The issue is that we don't know how to delight them. So we know category, there's a category that called delight, but we don't know how to. So the, the framework that I'm introducing and I'm calling it the delight framework is the framework that allows to first identify. So it's usually, represented into three steps. The first step is to start by identifying the emotional and functional motivators. So let me give you an example. I've been working at Spotify for about four years and as a Spotify user, imagine yourself, you are a Spotify user. You do have, of course, functional motivators. What could be the functional motivators? Listening to music, listening to podcasts, maybe listening to an audiobook. So all those are functional motivators. Now, what could be the emotional motivators as a Spotify user? It could be feeling less lonely. It could be feeling more productive because when you're working you need to listen to something. It could be about changing your mood. It could be about feeling connected. So all those are emotional motivators that drive users to use a product like Spotify. So what I encourage every product manager or every product team to do at first is to dig into identifying, of course, the functional need. And everyone is good, by the way, in identifying the functional needs. But also, while doing that exercise, pay attention to what could be the emotional motivators. So that's step number one is about listing the functional and the emotional motivators. Once you have those, Now we get to the second part of the framework, which is look at your backlog. And I guess you have a very busy backlog and take those features one by one and see for this particular feature, which motivator am I solving for among the functional ones and among the emotional ones as well. So the delight grid, for example, is a visualization tool that I came and created in order to allow product teams to visualize their backlog and see how many of my features are only solving for functional motivators. In that case, we call that category low delight. How many of my features are only solving for emotional motivators? These are very rare, but the best example I would call is, for example, I'm having an Apple watch and one month ago it was New Year Eve and at midnight I get fireworks popping out of my Brian Milner (10:35) Ha Nesrine (10:36) Apple watch and it was a happy new year there's nothing functional in there but it's all about creating some smile I call this surface delight and then how many of your features are solving for both functional and emotional motivators and I call this deep delight so maybe I deviated a bit from your question compared to canoe but it's actually about adding this dimension of connecting features to the real motivators of the users. Brian Milner (11:07) No, maybe a little bit, but you connected it to where we end up going anyway. So I think that's a great connection there. And by the way, for anyone listening, we'll link to all of this so that you can find this and follow up. But I like that differentiation between surface delight and deep delight. I know some of the examples that I've heard used kind of frequently in looking at Kano analysis and kind of trying to find those delighters. And that is kind of the area that it specifies there in Canoe, right? You're trying to find those things that are not expected, but when people find that they're there, they like that it's there, but they don't expect it's there. So if it's not there, there's no negative response that it's not there, but there's a positive response if it's there because they like seeing it. And my boss, Mike Cohn, tells this story about this Nesrine (11:59) Yes. Brian Milner (12:03) There's a hotel in California that became famous because at the pool, they have a phone that's by the pool that's the Popsicle Hotline. And you can pick up the phone and you can order a Popsicle to be brought to the pool. And it's the kind of thing where you're not going to go search for a hotel. Does this hotel have a Popsicle Hotline? I'm only going to stay at hotels with Popsicle Hotlines. It's not that kind of a normal feature. It's a delight feature because when you see it and you find out it's there, it's like, that's really cool. And it can be the kind of thing that says, yeah, I want to search that hotel out again next time I'm in this area because I really thought that was a nice little attention to detail and it was fun. But I think what I'm hearing from you is that might be more of what we would classify as a surface delight. It's not really meeting a deep need. Nesrine (12:35) Yes. Brian Milner (12:56) But it's fun, it's exciting, it's not expected, but it doesn't really cross that threshold into, but it also meets kind of functional delights. Is that kind of what you're saying there? Okay. Okay. Nesrine (13:08) Yes, actually I heard about that hotel story just to tell you how much viral it went. It came to me. So actually you get it correct that I consider that as surface delight and I have nothing against by the way, surface delight. You can add surface delight. The issue is you can end up doing only surface delight and that's not enough. So the idea is to do a combination and I do have two stories to share with you just to compliment on this hotel story. One is personal and one is professional. Brian Milner (13:21) Yeah. Okay. Nesrine (13:37) The personal one just happened to me a month ago. I went to Sweden and I went to Stockholm. That's where I worked for eight years. And I went there for business and I decided to meet some friends and some ex-colleagues. So we all gathered and went to a restaurant, a very nice restaurant in Sweden. And came the time where we had to say goodbye and to pay. And I guess you can feel it immediately when it's about paying and we are a large group and you start to get that anxiety about who's paying what and what did I order? What did I drink? What? I mean, I honestly hate that moment, especially in a large group where you don't necessarily have a lot of affinity with us. Like, should we split in 10? Should we pay each one paying its piece anyway? So that was a moment of frustration, of anxiety. Brian Milner (14:09) right. Yeah. Nesrine (14:28) And I loved how the restaurant solved it for it. You know how they solve for it? I mean, maybe it exists in the U.S., but for me, that's something I never seen before. The waiter came with a QR code on a piece of paper and you scan the QR code. And when you scan your QR code, you get the list of items that got purchased by the table. And all you have is to pick, and that happens automatically real time. Everyone is picking at the same time. You pick the things from the list and you pay. for the things that you order. You can even tip on the bottom. You can give feedback. Everything happened on that QR code. And you can guess how much that anxiety could be removed. So that's the personal story I wanted to share. The second story, which is more professional, I want to share how we try to improve experience at Google Chrome. So I've been the product manager at Google Chrome. Brian Milner (15:13) Yeah. Nesrine (15:25) And we started from the observation that people do have plenty of open tabs. I guess you are one of them, especially on mobile. Like on mobile, you go and check how many open tabs you do have on Chrome and you realize that they are have, we realized at least out of numbers, out of data that people do have plenty of open tabs. So it started as Brian Milner (15:32) You Nesrine (15:47) technical issue. Of course, the more tab you have, the heavier the app is, the slower the app could be, et cetera. So we wanted to reduce the number of unnecessary open tabs in Chrome. So we interviewed users and we started to check with them, why do they even leave their tabs open? So some of them leave tabs because they consider them as a reminder. I mean, if tab is open, it means that you need to finish a task there. Some people really leave tabs just for ignorance. mean, they moved from a tab to another and they completely forget about them. Actually, we realized that the fact of leaving tab open, the reason for leaving tab could be completely different from a person to another. And the other interesting observation, and when I say identify emotional motivators, you will realize that people feel a bit ashamed when they show to us that they do have plenty of open tabs. Some of them would say, sorry, I usually don't even have so many open tabs. It's only now. And I'm like, it's okay. But the point is, if you have this mindset of trying to track the emotional insight from your users, you will take note. And the note was anxiety, feeling ashamed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that was in introduction for in... Brian Milner (16:42) You Yeah, right. Nesrine (17:04) improving the tab management experience later on in Chrome. Brian Milner (17:07) That's actually a really good parallel, though. I think that's a good example because it reminds me, too, even going back, I remember one of the things, and I'm going way back here, but I remember one of the things about Gmail that was kind of a selling point initially was the concept there of you don't have to worry about maintaining an inbox. keep all your mails and search. And you can search through your mails and find whatever it is. And I remember prior to that, most people would use something like Outlook or something like that to have their mail, there was always this constant struggle of, I've got to keep it down. I've got to delete things. I've got to categorize things. And Google had this different approach of, don't worry about it. Just leave it. And that's a good, I think, example as well of kind of that emotional response of, Nesrine (17:48) Yes. Brian Milner (17:56) Gosh, I'm kind of anxious. I feel bad that my inbox is so big. And I know that's bad, but Google comes along and says, don't worry about it. You're not bad. It's OK. Yeah. Nesrine (18:05) Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I think Gmail is filled with plenty of deep delight features. One of them I can quickly highlight is, you know, when you send an email, we're saying attached file and the file is not there. And when you try to hit send, you get that pop up like a be careful or like a mind, there is no attached file inside. These are for me like very attached to the fact that You don't want to feel ashamed. You don't want to look stupid later on saying, Hey, sorry, I forgot the file. Here's the file. That's, that's a great example. And the other example that come to mind again in Gmail, you know, that smart compose when you're trying to answer an email and you can just hit tab, tab, tab to complete the sentence. I mean, the functional need is to write an email. The emotional need is to get it in a relaxed way. And the combination would allow for something like. Brian Milner (18:49) Yeah. Nesrine (19:00) Smart Compose. Brian Milner (19:01) That's awesome. Yeah, so I guess that leads to the question though, when we're talking about something like Spotify, mean, music intrinsically is emotional anyway, right? It's something that you have an emotional connection to and you feel a certain way when you hear music. But if my product is a, I don't know, expense reporting software, right? Nesrine (19:23) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (19:25) I can just hear people out there kind of asking, know, and kind of thinking to themselves, yeah, but my product, right, my product is not that kind of, it doesn't elicit that kind of emotional response in people the same way music would. So does this apply to me as well? So how would you answer those people who feel like my products might be a little bit more bland or boring and don't really intrinsically have an emotional connection to them? Nesrine (19:47) Mm-hmm. So my answer is that if your product is boring, then it's even more priority now to focus on emotional connection. But let me elaborate. So that's one of the reflections that came to my mind while writing the book. So while writing the book, I wanted the book to be a storytelling book. So I was writing a lot of my stories, stories from Skype at the time, Spotify and all the Google product. But at some point I said, hey, hey, Nisreen, you need to get more insight from other people and other experiences. So I get to interview product leaders from completely different industries and completely different domain. I interviewed leaders from B2B like Atlassian or Intuit and so many other companies that I don't have so much insight from. I even interviewed people from hardware, like I interviewed someone from Dyson and I was, hey, what makes Dyson so emotionally attractive for me? Cause I love my Dyson vacuum cleaner. But let me get to your point because when I interviewed someone from Intuit, that person told me something super interesting. She told me that at some point she was working at a tool called Tsheet. And Tsheet is a tool that allows you to enter your time report. There is nothing more boring than that. I think I'm picking the one that you're looking for here because it's, it's as a user. The only reason I would use this tool is to report my time so I can get paid. Brian Milner (21:06) Hmm. Right. Yeah. Nesrine (21:19) There is nothing exciting, nothing emotional. And what I got out of that product leader who used to be the head of product at the time, she told me that they were completely aware about the fact that the product is not that attractive. And instead of living with that observation, they did all what they could do to make it even more attractive. So they added some fun. They made the messaging less aggressive and less about enter your time. report but rather into more playful and even the images are more playful. When you press the enter time report you get the congratulation and some confetti if needed. So they explicitly turned and that's a strategy. They turned that boring moment into something even more attractive and they had to do that otherwise the experience will keep on becoming more more boring and the perception of users toward the product will be even less, more and more gray, I would say. Brian Milner (22:22) Yeah, yeah, just that little dopamine kind of kick, right? Just that little bit of chemical reaction in your brain can make a huge difference. That's awesome. That's a great story and a great answer to that question. So I'm curious, we're talking about trying to find these things and trying to see, your matrix here, it thinks about the emotional motivators, the functional motivators, and trying to find those things that kind of cross both planes. Nesrine (22:24) Yep. Brian Milner (22:52) How do you verify at the end? Because if you're lining your features up and think, I think this solves this emotional thing. I think this solves this functional thing. Is there a way to follow up to ensure that it actually is doing that? How do you follow up to make sure it's really doing what you thought it would do? Nesrine (23:09) Yes, so let's imagine you did the exercise well, you filled in the delight grade and you observed that you do have plenty of low delights, which is most of the cases by the way. The very first thing I recommend is to see opportunities for moving or transforming these features into deep delight. And in the book, for example, I talk about the nine delighters. Nine delighters are ways that could be sometimes cheap even to introduce. in order to make those low delight features into more deep delight. This could be, for example, through personalization. We love when the features are personalized, and that's one of the reasons, for example, why Spotify is so successful, is through features like Discover Weekly or RAPT or these kinds of super personalization related features. It could be through seasonality. That's, for me, the cheapest and the most delightful feature you can or aspect of feature you can add to your product. So for example, when I worked at Google Meet, I've been working at the background replace features. So we have been, of course, introducing static image. We have been introducing video backgrounds as well. But from time to time, we always use seasonality to introduce what we call seasonal background. So when it's Easter, we introduce Easter background. When it's Christmas, we introduce Christmas background. Guess what? Even like for Olympic game, we introduce Olympic game background. When it's the Earth Day, we introduced Earth Day background. So there is always an opportunity to introduce some seasonality to the product. And guess what? We relate to those, especially if the product is global. We relate like last, when was it? Like last Wednesday. It was the new year, the Chinese new year. And I was checking when is exactly the exact date for the new year, the Chinese new day. And I put that and you know what happened in Chrome? It got these dragons and those like the celebration within the product, like within Chrome. These of course are surface delight, but you know what? Why not? You see? So there are some tools. Some of them are not that... Brian Milner (25:17) Right. Nesrine (25:22) expensive to introduce to the product. Some would require a bit more thoughtful and thought into it, but there are ways that I detail in the book in order to introduce more delight. And then if you want to validate through metrics, and I guess that's your question where it's heading to, then the good news, and that's something that I discovered recently because there's been a study that was conducted by McKinsey. And you know what they studied? They studied the impact of emotional connection on product adoption. So they actually studied over, I don't know how many industries die, like tourism, IT, energy, whatever. And they interviewed more than 100,000 users or whatever. So the conclusion that they found out of that very interesting study is that emotionally connected users will get you more twice as more revenue, twice as more referral, and twice as more retention compared to satisfied users. I'm not talking about the non-satisfied. So if you take two groups of users, those that you satisfy their needs and those that you go beyond and they are emotionally connected, those that are emotionally connected get you twice revenue, referral and retention. Brian Milner (26:19) Hmm. Nesrine (26:43) So this is just to highlight that for people who say, no, but this is the cherry on the top. This is just like the extra. It's not the extra, it's the way to stand out. I don't know any company that is standing out nowadays without investing into emotional connection, none. Brian Milner (26:54) Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah, I mean, the example that comes to my mind when you talked about seasonality and other things like that, know, I love my, you know, they're not a sponsor, Oral-B toothbrush, you know, the electronic toothbrush, and you know, there's an app with it and it keeps track of, you know, did you get all the areas of your teeth and did you hold it there long enough and... One of the things I always love about it is when it gets to December, the opening screen when you open up the app starts having snowfall. It's kind of a funny little emotional response, but you look at that and you think, that's cool. Yeah, it is kind of that season where now it's time to get ready for Christmas and it's that special. It's only this month that it's going to be like that. It's going to go away at the end of the month. Nesrine (27:45) Yes. Brian Milner (27:49) feel little sad when it's gone, it's back to normal. But it's such a silly little thing. Does that make any difference in really brushing my teeth at all? Does it change how well I brush my Not really. It's just a fun little thing that when it pops up there. And think how little that took from someone to do that. It's a little animation that they just pop up on a loading screen. But that little tiny bit, think, again, maybe a little bit surface. Nesrine (28:10) Yes. Brian Milner (28:16) but it takes something that would have been routine. It takes something that would have been kind of boring otherwise, and it just added a little bit of fun to it, you know? And I think you're right, that emotional connection is really, really important in situations like that, yeah. Nesrine (28:21) Yes. Yes. Yes, yeah. And the thing that I'm very vocal about nowadays is the fact that this emotional connection is actually not a new topic. It's something that has been extremely popular among marketers. For example, if you think about the best marketing campaign, they are all very emotional. The most successful marketing campaign are. If you think about designers, there are plenty of resources about emotional design. There is a great book by Don Norman. It was called emotional design. Aaron Walter as well wrote something called Designing for Emotion. But you know, the problem is that among engineers and among product manager, we don't talk that much about that. And you know what happened when we are not informed about this topic? There is a gap between the language of marketers, designers, and the engineers and product manager. And that gap doesn't allow things to succeed. I'm trying to educate the engineers and the product world towards this well-known domain outside of the product in order to have this consistency and start making real impactful products. Brian Milner (29:40) Yeah, yeah, this is such a really deep topic and it just encourages me, think, even more to recommend the book there. It's not out yet, time of this recording it's not out, but it's going to be in May of 2025. That's when this book is coming out. And I know it's gonna have a lot of really good information in it. Again, the book is gonna be called Product Delight. by Nesrine Changuel, Dr. Nesrine Changuel. I should make sure I say that. But I really appreciate you coming on because this is fascinating stuff. And I think the product managers, the product owners that are listening here are going to find this really fascinating. So I appreciate you sharing your time and your insights with us, Nesrine. Nesrine (30:26) Thank you, it's my pleasure. I love talking about this topic. Brian Milner (30:29) Ha

Zvonimir Durcevic: Context Diagramming, Helping Agile Teams See Their Complex Communication Network Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Zvonimir shares a story about a five-person team developing an important product who maintained good internal dynamics but limited their interaction with the rest of the organization. Despite delivering quality work, they were viewed as a "difficult team" by stakeholders. When Zvone joined, he conducted assessments and introduced context diagramming to map the team's relationships and dependencies. This exercise revealed the complexity of their communication network and helped the team understand that cutting off relationships with stakeholders was counterproductive. The breakthrough came when the team began using the context diagram to explain their situation to others, helping stakeholders recognize how organizational factors were affecting the team's work. Self-reflection Question: How might mapping your team's communication network reveal disconnects that are affecting your effectiveness? Featured Book of the Week: Agile Transformation by Michael Spayd Zvonimir recommends "Agile Transformation" by Michael Spayd as a resource that helped him understand how to examine systems through different lenses. The book provides multiple perspectives for gaining deeper insights into the systems we work with. Zvone particularly values the book's ability to help practitioners look beyond surface-level issues and understand underlying dynamics in organizations undergoing Agile transformations. In this section we talk about the Integral agile transformation framework. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I'm a manager on a Product team. I've been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don't think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanting to make my team accountable for performance. For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer. I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning. I'd like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career. Any thoughts on how to approach this? A listener named Mike asks, I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice' that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM's before and think it's dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it's a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?

Zvonimir Durcevic: Establishing Communication Channels, Lessons From a Scrum Master's Failure  Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. In this episode, Zvonimir shares a pivotal experience that shaped his approach as a Scrum Master. His team started strong with excellent stakeholder relationships, but gradually team members began missing refinement meetings as they took on more outside responsibilities. Despite conversations with management, the issue persisted, leading to a growing backlog that no one wanted to trim down. Zvone learned critical lessons about the importance of establishing clear working agreements with stakeholders and sponsors from the beginning. He emphasizes the need to create proper communication channels, as successful Agile work depends on reaching the right people when problems arise. Self-reflection Question: How might the communication agreements in your organization be contributing to your team's ability to focus on their work? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

It's not a moment – it's a movement. Women's sports teams from the WNBA to women's rugby teams are selling out games from coast to coast. Breakout stars like Olympian Ilona Maher, illustrious former collegiate turned pro players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, and celebrity-backed teams like Angel City Football Club are in the spotlight. So are women's professional sports teams FINALLY getting the recognition they deserve?

In this insightful exploration of the "big rocks" concept from Stephen Covey's work, Kate and Ryan discuss how breaking down large goals into manageable chunks applies to both leadership and Scrum teams.  Learn practical strategies for prioritization, sustainable work pace, and achieving meaningful results through strategic goal-setting.

Ryan Singer is one of the earliest employees and the former Head of Strategy at 37signals (the makers of Basecamp), where he spent nearly two decades refining a product development approach that helped the company build super-successful products with small teams. Based on these lessons, he wrote "Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters," and Ryan now works with companies of all sizes to them them escape the cycle of endless sprints, missed deadlines, and dragging projects.What you'll learn:1. Why traditional Agile and Scrum methods often lead teams into endless cycles of work without meaningful shipping milestones.2. The “appetite-driven” approach to product development where teams set fixed timeboxes (usually six weeks maximum) and vary the scope instead of expanding timelines.3. The exact process for running effective “shaping” sessions that collaboratively define projects before committing resources.4. Why most teams struggle with too little detail in their planning, not too much.5. Why a 30-to-50-person team size is the critical breaking point when growing startups need to adopt more structured processes.6. Practical techniques for bridging the engineering-design divide by bringing technical and product perspectives together earlier in the process.7. The powerful “breadboarding” and “fat marker sketching” techniques that help teams align on solutions without getting lost in high-fidelity details.8. The clear warning signs that your current development process is failing before it's too late to change course.9. Proven strategies to implement Shape Up methods, whether you're working in a startup or enterprise environment.10. A step-by-step approach to transitioning from Scrum to Shape Up by piloting the methodology with a single team before broader implementation.11. Why the PM role shifts upstream in Shape Up, focusing more on problem definition than project management.12. How to adapt Shape Up principles to your company's unique context, even if it's nothing like Basecamp.—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Merge—A single API to add hundreds of integrations into your app• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development—Where to find Ryan Singer:• X: https://x.com/rjs• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/feltpresence/• Website: https://www.ryansinger.co/• Course: https://www.ryansinger.co/srl/—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) Ryan's background(04:38) The origins of Shape Up(07:40) Implementing Shape Up in different companies(09:56) How Shape Up is different(19:02) The core elements of Shape Up(26:29) Shaping sessions and timeboxing(37:23) Flexible sprint planning(38:56) The output of a shaping session(46:57) Balancing detail and flexibility(53:50) A deep dive into shaping sessions(01:01:32) Fat marker sketches(01:02:48) Getting started using Shape Up(01:13:20) Signs it's time to try the Shape Up method(01:18:25) Feature factories(01:25:59) The role of the PM in Shape Up(01:28:26) What makes Basecamp unique(01:35:55) The second edition of the book(01:38:30) Linking product strategy and shaping(01:41:53) Conclusion and final thoughts—Referenced:• Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/• David Heinemeier Hansson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221/• Jason Fried on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fried/• Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/jason-fried-challenges-your-thinking• Des Traynor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/destraynor/• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/• The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-jtbd-bob-moesta• How to find work you love | Bob Moesta (Jobs-to-be-Done co-creator, author of “Job Moves”): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-find-work-you-love-bob-moesta• Scrum: https://www.scrum.org/• 37signals: https://37signals.com/• Jobs to Be Done Theory: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/—Recommended books:• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters: https://basecamp.com/shapeup• Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress: https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progress/dp/1544509987/• Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice: https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612/• Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career: https://www.amazon.com/Job-Moves-Making-Progress-Career/dp/0063283581—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 special episode, host Andy Cleff breaks explosive news about the Agile Uprising's hostile takeover of the entire agile establishment. Listen as he reveals how the community-driven coalition has acquired PMI, Agile Alliance, ISO, and Scrum.org in one fell swoop—and why their surprise acquisition of Cologuard might be the most disruptive move of all. Learn about the immediate changes to certification processes, the dramatic condensing of the Scrum Guide, and the coalition's "more than generous offer" to Scaled Agile. This episode will leave you either cheering for the revolution or checking your calendar.. how close to the 91st day of the year are we? The agile world will never be the same... or will it? About the Agile Uprising If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rating, or leave comments on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist  from  who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard,     to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our  We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a .  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail! Sound Effects and Image Credits Ch-Ching.wav by hgernhardt -- https://freesound.org/s/402651/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 Paper Shredder by aunrea -- https://freesound.org/s/495666/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Aha Agreement by kanyonwyvern -- https://freesound.org/s/713754/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 FX dramatic music.wav by v0idation -- https://freesound.org/s/115139/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Applause, huge, thunderous by peridactyloptrix -- https://freesound.org/s/196094/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 record scratch.wav by luffy -- https://freesound.org/s/3536/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 Ba-Dum-Tish#1.wav by Timbre -- https://freesound.org/s/84427/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 Ba-da-dum.wav by Simon_Lacelle -- https://freesound.org/s/37215/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 Beep warning by SamsterBirdies -- https://freesound.org/s/467882/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 another magic wand spell tinkle.flac by Timbre -- https://freesound.org/s/221683/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 another magic wand spell tinkle.flac by Timbre -- https://freesound.org/s/221683/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 Generic Interior Walla by brunoboselli -- https://freesound.org/s/757318/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 wah wah sad trombone.wav by kirbydx -- https://freesound.org/s/175409/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Party Pack, Balloons, Deflate, Moderate, 03-02.wav by InspectorJ -- https://freesound.org/s/484269/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 STORYENDING_02.wav by phantastonia -- https://freesound.org/s/617068/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 15.wav by adcbicycle -- https://freesound.org/s/13824/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 34-muchos papeles moviendose.wav by Tomycatts -- https://freesound.org/s/429340/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Human laughing - Various.wav by ThisIsMiniMe -- https://freesound.org/s/327396/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 FX wait 1.wav by v0idation -- https://freesound.org/s/115143/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Opening A Curtain.wav by EmilZendera98 -- https://freesound.org/s/446046/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 TaDa!.aif by jimhancock -- https://freesound.org/s/256128/ -- License: Creative Commons 0 Megaphone via Freepik.com  

RUGBY: Connacht scrum coach Cullie Tucker with Galway Bay FM's William Davies after their URC defeat to Munster

Anthony Maroon subs in this week to join Nathan Hindmarsh, Wade Graham, and Michael Chammas on Triple M Saturday Scrum.The boys dissect all the fallout from the Cherry-Evans news, just how poorly the Dolphins have started the NRL season and Rabbitohs strong start to the year and a big win over the Panthers makes Maroon one very happy man.Plus they chat in depth about the Ashes returning after 22 years, Believe It Or Not, and a very intense take on Tony’s Quiz.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marina Lazovic: Leadership Skills Make the Difference for Product Owners Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The PO as a Leader Marina identifies that while product skills are important, it's leadership abilities that truly distinguish exceptional Product Owners. Great POs demonstrate strong empathy and lead by example, creating an environment where the team feels supported. Marina emphasizes the importance of availability – outstanding Product Owners make themselves accessible to their teams when needed, establishing a presence that goes beyond just attending ceremonies. This leadership through presence and support fosters trust, enabling teams to approach challenges with confidence knowing their PO has their back. The Bad Product Owner: The PO Who Did Not Understand Their Team Marina describes a problematic pattern where Product Owners fail to understand their team's strengths and weaknesses. These POs lack awareness of team composition – not recognizing the balance between senior and junior members or understanding their specific challenges. This blindness leads to unrealistic expectations about what the team can accomplish in a sprint. Marina suggests addressing this by establishing regular sync meetings with the PO to discuss team dynamics and challenges. By helping Product Owners understand team composition, Scrum Masters can bridge this knowledge gap and foster more realistic planning and expectations. Self-reflection Question: How might you help a Product Owner better understand the unique composition and capabilities of your team without creating an adversarial dynamic? About Marina Lazovic Marina is a Scrum Master and Kanban Trainer from Belgrade, Serbia, with nearly a decade in the IT industry. Though not from a technical background, she is passionate about helping development teams and organizations optimize processes and build great products using Agile. She thrives on driving efficiency and fostering collaboration. You can link with Marina Lazovic on LinkedIn.

Marina Lazovic: Measuring Agile Team Success Through Stable Delivery Flow Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Marina reflects on how her understanding of Scrum Master success has evolved, noting that delivery optimization is an aspect she previously undervalued. For her, success means supporting teams to deliver in an optimal way with stable flow. She emphasizes that since software is built for users, delivery is the ultimate measure of value creation. Marina recommends discussing with teams what "delivery" actually means in their context and focusing on aspects within the team's control. She suggests using the "circle of influence" concept to define what constitutes delivery and to identify actionable improvement options during retrospectives. By concentrating on sprint-level delivery metrics, teams can establish a concrete definition of success that ties directly to value creation. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Lean Coffee Marina prefers keeping retrospectives simple and direct, recognizing that developers typically appreciate getting straight to the point. She particularly recommends the Lean Coffee format, which provides structure while allowing teams to focus on what matters most to them at that moment. What makes this format effective is its adaptability and efficiency. Marina emphasizes the importance of asking teams which retrospective formats they prefer rather than imposing a particular structure. To make retrospectives actionable, she insists on specifying WHO will do WHAT and by WHEN for every action item, ensuring clear accountability and follow-through on improvement initiatives. Self-reflection Question: How clearly defined is "delivery success" for your team, and what specific flow metrics could you introduce to make it more concrete? About Marina Lazovic Marina is a Scrum Master and Kanban Trainer from Belgrade, Serbia, with nearly a decade in the IT industry. Though not from a technical background, she is passionate about helping development teams and organizations optimize processes and build great products using Agile. She thrives on driving efficiency and fostering collaboration. You can link with Marina Lazovic on LinkedIn.

David Allen recently spoke with Luca Gambetti, whose company E-quality Italia is the certified partner for GTD in Italy. Their discussion centered around traditional and modern approaches to project management. Before becoming a GTD Master Trainer, Luca worked extensively as a project manager. He has a background in Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban and others. His key piece of advice about projects? Keep track of your achievements, and take time to savor them. Luca confidently says that with GTD, it is possible to live a more relaxed, focused life. You can listen to this entire conversation from March 2018 at GTD Connect®. Sign up for the GTD Newsletter -- This audio is one of many available at GTD Connect, a learning space and community hub for all things GTD. Join GTD practitioners from around the world in learning, sharing, and developing the skills for stress-free productivity. Sign up for a free guest pass Learn about membership options Knowing how to get the right things done is a key to success. It's easy to get distracted and overwhelmed. Stay focused and increase productivity with GTD Connect—a subscription-based online learning center from the David Allen Company. GTD Connect gives you access to a wealth of multimedia content designed to help you stay on track and deepen your awareness of principles you can also learn in GTD courses, coaching, and by reading the Getting Things Done book. You'll also get the support and encouragement of a thriving global community of people you won't find anywhere else. If you already know you'd like to join, click here to choose from monthly or annual options. If you'd like to try GTD Connect free for 14 days, read on for what's included and how to get your free trial. During your 14-day free trial, you will have access to: Recorded webinars with David Allen & the certified coaches and trainers on a wide range of productivity topics GTD Getting Started & Refresher Series to reinforce the fundamentals you may have learned in a GTD course, coaching, or book Extensive audio, video, and document library Slice of GTD Life series to see how others are making GTD stick David Allen's exclusive interviews with people in his network all over the world Lively members-only discussion forums sharing ideas, tips, and tricks Note: GTD Connect is designed to reinforce your learning, and we also recommend that you take a course, get individual coaching, or read the Getting Things Done book. Ready to start your free trial?

Marina Lazovic: How to Introduce Data-driven Decision Making to Skeptical Agile Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Marina describes her experience introducing data-driven decision making to help teams improve their processes. Starting with basic metrics like velocity, she gradually expanded to more sophisticated data points such as how long items remain in specific workflow states. She emphasizes the importance of introducing these concepts naturally into daily work and using the data to spark meaningful conversations with both the team and Product Owner. By examining why items were stuck and for how long, the team uncovered underlying issues they could address. Marina also explains how she used historical data to inform sprint planning, making estimates more realistic. Her approach focused on simplicity—introducing one data point at a time, avoiding jargon, encouraging teams to discover problems themselves, and empowering them to develop their own solutions rather than imposing answers. Self-reflection Question: What single data point could you start tracking that might reveal the most important improvement opportunity for your team? About Marina Lazovic Marina is a Scrum Master and Kanban Trainer from Belgrade, Serbia, with nearly a decade in the IT industry. Though not from a technical background, she is passionate about helping development teams and organizations optimize processes and build great products using Agile. She thrives on driving efficiency and fostering collaboration. You can link with Marina Lazovic on LinkedIn.

Retrospectives shouldn’t suck the energy out of your team—or get skipped entirely. In this episode, Brian and Cort share how to fix the most common retro fails and announce two brand-new tools to help you run retros that actually work. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Cort Sharp break down why retrospectives are more than just a “Scrum box to check.” They’re the powerhouse behind continuous team improvement. From battling retro fatigue and quiet-room energy to creating psychologically safe environments and tying retrospectives to real results, they cover it all. Plus, Brian reveals the launch of two new on-demand courses—Better Retrospectives and The Retrospectives Repair Guide—designed to help teams stop skipping and start optimizing their retros. Whether you're a Scrum Master, coach, or facilitator, this episode is your practical guide to making retrospectives worth everyone’s time again. References and resources mentioned in the show: Cort Sharp Blog: Retrospectives With a Quiet Team Blog: Does a Scrum Team Need a Retrospective Every Sprint Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course Scrum Repair Guide 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. Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. Welcome back for another episode of Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner, but today we're gonna have a continuation of something we tried, a little experiment we tried a few weeks back here. I've got Mr. Court Sharp back with us. Welcome back in court. Cort Sharp (00:18) Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on again. I had lot of fun last time I was on here and it was a great discussion. So thanks for bringing me back. Brian Milner (00:21) Yeah. Yeah, it's, oh, absolutely. Yeah, know, got a lot of people said, hey, we kind of like that court guy. Kind of like hearing from court. So we wanted to have court back, you know, because you guys told us that you liked him. And we also wanted to have him back because we just thought this format kind of worked for various reasons. And last time we kind of hit on some things that were kind of more hot button issues of the day. things that have been flowing through social media or other things around Agile. But we wanted to have a little bit more of a focus for today's episode. And we're going to focus really on the topic of retrospectives. And maybe make a little announcement here along the way as we go along. But we're actually going to switch roles here a little bit. I'm going to kind of pass the ball over to Court. And I'm going let Court drive this, just like he did in the last episode. Ball's in your court. Ha ha, get it? Cort Sharp (01:18) Ha ha, court, there you go. Well thanks, Brian. Once again, I love coming on here, I love chatting with you. And like you said, yeah, we're gonna be talking about retrospectives today, mostly because I have been struggling with answering questions about retrospectives. I think this is one of the more common meetings within Scrum that just gets skipped over, just people don't find value in it. Brian Milner (01:42) Yeah. Cort Sharp (01:43) or people just struggle with understanding why we have retrospectives. And sometimes I get a little slipped up and I struggle with answering the questions about why do we do this? So can you give me some clarification? Why do we have retrospectives? Why do they matter? Brian Milner (01:58) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. And I think everyone should, should, you know, want to know that answer. If you're doing this, you one of things I say in class all the time is, you know, it's important to know the purpose behind the meetings that we have in scrum. If you don't know the purpose, then, you know, that, how are we gonna, how are we gonna have a successful meeting? How are we gonna get the most out of it? so yeah, it's, it's a funny kind of meeting, because all the other meetings and scrum are, are really, around one ultimate purpose and that's building the increment. This is not, right? This is sort of a timeout. It's an intentional kind of timeout to step away and say, all right, now that we've done that, how did it go? What kind of happened along the way? I think it's a vitally important meeting. And when I hear people sometimes say, is it okay to skip it or should we do it once ever so often? you know, again, I try to be pragmatic and say, you know, I don't, I don't know any possible situation out there, but, you know, I would tell you, I would advise you not to, I don't think that's the right path to go. I know scrum doesn't teach to do that. I think it's really, really important because it is that, that moment of let's pause for a little bit. Let's figure out what we need to do differently and then let's actually take a step to do it. There's actually an interesting little background for this. So I'm going to take a little side trip here. Retrospectives actually come from an idea that has been around for a while that actually started kind of in lean manufacturing, some of the things that came out of Japan. There was actually a phrase that they would use on the assembly line at the auto assembly plants there in Japan. They referred to this concept of Kaizen. Kaizen was kind of a, I don't speak Japanese, but what I understand is the word loosely kind of translates to good change. And they had this concept there on the assembly line floor that anyone who was on the floor had access to the big red button that could stop the entire thing. They could stop the entire assembly line, which you know, on an auto assembly plant, that's a huge deal to stop the entire production. And they were very deliberate about it and said, no, we want everyone to have access to that because the phrase they use was the Kaizen comes first. And what they instructed the employees was if you along the way, as you're doing your job, if you see something that we could change that would make it more efficient, that would be a better way of doing this, then we want you to hit the red button because we want to implement whatever that change is as soon as possible. The sooner we implement the change, the longer we have as a benefit, like an investment. The earlier I invest, the more I get as a return. So the same thing here, the earlier I invest in this good change, the longer I have to have a return from it. So that phrase, the Kaizen comes first, is sort of a central thing that we think about here with retrospectives. It's identifying those good changes. there's actually even an intention behind it that it doesn't go on the product backlog. It goes in the next sprint backlog. Because we don't want to have any even inkling of deprioritizing something that comes out of a retrospective. It's that Kaizen portion. So we want to make sure that comes first. So yeah, it absolutely is going to go into the next sprint. Whatever we decide is the most important thing, we're going to make an impact on it in the next sprint. So that's why I think that it's the most important thing for us is it's the engine that really drives continual improvement. And without it, I think teams stagnate. I think they just get kind of stuck in a rut. problems that we have, we just continually repeat. if we don't have the time to stop an exam. Cort Sharp (06:00) Yeah. All right. So I kind of got one bigger idea from there. And for whatever reason, when you were like, we gave everyone the red button to stop the assembly line. And that's kind of, we're stopping, we're pausing, we're inspecting, and then we're going to come up with a plan to adapt. Whatever reason, this phrase stuck in my head, it just popped out to me. But it sounds like we're giving power to the people. Brian Milner (06:06) Okay. Cort Sharp (06:26) where we're, you know, the team has the power, the people have the power to say, whoa, let's stop here. Let's hang on a second. Let's take some time and let's figure out a better way to move forward. And from that, I just think of sports. I think of sports teams. We're in the middle of March Madness as we're recording this right now. And I can pretty much guarantee you that every single one of those teams who's advancing on past, I think round one is going on right now, so passing on through round one, they're probably watching some film on their opponents. They're trying to see, what are they gonna do? What are some plays? How can we kind of counteract it? But more often than not, I would wager, I'm not a gambling man, but I'd wager, that they're looking at their own film and they're trying to see what did we do well in this game that got us the win? What can we improve? so that we could maybe have a little bit more of a bigger margin of victory. And what is it that we should probably stop doing? What is there that wasn't working out? Maybe our pick and rolls were not good, maybe we weren't executing well on those, or not to get too into basketball terms there, but maybe we should stop shooting so many threes or something like that. I don't know, right? But yeah, that's, yeah. Brian Milner (07:42) I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right that, you know, sometimes we think this retrospective thing is maybe, is this just a weird thing that we do in software development? No, this happens in a lot of professions. There's a lot of different professions out there that take time to analyze. And by the way, I'll throw this out there as well, because you mentioned kind of sports. Sometimes people will, I've encountered teams at times that think, You know what, we're good enough. We don't need to do this anymore. This is really only for teams when they're starting. We don't need to have retrospectives once we've become mature. Well, to them, I'd say, well, then why do championship teams continue to watch their film? Right? If a team won the Super Bowl last year, don't you think that they still go through training camp and get ready for the season? Yeah, they absolutely do. But they're on top of their game. So if they think it's necessary when they're on top of their game, is there really a moment that we would be so on top of our game that we have nothing left to learn and get better at? I'd say no. I think that there's always something that we can get better at. And I think that's a great analogy to kind of drive that home. Cort Sharp (08:54) Yeah, awesome. I totally agree with you there. Even just outside of the team sports world, I come from a more individual sport background. And it's so important to take some time and just reflect on, how did I perform? How was my performance, even on an individual level, so that I can take some action steps throughout this next period of training or work or whatever it is that I'm doing so that I can make the next next performance or the next time I race or the next time I get out there on the court or on the field or whatever. That's how I can make that next time better than this last time. So awesome. Thanks for clarifying. Thanks for. Brian Milner (09:28) Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, no, no, it's a great question. I think this is, probably time for us to kind of let the cat out of the bag here a little bit and just say, one of the reasons we wanted to focus on it for the episode is, drum roll, we kind of have a couple of courses coming out. here that we're going to offer at Mountain Goat Software that you can take around retrospectives. They're on demand videos that I worked on. They're two different separate courses. And we just thought this was an area that really needed some focus and attention and we were getting lots of questions around it. So we always try to listen to what you guys are telling us. And what we were hearing was, this is where you wanted us to focus. yeah, not a lot of details that I'm going to say right out of the gate. But yeah, we do want to kind of announce that those are coming here very, very soon. Cort Sharp (10:22) Yeah, so if I heard you right, I think you said this, but there's two courses coming out, right? Okay, cool. We're letting that out of the bag. Brian Milner (10:28) That's correct, yeah, two. right, right. I mean, you might think, one course I can understand, but two? Yeah, there's so much material that there was too much for one. And people could not consume all that in one go. And so we created two and kind of found different aims, different goals for both of them. to target what people were really asking for. So yeah, there are two separate courses. One that's going to be called Better Retrospectives, and another one that's called Retrospectives Repair Guide. So yeah, you can sell just from the names, kind of taking two different approaches here on focusing on retros. Cort Sharp (11:07) That's so awesome to hear that we have two separate types of courses that solve kind of two problems. So what were the reasons why you decided or Mountain Goat decided, hey, we probably need to make these to help solve some pain points. What were those pain points and what are these common struggles that you're seeing? Brian Milner (11:19) Yeah. Yeah, completely fair question, right? I mean, why didn't we do one on sprint planning? Or why didn't we do one on daily scrums or whatever, right? Well, maybe we will in the future. I think the kind of genesis of this idea or why we decided to focus on it was we periodically survey users. We watch what people do when they come to the site, what they search for. And one of our top search terms and one of the top search areas that we've seen over the years, really, it's been consistent, is around retrospectives. So we know that's an area people want to know more about and want to get help with. So that gave us the first little inkling that this might be something to focus on. That led us to doing just a free open webinar that we did. I hosted that, I put together a presentation to give some tips around it and help people, just a short little presentation, but wanted to just give some really quick tips people could apply. And we had over a thousand people sign up for that. not, I shouldn't say that. We had over a thousand people attend that. just, lots of people sign up and don't come, but. We had over thousand people who showed up and attended to hear that. And that kind of blew us away. think, wow, this is really, know, people made time in their day to come and listen to this, you know, short little webinar on it. There's interest here. And with a thousand people, we didn't have nearly enough time there on that webinar to answer everyone's questions and get through everything that was coming at us. But, you know, we love data. So. We pulled all that data from all the questions that had been submitted and people had presented to us and grouped them, categorized them, tried to sort them through and try to find what's the biggest kind of pressure, pain points that people are having that they wanna know answers to. And that's what led us to really create these courses is there were reoccurring themes, right? There was a kind of set of things that are common amongst people. common issues, common problems that people are having, common root causes of those problems. And we just thought, this is doable. It's not an impossible thing to fix. There are actually practical, real ways of solving these things. And we wanted to give people solutions to the things they wanted to hear about. So that's why we decided to focus on retrospectives. Cort Sharp (13:50) Awesome, sweet. That's still crazy to hear. I knew that you had a thousand people or a little over a thousand people attend that live stream, I think is what you did, right? Because it was like a YouTube live stream or something like that. That's still mind blowing to me that there was that much turnout and... Brian Milner (14:09) Actually, I just wanna say, I don't know that it actually even was on YouTube. That's what makes it even more kind of impressive to me is people had to like get a link and go into it. So it wasn't just, hey, I'm flipping through YouTube on my lunch break and it turned up. It was people who deliberately said, no, I'm making an appointment to go to that. Yeah. Cort Sharp (14:29) Man, that's even, yeah, that's crazier to me too. That's awesome. That tells me, yeah, there's a ton of demand for this, right? So can you give me just a brief overview without oversharing or sharing a little too much about what each course kind of offers and what problems they're working to solve or we're solving within each course? Brian Milner (14:31) Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I guess it's probably important to know the strategy of both of them and why there's two. As I said, there's just a lot of material, so it was too much to fit into one. But I tried to follow the pattern in creating these that we've established at Mountain Goat with previous classes. So the first one that I put together, we titled Better Retrospectives. And that's following the pattern that we've done with other things like better user stories. So better retrospectives, the focus is sort of the expert deep dive on retrospectives. We go deep on the meaning behind things and kind of facilitation techniques that are useful to do, patterns you can use in creating a retrospective, ways you can create brand new. themes for your retrospective that no one's ever done before in the past because it's yours. It's something you created on your own. And just kind of all the ins and outs of how to really make a retrospective work and be productive, produce things that actually make differences on your team. So that was better retrospectives. But we wanted to then address head on those most common questions that people have. Again, try to follow the pattern that we've established with some previous things here at Mountain Goat. Mike has a course that I took years ago called Scrum Repair Guide. And it was about the most common problems that Scrum teams have. so I follow that pattern here. And the second course is called Retrospective's Repair Guide. And what we did was we took those highest volume asked questions, the most common questions we got from that webinar. got just the top 10 and said, these are the biggies. These are the big ones that people are asking about that really want to know the answer to. And we put together a repair guide course for it so that people can maybe consume that in a little bit different way. If I'm having one big problem right now and I need an answer to that, or maybe I have two or three problems, I'm not having all the problems, but I need an answer. I need help with this big thing that's going on with my team. We wanted to get that to them as soon as possible. So the retrospective repair guide is that ability for someone to look at our list of top 10 questions. And you'll probably find three or four of them on there that you'd say, oh, yeah, that's one I've experienced. Yeah, that's one we're having right now. And then you can just kind of to the chase and get right to where it is that you need to get help. And then practically go and make those changes immediately. So better retrospectives. The expert course, Deep Dive on Retrospectives, makes you an expert at delivering them and working with them. Retrospectives Repair Guide, more for those finding the solutions to the problems you're having right now. Cort Sharp (17:37) Awesome. I want to kind of double click a little bit into the retrospective repair guide. Man, tongue twister, right? The retro repair guide. Can you share just like one or two, maybe three of those questions that are answered or some of those bigger questions that were asked that are answered and that you give a solution to and a very clear solution to within that course? Brian Milner (17:43) Yeah, it is a little. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. just know for each one of these, it's not a, the answer is, here's a sentence. Each one of these, we go really deep on how to answer that and strategies. And I give you multiple things that you can do. Because a lot of these maybe even have multiple root causes to them that could be causing them. And there could be something different you might need to do to solve that for your team. But you know, Like one of the biggest questions that we heard, probably the most popular question that we got was, how do you handle retrospectives when you have a quiet team? When you have a team of people that are a little more introverted or shy, not uncommon with a group of software developers. So how do you get them a little bit out of their shell or how do you get them to just feel safe enough there to actually contribute? That was a big one. Um, you know, a big one for our, our day and age is how do you handle retrospectives when you have people that are remote? Uh, you know, do you have an entirely remote team? Do you have people that are, uh, you know, parked your team? Part of your team is, is in-house part of your team is remote. Uh, how do you, how do you handle that split? Um, that was another big one. Um, you know, how do you handle it when you're, you have a team that just hates retrospectives? Um, you know, how do you, how do you, uh, How do you get your team to start really making progress, real progress, from the things that you talk about in your retrospectives? So these are just a couple of them. we really thought that these, for each one of them, as I went through each one of them, I thought, yeah, this is a big one. This is one I get questions about all the time in class. So there was none of them that I looked at and thought, this is a filler. Am I going to make it to 10? No, mean, it was hard to limit it to 10, you know? But yeah, we limited it to 10 and all of them are really, really important ones. Cort Sharp (19:47) You Yeah, nothing but heavy hitters here. Nothing but bangers. Here you go. Yeah, that's it. Awesome. OK, well, thanks for the overview. Thanks for introducing these courses. That last question there, what do I do? How do I manage a team within my retrospectives when they hate going to retrospectives or despise that? That'd be super useful for me. Man, I might buy this course right now. Brian Milner (19:55) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ha Yeah. Cort Sharp (20:23) But I would like to, we strive to have some pragmatic approaches. We strive to provide practical, immediately useful tips on this podcast. I know that's a big point for this podcast that you really work on and you really focus on. Do you have any just practical, immediately useful tips? Let's start out, I guess. This might be a little teaser, a little preview. You might repeat something that you gave out into the Retro's course there, the Retro Repair Guide. With quiet teams, can you just share something that I can immediately take away and go off if I have a really quiet team and it's like pulling teeth to get them to talk and participate in Retro's? Can you give me just some useful tips or something that I can go away with? Brian Milner (21:08) Yeah. Cort Sharp (21:13) after listening to this episode and go off and use with my team to help my quiet team be a little more active and a little more beneficial. Show them that, this retro is for you. What can I do to work with my quiet team here? Brian Milner (21:29) Yeah, yeah, no, mean, how can I tease the number one thing without giving any kind of advice on it, right? And no, I mean, we're doing this because we want to get this information out route. We want to help teams to be successful with this. So no, I don't mind at all going into some things that might help there on it. There'll be much more in the course because I just have more time to do that. I think that the number one thing when you have a quiet team is trying to understand the why behind it. So for starters, I think it's important for us to understand that there are different personality types. I mentioned things like introvertedness. There are people who are more introverted than others. And if that's a of a spectrum in itself. There are people who are extremely introverted, and there's people who are only mildly introverted. Not to mention, one of my favorite topics, thinking about kind of different neurodivergent traits and how they interact and participate and things of that nature. So all that's to say, that I think the number one thing that we have to do is know our team. We have to understand who is in the room. Because I think we make the mistake a lot of the times of, I'm gonna just put together a retrospective. Let me go find out what that guy on YouTube said about doing a retrospective. yeah, that was a fun little theme that he came up with. Let me go put that in place. But that may not match at all. the personality of your team. It may not match the way that they prefer to interact. If I have a team full of introverts, I'm not gonna do a big role play kind of exercise in my retrospectives, because everyone's gonna be uncomfortable and everyone's gonna shut down. They're gonna go into defensive kind of stance, right? So I think that's the number one thing I'd say is, first of all, just understand and respect. respect the differences there in personalities to understand that they're not broken or in need of repair in any way. If they are quieter, that's just who they are. That's just how they're made. So I think that's part of it, right? I think part is that you have to understand your team. But there are other possible root causes here as well. One of the biggest is they could be quiet because they don't feel safe to actually speak in that room. That's a huge one, right? And it's so important. If they come into that room and they are fearful that what they say in that room is going to be reported outside the room to someone else, or they're going to be made fun of in that room for voicing their opinion or belittled in some way for it, well, That's a killer to a retrospective. If there's not that sense of safety in the room, doesn't matter how brilliant your pattern is for the retrospective or what great idea you came up with for it. If I don't feel like this is a safe space where I can speak up and not be made fun of or not fear retribution for something I've said, I'm not gonna speak up. whether I'm an extrovert or an introvert. It doesn't really matter my personality type at that point because the fear is what's driving everyone in that room. So I think you have to maybe even gauge the team. Maybe even ask them in an anonymous poll. I've done this before by just giving slips of paper and everyone puts in a hat. And you can do something like a safety check where you say, give me a number from one to five. five being the highest and one being the lowest, how safe do you feel today in this room to speak honestly without fear of retribution or being made fun of, that sort of thing? And it could very much surprise you what the answer is. That's actually an activity that I repeat periodically when I have a team because I want to chart it. I want to see where they are now. I want to see if it goes up or down. If there's some kind of a change, how does that affect it? We had, we lost a team member or two team members and we had new people come on. Safety is going to drop because we have new people. God forbid if we have somebody who's an outsider who insists on coming into it. I try my best to keep them out, but hey, if my boss says, well, I'm overruling you, I'm coming in. Well, are you gonna quit immediately because that happens? Probably not. What can you do? Make it transparent, the effect. You can say, hey, we periodically take these safety checks. So here today, I took another safety check. Our normal average is 4.2. Today, it dropped to 2.1. Why do you think that happened? It's data. So I think safety is another big reason. Cort Sharp (26:13) Right. Right. Brian Milner (26:18) So let's, personality type, gotta understand personality type, gotta make sure the environment's safe. And by the way, kind of corollary to that is not only that it's safe, but that their opinion matters. So if they speak up and say things and no one pays attention to them, no one listens to them, well again, you're telling them your idea doesn't matter, learn this lesson, next time don't speak up, right? Cort Sharp (26:30) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (26:44) So they've got to have a safe space. And then I think you've got to match your activities to your team. You've got to find ways of connecting to them that will feel comfortable for them, that make them feel. I say this all the time in classes, facilitation, the root word in facilitation is facilis. It's a Latin word. means to make easy. So we're facilitating a retrospective. Make it easy. If your team doesn't want to role play, and you've got an activity that's a role play thing, then that's not easy. That's difficult for who they are. But if your team, another kind of difference, are they verbal processors? Do they need to talk things out to find a solution? Or do they need quiet space? that they need introspective time to find solutions. If that's the case, well, maybe I start with something like quiet writing. I don't even have an activity where they're talking to each other at the beginning. So I think that's third thing I'd throw out there is to say, Once you know your team, make sure you are matching the format, matching what you come up with for that retrospective to the personality of your team. It's hard, right? Someone can't walk in off the street and deliver a great retrospective to a team they don't know. But the good news is you know your team, right? You work with them all the time. You're the expert on this. Cort Sharp (28:08) you Yeah, yeah, as a more introverted person, nothing sounds worse to me than trying to, to do any kind of role playing, putting myself in some position that I just don't normally put myself into and I'm not comfortable with right that that is not my jam. That is not my thing. Brian Milner (28:27) Yeah. Yeah, and can you blame it when, if that happens, can you blame the team for saying they hate the retrospectives and that they don't want to do them anymore? Yeah. Cort Sharp (28:39) No, not at all. Not at all. If my scrum master came to me and said, right, we're going to, Brian, you're acting as this person, Court, you're acting as this, and we're going to reenact little Romeo and Juliet, bring that into there in this. And it's like, what? No, this isn't valuable. Brian Milner (28:47) You Right. Yeah, it's one thing to say, we're going to pretend to be each other and talk through. But it's another thing to say, pretend you are a peanut. you're like, that kind of thing. When you're an employee, you're like, god, really? I have to be a peanut now? Great, great. Yeah, no, this is fun. It's that kind of thing that if you don't, maybe your team would enjoy that kind of thing. If so, then match it to them. Cort Sharp (29:10) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (29:19) They're not in that mode. No, no, no, no, no, no. Cort Sharp (29:23) Yep. Well, awesome. think I have a couple more questions for you here. Should be relatively quickly, right? Thanks for giving a little preview and giving some practical advice for what we can do to help our more quiet teams. But I want to take a step back. I know we double clicked into that one course, but I just want to take a step back a little bit. how do I decide which courses is right for me? Brian Milner (29:28) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cort Sharp (29:48) Do you have any guidelines for that? Any advice for if I'm interested in both courses, but I don't know which one would be a little more beneficial for me? How do I make that choice? Brian Milner (29:58) Yeah, that would be an extremely difficult decision to make because you have to really know these courses intimately, think, to make that, or maybe not intimately, but you probably have to dive a little bit deeper into what the agenda is for each one to kind of know the answer. But here's the good thing. When we're launching these, I can tell you this as well. We're going to be launching it as sort of a two for one. So. The good news is when we, know, for the initial launch of this, that's going to be the bonus for being in the first group is you don't have to decide. You'll get them both and you can then, you know, choose on your own. can dip in and see, you know, if one's better for you than the other, great. But you can consume it any way you want. And, you know, I'm just really excited for people to get to see the stuff and to hear it. I think there's some. there's some stuff that's really gonna help people in it. Cort Sharp (30:47) Awesome, great. Helping my decision fatigue there, Brian. That's great. Wonderful. One less choice that I have to make. Well, great. Awesome. That's kind all the questions that I have for you. Are there any kind of key takeaways or anything that you want to single out about retrospectives as a whole or anything about these courses that are going to be offered here anytime soon or anything like that? Brian Milner (30:50) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I wanted to do this kind of an episode about this because, you know, I feel like the listeners here to our podcast, you guys know me, you know, the kind of stuff that I talk about. And, you know, I wanted you to be the ones who kind of heard this and knew about it first. I think it's going to be really beneficial and it's going to really kind of turbo charge a lot of teams. We talked about why retrospectives are important. Well, as I said, it's the engine for that continual improvement. If you don't have it, then the team stagnates. If you do have it and they buy in and this is, they're really all in on that Kaizen continual. improvement, know, Kaizen comes first mindset that kind of comes along with it. Then they look forward to this meeting. It's not just, know, something to check the box at the very end of our sprint, but it's actually, you know, when are we going to have that retrospective? I've got some stuff I want to talk about and that's our time now. You know, we can shut out the rest of the world. We can shut out, you know, everyone who's not here in our team. And now we can focus on us. You know, the question I often ask the teams when I do this is, do retrospectives is, what would it take for us to be the team everyone else wishes they were on? And, you know, that's really what you can accomplish through a retrospective is you can be that team, everyone else in the group and the organization looks at and goes, man, I wish I was on that team. That team's the, that team looks like a great team to be on. You know, I know there's, we're not given a lot of details here because this isn't We're not opening sales to this at the time that you hear this, when this podcast comes out. This is just a preview. I wanted to announce it here in the podcast first and let you guys know about it. Stay tuned. We're gonna have some stuff coming out soon. You can come to our website, mountaingoatsoftware.com and you'll find more information about this. But stay tuned here to the podcast as well. We're going to talk about some other things around podcasts in the next few weeks. we'll let you know when it's going to be open. I'll tell you as well, this is going to be a limited time thing. It's not something that we're launching and then kind of keeping open forever. This is something that we're going to launch. And there's a window for you to actually purchase this. receive both these at the same time. We'll talk about pricing and all that other stuff later down the road. But I just wanted you guys to know that these two things were coming. And hopefully, that gets you excited. And you can start now saying, hey, boss, there's something I'm going to be asking you for here for the training budget or something somewhere along the way. So stay tuned. We'll have more information here about it in the coming weeks. Cort Sharp (33:51) Yeah So we're starting the hype train now. Hype train is starting to pull out of the station. And the next station it comes into, it's only going to be there for a limited time. So make sure you get on board and get on with this. Because these sound like really awesome classes. And they sound like a really great way to either elevate where you're at already or where I'm at already for retrospectives and whatever techniques I'm using. I know we didn't talk much or really at all. Brian Milner (34:01) Yeah, exactly. Cort Sharp (34:26) other than the title of the Better Retrospectives course. But having been through the Better User Stories course, that really elevated my ability to write and facilitate user story work or story writing workshops. But it allowed me to be more effective on the user stories front. if it's anything following that trend line, which it sounds like it kind of is, that Better Retrospectives course sounds like a fantastic way to elevate. Brian Milner (34:46) Yeah. Cort Sharp (34:53) my ability to not only facilitate, but also just get more value out of retrospectives. And then the retro repair guide. Awesome starting point. Sounds like it's a great spot if I'm struggling with anything. Really, really common. Well, not really common. The biggest questions, biggest problems that are seen throughout retrospectives. Great starting point in order to. help myself grow and get up there. And the fact that I don't have to choose between the two, that's fantastic to me. makes me really excited. Brian Milner (35:25) Yeah. Bonus, right? Yeah. Well, and I do want to throw out there as well. know, the pattern here, I'm copying Mike, right? This is what Mike Kona has done previously. And I'm with you, Court. When I took the Better User Stories course, you know, I really wanted to go deep on user stories. I wanted to understand them at a level that I just didn't previously. And I wanted to know the ins and outs. I was ready to go deep on it. And I agree with you. did the same thing for me. It helped me to really fully understand kind of what this method is and how to get the most out of it. So that was my idea when I wanted to copy that into the retrospectives. I wanted the same thing. I wanted people who were at that point where they're ready to go deep. Here it is, right? It's ready for you. And retrospectives, the repair guide as well, I was a consumer of Mike's Scrum Repair Guide before I joined Mountain Goats, you know, when I was a Scrum Master on a team. And I remember when I saw that course and I saw the list of things that, you know, he was going to talk about in that course. There were two or three of them on that list that I just said, yeah, star that one, star this one, like that. I need that answer. I just remember that feeling of, I really need the answer to this. So my thought at that time was, whatever this is, It's worth it because I don't know how to do this on my team right now. We're having this problem and I need it fixed. So I need guidance on how to do this. And I know there's people out there that are gonna feel that way about some of these topics they're gonna see that we have in the repair guide. So all that's just to say, it's from the point of view of someone who benefited from that pattern, you know, from Mike and other courses. And I'm hopefully going to be able to do that for people here with retrospectives as well. Cort Sharp (37:15) Well, I'm excited. So a couple action points for anyone else who's interested in this. Stay tuned, right? Stay tuned for future episodes on the podcast. Keep an eye out on stuff. Can they visit mountainghostsoftware.com right now and sign up for a list or anything or get any pre-emails or anything like that or not quite yet? Brian Milner (37:33) I don't think there's anything that you can do at the moment. mean, if you're on our email list, I think that's probably the best thing you can do. You sign up for our email list. You can do that pretty easily at mountandgoatsoftware.com. And that'll keep you informed when we send out our newsletters. We're gonna have information on it there as well. But it's kind of like, you you get those emails sometimes that just say nothing right now, but, so nothing right now, but, you know, kind of just... File this away, know this is, you in the next few weeks, you're gonna hear more about this and then it'll be that limited window that you can actually, you know, take advantage of it. Cort Sharp (38:07) Awesome. Yeah, so keep listening in, keep an eye out, and we'll keep giving you some practical approaches, practical tips that you can use to go into your next retrospective. Maybe your team isn't the quiet team, but maybe they're the ones that just don't really like retros. know, Brian, thanks for helping me out with my quiet teams, or any time that I interact with quiet teams, and even the ones that are a little more just passive and don't. Brian Milner (38:28) Nah. Cort Sharp (38:34) don't really see the value in retros. Thanks for sharing those tips and for helping me out with all the teams that I work with. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Brian Milner (38:42) Yeah, absolutely. If you can't tell, I'm really excited about it. I can't wait for people to start diving into this stuff. more than anything, I can't wait for it to start to make a difference in teams. Cort Sharp (38:53) I'm excited, Brian. I can't wait. I'm stoked. Brian Milner (38:54) you

Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel are listening and reacting to Melissa Perri on Lenny's Podcast as she makes claims about product management, agile, frameworks, and why most companies struggle with product management. We discuss many of her claims, including:Product Management has nothing to do with the Manifesto for Agile Software DevelopmentScrum is only for Large OrganizationsLarge Organizations Lack Infrastructure to support Product ManagementRigid Processes Can Crash Your Entire Company...and many, many more!Whether you're in a startup or enterprise, Silicon Valley or your average FinTech, this discussion offers practical insights on balancing process with customer-centricity.#ProductManagement #AgileLeadership #TeamDevelopmentTags: product management, agile coaching, scrum, kanban, product strategy, team development, organizational design, product owner, product manager, safe framework, agile transformation, continuous delivery, silicon valley, enterprise agileReferences:Lenny's Podcast with Melissa Perri, https://youtu.be/wbi9chsAHp4Marteen Dalmijn's newsletter about Waternet: https://mdalmijn.com/p/how-a-digital-transformation-canAA199 - W. Edwards Deming's Profound Knowledge for Transforming OrganizationsAA187 - The Future of AI, According to Big Tech= = = = = = = = = = = =YouTubehttps://youtu.be/c0htPyVTKeESubscribe on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XUSoJPxGPI8EtuUAHOb6g?sub_confirmation=1Applehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3= = = = = = = = = = = =Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

(Mar 26, 2025) The state Conservative Party has announced a slate of preferred candidates to replace Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, starting with North Country State Senator Dan Stec. It's causing a stir among hopefuls for the Republican nod for the upcoming special election. Also: A new idea for an economic development program is getting a chilly reception from some lawmakers in Albany

Marina Lazovic: How Limiting Work-in-Progress Saved a Struggling Agile Team Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Marina shares the story of a small team of three developers who were struggling with multiple challenges. The team was primarily working on front-end fixes but faced persistent environment issues that kept breaking their work. Under pressure from a Product Owner pushing for delivery, the team fell into the trap of working on too many things simultaneously, resulting in items staying perpetually "in progress" and never reaching "done." As the situation deteriorated, the PO began micromanaging the team in attempts to unblock work. Marina explains how she helped the team understand the value of limiting work-in-progress (WIP), even when initially both developers and the PO were resistant to the idea. Through experimentation over several sprints, they discovered that limiting WIP actually increased their completion rate rather than reducing it. Self-reflection Question: What work-in-progress limits might benefit your current team, and how could you experiment with implementing them in a way that addresses stakeholder concerns? Featured Book of the Week: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Marina recommends "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" as an essential read for Scrum Masters. She describes it as a book filled with valuable lessons and examples that she could easily identify in her workplace. Marina finds particular value in sharing the concepts with her teams and using the book as a framework to discuss dysfunction patterns they might be experiencing. The practical examples provided in the book serve as excellent conversation starters to help teams recognize and address their own challenges. About Marina Lazovic Marina is a Scrum Master and Kanban Trainer from Belgrade, Serbia, with nearly a decade in the IT industry. Though not from a technical background, she is passionate about helping development teams and organizations optimize processes and build great products using Agile. She thrives on driving efficiency and fostering collaboration. You can link with Marina Lazovic on LinkedIn.

Marina Lazovic: When Nobody Expects the Scrum Master, Overcoming a Rocky Start in a Team New to Agile Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Marina shares her challenging experience of being the first Scrum Master to join a company new to Agile. She describes the awkward moment of joining a team via Zoom, only to discover that no one knew she was coming or fully understood her role. Marina explains how she navigated this uncomfortable situation by being patient, transparent, and not taking people's defensive reactions personally. She emphasizes that when people face unexpected change, their fear can manifest as resistance, making it crucial for Scrum Masters to remain calm, open, and focused on building understanding rather than reacting with frustration. Self-reflection Question: How might you prepare yourself emotionally and strategically for joining a team that isn't expecting you or doesn't understand the Scrum Master role? About Marina Lazovic Marina is a Scrum Master and Kanban Trainer from Belgrade, Serbia, with nearly a decade in the IT industry. Though not from a technical background, she is passionate about helping development teams and organizations optimize processes and build great products using Agile. She thrives on driving efficiency and fostering collaboration. You can link with Marina Lazovic on LinkedIn.

Karen Suarez: Decision Authority, The Make-or-Break Factor for Product Owners Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Clear Vision That Inspires Action Karen describes an exemplary Product Owner who deeply understood both their product and market. This PO maintained a perfect balance of being firm in their vision while remaining open and curious to input. What made this PO particularly effective was their ability to communicate a clear, compelling vision that motivated the team. They defined key results in ways that were easily understood and actionable for team members. Most importantly, they trusted the development team with solution design rather than prescribing how features should be implemented, creating an environment where the team felt both guided and empowered. The Bad Product Owner: Committee Decisions and Never-Ending Backlogs Karen identifies two common anti-patterns in the Product Owner role. The first is when the PO isn't truly empowered to make decisions because the company hesitates to give this responsibility to a single person. In these cases, the PO becomes merely a proxy for a committee, with solutions predetermined elsewhere. The second anti-pattern is the PO who cannot say "no," allowing backlogs to grow unmanageably large. Karen once worked with a team that had accumulated 5,000 backlog items! Her solution was to use data to demonstrate why such expansive backlogs are counterproductive, create filtered views showing only the highest-priority items, and eventually make it acceptable to delete irrelevant backlog items altogether. Self-reflection Question: In your organization, does the Product Owner have true decision-making authority, or are they operating as a proxy for committee decisions? About Karen Suarez  Karen is a dedicated Scrum Master with a long experience driving agile transformations and fostering high-performing teams. She is passionate about continuous learning, and excels in aligning agile practices with organizational innovation. You can link with Karen Suarez on LinkedIn.

Karen Suarez: Beyond Process Compliance, True Indicators of Agile Team Maturity Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. For Karen, success as a Scrum Master is measured by how well the team functions autonomously. She evaluates this through several key indicators: the team's ability to tackle tough topics, including when someone isn't carrying their weight; their willingness to embrace and resolve conflicts; the product's flexibility in responding to market and customer feedback; and most importantly, whether team members proactively suggest solutions themselves. Karen emphasizes that her ultimate goal is to help the team reach a state where they no longer need her guidance, as this represents true maturity and self-organization. Self-reflection Question: How comfortable is your team with addressing conflict directly, and what could you do to create psychological safety around difficult conversations? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start/Stop/Continue Karen prefers simple retrospective formats like Start/Stop/Continue that create space for meaningful dialogue rather than complex activities. Her focus is on developing team members' ability to share their real challenges. She prepares participants to discuss truly critical issues by modeling empathy and vulnerability herself. Karen encourages team members to bring up difficult topics by sharing how these issues affect them personally and acknowledging how others have helped. This approach creates psychological safety while ensuring retrospectives address substantive concerns rather than just surface-level issues. About Karen Suarez  Karen is a dedicated Scrum Master with a long experience driving agile transformations and fostering high-performing teams. She is passionate about continuous learning, and excels in aligning agile practices with organizational innovation. You can link with Karen Suarez on LinkedIn.

Karen Suarez: When a Scrum Master Needs to Hire a Manager, An Organizational Design Story Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Karen shares her experience as the first Scrum Master in a company where development, QA, product, and deployment were all separate departments, resulting in a cycle time exceeding six weeks. She strategically approached transformation by first identifying interested individuals in other departments who were already collaborating with the development team. Karen formalized the Product Owner role by cultivating a relationship with someone from the product department who showed interest in working closely with the team. She created regular collaboration routines between QA and development, and gradually involved the deployment team by inviting them to demos and having developers learn deployment skills. When faced with trust issues between deployment and development teams, Karen recognized the need for leadership support and built a case for hiring a manager who could help bridge these departments, acknowledging that some organizational challenges require sponsorship beyond the Scrum Master role. Self-reflection Question: In your organization, what departmental silos might be increasing cycle time, and who could be your allies in breaking down these barriers? About Karen Suarez  Karen is a dedicated Scrum Master with a long experience driving agile transformations and fostering high-performing teams. She is passionate about continuous learning, and excels in aligning agile practices with organizational innovation. You can link with Karen Suarez on LinkedIn.