Podcasts about Scrum

Pascal Papathemelis: Selecting the Appropriate Agile Values for Organizational Impact 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. Pascal defines success for Scrum Masters through his recent mantra of "effectiveness over efficiency," "outcome over output," and "create value for the customer." Working with a client introducing a new digital platform, he focuses on understanding the value for both the organization and end customers while minimizing confusion in the process. Pascal emphasizes the importance of ensuring work sustainability over time by focusing on Agile values and principles and their deep understanding. He customizes the Agile Manifesto's values and principles for each organization, such as focusing on customer value, collaboration, and constant learning. Pascal strategically highlights the principles and values that address the biggest challenges facing the organization at any given time, making Agile concepts relevant and actionable for the specific context. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Sailboat Pascal recommends the sailboat retrospective as his preferred format, though he emphasizes that the choice depends on context and team focus. He values this metaphor-based retrospective because it helps teams discuss critical aspects of their work through different perspectives. The sailboat format allows teams to explore what propels them forward (wind), what holds them back (anchors), what they need to watch out for (rocks), and their destination (island). Pascal also uses timeline retrospectives and stresses the importance of varying retrospective formats to prevent teams from falling into routine patterns that might limit their ability to bring fresh insights to their work. He believes that good data and effective visualization are essential components of any successful retrospective format. Self-reflection Question: How effectively are you customizing Agile principles to address your organization's specific challenges and context? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Is Agile Disappearing? - Not Again...For the last two years, we've seen a fairly drastic change in the agile landscape. Large companies have laid off hundreds of thousands of agile and tech jobs (287k in 2023 and 152k in 2024). The job market for new jobs is also very different. You can't just search for Scrum Master or Agile Coach like you used to.Maybe it's because big firms have started treating agile like “a skill not a role”, as mentioned by the Business Agility Institute and scrum alliance in their “Skills in the New World of Work” research paper. You might need to be multiple things, a manager who knows agile or a technologist who knows Scrum. It's a trend that is sad but true, IMO.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/

Pascal Papathemelis: From Waterfall to Agile—A Multi-Level Change Strategy 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. Pascal describes a successful agile transformation where he collaborated with a fellow coach in the IT department of a large organization with a waterfall history and heavy documentation-driven processes. The two coaches worked together effectively, sharing information and scouting for opportunities to take action. They began with an assessment and discussions across IT, business, and management levels to understand the current state. Using the Cynefin framework to understand complexity, they conducted a two-day workshop to introduce Agile vocabulary, covering concepts like Push/Pull and process waste.  The coaches operated at multiple levels simultaneously - working strategically with leadership who typically pushed excessive work to the organization, while also helping teams visualize their processes and clarify priorities. At the team level, they acted as Scrum Masters to demonstrate the role while mentoring the actual Scrum Master through one-on-one sessions. They also supported the Product Owner in understanding their role and used story maps to help visualize and organize work effectively. Self-reflection Question: How might collaborating with another coach or change agent amplify your effectiveness in leading organizational transformation? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Pascal Papathemelis: The Hidden Cost of Removing Scrum Masters from High-Performing 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. Pascal shares a cautionary experience with mature Scrum teams that appeared to function flawlessly. These teams demonstrated excellent Scrum practices with minimal impediments, leading management to conclude that Scrum Masters were unnecessary. When management removed all Scrum Masters from the department, the previously high-performing teams began to struggle significantly.  Team members had to absorb the responsibilities previously handled by their Scrum Masters, causing them to lose focus on their core value-creating work. Different teams adopted various approaches to fill the Scrum Master void, but none proved effective. Pascal reflects that the Scrum Masters could have made their value more visible by supporting Product Owners more actively and becoming more involved in team tasks. This experience taught him the importance of demonstrating the ongoing value that Scrum Masters provide, even when teams appear to be self-sufficient. Featured Book of the Week: Learning Out Loud—Community Learning and Networking Pascal draws his greatest inspiration not from a single book, but from active participation in the Agile community. He finds tremendous value in discussions within local communities, networking events, and sparring sessions with colleagues. Pascal particularly benefits from Agile Coaching circles in Helsinki, which provide practical knowledge and insights. He also gains inspiration from Agile conferences, but credits Agile Coaching Camps as having the biggest impact - these 2.5-day open space format events are intense and packed with valuable insights. Pascal recommends that Scrum Masters actively engage with their local Agile communities and attend coaching camps to accelerate their professional development and gain diverse perspectives. Self-reflection Question: How visible is the value you provide as a Scrum Master, and what steps could you take to make your contributions more apparent to your organization? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Pascal Papathemelis: From Mechanics to Human Factors—How Scrum Masters Grow 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. Pascal shares his evolution as a Scrum Master, moving from focusing purely on the mechanics of Scrum to understanding the critical importance of human factors. Early in his career, Pascal worked with teams that struggled to achieve sprint goals, with stories floating from one sprint to another. Through retrospectives and continuous improvement, he learned essential tips like not taking too much into sprints and making stories smaller.  However, Pascal's biggest transformation came when he shifted focus to human elements - involving everyone in the team, improving collaboration during refinement, and developing people's skills and attitudes. He emphasizes that every person is an individual with the intention to be their best, and a good Scrum Master must sense when something is wrong and create safe environments for open conversations. Pascal highlights the importance of corridor conversations and coffee machine breakthroughs, especially before COVID, and stresses the need to invest effort in how teams start, using models like Tuckman's team growth model and Diana Larsen's Team Liftoff approach. In this segment, we also refer to the episode with Arne Roock, about the importance of team design and setup in the success of teams. Self-reflection Question: How might shifting your focus from Scrum mechanics to human factors transform the way you support your team's growth and collaboration? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Bernard Agrest: Millions of Users, Multiple Stakeholders—The Art of Product Owner Navigation Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Stakeholder Navigator Bernard describes an exceptional Product Owner who managed a product impacting millions of people while navigating constantly evolving requirements from multiple stakeholders. This Product Owner excelled at understanding each stakeholder's unique needs and communicating effectively with all of them. What made this person truly great was their ability to come to the development team with a clear understanding of both the business case and user needs, having done the hard work of stakeholder management upfront. This Product Owner understood that their role was to be the bridge between complex stakeholder requirements and clear team direction. The Bad Product Owner: The Collaborative Hoarder Bernard identifies a dangerous anti-pattern: the Product Owner who adds everything to the backlog under the guise of being "collaborative." While this behavior appears inclusive and team-friendly on the surface, it actually demonstrates that the Product Owner isn't following through on delivering real value. These Product Owners become almost exclusively focused on authority rather than outcomes, making them particularly difficult to coach since they resist guidance. Bernard recommends using Cost of Delay as both a prioritization technique and a tool to help Product Owners understand why certain items shouldn't be added to the backlog at all. Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner truly collaborating by providing clear direction, or are they avoiding difficult prioritization decisions by adding everything to the backlog? In this segment we refer to the Coach Your Product Owner e-course that we created for everyone who needs to help their Product Owners succeed! [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Number 19 speaks as a Jet for the very first time.

Bernard Agrest: Creating Conditions for Healthy Conflict and Continuous Improvement in 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. Bernard believes successful Scrum Masters focus on creating conditions where tension and healthy conflict can emerge naturally, rather than maintaining artificial harmony. Too many organizations remain stuck in fear-based cultures where people avoid raising important issues. For Bernard, success means ensuring people regularly surface problems and engage meaningfully with each other—it's not enough to simply monitor green dashboards. He emphasizes that real leadership involves focusing on creating conditions for teams to discuss what truly matters, moving beyond surface-level metrics to foster genuine dialogue and continuous improvement. Self-reflection Question: Are the people on your teams regularly raising issues, or are you relying too heavily on dashboard metrics to gauge team health? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: 4L's The 4L's retrospective format is simple yet powerful, examining what the team Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed for. Bernard particularly values the "Longed for" category because it asks people to connect the dots between how they felt and how they performed. In one memorable session, using 4L's helped his team understand what they were missing in their regular sync work, leading them to change how they conducted meetings to better support upcoming deliveries. This retrospective format had long-term organizational impact, helping teams realize gaps in their collaborative processes and make meaningful improvements to their working relationships. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Bernard Agrest: One-on-One Insights—Building Change Strategy Through Individual Conversations 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 faced with a tool that needed complete rebuilding rather than more "duct-tape" features, Bernard knew that disruption was inevitable—but where to start? Through extensive one-on-one conversations with employees and stakeholders, he discovered that teams didn't understand their work was cyclical, and more importantly, that the onboarding team was central to the entire process. By starting the transformation with this pivotal team and focusing on training and user adoption, the new tool provided immediate organizational impact with data-driven decision making. Bernard's approach demonstrates that successful change management starts with understanding the true workflow and identifying the critical connection points that can drive the most significant positive impact. Self-reflection Question: In your current change initiatives, have you identified which team or process serves as the central hub that could accelerate transformation across the entire organization? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Most construction pros have heard of Lean — but far fewer truly understand it, and even fewer are putting it into practice. In this episode of The EBFC Show, we shine a light on why Lean is often misunderstood, overlooked, or completely invisible on job sites today. Join host Felipe Engineer-Manriquez and special guest Alan Boykiw as they unpack the roots of Lean, its relevance to construction, and what it really takes to make continuous improvement more than just a buzzword.   Why is Lean often misunderstood — or completely unseen — in today's construction industry?   In this eye-opening episode of The EBFC Show, host Felipe Engineer-Manriquez sits down with Alan Boykiw, Senior Experience Architect at Nialli, to explore why Lean Construction isn't as visible or widespread as it should be. Together, they unpack the history of Lean, bust some common myths, and share hard truths about where the industry stands on Lean adoption.   From the origins of the term “Lean” to the pressing need for change in how we plan, schedule, and collaborate — this episode gets real about what's holding teams back, and more importantly, how to move forward.  

Hour One- Reacting to Kevyn Adams Scrum with the press full 2944 Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:10:00 +0000 Ax9FHSnxWwwAZtCKeYroPtxQ9CK4rYtF sports Schopp and Bulldog sports Hour One- Reacting to Kevyn Adams Scrum with the press Sports talk should be entertaining and informative, which is why Schopp and the Bulldog control the WGR 550 airwaves every weekday from 3-7 p.m. Chris "The Bulldog" Parker bleeds Buffalo and is as passionate about the Sabres and Bills as any listener to our radio station. Mike Schopp keeps the callers in line while dishing out his unique perspective and opinions, and creating on-air fantasy drafts of anything from favorite candy and meats, to actors, presidents and bands. Bills reporter Sal Capaccio appears daily on the show covering every move the team makes like nobody else!The top-notch weekly guests include:Mondays (DURING FOOTBALL SEASON) at 4 p.m. - Buffalo Bill, Eric WoodSabres general manager Kevyn Adams (DURING HOCKEY SEASON) - 5:30 p.m.Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. - Sports betting media specialist Evan Abrams from The Action NetworkTogether for 10 years, Schopp and the Bulldog are the No. 1 most listened to talk show in all of Western New York.On Demand Audio is presented by Northwest Bank. For What's Next. © 2025 Audacy, Inc. Sports False https://player.amperwavepodcasting.com

07-02 Full Show- Kevyn Adams Press Scrum and Buffalo Bills news full 7528 Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:30:00 +0000 Xd2EIWosKglJ6RkdH3COL0hdpXpFI5E3 sports Schopp and Bulldog sports 07-02 Full Show- Kevyn Adams Press Scrum and Buffalo Bills news Sports talk should be entertaining and informative, which is why Schopp and the Bulldog control the WGR 550 airwaves every weekday from 3-7 p.m. Chris "The Bulldog" Parker bleeds Buffalo and is as passionate about the Sabres and Bills as any listener to our radio station. Mike Schopp keeps the callers in line while dishing out his unique perspective and opinions, and creating on-air fantasy drafts of anything from favorite candy and meats, to actors, presidents and bands. Bills reporter Sal Capaccio appears daily on the show covering every move the team makes like nobody else!The top-notch weekly guests include:Mondays (DURING FOOTBALL SEASON) at 4 p.m. - Buffalo Bill, Eric WoodSabres general manager Kevyn Adams (DURING HOCKEY SEASON) - 5:30 p.m.Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. - Sports betting media specialist Evan Abrams from The Action NetworkTogether for 10 years, Schopp and the Bulldog are the No. 1 most listened to talk show in all of Western New York.On Demand Audio is presented by Northwest Bank. For What's Next. © 2025 Audacy, Inc. Sports False https://player.amperwavepodc

We’re taking our own advice and hitting pause to recharge this July. While we’re off the mic, revisit past episodes packed with timeless insights and conversations you may have missed. Overview This week, we're pressing pause to model the sustainable pace we teach. Brian shares a quick update about our summer break, what’s ahead in August, and how you can make the most of the podcast archive while we’re away. Whether you’re poolside or simply stepping back from the daily sprint, we hope you’ll join us in creating a little breathing room and we can’t wait to be back with a fresh season soon. References and resources mentioned in the show: Subscribe & Listen to Previous Episodes of the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Hey there Agile Mentors, this is Brian Milner and I'm just gonna take a moment of your time today because we're actually going to be practicing what we teach here at Agile Mentors and we're gonna be working at a sustainable pace. So for us that means we're gonna take a few weeks off. It's summer and I know many of you are going to be taking time off with your families and we're gonna be doing the same thing. So we won't be around for the next month. We're gonna be out of here for July, but already have some plans for when we come back in August. So stay tuned when we come back in August, we've got a new season of shows that will begin there in August that I think you'll really enjoy. While we're off, might I suggest you go back through our archive. Look at some of the previous podcast episodes we've done. There's quite a few now. And maybe you've missed some of the episodes from the past. Go back and find some of our great guests that we've had over the years when we've been doing this. I think you'll find some really great guests and some really interesting topics. So fill your diet of Agile Mentors with that while we're at taking a little bit of a break here at Agile Mentors. I hope you're having a great summer and we look forward to seeing all of you back here in August. Take care.

De método tecnológico a filosofía de gestiónLa metodología Agile y Scrum surgió en 2001 como una forma de gestionar proyectos en el ámbito de las tecnologías de la información y el desarrollo de software. Con el tiempo, ha evolucionado hacia un sistema de gestión aplicable no solo a proyectos tecnológicos, sino a iniciativas empresariales de todo tipo. En esencia, permite a las organizaciones generar valor de forma más eficiente en comparación con la gestión tradicional.Principios del manifiesto AgileEl manifiesto Agile establece que es preferible fomentar la interacción entre personas en lugar de basarse únicamente en procesos definidos. También defiende la adaptación al cambio por encima de seguir un plan rígido y prioriza la colaboración con el cliente frente a la firma de contratos exhaustivos. Estos valores han moldeado lo que hoy conocemos como Agile.El objetivo central de Agile es minimizar el desperdicio, una preocupación compartida con metodologías como Lean. ¿Cuál es el mayor desperdicio en un proyecto? Desarrollar algo que no aporta valor al cliente.Cómo evitar el desperdicioPara prevenir este error, Agile propone:Mantener una comunicación constante con el cliente.Entregar pequeños bloques de valor de forma continua.Ajustar el rumbo con base en la retroalimentación del cliente.Estas prácticas permiten que el proyecto evolucione de manera más precisa y efectiva.Scrum: la metodología más extendidaScrum, la herramienta más popular dentro de Agile, combina elementos de distintas metodologías. Su propósito es facilitar entregas parciales y constantes de valor por parte de equipos multidisciplinarios.Características clave de ScrumDivisión en entregables pequeños: El trabajo se organiza en bloques llamados Sprints, unidades de tiempo fijas que se repiten cíclicamente. Cada Sprint genera valor que puede validarse con el cliente.Equipos reducidos y diversos: Usualmente compuestos por 8 a 10 personas que representan distintas perspectivas del proyecto.Roles definidos: El Scrum Master garantiza el cumplimiento del método, mientras que el Product Owner recoge las necesidades del cliente y guía al equipo hacia ese objetivo.Aprender para mejorarAl finalizar cada Sprint se realizan dos tipos de retroalimentación:Retroalimentación interna, que permite al equipo mejorar su dinámica de trabajo.Retroalimentación del entregable, que evalúa si lo producido realmente genera valor para el cliente.Este sistema iterativo evita que se invierta tiempo y recursos en soluciones que no serán apreciadas.

Bernard Agrest: Avoiding Hard Conversations—When High-Performing Agile Teams Self-Destruct 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. Bernard describes how a high-performing, fun-loving team began to unravel when a new member joined who wasn't delivering on their commitments. Instead of addressing the performance issue directly, team members started picking up the slack, avoiding the difficult conversation that needed to happen. As morale dropped and people checked out, Bernard realized the team was paralyzed by fear of confrontation and assumptions that raising the issue would be ignored. This experience taught him that individual performance problems quickly become whole-team problems when left unaddressed, and that strong relationships require the courage to have honest, supportive conversations. Self-reflection Question: What difficult conversation are you avoiding on your team, and what assumptions might be preventing you from addressing it? Featured Book of the Week: The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni Bernard recommends The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni because it helps leaders understand that everyone has specific "genius" areas in different phases of work. When people work outside their natural genius zones, they feel unfulfilled and frustrated. This framework has been invaluable for Bernard in understanding team dynamics—why some teams click naturally while others struggle. By recognizing each person's working genius, leaders can better position team members for success and create more effective, satisfied teams. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

What's on your mind? Let CX Passport know...How do Agile principles, customer experience, and camper life all fit together? Lauren Feehrer connects those dots brilliantly in this *Greatest Hits* episode of CX Passport.Lauren is the founder of LoyaltyCraft, where she helps mid-market companies grow through smarter customer experience strategies. From her roots as a process analyst at Accenture to helping clients implement Agile CX frameworks today, Lauren brings a balance of structure and empathy to the CX world.This episode originally aired as E182 and stood out not just for Lauren's insights but for her authenticity — whether talking about CX in hospice care or running her family like a Scrum team (yes, really).Lauren blends CX discipline with curiosity and care — and it's no surprise this episode made the Greatest Hits list.CHAPTERS  00:00  Starting at Accenture...and blue screens  04:58  Listening deeply to customers  07:49  Agile CX explained  11:46  The business of grief and caregiving  15:34  Family road trips during the pandemic  18:41  First Class Lounge  23:41  Discipline, emotion, and process  26:54  Her grandfather's CX inspiration  29:11  Using Agile with your familyEpisode resources:  Connect with Lauren Feehrer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenfeehrer  Learn more about LoyaltyCraft: https://www.loyaltycraft.comIf you like CX Passport, I have 3 quick requests:✅ Subscribe to the CX Passport YouTube channel https://youtube.com/@cxpassport  ✅ Join other “CX travelers” with the weekly CX Passport newsletter https://cxpassport.kit.com/signup  ✅ Bring

Back in the early 2000s, software teams started embracing a new way of working that turned conventional project management on its head. Instead of trying to define everything up front and push massive projects toward a distant deadline, they asked a different question: what's the most valuable work we can deliver in the next two weeks? That question gave rise to Scrum—a system built on fixed time, cross-functional teams, and fast feedback. And while it started in software, the lessons apply just as powerfully to legal work. Tune in to hear how you can apply these principles to your practice—especially around prioritization, workflow design, and respecting your finite capacity—so that you're working smarter, not just harder.Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://www.agileattorney.com/76

Bernard Agrest: When Stepping Back Becomes Stepping Away—A Leadership Failure Story Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Bernard shares a powerful story about a critical research project where his instinct to step back and empower his team ultimately led to project failure and personal burnout. When Bernard realized his team wasn't ready for the work ahead, he made the mistake of taking everything on himself rather than building proper feedback loops and ensuring true understanding. Working overtime and feeling guilty about not supporting his team properly, Bernard learned that empowerment isn't about stepping back—it's about creating space to work together. His key insight reveals that it's through doing the work that we discover what work actually needs to be done, and that having people say they "get" the plan doesn't mean they truly understand it. Self-reflection Question: How do you distinguish between genuine team empowerment and abandonment when stepping back from direct involvement in projects? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The Jinja Hippos enjoyed a largely successful season by many standards. However, their postseason was overshadowed by internal tensions as long-simmering issues came to the surface.At the heart of the dispute lies the question of the club's foundation—specifically, who holds the rightful mandate to claim ownership. This debate has also raised concerns about who has been truly responsible for supporting the day-to-day operations of the Jinja-based side.The controversy has caused divisions throughout the club, affecting players, management, and even the fans. To understand the situation, we sat down with Hippos Rugby Club Chairman Manzi Jonan and Secretary Ian Kiryowa to hear their side of the story, as we continue to unravel the facts.

It’s days after Origin with Tony Squires, Nathan Hindmarsh, Wade Graham, and dejected Queenslander Brent Read. Listen to Wade Graham tee off about Queensland offering up “One Of The Weakest Play In Origin History”. Nellie Doherty Medal winner Liv Kernick joins us, Dragons coach Shane Flanagan chat’s Red V’s momentum right now, and the final say on the outcome of the Galvin saga. Plus Believe It Or Not, Tony’s Quiz and Ready’s Mail.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s days after Origin with Tony Squires, Nathan Hindmarsh, Wade Graham, and dejected Queenslander Brent Read. Listen to Wade Graham tee off about Queensland offering up “One Of The Weakest Play In Origin History”. Nellie Doherty Medal winner Liv Kernick joins us, Dragons coach Shane Flanagan chat’s Red V’s momentum right now, and the final say on the outcome of the Galvin saga. Plus Believe It Or Not, Tony’s Quiz and Ready’s Mail.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lilia Pulova: Business Case Ownership—The Product Owner's Core Duty Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Always Present and Inspirational Lilia describes an exceptional Product Owner whose defining characteristic was consistent presence with the team. This presence went beyond just showing up - it was inspirational and made team members genuinely care about their delivery and the product they were building. The Product Owner served as the vital connection between the team and the organization's wider mission, helping everyone understand how their work contributed to the bigger picture. This constant engagement and visibility created a motivated team that took pride in their product development efforts. The Bad Product Owner: Unprepared and Responsibility-Shifting Lilia encountered a Product Owner who exemplified poor practices by consistently arriving at backlog refinement meetings without any preparation, expecting developers to provide business context instead. This approach was fundamentally wrong because developers aren't equipped to discuss business expectations or product direction - that's the Product Owner's responsibility. This individual habitually said "yes" to all tickets without consideration, shifted decision-making responsibility to the team, and relied on architects to manage the product and determine sprint priorities. Product Owners must own the business case rather than delegate it, and keep the business rationale constantly visible to the team. Self-reflection Question: How do you ensure your Product Owner maintains proper preparation and ownership of business decisions rather than shifting these responsibilities to the development team? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Lilia Pulova: Building Self-Sufficient Teams Through Emotional Intelligence 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. Lilia defines success for Scrum Masters by asking a simple but powerful question: "Do people feel supported?" Her approach focuses on training teams to take on her responsibilities and make their own decisions. Rather than dictating solutions, she presents options and allows teams to choose their path. Over time, teams learn these options and develop independence in decision-making.  She maintains awareness by monitoring delivery metrics, watching for tickets that take too long, and staying attentive during daily stand-ups. With her primarily remote team keeping cameras open, Lilia reads emotions and body language to identify potential issues early, preventing small conflicts from escalating into major problems. Self-reflection Question: How well do you read the emotional state of your team members, and what early warning signs might you be overlooking? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: 1-on-1 Retrospective Lilia advocates for the 1-on-1 retrospective as her most effective format, explaining that people open up more in private conversations than in group settings. While group retrospectives can work well with smooth conversation flow, she finds that structured formats don't always suit every team - sometimes the "lack of format" creates better outcomes. The key to successful 1-on-1 retrospectives is building strong relationships and establishing trust, which she considers the most important foundation for effective retrospectives. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Emma Lawrence is joined by James Graham and Michael Chammas for a fiery edition of The Thursday Scrum. The team breaks the news that the Dragons have pulled out of the race for Selwyn Cobbo, sparking big questions about Shane Flanagan's future. Pressure is mounting on Anthony Seibold at Manly, and the crew dives into the latest around NRL’s commercial revenue boom. We debate the Tigers' recruitment direction, and catch up with Wade Graham live from the Mark Hughes Foundation’s Beanies for Brain Cancer Walk.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Emma Lawrence is joined by James Graham and Michael Chammas for a fiery edition of The Thursday Scrum. The team breaks the news that the Dragons have pulled out of the race for Selwyn Cobbo, sparking big questions about Shane Flanagan's future. Pressure is mounting on Anthony Seibold at Manly, and the crew dives into the latest around NRL’s commercial revenue boom. We debate the Tigers' recruitment direction, and catch up with Wade Graham live from the Mark Hughes Foundation’s Beanies for Brain Cancer Walk.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lilia Pulova: Leading an Agile Transformation—The Power of Patience and Small Wins 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. Lilia shares her experience leading a genuine Agile transformation in an organization just beginning their journey. Faced with widespread skepticism and resistance, she encountered impatient stakeholders demanding immediate results during the challenging first 2-3 months. The breakthrough came after two months when stakeholders finally witnessed tangible improvements in the application and faster release cycles. Patience emerged as the critical skill that carried the transformation through its most difficult phase. Lilia emphasizes the importance of conducting numerous one-on-one conversations and consistently praising teams while celebrating small wins to maintain motivation throughout the change process. Self-reflection Question: How do you maintain team morale and stakeholder confidence during the uncertain early phases of organizational change? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Lilia Pulova: Leadership Red Flag—When Managers Care More About Career Than Team 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. Lilia shares the story of when she worked with a troubled team where all projects were running late. As a junior Scrum Master, she struggled to identify that the root cause was a manager more focused on career advancement than team success. This manager only paid attention to team members who could provide exposure to higher management, dismissing other requests with "let's solve that later." Integration problems mounted, key people were absent, and when COVID arrived, the team was ultimately disbanded. This experience taught Lilia crucial lessons about taking ownership of team success and viewing the Scrum Master role as a continuous learning journey in leadership. Self-reflection Question: How well do you understand the human dynamics within your team, and what signals might you be missing about individual motivations? Featured Book of the Week: 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Lilia recommends "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene for its insights into human behavior and understanding the consequences of our actions when working with others. As Scrum Masters who interact with humans daily, this book helps develop awareness of interpersonal dynamics. One key principle Lilia applies is "always say less than necessary" - helping teams make decisions rather than overwhelming them with too much information or direction. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Lilia Pulova: When Architects Push Solutions—Learning to Disagree but Commit in 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. Lilia shares a challenging situation where an architect pushed a complex solution that she felt might be too difficult for her less-experienced team. Despite having two alternative solutions that better suited the team's capabilities, she chose to let go of her concerns and try the architect's approach. This decision required significant adaptation and ongoing conversations with her frustrated team members. By informing her manager about the team's frustration level and working closely with the team to adapt the solution to their context, Lilia demonstrates the valuable principle of "disagree but commit" - sometimes you need to let go of your preferred approach and learn from trying something different. Self-reflection Question: When have you had to set aside your preferred solution to support a team decision, and what did you learn from that experience? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Tony Squires is joined by Wade Graham, Nathan Hindmarsh and Michael Chammas as we discuss looked back at Queensland's win in Origin 2, the future of Rugby League in Perth and is Manly coach Anthony Seibold under pressure? Plus, the Raiders make it 5 wins a row, Tony's Quiz and Believe It Or Not along with plenty more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tony Squires is joined by Wade Graham, Nathan Hindmarsh and Michael Chammas as we discuss looked back at Queensland's win in Origin 2, the future of Rugby League in Perth and is Manly coach Anthony Seibold under pressure? Plus, the Raiders make it 5 wins a row, Tony's Quiz and Believe It Or Not along with plenty more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Agile in Construction: Why Construction Teams Need Product Owner Thinking with Luca Cotta Ramusino Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Customer Value Detective Luca discovered that applying the Product Owner role in construction requires thinking like a customer and understanding that "it's the customer that defines what value is." The great Product Owner in construction acts as a customer value detective, constantly asking "which task out of these is going to move the yardstick?" They ensure that work always serves a customer—if you can't identify your customer, you should stop and find one. This mindset transforms how construction teams approach their daily huddles and project planning, viewing everything through the lens of customer value rather than just task completion. The Bad Product Owner: The Waste Accumulator The bad Product Owner in construction fails to eliminate waste from processes, allowing non-value-adding activities to persist simply because "that's how we've always done it." They struggle to have candid conversations with customers and fail to tease out real requirements. Instead of transforming language into customer reality, they ask customers directly "what they want" without understanding that customers are better at identifying what they don't want than articulating what they need. This approach leads to projects that complete tasks without delivering real value. In this segment, refer to The Last Planner Method. Self-reflection Question: Can you clearly identify the customer for every piece of work your team performs, and how do you ensure that work truly moves the project toward completion? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Agile in Construction: Managing The Network of Promises in Lean Construction, with Luca Cotta Ramusino 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. Luca defines success in Lean construction through two critical metrics from the Last Planner Method: PPC (Percentage of Plan Complete) and RNC (Reasons for Not Completing). Success means creating reliable promises in what he describes as construction's "network of promises." The Last Planner Method removes layers of management by having those closest to the work do the planning themselves. PPC measures how reliable your promises are—similar to Scrum's definition of "done"—while RNC identifies where problems concentrate, typically in 2-3 areas. Both the work provider and receiver must agree on what "complete" means for these metrics to be meaningful. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Reflect and Disinfect Luca developed this daily retrospective practice where people share what was interesting about their work day without formal meetings. Inspired by both Scrum retrospectives and Toyota's focus on reflection and introspection, this 15-minute format answers three questions: what should we continue doing, what should we stop doing, and what should we start doing? The practice emphasizes that teams need moments to stop and think back in order to improve how they work. The informal nature makes it accessible to construction crews who might resist traditional meeting formats. Self-reflection Question: How reliable are the promises your team makes, and what patterns do you see in the reasons they're not kept? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this "Value Delivered" episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West and PST Jay Rahman, Founder of Fractal Systems discuss how agile principles helped a large investment bank turn a struggling multi-million dollar project into a success. By applying Scrum at multiple levels, the organization improved leadership alignment, enhanced collaboration, and reduced risks tremendously—ultimately accelerating delivery and achieving better outcomes. Listen in to discover how Scrum can create transparency, alignment, and value at scale.

Agile in Construction: The Parade of Trades—Teaching Flow in Construction, With Luca Cotta Ramusino 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. Luca learned the hard way that you can't just parachute consultants into construction sites and expect Lean methods to stick. His change strategy focuses on getting buy-in from crews by showing them "what's in it for them." He starts with exercises that provide insight into how Lean ideas apply to their specific jobs, like the "Parade of Trades" simulation that demonstrates how one crew moving at twice the speed still gets stuck behind slower crews ahead. This reveals that predictability of progress matters more than speed of progress. Once teams become familiar with these concepts, Luca transitions from directive teaching to facilitating meetings and conversations, moving into the background to help teams become more sustainable in their Lean practices. In this segment, Luca refers to the movie Karate Kid from 1984, and to Theory of Constraints. Self-reflection Question: How do you ensure that change initiatives show clear value to the people who must actually implement them? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Is AI underdelivering? Or are we asking the wrong questions? This episode breaks down what actually leads to business ROI with AI (and no, it’s not more automation). Overview What if AI isn’t the silver bullet—yet—but the bottleneck is human, not technical? In this episode, Brian Milner chats with Evan Leybourn and Christopher Morales of the Business Agility Institute about their latest research on how organizations are really using AI, what’s working (and what’s wildly overhyped), and why your success might hinge more on your culture than your code. References and resources mentioned in the show: Evan Leybourn Christopher Morales Business Agility Institute From Constraints to Capabilities Report Delphi Method #93: The Rise of Human Skills and Agile Acumen with Evan Leybourn #82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton #117: How AI and Automation Are Redefining Success for Developers with Lance Dacy AI Practice Prompts For Scrum Masters Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Evan Leybourn is the co-founder of the Business Agility Institute and author of Directing the Agile Organization and #noprojects; a culture of continuous value. Evan champions the advancement of agile, innovative, and dynamic companies poised to succeed in fluctuating markets through rigorous research and advocacy. Christopher Morales is a seasoned digital strategist and agile leader with over 20 years of experience guiding organizations like ESPN, IBM, and the Business Agility Institute. As founder of Electrick Media, he helps U.S. and European businesses harness AI to make smarter, more sustainable decisions in a rapidly changing world. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. We've kind been a little bit off and on recently, but I'm back, I'm here, I'm ready to go, and we've got a really good episode for you today. I've got two, two guests with me. I know that's not a normal thing that we do here, but we got two guests. First, we have Mr. Evan Layborn with us, who's back. Welcome back, Evan. Evan Leybourn (00:23) Good morning from Melbourne, Australia. Brian Milner (00:26) And Christopher Morales is joining us for the first time. Christopher worked with Evan on a project and we're going to talk about that in just a second, but Christopher, welcome in. Christopher Morales (00:35) Yeah, good evening. Nice to be here. It's very late here in Germany. So this is an international attendance. Brian Milner (00:42) Yeah, we were talking about this just as we started. I think we have pretty much all times of day represented here on this call because we've got morning here from Evan. We've got late evening here for Christopher and I'm kind of late afternoon. So we're covered. All our bases are covered here. But we wanted to have these two on. They both work for a company called the Business Agility Institute. And if you have been with us for a while, you probably remember Evan's episode that we had on last year when we kind of talked about one of the studies that they had done. Well, they put out a new one that I kind of saw Evan posting about. And I thought, wow, that sounds really, really interesting. I really want to have them on to talk about this. It's called From Constraints to Capabilities, AI as a Force Multiplier. The great thing about the Business Agility Institute is they get into the data. They do the research, they put in the hard work, and it's not just speculation. It's not just, that's one guy's bloated opinion, and do they know what they're talking about or not? So that's what I really, really appreciate about the things that come out of the Business Agility Institute is they're factual, they're data-based. So that's what I wanna start with, I guess, is... What was the genesis of this? What did you guys, how did you land on this as a topic and how did you narrow it down to this as a topic? Where did this start? Evan Leybourn (02:07) Well, quite simply, it started from almost a hypothesis around so much of the conversation around AI. And let's face it, there is a lot of conversation around artificial intelligence and specifically generative, predictive and agentic AI. Focuses on the technology. And yet when we talk to organizations, a lot of them don't seem to be seeing a positive return on investment, a positive ROI. And we needed to understand why, why these benefits of like three times products or operational efficiency product throughput, three times value creation, Why weren't companies seeing this? That's really what we were trying to understand. Why? Brian Milner (03:01) Yeah, that's a great basis for this because I think you're right. There's sort of this, I would imagine there's lots of people out there who are kind of going through their business lives and hearing all these incredible claims that people are making in the media about how this is gonna replace everyone. And now it's, yeah, we can, I mean, you said 3X, I've heard like, 10 or anywhere from 10 to 100X, the capabilities of teams and that they can now do all these amazing things. And if I'm just going through my business career, I'm looking at that from the outside going, is this fact or is this fantasy? this just a bluster or is this really, really happening? So I really appreciate this as a topic. A little bit of insider baseball here for everybody. You guys talk about in this report that you use a specific method here, the Delphi method. for data geeks here, or if you're just kind of curious, would you mind describing a little bit about what that means? Evan Leybourn (04:00) Chris, do you want to take that one? Christopher Morales (04:01) Yeah, well, so the idea behind using the Delphi method was actually inspired by my sister. She had done a periodic review that utilized this method. And essentially what it is is we utilize rounds of inquiry with an expert panel to refine the research, the feedback that we're getting. And so we collected an initial set of data. reviewed that data, tried to analyze it to come up with a consensus, and then repositioned our findings back to the experts to find out where they stood based on what they gave us. And really trying to get all of the experts to come to an agreement in specific areas. In the areas that we found gray space, for instance, or let's say, data was spread out, right? Those were really the areas where we're really trying to force these experts to get off of the fence and really make an assessment. And it was proved extremely helpful, I think, in this research because what I find in the AI space is that there is plenty of gray. And we really wanted to get to some stronger degree of black and white. I'm not going to say these findings are black and white, but I will say that in order to guide people, you need to give them degrees of confidence. And I feel like that's what we wanted to do with this. Brian Milner (05:31) Well, that's the great thing about research though, Is it can give you information, but there's always the story. And it's really kind of finding that story that really is the crux of it. So we open this saying, fact or fiction. So just hit us up with a couple of the, maybe some of the surprising findings or some of the key things. For the people you talk to. Christopher Morales (05:38) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (05:53) Were they seeing these amazing kind of, you know, 100 X of their capabilities or what was the reality of what people reported to you? Evan Leybourn (06:01) In a few cases, yes. Maybe not 100x, but 8x, 10x was definitely being shown. But the big aha, and I won't say it was a surprise, was really in a lot of organizations, the teams that were using AI were seeing Brian Milner (06:03) Okay. Evan Leybourn (06:23) absolutely massive improvements. People talk about going from months to minutes in terms of trying to create things. And so there's your 100X. But when we look at it at a business level and the business ROI, when we look at the idea to customer from concept to cash, when we look at the overall business flow, very few of those organizations saw those benefits escape from the little AI inner circle. And so that 10x or the 100x improvement fizzles into nothingness in some cases. negligible improvement in the whole organization. Some organizations absolutely saw those benefits throughout the entire system. And those were organizations who had created a flow, who created organizational systems that could work at the speed of AI, especially some of the younger AI native organizations, if you want to think of them that way. But no, most organizations those 10x, 100x kind of goals were unachievable for the business. And so when I was saying 3x, by the way, what we sort of tended to find is those organizations, mature organizations with mature AI programs and systems. we're generally seeing between a 1.2 to 1.4x improvement to about a 2.8 to about a 3.2x improvement. So that's like a 20 % to a 300 % improvement if you want to think of it this way. Brian Milner (08:15) Wow. Well, that's nothing to sneeze at. That's still really, really impressive. Christopher Morales (08:19) yeah, it'll make a significant difference. I think for me the interesting thing about the findings is that there's two areas that I think will pose a really interesting question for people who read the report, and that is this idea of being very intentional about identifying your goal, right? I don't know how many organizations are really meaningfully identifying what their expected outcome is. And I think the other thing, which we didn't really talk about much in the report, but I think plays a role in the conversation that's kind of bubbling to the surface here today, has to do with the human element inside of the organization. And while all of the organizations that we spoke to said that the human was a very important element and prioritized, There was a challenge in identifying specific initiatives that were being put in place to account for the disruption that the technology might have on the staff or the employees. And that wasn't surprising. That was kind of expected. But I think it's interesting that, you know, eight months after we released this report, I would argue that that's still the case. Brian Milner (09:36) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating because you're right. It's, it's, that's not the story you always hear, because you, you are hearing kind of more of taking the human out of the loop and making it more of just this straight automation kind of project. I want to ask really a question here though, Evan, said you made the distinction about it being more mature, groups, more mature organizations. I'm just curious, is that translate to, is there anything that translates there into the size of the organization as well? Did you find that more larger organizations had a different outcome than smaller, more nimble startup kind of organizations? Evan Leybourn (10:14) So age more than size. Younger organizations tended to be more, well, mean, they tended to be more agile. There's more business agility and through that greater benefits out of AI. These things are very tightly tied together. If you can't do... Brian Milner (10:18) Hmm, okay. Evan Leybourn (10:38) Agile or if you don't have agility as an organization, you're not going to do AI particularly well. And a piece of that goes to what you were just talking about in terms and you use the word automation, which is a beautiful, beautiful trigger word for me here because the reality is that the organizations that utilized AI, specifically generative or agentic AI, to automate their workforce rarely saw a high, like a strong return on investment. It basically comes down to generative predictive AI, generative and agentic AI tends not to be a good automation tool. It's non-deterministic. You pull a lever, you get one result. You pull the same lever tomorrow, you will get a different result. There are better tools for automation, cheaper tools for automation. And so we're not saying automation is bad. We're just saying that it's not the technology for it. The organizations that used it to augment their workforce were the ones that were seeing significant benefits. And now there are caveats and consequences to this because it does change the role of the human, the human in the loop, the human in the organization. But fundamentally, organizations that were automating or using AI for automation were applying an industrial era mindset and mentality to an information era opportunity. And they weren't seeing the benefits, not at a business level, not long term. And in some cases, did more harm than good. Brian Milner (12:28) That's really deep insight. That's really amazing to hear that. I'm interested as well. You found some places that were seeing bigger gains than others that were seeing bigger payoffs. Did you find patterns in what some of the hurdles were or some of the kind of obstacles that were preventing some of these that weren't seeing the payoffs from really taking full advantage of this technology? Christopher Morales (12:52) Yeah, absolutely. mean, we identified some significant constraints that, interestingly enough, when we talk about this, we obviously do workshops. So we were just at the XP conference doing a workshop. And when we talk about this, we identify the fact that our position is that the challenges to AI are a human problem, not a technology problem. And the findings reflect that because of the constraints that we found. only one of the major constraints was associated with technology and that was data primarily. The constraints that we identified had to do with normal operations within a business. So long budgeting cycles or the ability to make a decision at a fast rate of speed, for instance. These are all human centric challenges that independent of AI, If you're trying to run an efficient organization, you're trying to run an agile organization, right? Able to take advantage of opportunities. These are all things that are going to come into play. and, you know, as we like to say, like AI is only going to amplify that, right? So if AI can show you 20 more times, like the opportunities available to you is your organization going to be able to pivot? Do you have a funding model that can provide the necessary support for a given initiative? Or is the way things that run within the organization essentially giving you AI that provides you information that you can't move? Brian Milner (14:31) That's a great, yeah, yeah. Evan Leybourn (14:31) And think of it this way, if you're expecting AI to give you a three times improvement to product delivery, can your leaders make decisions three times faster? Can you get market feedback three times faster? And for most organizations, the answer is no. Brian Milner (14:51) Yeah. Yeah, that's a great phrase in there that Chris was talking about, like the AI will just amplify things. I think that's a great observation. And I think you're right. this is kind of, you know, there's been a thing I've talked about some recently in class. there's a... I'll give you my theory. You tell me if your data supports this theory or not. I'm just curious. You know, we've been teaching for a long time in Scrum classes that, you know, there's been studies, there's been research that shows that when you look at the totality of the features that are being completed in software development, there's really a large percentage of them that are rarely or never used, right? They're not finding favor with the audience. The audience is not using those capabilities. And so my theory, and this is what I want you guys, I'm curious what your thought is. If AI is amplifying the capability of development to produce faster, then my theory is that's going to only expand the number of things that we produce that aren't used because the focus has been sort of historically on that it's a It's a developer productivity issue that if we could just expand developer productivity, the business would be more successful when those other former studies are saying, wait a minute, that may not be it. We need to focus more on what customers really want. And if we knew what they really wanted, well, then, yeah, then productivity comes into play. But That's the human element again, right? We have to understand the customer. have to know. So I'm just curious again, maybe I'm out on a limb here or maybe that doesn't line up, how does that line up with what you found? Evan Leybourn (16:41) So the report's called From Constraints to Capabilities. And Chris, we spoke about the constraints. So maybe let's talk about the capabilities for a second. for the listeners who are unfamiliar with the Business Agility Institute, the model that we use for the majority of our research is the domains of business agility, which is a behavioral and capability Brian Milner (16:45) Ha ha. Yes. Evan Leybourn (17:04) Now, in that model, there are 84 behaviors that we model against organizations. But in this context, more importantly, were the 18 business capabilities. And so what we found was that the organizations that were actually seeing an improvement weren't the ones with the capabilities around throughput. So one of the capabilities deliver value sooner. That wasn't strongly tied. So the ability to deliver value sooner wasn't strongly tied to seeing a benefit from AI. But the ability to prioritize or prioritize, prioritize, prioritize, something so important we said it three times, was one of the most strongly needed capabilities. It correlates where organizations that were better at prioritization, at being able to decide which feature or area, what thing to do was the next most important thing. If you're got AI building seven or eight prototypes in the same time you used to be able to create one, great, you now have seven or eight options. Not that seven or eight are going to go to market. but you're going to decide, you've got more optionality. So it's not that you're be delivering more faster, though in some cases that is obviously the case, but you've got more to choose from so that if you make the right decision, you will see those business benefits. But the capability that had the strongest, absolute strongest relationship to seeing a benefit from artificial intelligence was the ability to cultivate a learning organization. That's not education, that's around learning, experimentation, trying things, testing things, being willing as an organization to say, well, that didn't work, let's try something else. And those learning organizations were the ones that were almost universally more successful at seeing a business benefit from their AI initiatives than anybody else. So yeah, just because you can develop features faster, it means nothing if it's not the right features that the customers want. And that comes from learning and prioritization and there are other capabilities unleashing. workflow creatively and funding work dynamically, for example, that came out strongly. But I just really wanted to highlight those two because that's the connection that you're looking for. Christopher Morales (19:43) Yeah. And if you think about your question ties directly into something that we heard at the conference we were just at, likening to technical debt. So we're actually starting to see the increase in technical debt because of the influence that AI and software development is having in the creation of code and so on and so forth. And so... I think that what you're saying is spot on in terms of your theory. And I think that this speaks to what I believe we should really kind of amplify, right? AI is going to amplify certain things that aren't positive. I think leadership, think businesses need to start amplifying a conversation around... Are we approaching this the right way? What are the ultimate outcomes that we may see? And can we take that on? So if our developers are increasing the amount of technical debt that we have because we've integrated AI or adopted AI, what are we doing about that? What is the new workflow? What does the human in the loop do on account of this new factor? that we need to take into place because ultimately things like that make their way to the bottom line. And we know that's what CEOs care about. Brian Milner (21:02) Yeah, wow, this is awesome. I just want to clarify with sort of the learning organization ability, just want to make sure I'm clear. What we're saying here is that it's organizations that already have that kind of cultural mindset, right? That the background of a learning organization that see a bigger gain from this, or are we saying that AI can makes the biggest influence of impacting how learning an organization is. Evan Leybourn (21:34) The first, ⁓ the arrow of causation is that learning organizations amplify or improve or are more likely to see a benefit from AI. It's not a bad, and I should say we're not looking at how effectively you can Brian Milner (21:35) Okay. Evan Leybourn (21:57) deploy an AI initiative. It's about a we looked at AI as a black box. Let's assume or as in the cut through the Delphi method, the companies that we were speaking to had been doing these for years. These were mature established organizations. And the so it wasn't looking at how effectively you could deploy AI. But rather You've got AI, it's integrated. Are you seeing a business benefit from it? And those organizations that were learning organizations were more likely to be seeing a benefit, much, much more likely to be seeing a benefit. Brian Milner (22:40) Yeah. There's one phrase that kind of jumped out at me that I thought maybe one or both of you could kind of address here a little bit. I love the phrase, kind of the metaphor that you used in there about shifting from a creator to composer. And I'm just wondering if you can kind of flesh that out a little bit for us. Help us understand what that looks like to move from a creator to composer. Christopher Morales (23:01) Yeah, I'll start, but I think Evan will touch on it as well, because I do think it's a fascinating position, is how I'll phrase that. So when we think about creator to composer, we're talking about a fundamental shift on how a human is utilized within an organization. So if we eliminate AI from the equation, The human, your employees are acting as creators at some level, at some degree. Okay, so I have a media background, so I'm doing a lot of marketing. And I think that this is appropriate to use as an analogy, because I think a lot of marketers are utilizing AI right now. So independent of AI, that marketer is required to take into consideration all of these different factors about the business, create copy, let's say. create a campaign, do all of this real like hands on thoughts and levels. Now you bring AI into the equation and there are certain elements of these tasks that are being supported, offloaded in some cases. I'm not gonna get into my opinions about what is right and what is wrong here, but what I will say is there is a change in that workflow. And so what is... fundamentally at play here is that that marketer is now working in conjunction with something else. And so it is critically important that that marketer develops the skills to compose with the AI in a sense of, now know how to direct, I know how to steer a conversation, steer a direction. in order to get to a meaningful and hopefully valuable output utilizing the assist of the AI. And Evan, I'll toss over to you because this is the area, just so you know, Brian, this area of the report is the one that this podcast could turn into an hour and a half long podcast. Evan Leybourn (25:08) So I'll try not to make it an hour and a half, but just to build on what Chris said. Brian Milner (25:11) Ha Evan Leybourn (25:12) So this created to compose a shift, it changes the role of the human in the loop. It changes the responsibilities. And there's a quote in the report, AI is an unlimited number of junior staff or junior developers if you're a technologist. And that comes with some deep nuance because we all know that junior staff there is a level of oversight and validation required. So if you're creating through your AI colleague, let's call them that, if you're collaborating with AI, the AI is creating, then every human shifts into that composer mode and moves up the value chain. So your junior most employees, right? start to take on what would be traditionally management responsibilities. Now, this isn't in the report, but this is sort what we found after, right? Was that there were three sort of skill areas that needed to be taught to individuals in order to be effective and successful with AI or to collaborate in an AI augmented workforce. The first one was product literacy. So the ability to define and communicate use cases and user stories, design thinking techniques and concepts, the ability to communicate what good looks like in a way that somebody else understands, this somebody else, of course, being the AI counterpart. And product literacy, again, your senior employees have that, but that's got to Everyone now needs that. The second is the skill of judgment or critical thinking. The ability to, for anyone here who has a background in lean, pulling the and on court. The ability to and the confidence to, which are two separate skills, actually say, no, what AI is doing here is wrong. We're going to do something different. I'm going to say something different. I'm going to suggest. I'm going to override AI. I'm going to pull the hand on cord and stop the production line, even though it's going to cost the organization money. But because if I don't, it's going to be much, much worse. And so that ability to use your judgment and the confidence to use judgment, because let's face it, AI can be very compelling in its sounds accurate. So you've to be able to go, hang on, there's something not right here, and use that judgment. And then the third is around feedback loops, or specifically quality control feedback. Because as a creator, the first round of feedback, the first round of quality control is implicit. It exists inside the heads and the hands of the creator. Like you're writing a document or creating a... a marketing campaign, you go, oh, I'm not happy with this, I'll change that, or maybe not that word. You're a software developer and say, oh, I don't like that line, that's not doing what I wanted, I'm gonna change it. So the first round of feedback, the first round of quality is implicit. But once you become a composer, the first round of feedback is explicit, right? Because you're taking what has already been produced. And so the, what we, What we found post report is that a lot of people do not have the skill or haven't, sorry, have not learnt the skill, how to do that first implicit round of feedback explicitly. And so it gets skipped. so AI outputs get passed through into... later stages of quality control and so forth. And obviously they fail more often. So it's a real issue. So it's those three skilled areas that we would say organizations fundamentally need to invest in, in order to enable their workforce to be augmented, to work with AI effectively. And the organizations that have those skills, the organization with who have individuals with those skills at all levels from the junior most employee are more successful. Now, I'm going to add one thing to this. I'm going to slightly go off topic because it is the one of the most common questions that we get when we teach this topic or we talk about it at conferences. And that is Brian Milner (29:44) Yeah Yeah, please do. Evan Leybourn (29:56) If AI replaces your junior employees and your junior employees go up a level, what's the pathway for the next generation to become the senior employee? And this is where I have to give you the bad news that no one has an answer for that yet. These very mature, very advanced organizations Right? Many of them were trying to figure it out. None of them had an answer. and that's the, and I'll be honest, I personally, and this is just Evan's opinion, believe that this will become or must be a society level problem, or solution to that problem. it will require businesses alongside governments, alongside, education institutions to make some fairly substantive shifts and I don't think anyone knows what they are today. Christopher Morales (30:53) Yeah, and I would only say to that, and again, there's so much I would love to inject here, but I will say that this is an opportunity, and I always stress that, because that is a little sobering when you think about that idea. But I really, really strongly encourage organizations that are evaluating this to, I understand the considerations about efficiency and bottom line benefit. Brian Milner (30:53) Yeah. You Christopher Morales (31:20) towards AI, and I appreciate that wholeheartedly. But I think this is a real opportunity for organizations to take a step back and really think about the growth path for the talent that you have in your organization. Because augmenting your workforce with AI, are studies, Harvard Business Review put out a study that indicated that an augmented employee was more productive and enhanced as if it had been working with a senior staff member and collaborated at a level that was equivalent to working within a team. So there are studies that show real benefit to the employee having an augmented relationship with AI. If an organization can take two steps back, think about that pattern, think about that elevation strategy for your talent. you're going to be doing so much more to keep yourself sustainable in what is arguably the most like, you know, I don't know, I don't even know the word I'm looking for. It's, the most chaotic time I can think of for businesses when it comes to technology adoption. Brian Milner (32:23) You Yeah, I agree. But there's also sort of, I don't know if you guys feel this way as well, but to me, there's sort of like this crackling kind of sense of excitement there as well, sort of like living on the frontier that like there's this unexplored country out here that we don't really know where all these things are going to shift out. But gosh, it's fun thinking that we get to be the ones who kind of do that experimentation and find out and see what's the next step in this evolution? What's the next growth? The patterns that we've used previously may not apply anymore or apply in the same way because so much of the foundation underneath that system has changed. So we got to experiment and find new things. I love the call there, the learning organization, that that being the primary thing that If we have that cultural value, then that's really gonna drive this because we can then say, hey, this isn't working anymore, let's try something else. And that's how we end up at a place where we have new practices and new workflows and things that will support this and augment it rather than hampering it being a constraint, like you said, yeah. Christopher Morales (33:48) Well said. Well said. Brian Milner (33:50) Awesome. Well, this is a fascinating discussion. I really could go on for the next couple of hours with you guys on this. is just my kind of hobby or interest area at the moment as well. So I really appreciate you guys doing the work on this and appreciate you sharing it with us and sharing some of the insights. Hey, and the listeners here, hey, they got a bonus from the report, right? You listed extra things that didn't quite make it in the report. Just make sure you understand that listeners, right? You got extra information here listening to us today. ⁓ So just any last words from you guys? Christopher Morales (34:19) Thank Yeah. Evan Leybourn (34:24) Just for the folk listening, treat AI not as a technical problem, but as a human and a business opportunity, requiring human and business level changes. Don't just focus on how good the technology is, because that's not where the constraints nor where the opportunities truly lie. I would also just like to call out that if anyone listening wants to learn more about any of these topics, the capabilities, the domains of business agility, visit the Business Agility Institute website, check out the domains, download the report. But we've also launched an education portfolio and we'll be running a different education course on each of the capabilities over the next, I think it's every two weeks almost until the end of the year. So please come and join us and let's go deep into these topics together. Christopher Morales (35:21) Yeah, and I would just say, Brian, to all the listeners out there, don't fall into what I think is a common fallacy, which is where we're going is predetermined. It's already set in stone. I think as Agilists, we know the power of flexibility, the ability to pivot, and the ability to utilize data and information to inform what our next move is going to be. And I think this is a classic case of you control the narrative. You control what AI looks like in your organization, in your team, in your workflow, and you have the ability to carve out how it impacts your world. And so I encourage people to look at it that way. Empower your humanity, empower your decision making. The AI is here, it's not going anywhere. So embrace it in the best way possible. Brian Milner (36:22) Yeah, it seems oddly ironic or maybe appropriate to quote from the Terminator movie here, but it sounds like what you're saying is no fate, but what you make. Christopher Morales (36:32) Prophetic, Brian, that's prophetic. Evan Leybourn (36:37) I love it. Brian Milner (36:37) Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate you guys being on and obviously we're gonna have you back. you know, when you guys come out with new stuff like this, it's just amazing to dive deep into it. So thanks for making the time at all kinds of times of the day and coming on and sharing this with us. Christopher Morales (36:55) You're welcome. Evan Leybourn (36:56) Thank you.

The Scrum community is buzzing about a new 55-page expansion to the Scrum Guide. Is this the depth practitioners have been asking for, or is it turning the lightweight framework into bloatware? In this episode, Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando critically examine the "DLC" that claims the original guide was "deliberately oversimplified." We explore new concepts like outcome vs output definitions of done, the "supporters" role, and the inclusion of complex frameworks like Cynefin.Stick around as we debate whether these additions help teams navigate complexity or create more confusion, while highlighting crucial omissions around organizational structure and practical implementation guidance. #Scrum #Agile #ProductDevelopment= = = = = = = = = = = =LINKS= = = = = = = = = = = = http://arguingagile.comYouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@arguingagileSpotify https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Applehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596= = = = = = = = = = = =Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Agile in Construction: The Culture Shock of Applying Agile and Lean to Construction, With Luca Cotta Ramusino 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. Luca experienced a culture shock when first applying Lean thinking to construction, struggling to see how methods designed for cars and assembly lines could work in one-off construction projects. However, he discovered that collaboration in construction isn't about boss relationships—it's about people coming together to deliver value from the customer's perspective. The key insight: when multiple contractors compete for their share of income, the real goal becomes finding ways to complete "the work" efficiently. Competition exists, but the ultimate focus must remain on delivering what the customer truly needs, not just what individual trades want to accomplish. In this segment, we refer to the concept of an Andon Cord, and Swarming from Lean. Featured Book of the Week: The Machine That Changed the World & The Toyota Way These two books provided Luca with his "aha!" moment in understanding Lean construction. The Toyota Way, available in both English and Italian (with additional Italian company case studies), initially created a culture shock as Luca struggled to apply automotive methods to construction's one-off projects. However, these books revealed how Lean thinking could transform construction through visual management to surface problems quickly and swarming practices to fix issues faster. The books taught him that Lean principles transcend industries when properly adapted to different contexts. The Machine That Changed The World, by Womack, Jones, and Roos. Self-reflection Question: What industry practices have you dismissed too quickly without considering how they might adapt to your unique context? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

In this episode of Building Better Developers with AI, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche tackle a challenge that many modern developers face: navigating multiple software methodologies. With insights shaped by both real-world experience and AI-generated suggestions, the discussion reveals how developers can stay effective when juggling Agile, Waterfall, DevOps, and hybrid workflows. Understanding Common Software Methodologies The episode begins with an overview of today's most widely used software methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Kanban, DevOps, and SAFe. Rob and Michael highlight that developers often switch between these within the same organization or even across concurrent projects, depending on client requirements, legacy constraints, or team structure. The result? A dynamic but complex work environment that demands both technical and mental agility. The Challenge of Switching Software Methodologies The core challenge is staying productive while adapting to different software methodologies across teams and projects. Developers face more than just a change in process—they often deal with different toolsets, coding standards, sprint cadences, and collaboration models. This constant context switching can drain mental resources. “It's like being bilingual,” Michael explains. “If you're not fluent in a method, switching is exhausting.” Even development tools play a role. Some developers separate projects by using different IDEs to help them mentally shift gears between methodologies. Clarifying ‘Done' in Software Methodologies Rob and Michael explore a common point of contention: the definition of “done.” In Agile, it often means feature-ready for review or feedback. In Waterfall, it usually means final and locked. “You'll start a war in a meeting just asking what ‘done' means,” Rob quips. Michael uses a cooking analogy to explain the importance of clear expectations: requirements are the recipe, code is the ingredients, and the finished product must match what was promised. Without agreement on what “done” means for each software methodology, delivery and testing become chaotic. Adapting to Different Software Methodologies To truly thrive, developers must move from a methodology purist to an adaptive mindset, focusing on the value being delivered rather than the rigidity of a particular framework. “Don't serve the methodology. Serve the customer,” Rob emphasizes. Michael reminds us to avoid getting lost in small details, like UI color tweaks, when more critical features remain incomplete. Staying aligned with the end goal ensures that effort translates into real progress, regardless of methodology. Documenting Within Software Methodologies In teams that use multiple software methodologies, documentation often becomes fragmented or overly complex. Rob and Michael both stress that great developers learn to write “just enough” documentation—and keep it in one place. Michael offers a best practice: let the codebase be the source of truth. Embedding JavaDocs, comments, or changelogs within the code ensures that updates stay consistent with the actual implementation. It reduces dependency on separate, often outdated documentation tools. “If your code and documentation don't match, one of them is lying,” Michael warns. Key Takeaways on Software Methodologies Understand core methodologies — Agile, Waterfall, DevOps, and hybrids Support healthy context switching — Use tools and routines that help you adapt Align on ‘done' — Define it clearly with your team Focus on outcomes — Avoid getting stuck in rigid process rules Document just enough — And keep it close to your code Be Adaptable, Stay Focused To succeed across software methodologies, developers must be flexible, clear, and focused on delivering value. Rather than being loyal to a single framework, the best developers understand the principles behind them all. They communicate effectively, manage context switches efficiently, and utilize smart documentation to keep projects aligned. When you serve the goal—not just the process—you become a truly adaptive developer. Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, there's always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at info@develpreneur.com with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let's continue exploring the exciting world of software development. Additional Resources Learn From CoWorkers: Interview with Douglas Squirrel Rock Bottom Can Be a Starting Line Invest In Your Team – They Will Want To Stay Building Better Developers With AI – With Bonus Content

Agile in Construction: Tackling the Specialist-silo Problem in Construction With Luca Cotta Ramusino 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. Luca shares a critical insight from his 20+ years in construction: crews often obsess about the wrong problem. While everyone knows a drywall crew can hang drywall, the real challenge isn't about individual abilities—it's about having work ready to perform. Construction sites are messy, crowded environments where multiple trades work simultaneously, not in splendid isolation. Luca emphasizes that completing work depends not just on your crew's skills, but on having the area prepared and ready for your specific trade. He explains how he gains buy-in from tradespeople by showing them "what's in it for them" and helping them understand the difference between how they think they're working versus what's actually happening on site. Self-reflection Question: How often do you focus on your team's capabilities while overlooking whether the work is actually ready for them to execute? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Stuart Tipples: The Ghost Product Owner vs. The Storytelling Master Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Storytelling Master Stuart describes an exceptional Product Owner who worked with an API team on what could have been a dry, unsexy product. This PO excelled by maintaining clear availability through established office hours, showing up consistently for the team, and avoiding micromanagement. The standout quality was their ability to tell compelling stories that created clarity and got the team onboard with the vision. Through storytelling, this PO helped the team communicate the value of their work, transforming a potentially mundane product into something meaningful and engaging for both the team and stakeholders. The Bad Product Owner: The Ghost with the Most Stuart encountered a problematic Product Owner working with a customer-portal team dealing with edge cases, legacy systems, and messy code. This PO earned the nickname "The Ghost with the Most" because they were never available when needed. They would miss sprint planning sessions, delay or skip backlog refinement entirely, and leave team members to fill the gap while juggling their own responsibilities. Stuart learned to address this directly by outlining how the PO's behavior affected the team and delivery, asking "Can I help you?" The PO initially reacted defensively but eventually admitted they weren't happy in the role. Self-reflection Question: How effectively does your Product Owner use storytelling to create clarity and help the team understand the value of their work? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Stuart Tipples: Defining Scrum Master Success and the 4L's Retrospective 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. Stuart redefines success for Scrum Masters, moving beyond organized JIRA boards and well-structured stories to focus on team dynamics and behavior. True success means seeing healthy conflict that leads to insight, having transparent priorities, and watching teams call out their own behavior through self-checking mechanisms. Stuart emphasizes that happy teams aren't just content - they're energized by embracing obstacles and challenges. He stresses the importance of reinforcing great behaviors when you see them, creating an environment where teams can thrive independently. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: 4L's The 4L's retrospective format is Stuart's favorite because it strikes the perfect balance between warmth and honest feedback. The format covers four areas: Liked (appreciation), Learned (growth opportunities), Lacked (identifying gaps), and Longed for (dreaming big). This structure prevents people from freezing up while uncovering golden moments and building psychological safety. As a bonus, the format allows facilitators to bring fun elements and themes, making retrospectives more engaging while maintaining their effectiveness in driving team improvement. Self-reflection Question: Does your team demonstrate healthy conflict that leads to insight, or are disagreements avoided and issues left unresolved? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Stuart Tipples: Beyond Hierarchy—Influencing Agile Adoption Through Setting the Example and Community 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. Stuart explores the challenging aspect of leading change as a Scrum Master without hierarchical authority. He shares his experience as a chapter lead where he built a community of practice and recruited new Scrum Masters to become change agents. The breakthrough came when he convinced director-level leaders to run their own quarterly retrospectives, creating a powerful example for teams throughout the organization. Stuart emphasizes that change spreads organically - when you change your team, it becomes contagious. His approach involved showing up daily as a change agent, understanding the difference between sponsors and change agents, and initially facilitating leadership retrospectives to demonstrate proper technique. Self-reflection Question: How can you leverage community building and lead by example to create lasting organizational change without relying on formal authority? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Laura Kendrick and Cort Sharp hijack the mic to share what it’s really like behind the scenes at Mountain Goat. From Zoom bloopers to unexpected team bonding, they unpack how a fully remote team built a thriving, human-centered workplace. Overview In this special takeover episode, Laura Kendrick and Cort Sharp pull back the curtain on what goes into running hundreds of Scrum and Product Owner classes virtually—and why Mountain Goat's remote team still feels so close-knit. With stories of early tech headaches, Slack banter, hilarious costume moments, and the quiet rituals that keep the team connected, they explore how remote work can actually foster strong relationships and top-tier collaboration. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a distributed team work (or just want a peek at some Zoom-era growing pains), this one’s for you. References and resources mentioned in the show: Laura Kendrick Cort Sharp #61: The Complex Factors in The Office Vs. Remote Debate with Scott Dunn #147: The Power of Quiet Influence with Casey Sinnema Run a Daily Scrum Your Team Will Love Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years. Laura Kendrick is the producer of the Agile Mentors Podcast and a seasoned Scrum Master who keeps virtual classes running smoothly. Outside the podcast, she helps clients apply Scrum techniques to their marketing and business strategy, bringing structure and momentum to big, creative ideas. Auto-generated Transcript: Laura Kendrick (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. As you may have noticed, I am not Brian Milner. I am Laura Kendrick, and this is Cort Sharp. And if you have taken a class with us at Mountain Goat in the last five years, there is a good chance that you have met one or actually both of us. Cort Sharp (00:19) I think it's like 90 % chance, 95 % honestly. We've been in so many of these classes. Laura Kendrick (00:26) Definitely, and oftentimes together too with one of us TAing, one of us producing, sometimes one of us teaching court. Cort Sharp (00:33) once in a while, once in a while. Yeah. Laura Kendrick (00:37) So we thought we would come on over here and hijack the podcast to share a little bit about some of the insights that we have gained from doing about a billion, maybe a little exaggeration. Cort Sharp (00:49) Roughly. Roughly. We've done roughly a billion classes with Mountain Goat. Yes. Laura Kendrick (00:56) We have seen a lot in the certifying of Scrum Masters and product owners and advanced product owners and Scrum Masters and all of the evolution of the classes that we have done. We actually hold quite a bit of insight into what is happening in this world. And so we thought we would come in, steal the podcast, and share a little bit of what we have seen, learned, observed, and really just kind of Honestly, some of the laughs and fun that we've had along the way. Cort Sharp (01:25) Also, I think, I don't know, just your intro right there is talking about, hey, we've seen the evolution of these classes. That just got my brain going of like, remember the first class that we did? Way like 2020. I mean, I was in my parents' basement with really terrible internet. It was a struggle. Laura Kendrick (01:40) Yeah. Cort Sharp (01:49) But we were working on like Miro boards or mural. One of the two, forget which, which tool it was, but that was, yeah, that was before team home. And then we got to see the first version of team home. We helped do a little testing with it. And then we've seen it grow all the way into this awesome tool that we have nowadays. And I don't know, just, just to me, I think it's cool to see how we've been iterating and be part of that process of the iteration process, um, to develop these classes and these courses into. Laura Kendrick (01:52) Mm-hmm. Mural. Yep. Mm-hmm. Cort Sharp (02:20) the truly awesomeness that they are today. Personally, I'd rather take a virtual class than an in-person class with Mountain Goat at this point. Laura Kendrick (02:27) It's funny that you say that because I notice actually the iteration of the experience like outside of the tech piece because you know, that's where my brain goes. Here's the difference between court and I. I'm noticing the interactions. But I've noticed, mean how people are interacting a little bit differently in the online space, how even our team interacts, like all of those things has become so much more sophisticated and amazing and Cort Sharp (02:39) Yeah, just a bit. Laura Kendrick (02:54) I mean, honestly, we sometimes talk on our team between like the producing and TA team where like I've referred to it as a perfect game if we don't need anything from the outside team, which occasionally we need a lot of support from the outside team, but we've we've got this down at this point. And it is it's become those first classes. I remember them being super stressful, like, my gosh, the breakout rooms and all the things and just being like, I mean, you couldn't do. Cort Sharp (03:17) Yes. Laura Kendrick (03:21) It was almost like learning how to drive where you felt like if you turned the radio knob up, you might actually turn the whole car. And it was like, so much anxiety. Cort Sharp (03:31) I mean, but we just didn't know Zoom then. Zoom didn't even know itself then, right? What Zoom is, ⁓ for those of you who don't know, we host all of our virtual classes on Zoom. And learning that platform, like I'd used it once maybe for some just, yeah, here's Zoom exists in one of my college classes. That was about it. But yeah, totally. was like, man, what does this button do? Hopefully it doesn't end the meeting and kick everyone out. Laura Kendrick (03:34) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. Yeah, no kidding. But you know what's really interesting too, though, is that it's been over five years now for both of us being part of the Mountain Goat team. And we all work remotely. And other than you and Mike for a little while being right down the road from each other, none of us had any actual interpersonal interaction with each other outside of Zoom email and Slack and the occasional, know, fretted text message of like, are you late? Where are you? Cort Sharp (03:58) Absolutely, yeah, totally. Yeah. Laura Kendrick (04:26) But other than that it like we truly were of and still are a fully remote team and the crazy thing about it is we have at this point once gotten together as a full team in person and it was such an interesting experience being having been fully remote and then being in person and in particular the team that is live on the classes Cort Sharp (04:39) Yep. Yep. Laura Kendrick (04:51) It was a very different interaction because we have this time built into our classes where the team gets on the Zoom call 30 minutes earlier than the students do. And we get this time to just honestly have like water cooler chat and like friend chat or occasionally see Mike get on and you can't hear him, but you can see that he is quite angry at his very elaborate tech system that is not working correctly. Cort Sharp (05:14) you That does happen. Yes, it does. ⁓ Laura Kendrick (05:21) these moments, I feel like they really bonded us together. Because when we got together in person, it was old friends. wasn't even fast friends. It was old friends. And the banter even that goes on in Slack is fun and engaging and not rigid and confining. Cort Sharp (05:31) Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I agree with that. I mean, I'm just thinking back to like the first time because that was the first time I met you in person. aside from being like, wow, she's a lot shorter than I thought she would be. Laura Kendrick (05:47) Mm-hmm. shorter. By the way, court is like 6-4. Cort Sharp (05:55) Yeah, yeah. Not that you're short. But I've just always ever seen like, the profile like the profile picture. That's all that it's really ever been. So I'm like, yeah, you're like, what I would consider normal height, which you totally are. But in my mind, I was like, yeah, it's weird seeing, you know, your legs. That's funny. ⁓ Laura Kendrick (06:14) We digress. Cort Sharp (06:15) But aside from that, was like we've known each other for three, four, four years because we've had that time to get to know each other. We've had that time to talk about just life events, what's going on, where we live, what's happening, what the deal is going on with life. Because we've been very intentional about having that time with that. The 30 minutes before each class were originally very much so used to take care of any tech problems. As the years have gone by, we've for the most part figured out the tech problems. Sometimes, you know, we'll change something out. Laura Kendrick (06:48) Except, hold on, except last week in Lance's class, we were talking about his dog and suddenly it looked as though Lance in his entire room did a cartwheel because the camera just fell. This is not a small camera. Cort Sharp (07:02) It said, nope, I'm out. ⁓ man. Laura Kendrick (07:06) So we still occasionally have the tech problem. Cort Sharp (07:09) Yes we do, yes we do. That's why we still do the 30 vimits. Laura Kendrick (07:14) The crazy thing about that is that when we landed at this in-person meeting, there were members of the team that at that time, and I in particular had never had any interaction with. so like other than the odd email or Slack message, so it was like really knew their name, but didn't really work with them up until that moment. And it was really interesting because at one point, the way that the leadership team had mentioned of like, well, if you need somebody to step in and talk to Mike for you, if you're not comfortable. And I remember looking at court and being like, Mike's the one I'm most comfortable with in this room because of that 30 minutes. I feel like I know Mike. I feel like we have an actual interpersonal relationship where I have no problem speaking up and saying the things that I need to. And that has made like those little water cooler times, those little Cort Sharp (07:54) Yeah. Laura Kendrick (08:06) bantery questions, them asking about my kids or hobbies or whatever. And just knowing those things made a huge difference in our team functioning. The communication across time zones was so much better and easier and safer. Cort Sharp (08:24) Absolutely. We were talking a little bit before we were recording about just people who want pure in-person no matter what. I think at this point, I will always push back on that and say, you might not get that quote unquote collaboration time that's naturally built in, but if you're intentional about it and you provide the space and provide the resources, Laura Kendrick (08:32) Hmm. Cort Sharp (08:50) And also, kind of push people along, have some, I don't know, working agreements or something of, hey, our cameras are on whenever we're talking with each other, unless something like drastic is going on or something's happening, right? Which I think we're going to get into in a little bit, but it's massive. It's crazy. Laura Kendrick (09:03) That's huge. Yeah, I mean, it is. I think we can definitely speak to that in our own experience because we've had, of course, there are moments where people don't have cameras. There are moments where people have bad connections and we'll encourage them in class, like turn off your camera, save your bandwidth. But there are also moments where we are doing private classes for companies. In particular, we've done some with companies that work with like Department of Defense. So there's like real security. issues there and so they don't turn their cameras on. Their cameras are totally disabled on their computers. And it is, I have to say those classes are some of the most like energy draining classes I'm ever present in because I'll be there with the trainer and I feel like I have to give all this emotional feedback because when you are talking to a black screen, that's, it's really hard to just. Cort Sharp (09:47) Hmm. Laura Kendrick (09:58) survive that because you're not getting any feedback from anyone. So you don't know what's happening and you're constantly questioning and the kind of banter in your own mind is like, God, is it landing? Is it not? And you're just not getting any of that physical feedback. So I feel like when I'm on a class with a trainer like that, I feel like I have to be like, that's funny. I'm like, yeah, good point. Cort Sharp (10:19) Yeah, you're kidding. Laura Kendrick (10:21) I'm tired Cort Sharp (10:22) You No, I get that. And I've had some pretty similar experiences too. I might not be as in tune with the emotional side as stated earlier. So I might not help the trainers out nearly as much as I probably should. But I do think cameras on just can make all the difference. And again, situations where it's just not possible. Absolutely understand that. One of our trainers, Lance, he Laura Kendrick (10:39) Mm-hmm. Cort Sharp (10:47) He always likes to throw out the phrase, look, let's approach everything with grace, patience, and mercy. So I like, which I really appreciate, and I like that he throws that out there. But I think that's a good thing to keep in mind of like, know, even though you have the company policy, you have the working agreement, whatever it is that says, look, camera's on all the time, sometimes it's just not possible. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. I recently had to figure out internet in the middle of nowhere, because that's where I live now. Laura Kendrick (10:52) Mm. No. Cort Sharp (11:15) And I was worried for a while that I wouldn't be able to put my camera on. But, you know, if if they came down to that, I know that it would be, hey, you know, it's a it's a unique situation. It's something different. And we're going to do we're going to work the best that we can with it and try to figure out maybe you can turn your camera on for any time you're talking or just any time you have something to say or, you know, if you're agreeing with something, you could briefly turn your camera on to show like, yeah, I'm nodding. I'm agreeing. I'm doing whatever. Right. But Laura Kendrick (11:45) Honestly, I think recently I had a very busy day and we communicate in back channels, of course through email, but also we use Slack as a team. And so I sent a direct message to court about something and I just like, I sent it in a voice? No. And court's response was, didn't know you could do that in Slack. But in those moments, I think there are other ways of doing it too, where you can bring the humanity out, where it's not just words. Cort Sharp (12:01) Yeah. Laura Kendrick (12:09) So often I'm actually thinking about there was one time that you and I were talking about something and I misread it as like, I like kicked something, like some hornet's nest in there. Like you were upset with me, but you were like, no, that was not my intention. And it's an amazing thing that that's only happened once in five years. There was that subtle nuanced miscommunication of I thought I had offended in some way and I hadn't. Cort Sharp (12:18) So. Yeah. Laura Kendrick (12:34) Just keeping that in mind though, in written word, tone is interpreted because probably what happened is I like offended my kid or my partner and was bringing that into the conversation with court. And it had nothing to do with what was actually happening, but adding in those personal things of your face, your voice, those things really do help move that human connection, which enables the teamwork that we've seen at Mountain Go. Cort Sharp (12:42) Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (13:00) I mean, it's amazing the way this team functions and it is not perfect. There are definitely communications missteps. There are definitely like, oops, forgot to leave that piece out of the information packet. It happens. It happens to everybody, but we're able to recover really quickly or even it's a safe enough space to be able to speak up and say, I think I got left out on this. And it's responded to in a really gracious and amazing way. Cort Sharp (13:26) It absolutely is. I mean, Mountain Goat's been remote for longer than the COVID stuff, the pandemic stuff happened. Laura Kendrick (13:33) Yeah. Well, Lisa's been with them for what, 10 years? I think it was nearly 10 years when we started, maybe 15. And Hunter's around the same. So yeah, they've been spread for a long time. Cort Sharp (13:42) Something like that, Uh-huh. ⁓ I know that they had an office space and that office space changed just in case people wanted to like come in, come to the office. I think at one point, one of them was in Colorado, which is kind of funny because several people live on the West coast. And then it's like, okay, yeah, come on, come on, swing by the... Colorado office on just a random Tuesday. Yeah, fly in, have fun. I don't know. Yeah, why not? I don't know what the deal was or what it was like, but they've been fully remote. And I think with the kind of runway that they've had leading up until the time where everyone had to be fully remote has really benefited Mountain Go in a lot of ways, because a lot of those early, like, how do we work remote? How do we do this? Laura Kendrick (14:09) I'd do that. Yeah, let's do it. Cort Sharp (14:31) kind of was ironed out, but back to your, your point to just like, it's, it's incredible how much support there is. It's incredible how much, how well communication again, it's not perfect, but how well we're able to communicate with each other and how well we're able to just say, yeah, let's, let's hop on a call real quick or here. I think most of us have like personal phone numbers. We, we use that as a very much so last resort type deal. Laura Kendrick (14:57) Yeah. Cort Sharp (14:59) But even then, it's nice to just have those open lines of communication and know that those are always available, but also know that people are kind of in our corner all the time too. And I think you have a pretty good story about this one. Something happened in a class a few years ago. Laura Kendrick (15:09) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It was early on we had, it was a non-Mike class. So it was one of the other instructors and there was a student who was just challenging. And in the end, it didn't go well in the moment, to put it, just to kind of like not go into grave detail about it. But Mike wasn't there, right? And so The thing that was interesting though is the first piece of communication that came from Mike, which was before that class even broke, right? Because it was one of those things of like, we have to share. As a team, we can't hide it. We have to share that something happened in class that was less than ideal. And so we did. And the immediate response from Mike was in support of the team. And later on, he did go and review the tape of the, because the classes are recorded, not for this purpose. They're recorded actually so that the students get a recording of the class afterwards and can return to what, you know, all the things that they learned because it's a lot to take in in two days. But in this one instance, it was beneficial in this way because Mike could actually see rather than taking people's words, what happened. And I think the important thing is not even what happened after, but what happened in the moment. that he instantaneously was like, I've got you. Like no matter how this goes, we're a team and I'm gonna support you as well. And that was actually, that was pretty early on for me. And it was in a moment where I didn't know Mike that well yet. And it was actually this very solidifying moment for me that was like, I'm in the right place. Like I am part of this team, not just a minion or an employee. Like they care about all of us. Cort Sharp (16:48) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (16:56) and we're in this together, even if it turns out that we're in some form of trouble, it's still going to be thoughtfully managed and handled rather than just the kind of lashing out that can happen in so many environments. Cort Sharp (17:12) Right. And, and that experience, cause I think we were all included on that email. Like I, I wasn't in the class when it happened, but I do remember getting that email and it just was a clear communication from kind of head honcho Mike, right? A top dog saying, yeah, no, we, we got your back. on, we're on the same team. We're all working towards the same goal. And when I, when I read the email, I was like, wow, that was an eventful class. but. Laura Kendrick (17:26) Mm-hmm. us. Cort Sharp (17:38) My second thought, my second thought was, huh, this very similar to what you were saying of like, wow, this is a great place to be. This is a great company to work for. These are great people to be working with and alongside. ⁓ but also like, I know so many people whose managers, whose higher ups would say, Nope, you're in the wrong. You should have done better. Your toast, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like putting all the blame on you. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Laura Kendrick (17:52) Mm-hmm. Yeah. The knee jerk. Yeah. Yeah. Cort Sharp (18:07) And it just, makes me think all the time of like one really blessed, like very fortunate to be here, very fortunate to work with mountain goat. but also people don't quit jobs. They quit managers. They quit leadership more often than not. And, not that I'm talking about quitting mountain goat, but, neither, neither of us are throwing that out there right now, but just like, Laura Kendrick (18:20) Mmm. Yeah. No, but interestingly in five years, I've not seen anybody quit. I mean, we've had people kind of go down separate paths, but nobody has been throwing their hands up and been like, I'm done. I can't be in this. There have been people who have taken other opportunities that they needed to take for their own businesses. But yeah, nobody's quit. In five years, no one has quit, which speaks volumes to the culture that is created in an environment where Cort Sharp (18:37) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (18:57) And I also want to be clear that that response from Mike also, it wasn't disparaging to the other party either. It was simply a, like, it just let us know that I see you and this, you were in a hard moment in the moment and you had to react like a human being and you as a team, I've got your back and this is, you know, great. And to be fair to that was like in the heat of COVID. Cort Sharp (19:24) Yes, yeah It was yeah Laura Kendrick (19:27) good times. But there's also been a lot of fun that's happened in class too, which is, I think that makes a big difference. Like where we are, I don't want to say allowed because I don't think that's right, but like part of the culture is to have fun. Like Mike is a pretty funny guy. Brian's a pretty funny guy. Like honestly, the whole team is quite humorous and it's, we're allowed to like make these really fun things and Cort Sharp (19:48) Yes. Laura Kendrick (19:52) in response to like when we see them in class, like, we foster those two and it becomes this really fun working environment, not only for us, for our students. You brought up one that I had totally forgotten about with the costume. That was good. Cort Sharp (20:06) ⁓ yeah, I, I, yeah, I'll, I'll get into the costume thing, but I think the word you're looking for instead of allowed is enabled. Like we're, we're enabled to have fun. We're encouraged. Absolutely. Yeah. A hundred percent. If you ever hung out with Mike or, or taking a class with him, you've probably heard some funny stories. Laura Kendrick (20:13) Yeah, Encouraged, in fact. And my gosh, the one class too where Mike was asked how long they'd have access to like the videos and stuff. my gosh, Mike ended the class and it was a super engaged Chipper class. Everyone was laughing and Mike brought it down. Cause he did his usual thing where he talked about, what does he say? You have access as long as the internet exists and I'm alive. And then he went into great detail. great detailed speculation about what will happen once he's not alive. It went on for like five minutes. Cort Sharp (20:58) Yeah, where where he's like, yeah, you know, my kids will probably be like, what's this? What's this old website that dad's still hosting? Guess we'll we'll close that up 10 years down the line or whatever. Laura Kendrick (21:09) Dumbfounded. It was so good. But anyhow. Cort Sharp (21:13) man. But there was, I don't even remember why this happened in the class. don't think it was around like Halloween time or something. think the person, actually, I think the person does this to go to like local children's hospitals or local hospitals and just visit. But I get on and I'm normally the PM producer. So I normally hop on in the afternoon. And I took over from Laura and Laura Kendrick (21:22) No, it wasn't. think so. Cort Sharp (21:39) Laura was like, yeah, you know, pretty normal class. This happens, whatever. We're good. And I hop on and people start turning their cameras on. And then all of a sudden there's this dude in a Captain America costume. Like what? He's got the mask. He's got the, the, the uniform. He's got the shield and everything. And I was like, what is happening? What is going on? Come to find out he was telling his story. Laura Kendrick (21:50) Like full on math. Cort Sharp (22:04) Yeah, I do this. This is cool. And Mike was like, that'd be awesome to see. He went out, put it on and took the rest of the classes Captain America. So we have certified Captain America. Laura Kendrick (22:12) Awesome. We've had, there was the guy who was put on like a crazy hat for the first session and then came back for session two with a different crazy hat. And then other people started wearing crazy hats. And by the end of it, like by the final session, almost the entire class was sitting there with some like their kids stuff on their heads. it was. Cort Sharp (22:34) You Laura Kendrick (22:36) But was this one, like it stands out of the billion classes we've done. It stands out in our minds as these really fun moments. I remember the class where it was a private class, so it was for a company or team. And there were, it took me until the very end to, it was early on, so it took me until the very end to get up the gumption. There were five mics in the class. And finally I was like, I'm just gonna put them all in the same room and see if anybody notices. Cort Sharp (22:36) People just... Yes. Didn't they notice like right away, they all came back and they're like, team Mike is back in action or something, right? Laura Kendrick (23:04) I don't think they said anything, but they did. The instructor went into the room and like, yeah, they noticed. Good. My passive aggressive humor worked. Cort Sharp (23:10) Hehehehehe It's fun. It's all good. But it's also like going back to us being able to do this before I figured out kind of my background situation, I would always put up virtual backgrounds and I would just change your background every time and see if people noticed. And it wasn't, it was a lot of Disney. Yes. Laura Kendrick (23:23) Mm-hmm. Disney. That's the thing though. That also, that kind of stuff built a little bit of a relationship as well. like it was, court was always going to have something for Disney. I had one that I would, when I finally found the one I liked, I kept that one for a long time. And Mike would occasionally, when I wasn't in a class, he would send me a screenshot of somebody via email and be like, somebody's in your house with you. Cause they would have the same background. Cort Sharp (23:52) Yeah! Laura Kendrick (23:56) those little tiny things make the relationships and make the team function and make us giggle. So I'd be like out with my kids and see an email and be like, oh no, Mike, what does he need? And then click in and be like, you know, actually more often than not, it would probably be like, am I missing class? See, I'd be like, oh, that's funny. But you know, it builds that relationship. And I think it's why this remote working has worked so well for us. And I'm totally with you where I, when people are Cort Sharp (24:13) You Yeah. Laura Kendrick (24:26) railing against it because of my experience. like, you're crazy. This is great. Cort Sharp (24:31) Exactly. I'm like, how can you not want to just chill out, hang out in your home, chat with some people, get some work done, and like, you're good. Who despises that? Who doesn't like that? don't know. It's, Exactly, yeah. But I do think it does, it comes down to being intentional with it. We were talking about that 30 minutes before that used to be primarily tech troubleshooting. Laura Kendrick (24:47) I know, you get to do things on your own time too. Cort Sharp (25:01) but has since kind of evolved into, okay, so everything, like, I don't know about you, but the vast majority of time, unless a camera's fallen, the vast majority of time, it's, all right, does everything look good? Yeah? Cool. Sure does. Whoever I'm working with, awesome. So, what'd you do this weekend? how was this? ⁓ sorry, sorry that the Avs lost to the Dallas Stars. Yeah, I'm sorry too. Stuff like that, right? Where it's just, Laura Kendrick (25:19) Yeah. It's water cooler talk. Cort Sharp (25:29) It's fun, but we're very intentional with having that time to do that. And I think if you're not intentional in setting up that time, whether if you're working remote hybrid, you're not going to get it. And it's not just going to naturally happen because it is so much more difficult to produce. it's impossible for it to just kind of naturally pop up without taking away from some other intentional time. so I think in, in this this world that we're living in where there is the option to work remotely and there is this really big push to go back in person. I'm saying stick with remote, take your 15, 15 minute daily standup, and turn it into, you know, say, Hey, I'll be on 10, 15 minutes early. If anyone wants to come hang out, come chat. And make it worth it. Make it a valuable time because that is the time to connect and that is the time to say, yeah, cool. How are the kids? How was your weekend? Did you grill up some good hot dogs during this last weekend? What'd you do? Like, what was going on? ⁓ Build up that stuff. Laura Kendrick (26:23) Yeah. We also have Slack channels too, that are like that. Like there's a Slack channel for our team that's just movies, books and TV shows. That people, it'll get active at certain times and it'll be totally dead for a while and nobody's cultivating it. It's simply that somebody will pop in like, I just watched this and it's great. And they've set up also like the automatic bots, cause Mike's a big fan of James Bond. So like if somebody mentions James Bond, the Slack bot will say something quippy and it- Cort Sharp (26:39) Yeah. ⁓ Laura Kendrick (26:58) But it adds that little, like, little bit of humor, little bit of humanness to even though, like, the people that we have time to interact with like that is the team that's in class. So I don't, I mean, it wasn't until we were in person that I met our CTO. He was kind of an enigma, you know? Cort Sharp (27:10) Yeah. Mm-hmm. He was just in the background. Things just magically showed up digitally. Laura Kendrick (27:23) It was in my email and my Slack sometimes, but it creates that thing of like, now I know things about Hunter. Yes, of course it was because we were in person. I heard lots of stories and all that fun stuff. But also I know about like some of his like TV watching stuff. I know occasionally like what his wife likes to watch because sometimes he'll like pepper in something that, she dragged me into this and not my cup of tea. But it's those little bitty things that you start to learn about the people. Cort Sharp (27:39) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (27:50) that makes them human and gives that space. And I also, think it's important to have it be a little bit of white space. so often we talk about cultivating the conversation and like, can you have icebreakers and get people engaged? And yes, those things are so important, but when it's with a team, you need to do those things, but you also need to create the empty space where maybe you have that daily standup or that... weekly meeting or monthly meeting, whatever that is for your team. And maybe at the end of it, it's just leaving the call going and allowing people to just talk. I mean, we did that as a producer team that we would have a meeting as producers that would be very structured and then kind of the official meeting would end. And there would be times where as a team we'd be on that Zoom. I'm like, thank goodness nobody needs this channel. Cause like we'd be in there for like two and a half hours. Cort Sharp (28:26) Yeah. Yeah. Laura Kendrick (28:42) just talking. And of course, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't billing time. It wasn't, you know, it was just us being friends and hearing each other and sometimes ranting and complaining and doing the things of like, this part was hard and like, yeah, well, people need the space to do that and feel seen and heard. And the only place they're going to get that is in the white space. Cort Sharp (29:01) Yep. Exactly. Yep. And where my head went when you were talking about the white space, I love where you just went to because that's absolutely very true. But where my mind went was the newest kind of Slack channel that that's been set up, which is the artificial intelligence. Yeah. Where we just we just it's cool because I'm interested in AI. I think everyone's interested in AI right now. Things are things are going in all sorts of wild directions with it. There's there's all sorts of possibilities that we can do with it. Laura Kendrick (29:17) ⁓ Yeah, that one's Yeah. Cort Sharp (29:32) And Hunter just threw out, who wants in? If you want in, cool, I'll get you in. If not, and you're not interested in AI, let me know when you are, because it'll be at some point, I was going to say. It's just another full group one. Yeah, we just. Laura Kendrick (29:39) Yeah. Pretty sure the whole team's in there. But it is fun. Like Hunter and Mike do deep dives and Brian too. And I'm like, wow, I just get to swim in that pool. It's really Cort Sharp (29:50) Yes. Yeah, yeah. You just kind of get a glean from what's posted in there and say, oh yeah, I am really interested in the automation side of AI. I want to do, I think I threw in there one time, like this whole GitHub repository that has just from zero to hero AI, here's a two week crash course. And I've been working my way through that. It's taken a lot longer than two weeks for me. I've been working my way through that. And it's opened my eyes to say, okay, now this awesome thing, think Mike just threw in there something about someone using it at Disney, I think it was, and how they were using it at Disney to propose, here's a cool way that we can use AI to help our proposals go faster or help our marketing campaigns go faster or whatever it is. And just learning and seeing and... Laura Kendrick (30:38) Yeah. Cort Sharp (30:44) growing together as a team as well and having that space of, yeah, you know, here's what here, here are these articles that I'm reading. Here's the ones that stuck out to me. And to have that space, I think also is, is really interesting to me too, not just because I like learning, but it's also like, I feel like, okay, I can talk with Mike about AI. I can talk with Hunter about AI. I can talk with whoever about it. And we're all relatively on the same page because we're all relatively getting the same information. Laura Kendrick (31:14) Yeah, yeah. I feel like having the Slack channel has been really helpful and all the white space and even honestly the in-person event, there was white space built into that too. There was definitely a lot of structured meetings because of course when you are bringing everyone in from all over the country and actually the world, have a team member who is in the UK too. Cort Sharp (31:26) yeah. Laura Kendrick (31:37) flying a great distance and being in a space together, it's got to be structured. You have to make that worth the time and effort and investment. But also there were dinners, there were shows that happened, there was fun built into it, and there were options of not just like, I'm forcing you to go to this, but like, here's a choice. Would you like to do this or that? And those things have made a huge difference in breeding the like belongingness. Cort Sharp (31:55) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (32:05) and the feeling like we are actually a team. And even though there are definitely times where the frustrations arise, of course, I mean, who doesn't have frustrations, but it's a space where they can be vocalized, they can be talked through, and it's all due to that togetherness that we have, that connectedness that has been built through, honestly, Cort Sharp (32:05) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (32:30) just being in these like casual fun spaces is where that comes from in my opinion. Cort Sharp (32:36) Yeah, I agree with that. Just having the space to talk about whatever. But I think it's all rooted in communication, right? So in various methods of communicating and various ways of communicating too, where it's not just exclusively Slack, email, written text, we have that space there. But we do still run into some communication problems, right? There's... Laura Kendrick (32:41) Yeah. For sure, for sure. Cort Sharp (32:58) there's all sorts of communication problems that we're gonna run into because especially we are text-based heavy, but we're not exclusively text-based. But I think you were talking about a story where Mike was late one time or Mike's late story about communication and what was going on with that. Laura Kendrick (33:12) he tells it in class. He tells a story in class with that. It's one of his examples that he will pull into fairly frequently with an experience with a team where somebody was always late to the daily standup and they realized that it had to do with the fact that they had to drop their kid off at school. And so it was that simple communication shift of asking instead of assuming, asking which... They've put into practice too, like I recall early on hearing like, do you prefer to be communicated with? And like we've had these conversations that court and I have a tendency to be more slack people. But Brian has stated that for him, like when he's teaching slack is like his emergency line. And so like knowing that I'm not going to send him something through slack unless I desperately need him to see it when I can land it in his email versus Lisa and Laura are much more Cort Sharp (33:43) yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (34:04) they're going to be in the email. Like that's just where they live and they are less likely to be in Slack. So it's just knowing those things have also helped us build the right kind of streams of communication. I'm pretty sure Hunter is everywhere all at once. Like he's omnipresent. You can get him anywhere. I know it. I'm in New York and he's in California. I'm pretty sure if I whispered his name, he's hearing it right now. Cort Sharp (34:06) Right. my gosh. He's the enigma. He's the enigma everywhere. I was gonna say, I'm surprised he hasn't popped into this. We've said his name three times. It's, he just knows everything and he's always got everything coming through and no matter what you need, he's any message away. Slack, email, could be carry your pigeon. I don't know, something like that, right? Laura Kendrick (34:43) Yeah, his next Halloween costume needs to be Beetlejuice, so I'm sending that to him. my goodness. But I think at the end of the day, the practices that have been put into place that you may have felt in our classes too, have helped really grow this team into what it is. There's a lot of strength here. There's a lot of fun here, but there's a lot of hard work here too. And a lot of, there have been hard moments where we've all just kind of put our heads down together and moved through the hard moments as a team with a lot of support and a lot of. Cort Sharp (35:12) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (35:15) Just trying to be in it and be like kind of move things where it needs to go. I don't know what the right word is as a team. It's redundant. Cort Sharp (35:22) I think it. Yeah. But I think that that does show in our classes a lot, right? You and I have both taken a class outside of the mountain goat sphere, ⁓ and I'm not I'm not dogging on anyone. I'm not trying to talk down on anyone. But I got out of that class. I was like, man, we are light years ahead of that. Laura Kendrick (35:30) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Cort Sharp (35:49) that kind of interaction and that kind of experience. was the information that I got out of that class was awesome, superb. It was great. But just the amount of energy and effort and time that has been invested into these Mountain Goat courses, it's far and away just, it shows. And it shows how much of a level up it is to take a class with Mountain Goat. And I do think partly, you know, I'm boosting my own ego here. But I do think partly it is because we are surrounded with some awesome people and we have some awesome people working together and awesome support on every call, every class that you take with us, right? You don't have to, like the instructor can focus on just instructing. And we, more often than not, we are typically in charge of everything else. Make sure that any tech problems, any issues, anything that's going on, right? Yeah. Laura Kendrick (36:32) Yeah. Yeah. I remember the early days. Like you just brought up a memory that apparently I had stored in the trauma bank. I remember the early days though being, because I would often, because I'm on the East Coast, court is in mountain times. So, often I would be the early person just because it's easier for me. was mid morning for me. we would start class and it would be just, especially honestly when like people were figuring out Zoom and all this stuff, it was... stressful. Like they were just, it was just question, question, question, problem, problem, problem. And we would get to the first breakout and I would send everyone away and the instructor would be like, that was great. And I'm like, was, you know, just totally frazzled. But the point was, is no one else felt that. And it was, I was in my Slack and working with the team, working with Hunter, things fixed, working with Lisa, making sure the person was in the right place. Cort Sharp (37:20) Yeah, glad. Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (37:33) and doing all these things. And though that has died down because we've all gotten very good at our job and the systems in place are amazing at this point, it still is like, that's the whole point. We worked as a team so that the instructor could deliver an amazing class and be present with his students. And we could be here or her, because we do have hers too, I should say. They're students. And we were here taking care of the things that needed to be taken care of, which was, yeah. Cort Sharp (37:54) Yes. Laura Kendrick (38:00) Though I had forgotten about that. Thanks for that. Cort Sharp (38:02) Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's gotten easy, right? ⁓ Laura Kendrick (38:04) Yeah, it does. But that's at the end of the day, that's how a good team is. I think that we can kind of end it with this thing of Mike has created this environment and it definitely comes from him. Like it's is rooted in the founder for us because we're a small team, small but mighty. But he it's rooted in his like engine of creativity, efficiency, and just love of innovation. And that has kind of Cort Sharp (38:18) Mm-hmm. Laura Kendrick (38:34) folding that in with seeing all the people as humans, and with flaws and different talents and all those things and human interaction is messy and folding all of that in has actually been what has bred these amazing class experiences for our students and also this rewarding and fantastic team experience for the people behind the scenes as well. And I think the lesson Cort Sharp (38:39) Yes. Yep. Laura Kendrick (38:59) comes from that, that if we can fold those things in together and make space for humans to be humans and also have this amazing expectation of creativity and innovation, then it's all going to happen. Cort Sharp (39:06) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I 100 % agree with that. I mean, it does come down to Mike and Mike is a fantastic leader. It's awesome. I also want to raise Mike, but. Laura Kendrick (39:28) Nice. Not passive aggressive at all. On that note. Cort Sharp (39:29) Yeah, you know. No. I'm just joking, right? We're able to have fun. We're able to joke around. But it does come down to leadership, right? And I think that's true on any team. And we have just we've been so fortunate to be able to experience it firsthand and go through this awesome transformation from being in person to fully remote, even in the class teaching stuff. And it's been really, really fun. really, really enjoyable. I, you know, you don't love every day. There are jobs, right? It's a job. But I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie. It has been fun. It has been enjoyable. But I don't look back on it and be like, wow, these last five years were just all terrible. No, it's we've had great leadership. We've had great interactions with with everyone. And I think Laura Kendrick (40:05) You should have just left it at really, really fun and enjoyable. Mic drop, goodbye. Cort Sharp (40:28) It's just come down to the people that we're working with and the people that we're engaging with consistently. And our leadership, Mike, has fostered an environment very, very well that is around fun, around communication, around enabling us to grow, to learn, to try new things, to move forward. And I really feel bad for companies who don't have that kind of leadership. that's, it's a tough spot to be in, but, I'm really, we're really blessed and really fortunate to, to be able to work here. And I hope this, this little peek behind the curtain, kind of encourages you to you, the listener, guess, whoever, whoever's out there to take a, take a little step back and say, okay, what, what am I doing as a leader within my sphere of influence to help my team be a little more human and embrace the humanity side of stuff? Not just pushing for more, we need more, more productivity, more AI, more everything, right? Yeah. Use AI, make it a tool, but just remember you're, building stuff for, for people. You're working with people all the time. And I think that's something that Mike has never forgotten and never will forget and never will let fall to the wayside that we're all people and we're all here working with each other. Laura Kendrick (41:43) Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Well, on that amazing note, thank you, Cort, for joining me in this hijacking of the podcast, the Agile Mentors podcast. And we're going to turn it back over to Brian, who's going to walk you right on out. Cort Sharp (41:54) Happy to.

Stuart Tipples: Silent Teams, Explosive Outcomes—Learning to Normalize Disagreement 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. Stuart tells the story of a team he was brought in to coach that appeared functional on the surface but was struggling beneath. Despite being behind on critical work, the team maintained a facade of happiness while abandoning retrospectives and falling into hero culture patterns. The team had developed "toxic positivity" where members stayed silent about real issues, creating an environment without psychological safety. When problems finally surfaced, the team exploded into unpleasant disagreements. Stuart's key learning: teams usually stay silent until it's too late, making it crucial to foster psychological safety by normalizing disagreement and creating space for honest dialogue. Self-reflection Question: Is your team comfortable with healthy disagreement, or are you maintaining a facade of toxic positivity that prevents real issues from being addressed? Featured Book of the Week: Trust Based Leadership by Mike Ettore Trust Based Leadership by Mike Ettore stands out because it's devoid of corporate fluff and delivers a clear message from a former marine turned executive. Stuart recommends it because it focuses on the fundamental truth that if you don't build trust, you're just managing compliance. The book emphasizes leading with consistency, clarity, and courage, and encourages leaders not to wait for permission to make positive changes. It's a practical guide that moves beyond typical corporate leadership advice to address real-world leadership challenges. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Stuart Tipples: From Zombie Scrum to Agile Thinking—Learning from a Failed 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. Stuart shares a powerful story about joining a team that appeared to be thriving with Scrum ceremonies in place, only to discover they were performing "zombie scrum" - going through the motions without embracing agile thinking. The team functioned as a feature factory, never questioning requirements or truly collaborating. Stuart learned that agile isn't about what you do, but how you and the team think. He emphasizes that frameworks are just guardrails; the real focus must be on coaching people in agile values and principles. His key insight: know the rules before you break them, and remember that no amount of ceremony can rescue a team that lacks the agile mindset. Self-reflection Question: Are your team's agile ceremonies creating real value and fostering collaboration, or are you simply going through the motions of "performative theatre"? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Joel Bancroft-Connors: The No-Scroll Bar Rule—Empowering PO's Through Constraints Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Collaborative Innovator Joel describes an exceptional Product Owner scenario at a large insurance organization where complementary skills created magic. Working with two different people - a business expert who understood insurance but lacked development knowledge, and a designer with user experience expertise - Joel suggested the designer take on the Product Owner role while collaborating closely with the business person.  This collaboration between complementary skills produced outstanding results. The great Product Owner understood that their role wasn't to control every detail but to unleash developer creativity by providing problems and context rather than prescriptive solutions. Joel's approach of "give the developers a problem and a canvas" allowed the team to innovate while staying focused on customer needs. This Product Owner fostered innovation rather than preventing it, demonstrating how effective collaboration can transform product development. The Bad Product Owner: The Business Analyst That Couldn't Let Go Joel identifies a problematic anti-pattern: the Business Analyst who transitions to Product Owner but can't abandon their documentation-heavy approach. While Business Analysts can make excellent Product Owners with proper support, those who insist on documenting everything create communication bottlenecks and slow down delivery. This creates a "telephone game" effect between the BA/PO and developers. Joel encountered one such individual who would declare "the developers can't do that" without giving them the opportunity to explore solutions. Following his "no-scroll bar rule" for documentation, Joel emphasizes that Product Owners should provide just enough information to enable developer creativity, not overwhelming detail that stifles innovation. When the problematic BA was replaced with someone who understood customers and trusted developers, the team's innovation flourished. In this segment, we refer to the book Liftoff, by Larsen and Nies. Self-reflection Question: Are you enabling developer innovation by providing problems and context, or are you stifling creativity with excessive documentation and control? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Joel Bancroft-Connors: Sustainable Value—Redefining Success Beyond Profit 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. Joel has evolved his definition of Scrum Master success over time, moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on what truly matters: sustainable value delivery. While Agile principles clearly state the goal of delivering value continuously, Joel emphasizes that success isn't just about making profit - it's about creating sustainable profit through sustainable processes and people practices. He challenges Scrum Masters to consider their "people sustainability metric" and asks whether their approach supports long-term team health and organizational resilience. Joel's definition encompasses three pillars: delivering sustainable value, maintaining sustainable processes, and ensuring sustainability for people. This holistic view of success requires Scrum Masters to think beyond immediate outcomes and consider the long-term impact of their practices. In this segment, we refer to the book Turn the ship around! by David Marquet.  Self-reflection Question: What is your people sustainability metric, and how are you measuring whether your Scrum practices support long-term team and organizational health? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Back to Basics Joel advocates for returning to the foundational retrospective format outlined in "Agile Retrospectives" by Derby and Larsen. Rather than getting caught up in complex or creative retrospective techniques, he emphasizes the power of following the basic steps: set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, and close the retrospective. Joel stresses that there's an important arc to retrospectives that shouldn't be overlooked. By taking time to properly gather data and following the structured approach from the agile retrospectives book, teams can achieve more meaningful and actionable outcomes. Sometimes the most effective approach is simply executing the fundamentals exceptionally well. In this segment, we refer to the book Agile retrospectives, by Derby and Larsen.  [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Joel Bancroft-Connors: The 90-Day Rule—Building Trust Before Disrupting the Status Quo 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. Joel shares his first experience as a CSM at a traditional hard drive manufacturing company, where he learned the art of patient change management. Tasked with bridging the gap between a rigid mothership company and their agile startup division, Joel discovered the power of focusing on principles rather than processes. For six months, he concentrated on creating transparency and shifting focus from status reporting to "getting to done" without ever mentioning Scrum or Agile.  His approach followed what he calls the 90-day rule: "In the first 90 days - do no harm, but then have a plan to do something." By listening first and building trust, Joel helped the team deliver a product in just three months. He emphasizes the importance of making people feel valued and using "future perfect thinking" to envision desired outcomes before introducing change. In this episode we refer to Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games, the website and resource Manager-Tools.com, and Daniel Pink's book Drive. Self-reflection Question: Are you rushing to implement changes, or are you taking time to build trust and understand the current state before introducing new practices? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Joel Bancroft-Connors: How Performance Reviews Killed a Great Agile Team Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Joel tells the story of a team caught in the crossfire of a poorly executed large-scale agile transformation. While the CTO championed going agile, they quickly checked out, leaving the organization without clear direction or understanding of why they were adopting agile practices. The company measured success through output metrics like "number of teams trained" rather than meaningful outcomes. Joel worked with an exceptional team that had built their own collaborative workspace and was performing well, but external forces kept pulling them out of flow. Performance reviews created internal conflict, leading team members to focus on individual success rather than collective achievement. The team ultimately fell into their own traps, with everyone "focusing on themselves and throwing others under the bus." Joel recommends balancing performance evaluations with 50% team-based and 50% individual metrics to prevent this destructive pattern. Self-reflection Question: Does your team truly understand why they are using Scrum, or are they just going through the motions of the framework? Featured Book of the Week: Start with Why by Simon Sinek Joel credits Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" as a transformational influence on his coaching approach. The book's central principle that "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" fundamentally changed how Joel teaches Scrum. He realized he had been teaching Scrum incorrectly by focusing on the mechanics rather than the purpose. Now Joel listens to this book annually and has shifted his focus to helping teams and organizations understand why Scrum matters and why it's important. This shift from teaching the "what" to emphasizing the "why" has made his coaching significantly more effective and meaningful. Joel also mentions the book Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]