Podcasts about Scrum

Welcome to Botched: A D&D Podcast! When a mysterious book appears at the front of their compound, in a langue that no one understands, Terry's Tough Guys are forced out on a quest. With their top crack Sky Yacht pilot, they head to the one place that has the wisest elders, New Monk City.With book in had, they fly north to New Monk City, hoping to get some new magical items because, oh yeah, Scrum a demon now.... Yeah so, Orlok did a deal with elder small g god, and used those powers to turn Scrum, it's a whole thing but yeah..Will the party be able to find someone who can read this old skin book? Will the shop have the magical items that Orlok thinks he deserves? Will Scrums new demon girlfriend be happy about his new look? Find out tonight, on Botched Podcast!Dennis has successfully completed a Kickstarter for his 4th graphic novel in his Lycan: Solomon's Odyssey series! Lycan is about the world's first werewolf! It's a mix of horror, mythology, adventure, and history. The 4th book in the series is all about ancient Egypt! Wanna read a story mixing a werewolf with Egyptian Gods? You can still back it on Kickstarter for the time being as we have Late Pledges enabled! ⁠Check it out on Kickstarter⁠!We now have a PO Box! Wanna send us something? PO BOX 3178 Gettysburg, PA 17325All of our previous seasons can be found on our new channel!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Archives⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!A special shout out and thank you to all of our supporters over on Patreon. You help us continue to churn out “quality” episodes. With your continued support we can take our show on the road! Check out our store over at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ where you can find tshirts, stickers, pint glasses and more!Give us a 5 star review on Itunes. Doing so will help the show grow, but we will also read out whatever you write at the end of one of our episodes!Feel free to email us any questions, comments or suggestions at ⁠BotchedPodcast@gmail.com⁠Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, like us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.You can watch the show live on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!Check out each of the hosts' Twitch streams! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steve⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Editor: Philip D Keating And Dennis RobinsonProducer: Philip and DennisExecutive Producers: ⁠⁠⁠⁠James Thatcher⁠⁠⁠⁠, Chronic Ejac, Jim Beverly,Disgruntled Furniture, Chris Wisdom, ShinigamiSPQR,  Jayson Haiss, Toaster Bath and Scabby GoosePublisher: Phil and DennisArt by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Emily Swan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gozer⁠

Maria Skvortsova: The Team That Gave Up — When Green Reports Mask a Sinking Ship 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.   "They said, 'Yeah, we know, but no one will listen to us.' And they just gave up — waiting for the ship to sink so they could swim away." — Maria Skvortsova   Maria walked into a 20-person migration team where the PowerPoint reports glowed green but the reality on the ground was covered in red flags. Developers were building features against requirements that had already changed — nobody had told them. The scope was impossibly large, and when Maria asked the team why they hadn't raised a red flag, the answer shook her: "No one will listen to us." The team had given up. They were waiting for the project to fail so they could leave. Maria's first instinct was to observe — spend weeks understanding the dynamics, the communication patterns, the culture. But she learned the hard way that when a team is already drowning, there's no time for a slow ramp-up. She needed to act immediately. Her breakthrough came from a simple technique: replacing some daily standups with an async RAG (Red-Amber-Green) status system in Jira. Team members just chose a color for each story — no explanation needed. It gave them psychological safety to signal problems without speaking up in a 20-person meeting. From there, Maria broke the team into smaller cross-functional groups — one QA, one developer, one consultant — so they could actually discuss features instead of hiding behind silence.   In this episode, we refer to Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem. Also check out the episode with Barry and Christiaan, authors of the book, on the podcast.   Self-reflection Question: When you join a new team and sense that something is deeply wrong, how long do you wait before acting — and is that waiting period serving the team or just your own comfort? Featured Book of the Week: Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem Maria chose Zombie Scrum Survival Guide because, as she puts it, "Most Scrum Masters learn by the happy path. We all know how it should be. But we rarely think about how it should not be." The book focuses on detecting anti-patterns early — before they become entrenched behaviors that are much harder to break. Maria finds it especially valuable because it provides concrete experiments you can try with your team to shake off the zombie symptoms. Her advice: start here, because understanding what bad looks like is just as important as knowing the ideal.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Maria Skvortsova: When Agile Labels Hide Waterfall Reality — A Scrum Master's Wake-Up Call in SAP Migration 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.   "I realized that even if I like Scrum and Agile, and I think they are really good ways of thinking, some areas cannot adapt them because they are completely different from the mindset and ways of working." — Maria Skvortsova   Maria came to Agile with the fire of a true believer. After a decade as a C++ developer, she'd found something that matched how she thought and felt about building software — something that went beyond controlling budgets and roadmaps. When a boutique SAP consulting company hired her as an Agile coach to transform their entire organization, she was all in. She built what she describes as a "really good" training for senior management, designed to sell them on Agile ways of working. But when she stepped out of the PMO role and into a real SAP migration project as delivery manager, the ground shifted beneath her. The iron triangle — fixed cost, fixed scope, fixed time — ruled everything. Teams ran "sprints" that were really just boxed iterations with no feedback loops, no value delivery, just a march toward a go-live date. Maria realized she was putting Agile labels on a fundamentally waterfall process. The hardest part wasn't the discovery — it was accepting that she needed to redirect her energy to environments where Agile could genuinely take root, rather than forcing it where the mindset simply didn't exist. Her advice: recognize when labels don't match reality as quickly as possible, and have the courage to choose environments that align with how you want to work.   Self-reflection Question: Are you putting Agile labels on processes that are fundamentally waterfall? How quickly would you recognize the mismatch — and what would you do about it?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Njegos Ilic: The "Painting by Numbers" Scrum Master vs. The Quiet Leader Who Made the Team Self-Sufficient In this episode, we refer to the concepts of Scrum Master as facilitator and team empowerment. The Bad Scrum Master: The "Painting by Numbers" Approach That Leaves Product Owners Working Alone 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.   "You basically feel totally alone because you are trying to deliver value as a team, but if nobody asks anything and nobody challenges anything, you end up defining everything yourself." - Njegos Ilic   Njegos describes the worst Scrum Master anti-pattern he's witnessed: the "painting by numbers" Scrum Master who runs every ceremony by the book — dailies, refinements, plannings, retros, reviews — but without understanding the purpose behind any of them. The meetings become a reporting cycle: "What did you do yesterday?" with no interaction, no challenging, no real engagement. From the product owner's perspective, this is devastating. Njegos describes feeling completely alone — trying to deliver value as a team while nobody engages, nobody asks questions, nobody pushes back on assumptions. The downstream effect is predictable: gaps that could have been caught early with a single conversation only surface during development or after deployment. Worse, the lack of engagement creates doubt and overthinking — the product owner starts over-defining requirements because there's no feedback loop, which reinforces the very passivity that caused the problem.   Self-reflection Question: Are the ceremonies on your team creating genuine engagement and learning — or have they become a reporting cycle that nobody actually needs? The Great Scrum Master: The Quiet, Impactful Leader Who Made the Team Self-Sufficient 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 best Scrum Masters I worked with were invisible — they knew always when to speak, they sensed the pulse of the team, and they weren't afraid to jump in when needed." - Njegos Ilic   The best Scrum Masters Njegos has worked with share a common trait: they were almost invisible. They didn't dominate meetings or insert themselves where they weren't needed. But they were always present — sensing the team's pulse, knowing when to step in, unafraid to say "we're out of time, let's take this offline." They were knowledgeable about the product, which earned them genuine respect from developers. And perhaps most powerfully, they delegated facilitation itself. Njegos shares an example where a Scrum Master introduced a round-robin system: when new developers joined the team, everyone took turns facilitating meetings — planning, retros, dailies. This wasn't just delegation for efficiency; it was empowerment by design. Team members who facilitated a retrospective suddenly understood how hard it is to lead one. That empathy changed how they participated when someone else was facilitating. The Scrum Master remained the guide, but the team grew its own capacity to self-organize.   Self-reflection Question: If your Scrum Master disappeared tomorrow, would your team know how to facilitate its own ceremonies — and if not, what does that say about how the role is being used?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Njegos Ilic: Why Measuring Your Product Bets Is the Key to Product Owner Success 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.   "If you cannot measure what you build, you will just be depending on who is screaming the loudest and using your gut feeling — which is not a good thing long term." - Njegos Ilic   Njegos defines product owner success through three pillars: the ability to measure product bets, deep knowledge of the industry and product, and the humility to admit mistakes and be challenged. The measurement piece is central — without it, he argues, you're flying blind, making decisions based on opinions rather than evidence, reacting to whoever screams loudest rather than what the data shows. But Njegos is honest that not every environment makes measurement easy. Some companies lack the tooling, the culture, or the historical infrastructure to set up proper analytics. In those situations, he turns to user interviews as the next best thing — getting direct feedback from users, even though he acknowledges that opinions are still limited without data to fact-check them against. His most powerful suggestion: invite the whole team to user interviews, not just the product trio. When developers hear directly from users, they connect to real-world problems, and conversations during refinements become richer and more grounded.   In this episode, we refer to The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and Shift: From Product to People by Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Kruger.   Self-reflection Question: How do you currently measure whether the features you shipped actually delivered the value you expected — and if you can't measure it, what's your fallback? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start With a Relaxing Exercise Njegos doesn't advocate for a specific retrospective template — and that's the point. From his product owner perspective, he values retrospectives that begin with a relaxing, informal exercise to set the tone. Not everything needs to feel like business as usual. This casual opening allows people to connect as humans first, which opens them up to think differently about what they learned during the sprint. Njegos is candid about the reality: some teams love icebreakers, while others find them childish and just want to get to the point. His advice is to sense the pulse of the team and adapt. The format matters less than whether it creates an environment where people can be honest about what went well, what didn't, and what to improve. A Scrum Master who reads the team's vibe and adjusts accordingly — that's what makes the difference.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Njegos Ilic: How a Miro Board Experiment Changed the Way His Team Understood the Big Picture 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.   "Every feature is a product bet. I would call this a process bet — just try to see what works best for you." - Njegos Ilic   Njegos shares a change story from his time working with a tech lead who had previously been a Scrum Master — a partnership that made all the difference. Together, they introduced a simple but powerful change: visualizing the team's work on a Miro board instead of relying on a standard ticket board with cards and status columns. They mapped out concepts, connected ticket numbers to a visual representation of how different pieces of work fit together, and used this board during dailies and refinements to track progress in context. The change wasn't imposed top-down — Njegos and his tech lead simply said, "Give us one sprint to try this. If it doesn't work, we drop it." The result was immediate: dailies became more engaging, the team could see how their individual work connected to the bigger picture, and Njegos found it much easier to track progress as a visual thinker. His advice for Scrum Masters and product owners who want to introduce something similar is refreshingly simple — frame it as a "process bet," just like you'd frame a product bet. Try it, measure what happens, and if it doesn't work, drop it and try something else. The willingness to experiment with your own process is a prerequisite for experimenting with the product itself.   Self-reflection Question: What "process bet" has your team been avoiding — and what would it take to just try it for one sprint?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Njegos Ilic: Why the Product Trio Breaks the Hand-Off Mentality That Kills Team Engagement 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.   "I can't change people, but I can definitely involve them." - Njegos Ilic   Njegos describes a pattern he's encountered multiple times as a product owner: teams where engagement is almost nonexistent. He walks into a refinement session, presents ideas, asks for feedback — and gets crickets. Nobody pushes back, nobody asks questions, nobody challenges the assumptions. The result is a product owner working in isolation, defining everything alone, only to discover gaps during development that could have been caught early with a single conversation. Njegos is honest about the limits of what any one person can do — you can't change people's personalities, and expecting a Scrum Master to do so is unrealistic. But what you can do is involve people. His approach when joining a new team: don't come in announcing how things will work. Instead, learn how the team already works, meet them where they are, and then find ways to fit new concepts into their existing rhythm. For the non-negotiable things — the red lines — he's precise, open, and always provides an alternative rather than just pushing his way.   In this segment, we talk about Discovery and Delivery and the Product Trio concept.   Self-reflection Question: When you join a team meeting and get silence instead of feedback, do you assume agreement — or do you treat it as a signal that something deeper needs to change? Featured Book of the Week: Inspired by Marty Cagan Njegos recommends Inspired by Marty Cagan as the book that most shaped his approach to product ownership. He highlights the entire SVPG series — including Empowered and Transformed (available as the Product is Hard SVPG Box Set) — but points to the Product Trio concept as especially powerful. As Njegos puts it, the Product Trio — bringing together a product manager, a tech lead, and a designer — removes the hand-off mentality where each discipline works in isolation. Instead of the product owner defining everything alone and handing it to the team, the trio shapes problems together during discovery, so that by the time work reaches the team, there's shared understanding of why they're building something, not just what to build.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Your Retrospective Never Actually Fixes the Alignment ProblemThe retrospective is one of the most protected ceremonies in agile. Scrum teams hold it every sprint. SAFe bakes it into every iteration. Coaches run workshops on how to run better ones. And yet, the same misalignment issues resurface sprint after sprint.This isn't a facilitation problem. It isn't a psychological safety problem. It is a structural mismatch: teams are applying a periodic, backward-looking review to a continuous, structural problem.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/

Law firms are constantly being introduced to new tools, frameworks, and operational philosophies that promise better efficiency and better results. But the challenge is not simply adopting a popular methodology; it's understanding which approaches actually fit the type of work your team is doing and the problems you're trying to solve within your law firm operations.In this episode, I sit down with business consultant and Agile practitioner Robin Sims-Allen to explore what law firms can learn from other heavily regulated industries about process improvement, project management, and organizational change. We discuss the strengths and limitations of frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, and Waterfall, and why choosing the right tool depends on the nature of the work, the structure of the team, and the realities of the environment you're operating in.Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: agileattorney.com/121Take your law practice from overwhelmed to optimized with GreenLine LegalFollow along on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnegrantFollow Robin on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robinsimsallen

Njegos Ilic: Why Saying Yes to Every Stakeholder Request Is the Fastest Way to Fail as a Product Owner 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 game is rigged because they are strong personalities, they want to get things done, but you don't have a magic stick — it's really hard to deliver results if you cannot say no." - Njegos Ilic   Njegos shares a failure from early in his career as a product owner in startup environments, where he found himself saying yes to every stakeholder request. Working with strong-willed founders who expected things done their way, Njegos fell into the trap of trying to please everyone — building everything that was asked without pushing back. The result was predictable: scattered priorities, no room to pivot, and a product backlog driven by the loudest voice in the room rather than real user needs. But Njegos frames this failure with a perspective that product owners at any stage can learn from. He compares the learning process to watching children learn to walk — stumbling and falling is not a sign of weakness, it's a necessary step in the process of growing. His advice to product owners currently stuck in this pattern: don't try to avoid failures too hard, because you might prevent yourself from learning the most important lessons. Instead, treat failure as a feedback loop — something happened, you can measure it, and you can change your approach. The key is doing the actual work of reflection: What did I do? What should have been different? What wasn't possible to change, and why?   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you said yes to a stakeholder request even though your gut told you it wasn't the right call — and what would it take for you to say no next time?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Christian Thordal: The Jazz Duo Effect and The Absent PO — Two Sides of Agile Product Ownership The Great Product Owner: Clarity, Accountability, and a Partnership That Fills in the Blanks 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.   "We kind of filled in the blanks for each other, and it felt very natural — it's grown organically into this partnership where we're extremely aligned on how we see and do things." - Christian Thordal   Christian describes his best Product Owner as someone he currently works with — a person who combines deep product clarity with genuine leadership. This PO is fully accountable for the backlog, sets clear expectations toward the teams, and isn't afraid to push them. What makes this PO stand out is how they use reporting as a communication tool: alongside the backlog, they proactively communicate to the product leader whether things are within or outside scope, always with a plan ready. Christian and this PO hold weekly follow-ups to discuss the team, the backlog, and the product direction. Over time, their alignment has become so strong that during facilitation sessions they naturally fill in blanks for each other — one picks up where the other leaves off. Vasco compared it to a jazz duo, where each musician picks up on the other's leads in real time. This kind of organic partnership in leadership direction reflects positively on the entire team, creating a sense of coherence and momentum that everyone can feel.   Self-reflection Question: How aligned are you with your Product Owner on leadership direction, and what would it take to build the kind of partnership where you naturally fill in the blanks for each other? The Bad Product Owner: When the PO Disappears and the Scrum Master Becomes the Glue 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.   "You can inspire, you can motivate, but you can't really do the work for them." - Christian Thordal   Christian shares an experience from a larger logistics company in Denmark where the Product Owner was a great, likable person — but didn't understand the role. The backlog was high-level, consisting primarily of Epics with no acceptance criteria. Then the warning signs started: the PO became increasingly hard to get a hold of, started canceling refinement meetings (sometimes on the same day), began working more from home, and became physically more distant from the team. Christian and the team were left to navigate on their own, breaking down epics into stories and tasks without knowing if they were building the right product. Christian tried setting up weekly one-hour sessions to help the PO work through the backlog, but the fundamental problem remained — you cannot do the PO's work for them. Eventually, Christian found himself filling in for the PO, which is itself an anti-pattern: the Scrum Master becoming the glue that holds the product together. The symptoms to watch for are clear: a PO who starts missing meetings, backlog items that remain unrefined, a PO who becomes physically or remotely distant, and — the biggest red flag — a Scrum Master who feels compelled to step in and do the PO's job.   Self-reflection Question: Are there signs that your Product Owner is drifting away from the team, and have you caught yourself filling in gaps that aren't yours to fill?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup. Sold 2 million copies. Helped hundreds of people build companies from nothing. Now he's back with a harder question: why do so many of those companies eventually go bad?In this episode, Matt Watson sits down with Eric to talk about his new book Incorruptible—a deep dive into the invisible forces that corrupt organizations, why profit-maximization becomes pathological, and what it actually takes to build a company that stays great.They get into why the stage-gate development model keeps failing founders, the story of Saul Price and how Costco was born from a betrayal, and what a real fiduciary duty to your customer looks like in practice. Plus, how to structure your company so your values outlast you.Listen to the full episode on Startup Hustle. And if Incorruptible sounds like your next read, pre-order it at incorruptible.co before May 26th.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:37 Introduction to Eric Ries and The Lean Startup06:57 The Journey to Incorruptible: A New Perspective12:38 The Challenge of Short-Term Thinking in Business16:14 Understanding Corruption in Business Practices22:51 Building Trustworthy Organizations31:03 Who Should Read Incorruptible?Links & ResourcesConnect with Eric Ries on LinkedInWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.

Christian Thordal: Structure Creates Freedom, How an Agile Coach Measures Success by Becoming Less Needed 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 less I shine and the more the team shines, the better I perform." - Christian Thordal   Christian shares how his definition of success has fundamentally shifted over the years. Early in his career, the question was "How can I shine?" Today, it is the opposite — success means becoming invisible. For Christian, a high-performing Scrum Master builds teams that no longer depend on them, much like raising a child to become a functional adult by eighteen. They can always call dad for coaching or to borrow money, but they can stand on their own. He illustrates this with a team he moved from what he calls "cowboy loose Kanban" to an adapted Scrum framework. The structure gave the team freedom: he can now miss dailies and planning sessions, and the team still produces a solid plan, sprint backlog, and sprint goal. He drops by to give pointers and encourage good behaviors. Christian also highlights the importance of the Scrum Master and Product Owner partnership — "the mom and dad of the team" — and how building predictability and flow matters more than heroics. A key tactical insight: he created a one-pager roadmap for his domain leader showing issues, plans, milestones, and metrics. This simple artifact gave leadership the comfort that things were under control, buying Christian the autonomy to do his best work. This proved critical when his team was decimated by departures in late 2025 — he hired new people, stabilized the group, and got them delivering again.   Self-reflection Question: What would it look like if your team could run a full sprint cycle without you present — and what is stopping that from happening today? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Four-Box Retrospective Christian shares a retrospective format he calls the Four-Box Retrospective — a structured, pragmatic approach that resonates especially well with engineer-minded teams. The session begins with a team check-in to get the vibe in the room. Next, the team reviews last week's agreements: who was accountable, and are those items still alive or handled? Anything still alive moves forward automatically, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Then comes the core mechanic: topic creation divided into four boxes — Tech (tools and tech stacks), Team (issues within the team), Outside (external dependencies and blockers), and Parking Lot (everything else). Presenters explain their topics briefly to give context, and the group uses dot voting to surface the most pressing issues. Discussion follows, with clear accountability assignments and action items written down. The pre-grouping into four boxes saves significant time by giving topics a natural home before discussion begins. Named owners for every action item create real progress between retrospectives. Christian values this format because it is grounded in actual operational problems — people can see the direct application of every conversation, which keeps engagement high and outcomes tangible.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Christian Thordal: Managing Cross-Team Dependencies in Scaled Agile, From Planning to Real-Time Coordination 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.   "When one team's plan failed, the rest collapsed — deliveries and outcomes were delayed across the entire domain." - Christian Thordal   In this episode, Christian Thordal shares the biggest challenge he faced as an Agile Coach working within a large Danish broadcast company's technology division, where 32 teams operate across multiple domains. Within his domain of 10 teams, they plan in three-month cycles using OKRs, but a critical blind spot kept undermining their results: nobody had a clear grasp of the dependencies between teams and sister domains. When one team's delivery slipped in a previous cycle, it triggered a cascade of failures across the organization. Christian and the agile coaching community escalated the issue to the portfolio and delivery department, pushing to synchronize cycle timing across domains. He introduced a "big room planning" approach within his domain to map out which teams they impact and who impacts them, structured around a three-week cadence: define OKRs, align, then commit. A key coaching insight reshaped his thinking: dependencies are not facts — they are decisions. By naming the specific people involved (the person who needs resolution and the person who provides it), teams can manage dependencies in real-time rather than waiting for a program management layer that only addresses problems after escalation. Christian now plans to establish dedicated coordination days during each cycle where teams actively collaborate and resolve dependency issues together.   Self-reflection Question: When dependencies between your teams cause delivery failures, do you treat them as coordination problems to solve in real-time, or do you wait for escalation through a management layer?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Christian Thordal: How "Fake Kanban" Fooled the Metrics, And What This Agile Coach Did to Fix It 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 team was like birds in a nest waiting to get fed — completely dependent on the PO for every piece of work." - Christian Thordal   Christian tells us about a team that always appeared busy but was hiding serious dysfunction behind a single healthy metric. When he rated the system across his domain, he found the team scored low in process maturity, effectiveness, and learning — yet their cycle time looked good. The team claimed to practice Kanban, but in reality it meant "we can do whatever we want." Daily standups had become social check-ins. The backlog held over 100 items to do and 50+ in progress, most of them just headlines with no descriptions. Real work assignments happened through 30-minute Slack huddles between the PO and individual developers — pure push, no prioritization. Despite having OKRs, the team could only plan a week ahead. Christian's fix was radical: he restarted the backlog entirely, cutting 150 items down to roughly 30, established WIP limits to create a pull-based system, and brought the team into the process as active participants rather than passive recipients.   In this segment, we refer to Kanban and OKRs.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you looked beyond a single "green" metric to understand what was really happening in your team's workflow? Featured Book of the Week: Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet Christian recommends Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet, a former U.S. Navy submarine commander who transformed his crew's performance by replacing permission-seeking with intent-based leadership. Instead of waiting for orders, crew members were expected to say "I intend to..." — transferring ownership and making people accountable for their decisions. Christian says this deeply resonated with his own military background in the Danish Army, where leadership operated on similar principles. The book's core message — stop creating dependency and start building leaders at every level — connects directly to the team story in this episode, where passive dependency on the PO was the root of the dysfunction. You can also listen to previous episodes with David Marquet and explore more on intent-based leadership.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Christian Thordal: When Applying Scrum By The Book Fails, Understanding Context Before Changing The System 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.   "I treated Scrum like a military SOP — follow the book, execute the steps. But I failed to see that the context was really the tipping point. What looked like a problem was actually their solution." - Christian Thordal   Christian shares a hard-won lesson from his time coaching three RPA teams at one of Denmark's largest banks during the pandemic. He inherited teams running six-week sprints with half-hour planning sessions that amounted to little more than putting items on a calendar. As a former Danish Army officer, Christian's instinct was to fix the obvious deviation from the Scrum Guide — the sprint length. He advocated for shorter feedback loops and eventually convinced the Product Owner, who also served as the director, to try two-week sprints. The first planning session was a disaster. There was yelling and scolding, and it became clear that the real problem had nothing to do with sprint length. The teams had no proper backlog. The six-week sprints actually worked because they gave teams enough time to go out to the business, discover work, and deliver it within a single cycle. Christian realized he had been applying Scrum mechanically without understanding how work entered the system. He started attending business analyst and PO meetings, uncovered the backlog gap, and helped the teams build a proper one. His key insight: what looks like a symptom can actually be a pragmatic solution to real constraints. Understand the system before you change it.   In this episode, we refer to the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you assumed a team's practice was wrong, only to discover it was a reasonable adaptation to their context? How might you investigate the "why" behind existing processes before proposing changes?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Discover how AI can be seamlessly incorporated into Scrum teams to enhance productivity, storytelling, and problem-solving. Claudio Lassala shares real-world experiences of leveraging AI to fill skill gaps, automate tasks, and scale solutions, challenging traditional notions of team roles and developer identities. Key Insights: • The importance of teaching AI your principles for better, personalized outcomes • AI's role in automating routine tasks allows developers to focus on high-value stakeholder engagement • Emphasizing a solution-oriented mindset rather than coding as an identity • Managing resistance by framing AI as a problem-solving partner, not a threat • Continuous re-skilling and mindset shifts needed for teams to thrive with AI • Leaders should focus on enabling their teams to leverage AI ethically and effectively Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction and Claudio's background in IT and agile coaching 02:21 - How AI is integrated into Scrum teams 03:45 - Using AI to write user stories and acceptance criteria 05:24 - The importance of conversations and stories in Agile 07:01 - Teaching AI to reflect team principles and critique solutions 08:15 - Addressing fears of losing roles with AI integration 09:42 - Resistance from team members and how to approach it 11:08 - Demonstrating productivity gains with AI-driven planning 12:13 - Balancing automation with the human touch in problem-solving 15:03 - Clarifying misconceptions about AI automating all tasks 16:38 - Managing detailed task decomposition with AI 18:04 - The evolution of developer roles and knowledge retention 20:17 - Using analogies like cars with carburetors to explain technological shifts 21:34 - Passion projects and opportunities AI unlocks 23:29 - How AI might change the identity of developers 26:38 - The need for continuous retraining and knowledge updating 29:43 - Supporting team members in adapting to AI tools 33:01 - Leadership strategies for leveraging AI ethically and effectively 36:16 - Personal storytelling: AI in content creation and blogging 37:04 - Claudio's favorite guitar solo and closing thoughts Contact Claudio • LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiolassala/ • Web / Blog https://lassala.net/ • Improving https://www.improving.com/profile/claudio-lassala/

Huge magic round special with Tony Squires, Brent Read, Nathan Hindmarsh & Wade Graham are in to give us all the latest from round 11! We talk Origin mail, the sliding Bulldogs & have some huge player movement news! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Huge magic round special with Tony Squires, Brent Read, Nathan Hindmarsh & Wade Graham are in to give us all the latest from round 11! We talk Origin mail, the sliding Bulldogs & have some huge player movement news! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mukhtar Kadiri: The Three Qualities That Separate Great Product Owners From Those Who Just Drop Tickets The Great Product Owner: Decisive, Versatile, and Credible at Every Level 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.   "This person could hold his own at any level of the organization — with executives, with engineering leadership, and with the team." - Mukhtar Kadiri   Mukhtar describes the best product owner he ever worked with through three distinct qualities. First, this person could operate at any level — equally comfortable in a strategic conversation with executives and in a tactical session with the engineering team. Second, they had vast cross-functional knowledge. They weren't a specialist in any one domain, but they could hold intelligent, credible conversations with marketing, go-to-market, customer success, and engineering alike. And third — perhaps most critically — they were decisive. In ambiguous environments where nobody has done this before, teams need someone who will pick a direction and say "let's find out," even if the decision might be wrong. That decisiveness, combined with the ability to course-correct early, is what separates great product owners from those who leave teams waiting for direction that never comes.   Self-reflection Question: Which of these three qualities — operating at any level, cross-functional credibility, or decisiveness — is strongest in your product owner, and which one needs the most development? The Bad Product Owner: Not Owning the Backlog 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.   "If you don't have a strong product person, engineering just takes over the backlog. And that is dangerous, because it's product that is the representative of the customers." - Mukhtar Kadiri   Mukhtar has seen it happen repeatedly: when a product owner doesn't truly own the backlog, a strong engineering lead steps in and takes over prioritization by default. Things still get built — often beautiful, technically elegant solutions — but they don't produce business value because engineering lacks the customer intimacy that product should bring. The fix isn't simple, but Mukhtar identifies three levers. First, mentorship — pairing a junior product person with a more senior one to build confidence and skills. Second, building technical literacy — a product owner who can't meet engineering halfway will always be seen as an outsider dropping tickets. And third, closing the relationship gap between product and engineering. As Mukhtar points out, a product owner is technically a part of the team, but if the team doesn't feel like they're a part of the team, that gap becomes a chasm. There needs to be real overlap between engineering and product — not just shared meetings, but shared understanding.   Self-reflection Question: Is your product owner truly a member of the team — or are they just someone who shows up to drop tickets and disappear until the next sprint planning?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mukhtar Kadiri: Why Success Means Nothing If the Project Doesn't Move the Business Forward — And How Public Commitments Keep You Honest 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.   "If you're not careful with success, you can deliver a project, but the project will really not do much for the business." - Mukhtar Kadiri   For Mukhtar, success is personal — he's the kind of project leader who gets emotionally invested, who thinks about the project after hours, who needs recovery time between engagements. And that emotional investment shapes how he defines success: not as hitting deadlines or completing tasks, but as delivering real business value. He breaks success metrics into three buckets using his signature rule of three: business and product metrics (NPS, revenue, market penetration), project management metrics (velocity, burn-down, risk scores), and software and system metrics (availability, transactions per second, platform health). But the real insight is in how he holds himself accountable. Mukhtar makes public commitments at the start of every project — "Expect status updates from me every week" — because he knows that the discipline of narrating the project's story every week forces him to truly understand what's happening. A status report isn't bureaucratic busywork when you approach it as storytelling: you have to make sense of the data, surface what's relevant, and articulate where the project actually stands. If you can't tell the story, something's missing from your understanding. That weekly narrative becomes both an accountability mechanism and an early warning system.   Self-reflection Question: Can you tell the story of your project right now — not just the tasks completed, but the narrative of where it stands, why, and what that means for the business? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What Worked / What Didn't Work / Next Steps Mukhtar is a firm believer in simplicity, and his favorite retrospective format reflects that — the classic "What worked, what didn't work, and next steps." He applies his rule of three here as well: three categories are easy for humans to hold in their heads, removing cognitive overhead so the team can focus on the conversation itself. But Mukhtar is quick to point out that a simple structure can still produce terrible retrospectives. What matters more is the facilitation: making sure people feel safe at the very start, level-setting so participants can "land" into the retrospective after jumping from another meeting, giving everyone a moment of quiet introspection to write things down before discussion begins — ensuring both quiet and loud voices are heard. He prepares for every retrospective because, as he puts it, "if you run a bad retro, you could do damage to your team morale and your project." Active facilitation — watching for who isn't speaking, encouraging quieter voices, managing tone — is what transforms a simple format into a powerful conversation.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community podcast, Dave West sits down with Dave Dame, Senior Director of Human-Centered Design at Microsoft, to explore the lessons behind his new book, “Leading with Imperfect Feet.”Dame shares his journey of leadership through the lens of imperfection, emphasizing the value of vulnerability, humility, and learning from mistakes. Drawing on personal experiences, including overcoming the challenges of Cerebral Palsy to walk on the beach, he illustrates how embracing imperfection can empower leaders and their teams.The conversation dives deep into inclusive design, human factors, cognitive science, and user research, showing how thoughtful, human-centered approaches create better products and more effective teams. Dame discusses how organizations can balance efficiency with creativity and human connection, and why continuous learning and adaptive leadership are essential in today's fast-changing work environment.Whether you're a product leader, designer, or someone striving to lead with empathy, this episode offers practical insights and inspiring stories on how embracing imperfection can drive innovation, inclusivity, and authentic leadership.Leading with Imperfect Feet is now available for pre-order and will be published in June!

Mukhtar Kadiri: Merging Three Companies Into One Platform — When Founders Can't Let Go and Leaders Won't Decide 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.   "A lot of times, conflict arises because people don't understand each other. The first thing you need to do is make sure they understand each other." - Mukhtar Kadiri   Mukhtar brings us a challenge from a merger and acquisition program where a dominant software company acquired two competitors simultaneously — both solving the same market gap, each with their own platform, their own founders still in place, and their own fierce loyalties. The mission: merge three platforms into one. But the technical challenge was the easy part. The real complexity was human — founders who'd built their companies from scratch watching their babies potentially get retired, teams losing people to low morale and uncertainty, and leadership paralyzed by the knowledge that every decision would make somebody unhappy. Together, Mukhtar and Vasco explore a four-step approach to navigating these high-stakes disagreements: first, create a feeling of time abundance — never rush a decision that requires buy-in. Second, get each side to present their perspective with only clarifying questions, no judgment. Third, name the disagreement explicitly — turn emotions into concrete, debatable statements. And fourth, co-create an alternative solution that doesn't come from either original position, because co-creation builds commitment. Mukhtar adds a critical fifth element: steel-manning — having each side articulate the other's argument as if defending it. When people feel genuinely understood, even "disagree and commit" becomes possible.   In this episode, we refer to steel-manning and the concept of disagree and commit.   Self-reflection Question: When you're facilitating a disagreement between two strong positions, do you rush toward a decision — or do you invest the time to make sure both sides can articulate each other's argument before you even think about next steps?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Is AI actually helping us escape the build trap, or just helping us build the wrong things faster?In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel discuss the new AI4Agile Practitioners Report 2026 from Scrum.org. The data reveals a startling trend: while 83% of practitioners have access to AI tools, the primary fear isn't job replacement, it's that AI is becoming a "supercharged way into the feature factory."Listen or watch as we examine the report's key findings, including the gap between AI access (83%) and actual competence (only 15% received formal training). We discuss why the reported productivity gains (73.7%) might be masking the erosion of agile values like reflection and collaboration. Citing Melissa Perri's "Escaping the Build Trap," we explore how organizations are using AI to accelerate output without redesigning workflows to improve outcomes.Key topics include:Why "speed of delivery" was never the real bottleneckWhat practitioners really fearThe lack of workflow redesign in the AI eraFive actionable questions to test if your team is escaping or acceleratingTune in to learn how to ensure your AI adoption drives value, not just volume.#Agile #ProductManagement #AIEscaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri, The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, AI4Agile Practitioners Report 2026 by Scrum.org, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey MooreLINKSYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagileSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596INTRO MUSICToronto Is My BeatBy Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Mukhtar Kadiri: When the Smartest Person on the Team Becomes the Biggest Bottleneck — And Explodes in a Meeting 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.   "A lot of times, the problem is not necessarily technical. It's a human problem. Just figuring out the human dynamics removes the obstacles and makes the project flow." - Mukhtar Kadiri   Mukhtar was brought into a healthcare software project where the team couldn't hit any of their milestones. The product manager, engineering team, and head of engineering were supposed to be self-sustaining, but chaos reigned. What Mukhtar found through his one-on-ones was a pattern of finger-pointing — product blaming engineering, engineering blaming product. Then, in one meeting, the head of engineering exploded. He burst out yelling in front of the entire team. In a private conversation afterward, Mukhtar discovered the root cause: this brilliant architect was a bottleneck. Everyone depended on him, he was stretched across multiple projects, and the frustration had been building with no outlet. Mukhtar's approach was direct — "Your name is on this project. Yelling is not going to help." But the real insight came from what happened next. Once the head of engineering started controlling his outbursts, team morale improved almost immediately. Combined with basic structure — regular meetings, low-hanging-fruit milestones — the team built momentum and eventually became self-sufficient. The lesson? No matter how technical the challenge looks, it's always a people problem. And one-on-ones aren't just status updates — they're pressure valves that prevent public explosions that can cause irreparable damage to team morale.   Self-reflection Question: Is there someone on your team who's carrying too much load in silence — and what would it take for you to create a safe space where they can express that frustration before it boils over? Featured Book of the Week: HBR Project Management Handbook by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez Mukhtar recommends the HBR Project Management Handbook because, as he puts it, "A lot of project management books, I can read them and it's almost like I'm not really learning anything new. But this one had substance." After stumbling into project management and leading projects for seven years before even pursuing his PMP, Mukhtar found that most PM books simply codified what he already knew from experience. The HBR handbook was different — it offered breadth, depth, and fresh approaches to common project management challenges. He also recommends the Rita Mulcahy PMP Exam Prep for those preparing for PMP certification, noting that studying for the exam crystallized frameworks around things he had been doing instinctively.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this episode, manufacturing executive Rodd Joos breaks down how to prioritize the right projects, manage scope, build stronger teams, and use Scrum and Fibonacci sequencing to deliver faster. ------------------------------ Unlock practical tools, training, and support to help your team improve. Manufacturers Alliance members get full access to our webinar library, digital courses, member pricing, and a statewide network of leaders who share what's working on the factory floor. Links: Subscribe to the Newsletter: https://www.mfrall.com/hmi/ Become a Member: https://www.mfrall.com/membership/ Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5orRRXkVgAkbAeUuCj1dP5 Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-manufacturers-improve/id1677078610 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfj2OPOknywMeVwzPJX7Ifw

Mukhtar Kadiri: The Invisible Stakeholder Who Almost Derailed His First Big Project 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.   "Nobody really told me, okay, this is what success looks like. And that's a very dangerous thing, because you can just go in there and be busy and be executing." - Mukhtar Kadiri   Early in his career, Mukhtar was sitting on the bench with nothing to do — and his days felt numbered. When a low-priority project came along, he jumped at it, eager to prove himself. He met the contract holder, understood the terrain, laid out a plan, and started executing. Then a stakeholder he hadn't even mapped called him into her office and blasted him. The project wasn't aligned with her vision — and it turned out she was more powerful than the contract holder, even though she appeared nowhere on the org chart. That moment forced Mukhtar to rethink everything. He started scheduling one-on-ones with every stakeholder he could find, asking each one what success looked like from their perspective, and then asking them to point him to the next person he should talk to. What emerged was a comprehensive success criteria that no single person had articulated before — because even the leaders hadn't sat down to define it. Mukhtar learned that in complex, ambiguous environments, success isn't handed to you. It's your job to surface it, articulate it, and get everyone aligned. As he puts it, don't be fooled by org charts — the real stakeholder map is one you have to build yourself through one-on-one conversations.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you validated your stakeholder map beyond the org chart — and could there be an invisible stakeholder whose definition of success you haven't yet discovered?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Welcome to the The Achievers Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Deibert, Performance Coach. I help enterprise sellers unlock their full potential by aligning their work with how they workout and cleaning up mindset trash, so they can sell more, stress less, and take back control of their time and success.   You spend hours polishing a deliverable nobody notices. You build a beautiful AI-powered strategy and never implement a single piece of it. You refuse to start because you can't do it "right." In this episode, I break down how perfectionism quietly steals your time, masks deeper fears, and keeps your best work trapped in draft mode, plus the exact tools I use to release the pressure and start shipping work that actually moves deals forward.  

Organizations are still struggling to deliver what their customers want, when they want it, and the loudest question in delivery right now is whether agile and traditional project management are stronger together.Some Scrum practitioners are pursuing PMP certifications for the first time, traditional project managers are picking up the updated PMI-ACP, and the lines between Scrum Master and Project Manager have blurred in the marketplace.  Both disciplines bring real strengths. Forward thinking leaders are leaning into the blend instead of defending a camp.Most organizations are not picking sides anymore.  They are picking outcomes. The question is no longer "are we doing real Scrum" or "are we doing proper Project Management."  The question is whether your teams are delivering value, learning fast, and treating their customers like the heroes of the story.In this episode, we discuss:Why "Technical Project Manager" and "Scrum Master" have quietly become the same role on most job boardsHow the updated PMI-ACP is bridging traditional project management and agile leadershipThe hybrid skills organizations are hungry forThe leadership move that changes everything, regardless of title or framework

It's Round 10 of the NRL and it's Tony Squires, Wade Graham, Nathan Hindmarsh and Danny Weidler to chat about the week that was. The boys scratch their heads as to how the Robert Toia try was given last night in absolute howler by the Bunker. The man of the hour, Cody Ramsey jumps in for a chat and shares a deep insight into his journey back to the NRL. Danny shares some NRL truths around the crazy Golden Point ending in North Queensland last night where the Eels took the spoils. The team tries to understand how the Bulldogs have fallen so far, and Wade shares his Blue Origin side, pumps up Victor Radley for selection. Plus Tony's Quiz, Believe It Or Not? and tips for the rest of the weekend's footy. Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Round 10 of the NRL and it's Tony Squires, Wade Graham, Nathan Hindmarsh and Danny Weidler to chat about the week that was. The boys scratch their heads as to how the Robert Toia try was given last night in absolute howler by the Bunker. The man of the hour, Cody Ramsey jumps in for a chat and shares a deep insight into his journey back to the NRL. Danny shares some NRL truths around the crazy Golden Point ending in North Queensland last night where the Eels took the spoils. The team tries to understand how the Bulldogs have fallen so far, and Wade shares his Blue Origin side, pumps up Victor Radley for selection. Plus Tony's Quiz, Believe It Or Not? and tips for the rest of the weekend's footy. Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peter Merel: From Desk-Pounding to Harmony — How the Game of Go Transformed a Violent Product Owner, and Why Every Employee Should Think Like an Owner In this episode, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel and The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. The Great Product Owner: The Real Estate Visionary Who Built Channels of Learning 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.   "When a product owner brings an attitude of learning together, it doesn't just create psychological safety — it creates an active experimental mindset and a network of trust relationships that support each other in the learning process." - Peter Merel   The best product owner Peter has worked with is Ben White, one of three brothers and partners in Ray White — Australia's largest property management business, started by Ben's great-grandfather. Ben had a vision for transforming how property management works across the entire Australian industry. To realize this vision, he tried to bring an app to market — and failed. Not once, but twice, before succeeding on the third attempt. What made Ben exceptional wasn't his persistence alone, but that each failure became an opportunity to learn how to approach the problem differently. The product he finally brought to market was informed by all of that learning. Ben's real genius, Peter explains, is his ability to establish channels of learning — trust relationships that flow not just through the technical team, but throughout the entire business and back into product development. Without those trust relationships, psychological safety alone isn't enough. Peter also emphasizes that the product owner should be a servant leader, and points to Jack Stack's open book management model where every employee is motivated to think and act as a business owner. When everyone understands that the future of the business is their future, they all collaborate as product owners — and the need for desk-pounding disappears entirely.   Self-reflection Question: How many channels of learning does your product owner currently have — and are there trust relationships in the organization that could become active channels but haven't been tapped yet? The Bad Product Owner: The Violent Visionary Who Didn't Understand Collaboration 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 problem isn't the role of product owner. The problem is the relationship between product owner and everybody else." - Peter Merel   At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter worked with a business executive who drove the development of a digital product that generated $2 billion in business for the bank. By any business measure, this person was extraordinarily successful. But as a product owner, he was terrible. He pounded desks, went red in the face, insisted that everything the team was doing was wrong, didn't trust anyone, and couldn't be trusted either. The core anti-pattern wasn't the shouting itself — it was that this person didn't understand what a collaborative relationship needed to be. Peter found a creative solution: he taught the executive the game of Go. Go rewards harmony — you lose by being too passive, and you lose by being too aggressive. Through Go, Peter taught the executive to create prompting questions, to work through others so they would carry concerns into meetings, and to provide answers rather than demands. Once the executive saw that collaboration was a more effective way to realize his own vision — faster, better, and more reliably — the behavior changed completely. The insight Peter shares is that before coaching behavior, you sometimes have to prove the business case for collaboration itself.   In this segment, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel, which Peter now gives to product owners as a framework for understanding collaborative relationships.   Self-reflection Question: When you encounter a product owner who leads through demands rather than collaboration, have you considered showing them that collaboration is actually a faster path to getting what they want?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Most founders get the order wrong. They build for two years, then ask a marketer how to sell it. Connie Lund flipped the script. She started Zaboom with no dev team, no code background, and no VC funding. What she had was 50+ years of combined marketing and product experience, a GoHighLevel account, and a willingness to break things at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. In this episode, Connie walks Matt through how she built a working voice AI product for insurance agencies—using N8N, GoHighLevel, and Claude as her "CTO." Then landed paying customers in under 90 days. She also gets honest about what AI can't do for you: use good judgment, know when to stop, and figure out if what you're building actually matters to anyone. They cover the difference between outputs and outcomes, why talking to customers beats building in isolation every time, and how the traditional "raise VC, hire devs, ship product" playbook is getting replaced by something scrappier and faster. If you're a founder who's been waiting until the product is perfect to talk to people, this episode will make you uncomfortable. Good. Listen to this Startup Hustle episode now.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:49 Introduction to Connie Lunn and Zaboom02:33 The Journey of Building Zaboom05:41 Tech Stack and Tools Used11:58 Prototype vs. Final Product16:16 Marketing and Customer Engagement21:09 Coaching and Helping Others25:31 Democratizing Technology and Skills32:08 Final Thoughts and AdviceLinks & ResourcesConnect with Connie Lund on LinkedInWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.

Peter Merel: Leadership as a Service — Why Scrum Masters Should Work Themselves Out of a Job and How Quality Circles Make Learning 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.   "A Scrum Master is a self-defeating role. If you have worked yourself out of a job, then you've succeeded." - Peter Merel   Peter Merel challenges the very notion of the Scrum Master as a permanent organizational role. He argues that calling someone a "master" makes everyone else a servant — the opposite of what agile teams need. Instead, Peter advocates for leadership as a service, where every team member provides leadership to their team and every member of a swarm provides leadership to their swarm. He points to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the successful direct democratic republic that existed in North America before the USA, and which influenced the American founding fathers — as a model for distributed leadership. The protocol is simple enough to apply universally, regardless of organizational structure. Peter's practical approach to success measurement is equally compelling: build a thin steel thread of alignment, prove it works in 8 to 12 weeks, then split it and backfill with the most progressive people in the organization. He describes growing a group of 300 in just 9 months using this approach. The key insight is that coaches should not think of themselves as change agents, but rather as people who transform change participants into change leaders. Once a team can self-organize without you, your job is to move on to the next challenge — and that's what success looks like.   In this episode, we refer to the concept of leadership as a service and the XScale Alliance.   Self-reflection Question: If you stepped away from your team tomorrow, could they self-organize effectively — and if not, what's the one thing you could teach them this week that would bring them closer to not needing you? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Quality Circles Peter Merel recommends quality circles as a cross-team retrospective format drawn from the Toyota Production System. The concept is simple but powerful: take three teams of six people and break them into six quality circles of three — one person from each team in each circle. These circles meet regularly for 10 to 30 minutes, ideally before team planning sessions, to share problems, ideas, and ways they can help each other. The magic of three people is that while one person explains, another listens, and the third is already thinking about where the conversation goes next — creating what Peter calls "a beautiful hum." Each circle brings two kinds of ideas back to their team: proposals for work that would benefit the teams as a whole, and treaties — working agreements between teams. The teams remain autonomous and can decide how to respond. Peter emphasizes that this approach scales naturally — representatives from groups of teams can form quality circles at higher levels, keeping face-to-face communication alive across entire organizations. As Peter puts it, "Learnings flow across the organization — and that's more valuable than anything you can come up with in a retrospective by yourself."   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Peter Merel: AI Alignment Is the Agile Coach's Next Frontier — Using Throughput Accounting and Pull-Based Transformation to Prove Value 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.   "Our jobs ARE about alignment. Alignment is how do we get all of the people and all of the tools to work together for mutual benefit." - Peter Merel   Peter Merel brings a provocative perspective on the biggest challenge facing agile professionals today: AI and agile alignment. With AI rapidly advancing, Peter observes that everyone in the agile community is afraid for their jobs — but argues this fear is misplaced. The real challenge isn't replacement; it's alignment. How do we get biological and electronic entities to work together for mutual benefit? Peter's answer begins with pull-based transformation — building a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps, proving it works with a small group, then growing it. He connects this to Goldratt's throughput accounting, arguing that throughput (operating expense plus net profit) is the only metric immune to Goodhart's Law. From throughput, Peter derives three flows: value flow (throughput itself), workflow (the first derivative — what increases value flow), and learning flow (the second derivative — what improves workflow). He then introduces the pirate metrics (AARRR) — acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue — as market constraints that can be analyzed through Theory of Constraints. Peter's frustration is that 25 years after Agile began, most business stakeholders still can't identify their market bottleneck. Without that knowledge, he argues, priorities are meaningless. The path forward for agile coaches? Bring scientific rigor to transformation, measure what matters, and prove value before scaling.   In this episode, we refer to FAST Agile, Joe Justice's work with Tesla and WikiSpeed, and the connection between throughput accounting and agile transformation metrics.   Self-reflection Question: Can you identify the single biggest market constraint limiting your organization's throughput right now — and if not, how confident are you that your current priorities are the right ones?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Peter Merel: When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It 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.   "Either you're going to do what you know works, or you're going to step away. Either way, you're not going to do damage to your client." - Peter Merel   After a successful transformation at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter Merel moved to Westpac, another major Australian bank, expecting to replicate the same approach. He found an executive who appeared eager to support an agile transformation — but this executive saw agile as the ideal form of micromanagement. Everything and everyone revolved around this one individual, and as Peter began facilitating conversations that didn't hub on the executive, the executive felt disempowered. Peter was blind to this dynamic — he had never encountered it before. The situation deteriorated because Peter had been hired to run a push-based transformation, when he knew from experience that only pull-based transformation works. At Commonwealth Bank, he had built a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps with a small group, proved it worked, and then grown it organically. At Westpac, he let himself be persuaded to push change into the organization, and it compromised everything. The lesson Peter shares is stark: if you can't do what you know works, and you can't step away, then you are the problem. He also warns that when coaches fail this way, they make life harder for whoever comes next — a responsibility that's easy to overlook in the moment.   In this segment, we talk about pull-based transformation and why push-based change programs consistently fail in large organizations.   Self-reflection Question: Are you currently in a situation where you've compromised on your approach to change — and if so, are you doing more damage by staying than you would by stepping away? Featured Book of the Week: The Agile Way by Peter Merel Peter's own book, The Agile Way, is his modern translation of the Tao Te Ching — a 3,000-year-old text he argues was originally about how to achieve agile development in organizations large and small. Peter first started translating this text in 1989, and after decades of iteration, the book draws connections between ancient wisdom and modern agile practices — XP, Lean, Theory of Constraints, throughput accounting, and permaculture. As Peter explains, "The sage in Lao Tzu is Shang Ren — agile people. This is a book about agile people, agility, and it always was." The book is available at agile.way.pm, and Kent Beck, who wrote the foreword, calls it "a dangerous little book" — dangerous in the same sense as the word extreme.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Peter Merel: When Telling a Manager "You Don't Have a Role" Backfires — A Lesson in Agile Coaching Humility 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.   "A failure is not a failure. A failure is just the first step." - Peter Merel   Peter Merel became a Scrum Master by stealth — long before the title existed. Credited in Kent Beck's first XP book and present at the first agile conference, Peter was practicing lightweight processes at Hewlett Packard in the late 1990s. When he took a role at GMAC, the residential finance arm of General Motors, he brought XP practices with him and found early success. After six months of strong results, the project manager, Mike Alakom, sat Peter down and asked the most dangerous management question: "What do I do?" Peter gave what he now calls the stupidest answer possible — "You don't really have a role in this process." The next day, Mike called an all-hands meeting and calmly maneuvered Peter into crediting the entire way of working as Mike's idea. Peter stayed on for another six months, but at arm's length. In hindsight, Peter recognizes Mike did exactly what he should have done. The second failure came at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where Peter was brought in to coach agile but was actually being set up to fail — a ripcord the organization could pull when it wasn't ready for change. The delivery manager, Des Webster, told Peter directly: "You were set up to fail." Peter walked away, thinking he'd never return. But six years later, every person he had coached had moved up in the organization, and Peter came back as principal coach for 50,000 people. The CIO declared Agile one of the bank's five pillars. Just because you hit the wall doesn't mean it's the end — it might be the beginning.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you failed at introducing change, and have you considered that the seeds you planted might still be growing in ways you can't yet see?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The framework wars are over, and the only question that still matters is whether the work is landing in your customers' hands.This episode dives into the great convergence of project management and agility. Job titles are blending, PMI is leaning hard into adaptive approaches, and the new PMBOK reads nothing like the tablet of stone we used to study. The lines between Scrum Master and Project Manager have blurred in the marketplace, and forward-thinking leaders are leaning into the blend instead of fighting it.Most organizations are not picking sides anymore; they are picking outcomes. The question is no longer "are we doing real Scrum" or "are we doing proper Project Management." The question is whether your teams are delivering value, learning fast, and treating their customers like the heroes of the story.In this episode, we discuss:Why "technical project manager" and "Scrum Master" have quietly become the same role on most job boardsHow PMI and Agile Alliance moved from rivals to partners, and what the new PMBOK signals about the futureThe Shuhari path of mastery, and why so many teams skip straight to “ri” without earning itThe better questions leaders should be asking instead of arguing about labels

What does real world STEM education look like in a high school where students run actual manufacturing contracts on industry-grade equipment, intern at MIT, and learn AI ethics alongside CAD? Joe Fatheree (Top 10 Global Teacher Prize, Illinois Teacher of the Year) and Dr. Mark Buckner (Smart Industry Top 50 Innovator, founder of Oak Ridge High School's iSchool and Wildcat Manufacturing) take Vicki inside a $1.25 million state grant program where 26 student-run contracts with 18 companies have produced near-net-shape metal 3D printing, augmented reality experiences, and graduates already working four to five years ahead of their college peers. This extended episode also tackles the AI conversation educators most need: where AI belongs in classrooms, where it doesn't, what neuroscience says about kids' developing brains in the attention economy, and why "just because you can does not mean you should" is the most important lesson STEM students will learn this year. In this episode, you'll learn: How Wildcat Manufacturing's profit-sharing model pays students for real client work The three pathways Oak Ridge graduates take — start a business, $100K+ workforce, or accelerate into engineering Why Mark teaches industry frameworks (Scrum, Lean, Toyota Kata, Deming) instead of "edu-ese" Where AI helps (rapid feedback, math practice) and where it harms (Grok Annie, social companionship, attention erosion) What the "Manhattan Project 2.0" frame means for AI policy and your classroom Show notes: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e933 EF Explore America STEM Tours sponsored today's show. Show students how STEM impacts the world up close and in action. Students could code robots with MassRobotics at MIT or explore marine ecosystems in Florida's coral reefs or even sit down to talk with a former spy in Washington DC. Students will learn how STEM thinking often shows up where you least expect it. Inspire your students visit efexploreamerica.com/STEM

BONUS: Hard Hats and Standups — Why the Construction Industry Is Going Agile at GAS26 Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is one of the co-hosts of the Agile in Construction track at the Global Agile Summit 2026. In this preview episode, he and Vasco talk about why Agile belongs on the construction site, what the track's speakers discovered when they stopped following the plan, and why software people should pay close attention to an industry that builds hospitals, not apps. Construction Is 20 Years Behind — And That's the Opportunity "People don't realize that those ideas absolutely work in other industries. Agile's been successfully applied everywhere, and I think where it gets the least amount of publicity is in the construction sector."   When most people hear "Agile," they think standups in a tech office, not concrete and rebar. Felipe wants to change that. Construction, he says, is always about 20 years behind whatever process or technology the rest of the world adopts — a "very safe stock of keeping tradition." That gap is exactly what makes this track valuable. Agile is alive and growing in construction, and the translation turns out to be simpler than you'd expect. Most of what needs to change isn't the framework — it's the vocabulary. The sessions in this track show how practitioners made that jump with surprisingly small tweaks. The Speakers Don't Know How Good They Are "Half the speakers that I asked were like, 'what, me? Do I have a story to share?' I was like, yeah, you have this really amazing... people just don't realize how awesome they are."   One of the things that struck Felipe while assembling the track was how humble the speakers are. People who have transformed how their companies deliver work — including the keynote speaker, Brian, whose organization celebrated 10 years and saw dramatic before-and-after results — genuinely didn't think their stories were remarkable. They grew up in an industry with 100 years of project management tradition, where PMI-style thinking is the water they swim in. They don't see how different things look from the outside. Some of these practitioners couldn't even work across projects before adopting Agile — and now they're doing it routinely. That capacity shift alone is a data point worth paying attention to. Stop Following the Plan — Start Responding to Change "It's just ground into you, that thou shalt follow a plan. But in reality... they have to do heroic things to make those plans happen. Because the plans are just wrong."   Felipe zeroed in on the Agile value of responding to change over following a plan as the single biggest shift his speakers experienced. In construction, plan adherence is gospel — you follow the schedule, period. But in practice, teams were performing heroics just to make flawed plans appear to work. As speakers adopted Agile, they stopped forcing broken plans and started adapting. Felipe gives a nod to #NoEstimates — calling Vasco "the granddaddy of #NoEstimates" — as part of the same insight: the plans are wrong, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can respond to what's actually happening. The second pattern was equally powerful: for the first time, construction workers started thinking about who actually uses what they build. You'd think building a school or hospital makes the end user obvious, but Felipe says people in the industry can work for years and never once consider who receives their work. Agile forced that question, and the answers changed how they prioritize. What Software People Should Steal From Construction "Inside of every process are people. Everyone faces resistance to change... when I stopped trying to teach people, and I started inviting people, things changed."   Here's the cross-industry lesson Felipe wants software practitioners to hear: resistance to change is universal, and the breakthrough is the same everywhere. Every speaker in the track had a moment where they learned something new and didn't want to go back to the old way. That's the same moment every Scrum Master, product owner, and developer has lived through. The universal tactic that worked? Showing rather than telling. Case study after case study revealed that the real breakthroughs came not from training sessions or slide decks, but from demonstrating results and inviting people in. Stop teaching, start inviting — that's a principle that works whether you're pouring concrete or shipping code. Come Monday, You'll Ask Better Questions "The best thing you're gonna do on Monday after the summit is you're gonna start to ask really intelligent questions. That is gonna be priceless. That's something that AI doesn't even do for people."   Felipe's take on what attendees will walk away with isn't a new framework or a certification. It's a shift in the questions they ask. Twenty years into practicing Lean Construction, Agile, and Scrum, Felipe says asking better questions is the one thing that has stuck with him the entire time. Better questions melt away resistance, open up new perspectives, and make new ways of working accessible. The ideas in the track are, in his words, "not terribly complicated — they're actually quite simple, and I would even say elegant." And the speakers are approachable — Felipe personally vouches that every speaker in his track answers emails. There will also be live Q&A sessions during the summit for direct interaction. When Your AI Agent Tells You to Build a Website, You Listen "My chief orchestrator said, you should have your own website. So felipe.engineer was built."   In a delightful closing moment, Felipe shared that his personal website at felipe.engineer was built by his AI agent. Not suggested and then hand-coded — fully built, complete with a style guide the agent had strategically created two weeks earlier. Felipe jokes that the AI was setting him up: first planting the seed that he needed a style guide, then recommending it be applied to a brand-new personal site. Felipe also has a session in the track about building an AI bot for construction sites — another reason to check out the full lineup at globalagilesummit.com. About Felipe Engineer-Manriquez Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide — and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.   You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.   You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.

Is the State of Agile Report a clear-eyed snapshot of the industry - or a sales brochure? In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel are joined by returning guest Ed Martin to dissect the 18th State of Agile Report from Digital.ai. Applying the economic theory of the 'Market for Lemons,' where asymmetric information leads to market failure, we discuss the survey results and 'pontificate' on the state of the agile industry.Join us by watching or listening as we discuss:Why 41% of organizations increased agile investment while only 13% claim it is deeply embeddedIf the Rise of Hybrid and Homegrown Agile is an indicator of a return to 'cowboy coding'Analyzing the report's contradictory finding that 63% of companies struggle with quality while 68% claim high-quality deliveryThe critical issue of leaders demanding ROI from systems they do not understand or actively guideWe don't just discuss the report, but we also brainstorm and share actionable advice for agilists and tech workers on how to navigate a landscape of conflicting data and pressure to prove value.#Agile #ProductManagement #LeadershipThe Market for Lemons by George Akerlof, The 18th State of Agile Report by Digital.ai, Inspired by Marty Cagan, The Wright Brothers vs. Samuel Langley history, J.J. SutherlandLINKSWatch it on YouTube!YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagileSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596INTRO MUSICToronto Is My BeatBy Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Viktor Glinka: The Curious Product Owner and the Disempowered One — How Scrum Masters Can Help POs Find Their Voice In this episode, we refer to product owner anti-patterns and product owner interviews on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. The Great Product Owner: The Curious Negotiator Who Uses Data and Passion 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.   "Great product owners are always asking: what if? How can we do it differently? How can we simplify?" - Viktor Glinka   Viktor describes great product owners as fundamentally curious people who constantly look for simpler, better ways to do things. But curiosity alone isn't enough — they're also skilled negotiators who navigate conversations with teams, stakeholders, and customers. In scaled setups, their work shifts from clarification to prioritization, and they delegate effectively. Viktor highlights their visualization skills with a concrete example: one product owner showed stakeholders a work composition chart revealing that more than 50% of the team's work was technical debt, making it impossible to deliver new features. That single visualization changed the conversation. Great product owners are also systems thinkers who understand dynamics and root causes, avoiding local optimization. Viktor adds something rarely discussed in frameworks: mindfulness. Product owners face constant pressure, and the ability to make peace with decisions — to move forward without regret — is critical. They also share their passion and vulnerability with development teams, telling them personally why they want to build something. It's the emotional complement to data-driven negotiation.   Self-reflection Question: Does your product owner use data and visualization to negotiate with stakeholders, or do they rely on authority and deadlines? How could you help them build those skills? The Bad Product Owner: The Disempowered Middleman Who Can't Give Direction 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.   "This fear of not being allowed — it's an illusion. You can always do more. Just try. No one will fire you for a suggestion." - Viktor Glinka   For Viktor, the worst product owner anti-pattern isn't about skill or knowledge — it's about empowerment. He believes every person can learn to become a great product owner if they are empowered and trusted by the organization. The red flags are clear: when a product owner talks about deadlines and commitments but never about return on investment or outcomes, that's a sign they're being pushed rather than empowered. Viktor shares the story of a product owner who was struggling to give direction because stakeholders just wanted their features delivered. He was a middleman — afraid to communicate his own vision to the team, afraid to challenge stakeholders. But inside, there was a spark of passion about the product. Viktor helped him uncover it using a simple tool: the product vision canvas. They sat down together and put his thoughts on paper. Once the vision was written, the product owner started thinking about the next step on his own: "What if I show this to stakeholders? What if I tell them there's a better way?" The product vision canvas became the bridge from learned helplessness to ownership.   Self-reflection Question: Is your product owner telling themselves "I'm not allowed to" when they actually could do more? What's the smallest experiment you could run together to test that assumption?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Most product managers are just project managers with a fancier title. They make zero real decisions, answer to everyone, and wonder why nothing ships on time. Willis Jackson has been building product teams for over a decade. He's blacklisted entire companies from his hiring pool. And he moved to the Bay Area to measure himself against the best—only to find out nobody there really knows how to do product either. In this episode, Willis and I get into why product thinking is now the most valuable skill in tech, why AI didn't solve the bottleneck problem (it exposed it), and what happens when engineers can build 10x faster but nobody knows what to build. We also get into his company Middle Mile—basically the Airbnb of e-commerce fulfillment—and why stay-at-home parents running micro-warehouses out of spare rooms might be the future of how your next Amazon package gets delivered. Fair warning: if you're a product manager who hasn't talked to a customer for two weeks, this episode is going to be uncomfortable. Hit follow so you never miss an episode of Startup Hustle.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:35 Reconnecting and Early Influences03:27 The Challenges of Product Management06:34 The Role of AI in Product Development09:32 Understanding Risks in AI and Software Development12:34 Bottlenecks in Product Teams15:25 The Importance of People in Business18:17 Innovative Fulfillment Solutions21:39 The Journey of Building a BusinessLinks & ResourcesConnect with Willis Jackson III on LinkedInWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.

Viktor Glinka: Why Context Is King for Scrum Master Success — Building Capabilities That Drive Business 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.   "Product management skills are crucial for Scrum Masters. Once you understand how retention impacts your return on investment, you will be able to coach your product owner." - Viktor Glinka   Viktor offers a nuanced perspective on Scrum Master success by distinguishing between short-term and long-term success. On the long-term side, he argues that the purpose of a Scrum Master extends beyond working with teams — it's about helping improve the system as a whole. To do that, you need to connect your contribution to the product's success by helping build specific capabilities. Viktor grounds this in practical terms: start by asking what the business goal of your company is, and check whether people around you actually know it. Never assume everyone does. That simple act of curiosity gives you the information you need to figure out how to contribute. In his experience, the key capability his teams needed to develop was multi-learning — the ability to work across components — and that directly served the business goal. Viktor makes a strong case that Scrum Masters need product management skills. Understanding how metrics like retention impact long-term success allows you to coach product owners and analyze product dynamics. His practical advice: if you're not experienced in this, go shadow your product owner, spend time with the sales department, and look through customer support tickets. You'll understand far more about the system than staying at the development organization level.   Self-reflection Question: Can you clearly explain how your work as a Scrum Master contributes to your product's success? What specific capability are you helping the system build right now? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Data-Driven Discussions with Actionable Outcomes Viktor's approach to retrospectives is refreshingly pragmatic: it depends on the team. For teams not yet used to actionable improvements, he starts simple — review previous retro decisions, ensure new concrete ones are created, and bring data as food for thought. He particularly likes using the cumulative flow diagram and time distribution histogram to help teams reflect on consistency in delivery. One team he worked with adopted this as a natural habit over time. For mature teams, format matters less — one team ran a simple "good, bad, to improve" retro in 30 minutes on their own, without a Scrum Master, and it was one of the most engaged and effective retrospectives Viktor had ever seen. He also values the free-talk format when first meeting a new team, coming in with genuine curiosity and no biases. And when something clearly went wrong — an incident, a failure — Viktor drops whatever format he had prepared. "In those moments, it's important to trust your instinct, read the room, sense the tension, and step into the danger directly."   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Viktor Glinka: From Component Teams to Cross-Functional Teams — How to Navigate the Hardest 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.   "Our customers do not buy our components. They use the product as a whole. And when it comes to integration, the real problem pops up." - Viktor Glinka   Viktor brings a challenge many Scrum Masters face: transitioning from component teams to cross-component, cross-functional teams in a large-scale Scrum setup. Picture 8 to 10 teams, each owning their own part of the system, never touching anything else — and the company stuck in delivery for months. The premise behind component teams sounds logical: specialization leads to speed. But as Viktor explains, that speed is local — optimized for the component, not the product. When integration time arrives, responsibility gaps appear, rework multiplies, and teams start identifying with their components rather than the product. "We're the billing team — we don't deal with anything else." When they reorganized into cross-functional teams, the complaints were immediate: "I was really productive before, and now I can't finish anything." Viktor and his fellow Scrum Masters took a two-pronged approach. First, they secured time credit from leadership — a couple of months where learning was prioritized over deadlines. They ran mob programming sessions, coached teams, and removed impediments. Second, they shifted focus from outputs to outcomes, organizing customer interviews that helped developers understand what users actually needed. The development director reinforced this by joining refinement sessions, telling teams: "You might not develop anything if it still satisfies the customer need." The result was a shift from transactional stakeholder relationships to genuine cooperation, and teams that began to see beyond their component boundaries.   Self-reflection Question: If your teams are organized around components, what would it take to run one experiment — just one sprint — where a team picks up work outside their usual component? What would you need to make that safe?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Viktor Glinka: When Internal and External Team Members Have Divergent Goals — The Silent Killer of 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.   "The root causes for destructive team patterns often lie outside the team itself." - Viktor Glinka   Viktor shares a story from a manufacturing organization where one team stood out — and not in a good way. The team was composed of both internal and external members, and what no one saw coming was that their implicit goals were fundamentally divergent: the external members were focused on maximizing revenue for their own company, while the internal members cared deeply about product quality. The signs were visible to anyone who approached them — they barely talked to each other and preferred to work individually. When Viktor tried to raise the topic of cooperation and trust, he was met with awkward silence. One team member finally told him: "I don't want the team to blow up. In my previous experience, I raised this topic and that was the end of the team." Fear kept the truth underground. Viktor brought his observations to the manager, who acknowledged the lack of a shared goal as the root cause — but couldn't fix it because he wasn't authorized to manage the external people. The takeaway was clear: three key success factors for any team are the right team composition with people who want to work together, a shared goal that unites diverse perspectives, and clear expectations set by their manager.   In this segment, we talk about LeSS self-designing team workshops and the importance of team composition in scaled setups.   Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a shared goal that everyone — including external members and contractors — genuinely understands and cares about? When was the last time you checked? Featured Book of the Week: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland Viktor recommends The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland as the book that sparked his passion for Scrum. As he puts it: "I know the title is very controversial and often criticized, but I could deeply relate to the stories inside the book. They sparked a passion that is still with me." Viktor also recommends a bonus book: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, which showed him the real power of self-organization and validated what he had already started experimenting with in his project management career. It pushed him to explore holacracy, sociocracy, intent-based leadership, and coaching.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Viktor Glinka: When Passion Becomes the Problem — How Pushing for Agile Change Too Fast Creates Resistance 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.   "I wanted to change the organization overnight with my eagerness and passion. Instead of helping the system to evolve, I created resistance. I became the problem myself." - Viktor Glinka   Viktor shares one of the most honest failure stories we've heard on the show. Early in his Scrum Master career, he joined a finance organization as a Scrum Master for a newly created department — his first experience in a scaled setup. Each team owned a particular part of the user journey, organized around components. After getting exposed to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) through a colleague, Viktor became overexcited. He started pushing for structural changes daily, telling the head of department that the current team composition was wrong and they needed cross-functional feature teams. But he was disconnected from reality. For this particular organization, even having partially cross-functional teams was already a big stretch. Worse, the head of department wasn't even authorized to make the changes Viktor was pushing for. Instead of helping the system evolve, he created resistance. What proved his approach wrong? That same department later received a European Award for being the best mortgage department. It took Viktor a few more years and similar cases to fully absorb the lesson: read the room, develop sensitivity to the system's pace, and stimulate reflection in decision makers rather than pushing your own agenda.   In this episode, we refer to organizational development, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and systems analysis. Viktor also mentions the interview with Bas Vodde on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you pushed for a change because you believed it was right, without checking whether the system was ready for it? What would happen if you started by asking decision makers what they think would be a good next step?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Efe Gümüs: The People-Pleasing Product Owner and the PO Who Understood User Value — Two Sides of Product Ownership In this episode, we refer to the SPIDR slicing method. The Great Product Owner: The PO Who Understood User Value 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.   "If your product owner can phrase what the user wants to do — not what the button should look like — it is going to be a night and day difference." - Efe Gümüs   Efe describes the great product owner as someone who creates focus and a clear product vision, so the team knows what they're building and why. The foundation is simple but powerful: describe what the user will be able to do, not what the interface should look like. Instead of specifying a red subscribe button with exact text in three languages, say "as a user, I want to subscribe to my favorite channel." That shift unlocks the team's ability to contribute design insights, architecture decisions, and user journey thinking — the kind of expertise no product owner could anticipate alone. Efe highlights the SPIDR slicing method as one of his favorite tools for breaking product backlog items into consumable pieces — by interface (iOS, Android, web), by data, by rules. When the PO frames work around user value and slices it effectively, the team delivers visible value in iterations, and sprint goals become meaningful. Without this, the team becomes a ticket delivery machine.   Self-reflection Question: When you look at your product backlog right now, are items described in terms of what users can do — or in terms of what the interface should look like? The Bad Product Owner: The People-Pleasing PO Who Says Yes to Everything 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.   "If you are doing everything your customer says, then you are not managing your product. That's the foundation." - Efe Gümüs   Efe names people-pleasing as the worst product owner anti-pattern — the "customer is always right" mentality applied to product management. When a PO says yes to every request, the consequences cascade quickly: multiple priorities competing simultaneously, everything marked urgent, no meaningful sprint goal, constant context switching, and new items injected mid-sprint. The team loses focus entirely. Efe has seen this in startups where the CEO walks in with urgent customer requests, and in larger organizations where multiple customers each demand customizations. In both cases, the PO becomes a pass-through instead of a decision-maker. The customer might be happy today, but will they be satisfied in six months when nothing is coherent? As Vasco notes, when you're serving multiple customers and saying yes to one, you're saying no to all the others — you just haven't told them yet. The result is chaos: steering blindfolded without navigational tools, trying to go everywhere at the same time. A product owner's most important skill is coherent, aligned decision-making — and that means learning to say no.   Self-reflection Question: How often does your product owner say no to stakeholder requests — and when they do say yes, is it because the request aligns with the product vision or because they want to avoid conflict?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Most founders think investors bet on ideas. They don't.Dave Lambert has funded over 2,000 companies through RightSide Capital, and he's seen this pattern play out thousands of times. Great product. No revenue traction. Wrong ask, wrong timing. Automatic no.In this episode of Startup Hustle, Matt sits down with Dave to break down how RightSide Capital evaluates startups differently than traditional VCs. No subjective analysis. No months of diligence. Just data, profiles, and a decision in about a week.They get into how AI is changing the startup game, not just for building products faster, but for every operational aspect of running an early-stage company. And why sales is still the one thing that isn't getting easier anytime soon.Plus, the real talk on founder-market fit, why being slightly delusional might actually help, and what it takes to walk away with a check from an investor who's seen everything.If you're a technical founder who knows how to build but has no idea how to sell, this episode is for you.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:26 Introduction to Venture Capital and Startups03:36 The Importance of Sales and Marketing in Startups06:24 Data-Driven Investment Strategies09:23 The Impact of AI on Startup Opportunities12:23 Operational Efficiency and Cost Reduction through AI15:28 Sales and Marketing Challenges for Startups18:31 Support and Resources for Portfolio Companies21:25 Evaluating Founders and Market Fit24:28 The Role of Delusion in EntrepreneurshipLinks & ResourcesConnect with Dave Lambert on LinkedInWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.Right Side Capital Management - https://www.rightsidecapital.com/

Welcome to Botched: A D&D Podcast! The Terry's Tough Guys Wingbowl is almost here! Terry better get to digging that pit! But in the meantime, things need to be done in the world. They are tasked with investigating the Lizardfolk town of Scalipoli, on the southern most point of the continent of Kix. Of course, they assign the worst possible group to do it. A group of “differently housed” individuals selling cooked lizards out of a shopping cart. First they arrive in Pliskenville and decide to annoy the snake people living there. Before too long, they steal a hand cart to mosey on down the railroad line directly to Scalipoli.Who are these hippies being assigned such an important task? How will they successfully accomplish their mission? What happened to the town of Scalipoli? Why is Scrum so bad at answering the phone and giving instructions? Tune in and find out!Dennis has successfully completed a Kickstarter for his 4th graphic novel in his Lycan: Solomon's Odyssey series! Lycan is about the world's first werewolf! It's a mix of horror, mythology, adventure, and history. The 4th book in the series is all about ancient Egypt! Wanna read a story mixing a werewolf with Egyptian Gods? You can still back it on Kickstarter for the time being as we have Late Pledges enabled! Check it out on Kickstarter!We now have a PO Box! Wanna send us something? PO BOX 3178 Gettysburg, PA 17325All of our previous seasons can be found on our new channel!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Archives⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!A special shout out and thank you to all of our supporters over on Patreon. You help us continue to churn out “quality” episodes. With your continued support we can take our show on the road! Check out our store over at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ where you can find tshirts, stickers, pint glasses and more!Give us a 5 star review on Itunes. Doing so will help the show grow, but we will also read out whatever you write at the end of one of our episodes!Feel free to email us any questions, comments or suggestions at ⁠BotchedPodcast@gmail.com⁠Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, like us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.You can watch the show live on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!Check out each of the hosts' Twitch streams! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steve⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Editor: Philip D Keating And Dennis RobinsonProducer: Philip and DennisExecutive Producers: ⁠⁠⁠⁠James Thatcher⁠⁠⁠⁠, Chronic Ejac, Jim Beverly,Disgruntled Furniture, Chris Wisdom, ShinigamiSPQR,  Jayson Haiss, Toaster Bath and Scabby GoosePublisher: Phil and DennisArt by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Emily Swan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gozer⁠