Podcasts about Scrum

Alf Dobbert-Baums: The Two-Country Scrum Team and the Rapport That Never Showed Up 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.   "It did not quite go as planned. I was really humbled." - Alf Dobbert-Baums   Alf was new in the company. His boss walked over with a setup that already sounded like a warning: two development teams in two countries, two locations in Germany, a "difficult" Product Owner — and a quick "do you want to take it?" Alf said sure. Everything happened on video chat. Every meeting, every conversation, every attempt to read the room — through a window that closed the moment the call ended. The rapport never built. The PO stayed difficult. Alf eventually got pulled from the team. Looking back, he saw what the video chat had hidden: the crossed arms, the eyes drifting to email, the small in-between moments that turn coworkers into colleagues. The fix wasn't a tool — it was a flight. Visit the other location. Run a workshop with a real goal ("how do we want to work together?", "what's hard about our setup?"). Build a positive anchor before anything goes wrong, not after. And when you do go, don't lead with the failures — lead with what could be possible together.   In this episode, we refer to the practice of building team working agreements as a way to create rapport without putting people on the defensive.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you saw the people you work with face-to-face — and what conversations are you still postponing because they only happen well in person?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

This powerful message draws us into the reality of what it means to be the unified body of Christ through an unexpected analogy: the rugby scrum. Just as eight players must crouch, bind, and set together to withstand 2,000 pounds of pressure and advance the ball, we are called to come together in the church with coordination, alignment, unity, and maturity. The Gathering Church is located in Midland, Texas.You can watch our live worship experience online at mygathering.liveVisit our website at https://www.mygathering.churchConnect with us on Social Mediahttps://facebook.com/mgatheringhttps://Instagram.com/mygatheringhttps://Twitter.com/mygatheringGOD | COMMUNITY | PURPOSE

This powerful message draws us into the reality of what it means to be the unified body of Christ through an unexpected analogy: the rugby scrum. Just as eight players must crouch, bind, and set together to withstand 2,000 pounds of pressure and advance the ball, we are called to come together in the church with coordination, alignment, unity, and maturity. The Gathering Church is located in Midland, Texas.You can watch our live worship experience online at mygathering.liveVisit our website at https://www.mygathering.churchConnect with us on Social Mediahttps://facebook.com/mgatheringhttps://Instagram.com/mygatheringhttps://Twitter.com/mygatheringGOD | COMMUNITY | PURPOSE

The Saturday Scrum crew are back and with Origin finally in the rear-view, the focus has shifted to the run home to the finals. The boys chat about which teams are timing their run to perfection, who's starting to look like the real deal, and who's got a few question marks hanging over them. Hindy gives his take on Jarome Luai's move to the Eels next season, while the panel asks the big question – can the Broncos put it all together and make a serious late-season charge? Plus, there's another edition of Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz, plenty of laughs and all the footy chat you'd expect from the Saturday Scrum crew. Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Saturday Scrum crew are back and with Origin finally in the rear-view, the focus has shifted to the run home to the finals. The boys chat about which teams are timing their run to perfection, who's starting to look like the real deal, and who's got a few question marks hanging over them. Hindy gives his take on Jarome Luai's move to the Eels next season, while the panel asks the big question – can the Broncos put it all together and make a serious late-season charge? Plus, there's another edition of Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz, plenty of laughs and all the footy chat you'd expect from the Saturday Scrum crew. Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mirco Gerling: The Hydra Product Owner and the PO Who Made Trust Possible 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: Precision That Builds Team Trust 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.   "He always had an answer, or if he didn't have the answer, he tried to ask the clients, the users, the stakeholders." - Mirco Gerling   In pharmaceutical software, the wrong dose can kill someone. So when Mirco worked with a PO in that domain, precision wasn't a virtue — it was a survival requirement. The PO wrote meticulous user stories in classic "As a user, I want… so that…" format with very good acceptance criteria. The developers always knew what done meant. And when, mid-sprint, the team spotted a gap — "Is 80% tolerance of 100% or 80% of all?" — the PO was there, asking the right people, refining or splitting the story, never letting ambiguity ship. Even when half the team was out sick in winter, the remaining developers could deliver because the user stories were clear enough to stand on their own. Stories linked to automated tests. Each acceptance criterion traceable to the test that proved it. The result: a team that trusted their PO. As Mirco puts it, that trust came from one thing — the PO had already done the work needed to help the team understand what to do and how they'd know it was done.   Self-reflection Question: What's the level of precision in your team's user stories signaling to your developers about how much you trust them — and how much you've prepared for them? The Bad Product Owner: The Hydra PO with Seven Heads Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "If the developers had questions, the people said: 'it's not my ticket, it's not my story.'" - Mirco Gerling   Five Scrum teams. One Product Owner. Seven requirements engineers writing user stories alongside. Eight people doing the work of product ownership — and nobody owning any of it. Developers learned quickly that asking a question meant being bounced from one requirements engineer to another. "It's not my ticket." The eight-person PO group split into two sub-teams who, when they spoke about each other, used "you" and "they" instead of "we." Decisions made in week one collided with decisions made in week three. Mirco's intervention: treat the PO group like a Scrum team. Eight people is a team-sized group. Run retrospectives with them. Get them communicating as a unit instead of as parallel individuals. The one anchor that kept things from completely falling apart was the single PO at the top, who could still say "this feature we need at the end of the year, the other can wait." Without unified prioritization, the hydra has no direction — just seven heads pulling in seven ways.   Self-reflection Question: Where in your product organization are decision-makers proliferating without a shared mandate — and what's the cost in clarity for the teams downstream?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mirco Gerling: The Silence Test — How to Know Your Team Doesn't Need You Anymore 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.   "Don't talk too much. And only talk if it's necessary." - Mirco Gerling   For Mirco, success as a Scrum Master starts with a simple rule he had to fight for: don't try to be someone else. Early in his career, when people kept saying "Mirco, you decide, you're the Scrum Master," he had to do the hard work of pushing back — "no, we decide together." That instinct shapes his whole definition of success. Be authentic. Wait before you speak. Ask before you instruct. And when a discussion stalls, sit with the silence — because in most cases, someone in the team has a better idea than you do. The cleanest test of whether a team is truly self-managing? Disappear. When Mirco took two months of parental leave, his team kept running every Scrum event without him. That's the signal. If you stop sending the sprint review invite, stop preparing the retrospective, stop nudging — and the team picks it up because they own it — your work is showing.   Self-reflection Question: What's one thing you currently do for your team that you suspect they would do themselves if you simply stopped doing it? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: 1-2-4-All from Liberating Structures Mirco's universal tool is Liberating Structures, and within that toolbox, 1-2-4-All is his go-to. The pitch: "involve everybody, especially in large groups. And there's nearly no preparation needed." His proof point — facilitating a retrospective for 60 people at the Agile by Nature bar camp in just 20 minutes. The format scales from a team of five to a room of sixty without changing its shape: one minute alone, two minutes in pairs, four minutes in small groups, then a share-back with the whole group. During a 30°C COVID summer in Hamburg, Mirco even ran retros walking outdoors with his team — station to station, down to the lake for ice cream, then back. "It was a very good and constructive retrospective." The lesson: the right structure makes you portable.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mirco Gerling: Two Teams, One Sprint Cadence — The Hidden Cost of Synchronization 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 teams need to understand the advantage of the synchronization — but will they?" - Mirco Gerling   Two of Mirco's teams just got merged into one — and the brand-new, fused team is now part of a 10+ team organization trying to move from loose-coupled chaos to a standard process. Different sprint lengths. Different estimation methods. Different ticketing tools. The plan: align everyone to 4-week sprints, hold a global planning week every three months, and synchronize start and end dates across all teams. Mirco voted for 2-week sprints. The majority went with 4. And then the side effects started. Sprint reviews stack up on the same days, making it impossible for Scrum Masters to facilitate them all. Teams synchronize on paper, but interact organically across the four weeks anyway, so the cadence advantage doesn't materialize. And the merged team itself? Pushed back through Tuckman's stages by the merge — the Tuckman model reminded Mirco that "adjourning" is real, and a high-performing team starts over when its membership changes. Mirco's experiment: let faster-moving teams run two 2-week sprints inside the 4-week window, keeping organizational sync while restoring their own learning rhythm.   Self-reflection Question: Where in your organization is process standardization being mistaken for actual alignment — and what would it cost you to separate the two?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mirco Gerling: The Supermarket Team That Self-Destructed Trying to Help Everyone Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "They tried to help, and finally, it... it self-destructed the team." - Mirco Gerling   The team was the supermarket of the organization. Cloud systems, versioning, developer machines, hardware — if another team needed infrastructure, this team built it. And when other teams asked, the answer was always the same: "We will try, we will try." Mirco watched what happened next play out in slow motion. The team escalated their overload to management. Management responded the way management often responds — sent in temporary help. The reinforcements solved problems quickly and left. But every system they built became permanent maintenance work for the original team. The pile grew. The team shrank. People left for other teams, or left the organization entirely. The escalation that was supposed to save them became the signal that broke them. As Mirco puts it: running to the higher level "sends a signal that self-organization or self-management does not work." Sometimes the help is the harm.   In this segment, we refer to the dynamic of team self-organization and how it can break down under pressure.   Self-reflection Question: When your team is overwhelmed, what does the act of escalating tell management about your ability to self-manage — and is that the signal you want to send? Featured Book of the Week: The Kanban Maturity Model In this episode, Mirco also recommends two books that shaped his thinking on process and estimation. The first is #NoEstimates by Vasco Duarte, which inspired Mirco to drop story-point estimation in some teams and simply count completed tickets per sprint. The second is the Kanban Maturity Model — a book Mirco uses to run workshops where teams discover their current level of process maturity. "The highest level says that you have a standardized process, and the result is always the same for the same type of work," he explains. Most teams start at level zero, but that's the point: knowing where you stand is the precondition for knowing where to go next.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mirco Gerling: When the Scrum Guide Isn't the Rulebook — A Scrum Master's First Conflict with Management Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I had to learn that the organization didn't know the Scrum Guide very exactly." - Mirco Gerling   In his first Scrum Master role — running hybrid as both developer and Scrum Master — Mirco walked in believing the Scrum Guide was the rulebook everyone played by. The team thought so too: they were self-managing now, so they would decide. Management hadn't read the same memo. When Mirco called time on a meeting, a manager said "It's my decision when the meeting is over." When Mirco asked the team if they were happy in a retrospective, the manager saw the flip chart afterward — and from that day on, Mirco started destroying anything from retrospectives that could attract attention. The conflict wasn't about Scrum. It was about who gets to decide what. Without an explicit conversation about the limits of self-management, the team and management each assumed authority the other thought was theirs. Mirco eventually found Management 3.0's Delegation Poker — a tool that makes those invisible boundaries visible and gives teams and managers a structured way to negotiate them. The lesson: raise the topic with management before the conflict, not after.   In this episode, we refer to the Delegation Poker practice from Management 3.0.   Self-reflection Question: Where in your team's work are the limits of self-management still unspoken — and what would change if you put them on the table this week?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The Saturday Scrum crew were back and recapped a massive State Of Origin decider as New South Wales take the series 2-1 and spoke to New South Wales Origin Star Hudson Young on the back of the massive win. Plus, the Tigers are back in the headlines as we broke some major news on the future of Jarome Luai. Plus, Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz and much more! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Saturday Scrum crew were back and recapped a massive State Of Origin decider as New South Wales take the series 2-1 and spoke to New South Wales Origin Star Hudson Young on the back of the massive win. Plus, the Tigers are back in the headlines as we broke some major news on the future of Jarome Luai. Plus, Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz and much more! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Aliu Adewale: The Over-Communicator vs. The Over-Ambitious—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize 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 Over-Communicator Who Negotiated Every Scope Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "This is a guy who over-communicates everything." - Aliu Adewale   The best Product Owner Aliu ever worked with did something simple that almost no PO does. Before each refinement, he'd pull up the Jira board, record himself walking through every user story, explaining acceptance criteria, talking through the end goal one ticket at a time—and post the video to the team a day or two ahead. This was before Loom existed. The result: refinement felt less like discovery and more like "walking it back"—the team arrived already prepared, with real questions, ready to engage. He still attended every refinement and never missed a comment in Jira. But the second skill Aliu names matters even more: negotiation. This PO never let scope creep into a sprint mid-stride without consulting the team first. "If we add these two requests from leadership, what's the impact? Do we need to take something out?" And if the team said no, he didn't force it. He went back to leadership and named the consequence: "If we add this, here's what happens. Are you okay with that?" Over-communication and negotiation—two skills that protect the team and the product at the same time.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO asked the team's permission before adding work mid-sprint? The Bad Product Owner: The Over-Ambitious PO Who Never Said No Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters." - Aliu Adewale   The Product Owner Aliu names as the anti-pattern is the over-ambitious PO—the one who never says no. Never to stakeholders, never to the business, never to a new feature request. He never considered the size of the team or the capacity of the team. He was blind to it. Underneath the behavior, Aliu sees a pattern: POs who want to keep their job by saying yes, stakeholders who keep asking because they think they have to, and a team on probation that doesn't feel safe pushing back. The damage compounds—more features delivered, less value per feature, and eventually the team itself starts to break. Aliu's framing is sharp: "More features don't equal more value. Sometimes more is just less." The job of the Scrum Master here is to coach the PO on when to say no, when to say yes, and how to recognize that on the phone in front of you right now, 90% of the features in that app you're staring at—you never use them. Built. Shipped. Ignored.   In this segment, we refer to Product Owner anti-patterns and the courage required to challenge stakeholder demands.   Self-reflection Question: Is your PO measuring success by features shipped, or by features used?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aliu Adewale: Success Is Living the Five Scrum Values—And Asking the Team If You Are 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.   "Trust is the foundation of empowerment. When you trust your team, they will deliver beyond your expectation." - Aliu Adewale   For Aliu, success as a Scrum Master is concrete: the team is living the five Scrum values—commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage—and the organization is getting real value from their work. Commitment shows up in how the team holds itself to a Sprint goal. Focus shows up in how they protect that goal from noise. Openness reduces conflict because nothing festers in the dark. Respect, Aliu reframes powerfully: respect for someone's background comes before respect for their skill set—because in a team where people come from different countries, religions, and skill sets, that's the foundation everything else sits on. And courage shows up when a team can tell a Product Owner or a stakeholder that no, this can't be done in this Sprint, and we need to talk about it. But the values alone aren't success—the test is whether the team is delivering value frequently to the organization. The way Aliu keeps himself honest is uncomfortable but simple: he sends a survey to his team and asks them to tell him how he's doing on communication, on risk mitigation, on empowering them to reach stakeholders directly. He starts the assessment cycle the moment he joins—asking the organization what success looks like in this role in the next three months—and he refuses to "get carried away" and stop asking.   Self-reflection Question: Have you ever sent your team a survey asking them to rate you—and acted on what they said? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start, Stop, Continue Aliu's go-to retrospective is the classic Start, Stop, Continue. Three questions—What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing?—and the team has the structure they need to pinpoint their own shortcomings and decide what to do about them. The reason it works so well, Aliu argues, is the psychological safety the simplicity creates. There's no jargon, no clever framework, no facilitator gimmick to hide behind. Experienced and self-organizing teams especially thrive with it because they can name what's not working without you having to call it out for them. As a Scrum Master, when your team starts pointing at their own gaps without your prompt, that's the moment you should applaud yourself—you coached them into the space where they can do it.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

What happens to organizations when the cost of outputs drops to nearly zero? That is the central question Dave West and Dr. Mik Kersten are back to explore in this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast. Mik, the author of the upcoming book Output to Outcome, joins Dave to dig into why so many companies are failing to see meaningful value from their AI investments and why the organization itself has become the bottleneck.They cover the AI productivity paradox, why complexity is growing faster than outcomes in most large organizations, and what leaders need to do differently. Mik introduces the "outcome loop" as a mental model for leadership, explains why modularity and decentralization are the only structures that scale (in nature or in business), and shares why many organizations are quietly reverting to command-and-control patterns at exactly the wrong moment.If you work in or lead a Scrum Team, manage a product organization, or are thinking about how AI is reshaping the way we structure and run teams, this conversation will give you a lot to chew on.Output to Outcome by Dr. Mik Kersten is available for pre-order now, with release on July 14.

Aliu Adewale: When Everything Is a "Must-Have," Nothing Is—Prioritization for Real-World 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.   "Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters." - Aliu Adewale   Aliu's current challenge isn't from his day job—it's from a volunteer project for his local Parent-Teacher Association. The group wants to build a centralized app for school announcements, PTA updates, volunteer coordination, event reminders. The first meeting produced 250 ideas, all of them framed as must-haves, all of them needed before school resumes. The window: three months. Vasco names two traps that most Scrum Masters fall into. First, MoSCoW and similar frameworks aren't prioritization—they're categorization. The moment everything ends up in the "must" bucket, you're still stuck. Second, prioritizing a feature list assumes features are independent. They almost never are: a login blocks a dozen things downstream; front-end depends on back-end; dependencies decide the order more than desirability does. Aliu's experiment with the PTA group is a focusing constraint: stop asking "what do we need this year?" and start asking "what do we need in the first three months when school resumes?" The 50-item must-have list collapsed to five or six features. Vasco pushes it further with his own favorite question: "What's preventing us from releasing tomorrow?" That's the question that exposes what really matters—and it almost never returns a list of features.   Self-reflection Question: If your team had to release tomorrow, which of your "must-haves" would you actually need?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aliu Adewale: The Counterintuitive Fix—How Collapsing the Jira Board Sparked Collaboration Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Collaboration is the foundation of a successful Scrum team." - Aliu Adewale   Aliu walked into a team where the daily standup was theater. Developers delivered their tickets and forgot about them. QA picked up "their" column. Front-end, back-end, senior architect, junior developer—everyone was a champion of their own silo. Nobody engaged during refinement. Nobody called anything out. The board had close to ten columns, one per specialty, and it was working exactly as designed: as a handoff system. Aliu's diagnosis is sharp—the foundation of the team's problem wasn't the people; it was the tool. The Jira board was visualizing silos and the team was living up to it. The fix was counterintuitive: he collapsed the board from nine columns to three—To Do, In Progress, Done. Once "In Progress" was the only place where work lived, nobody could hide. A QA needing to know when a ticket would be ready had to talk to the developer. A stakeholder asking for status meant everyone on the ticket had to communicate. The team had no choice but to collaborate. As Vasco frames it in the episode: by creating the smaller problem of "hiding status," Aliu solved the bigger problem of "no collaboration." Sometimes you have to make things a little worse so they can get much better.   In this segment, we refer to the Agile value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, and to the recognition that the tools we choose shape the behaviors we get.   Self-reflection Question: Is your Jira board designed to enable collaboration, or to enable handoffs? Featured Book of the Week: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson For Aliu, the book that most inspired him as a Scrum Master is Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson—a book he discovered through a recommendation on this very podcast. The provocative title pulled him in; the content gave him something he could use every day. As a Scrum Master, you work with people from different backgrounds, different communication styles, different ways of seeing the world. The book maps four personality patterns and, as Aliu puts it, "it might not be a hundred over a hundred, but at least ninety over a hundred about personality and human relation." For someone already working on his emotional intelligence, it became a tool for understanding why a message that landed clearly with one team member completely missed another—and what to do about it.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

AI is transforming the legal profession, but adopting new technology isn't just about tools. It requires a mindset shift. Without structured approaches, lawyers can struggle to keep up with rapid technological change, meet evolving client expectations, and maintain quality and efficiency in their work. Understanding how to integrate AI into legal workflows effectively is key to sustainable transformation.In this episode, I speak with Marion Ehmann, partner at Venturis Consulting Group and a leading expert in legal process improvement. We explore how Agile methods provide the structure law firms need to experiment, adapt, and iterate when integrating AI and other tools into their practices. Marion shares examples from legal teams using Kanban boards and Scrum-inspired feedback loops to make work visible, identify bottlenecks, and create learning loops that improve productivity, morale, and client satisfaction.Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: agileattorney.comTake your law practice from overwhelmed to optimized with GreenLine LegalFollow along on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnegrant

Aliu Adewale: The New Scrum Master Trap—Being In Everyone's Business to Look Busy 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.   "Sometimes the best architecture and design comes from a self-organizing team." - Aliu Adewale   When Aliu first became a Scrum Master, he wanted to be everywhere. New to the role, new to the organization, with a new team relying on him to deliver, he scheduled extra check-ins, sat in on everything, and made sure his manager could see him working. The result wasn't visibility—it was suffocation. The team felt he was in their business, and the deliveries he was trying to protect got worse, not better. Aliu's wake-up call came from his coach, who told him a sentence he still carries: "Stepping back gives your team the space to take ownership and unlock their true potential." The hardest thing a new Scrum Master can do is let things roll on their own for a Sprint or two and adjust through the retrospective. But once Aliu did it, the team started self-organizing, owning their day-to-day, and delivering beyond his expectations. The lesson he names is Agile principle number 5: build projects around motivated individuals, give them the support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The deeper insight from Vasco in this episode: when we want to be in our team's business, it's usually because we don't trust ourselves to know enough—so we try to know everything.   In this episode, we refer to Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet, which Vasco recommends for any Scrum Master learning to step back, and to the Agile Manifesto.   Self-reflection Question: What are you doing this week to "be visible" that the team would actually be better off without?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

WAgile Isn't a Compromise... It's the Future of Modern Project Delivery"If Agile works so well... why are so many organizations mixing it with traditional project management?"For years, the conversation has been framed as a battle.Agile versus Waterfall.Scrum versus Project Management.Innovation versus governance.Speed versus predictability.Choose a side.Defend your methodology.Convince everyone else they're wrong.But something interesting has happened over the past several years.Organizations have largely stopped arguing.Instead...they've started adapting.Across healthcare, banking, government, defense, manufacturing, insurance, education, and even technology companies, leaders are discovering a simple truth.Very few projects fit neatly into a single delivery model.Some work demands rapid experimentation.Other work requires extensive documentation.Some initiatives benefit from short iterative cycles.Others must satisfy regulatory reviews, contractual milestones, compliance audits, procurement gates, or executive approvals before moving forward.The reality is that modern organizations aren't choosing between Agile and traditional project management.They're using both.- [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/

the Saturday Scrum crew were back and were joined by Luke Keary this week, and they gave a huge Origin Three preview and where the game will be won. Plus, what was Cody Walker thinking in Souths' loss to Penrith, and David Riccio gave us the latest news on the future of Sam Walker. Plus, Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz and much more! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

the Saturday Scrum crew were back and were joined by Luke Keary this week, and they gave a huge Origin Three preview and where the game will be won. Plus, what was Cody Walker thinking in Souths' loss to Penrith, and David Riccio gave us the latest news on the future of Sam Walker. Plus, Believe It Or Not, Tony's Quiz and much more! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gunnar Fischer: From Staying in Your Line to The Connected Product Owner—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize The Great Product Owner: The Connected PO Who Makes Information Flow Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "This Product Owner didn't need to be the smartest person in the room, but everybody knew, okay, this is a really smart guy." - Gunnar Fischer   The best Product Owner Gunnar ever worked with was what he calls the connected PO. This person had a deep professional network—inside the company and with the customer—and could talk to anyone: a colleague, the client, a brand-new team member they were onboarding. They were socially sharp without being shallow. They could disagree clearly, even harshly, and then turn around and say, "now let's talk about something else," with kindness. When this PO said no, it was a no people respected; when they said yes, it was a yes people trusted, because everyone knew the PO could push back. The praise behind their back matched the praise in the room. They had a private life, too—not married to the job, which made them a more well-rounded human. But the specifically Product Owner skill Gunnar names is this: they could look at the product across different time horizons—what does it need to do in one month, three months, one year—and they kept juggling functionality, contracts, customer situation, and economic reality at the same time. Their technical background helped, but they understood the line: "It's not my job to be the technically most savvy guy, but I'm willing to share my knowledge with everybody." As Gunnar puts it, the difference between a subject matter expert and a Product Owner is that the Product Owner makes the information flow.   Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner make information flow across the team, the customer, and management—or are they hoarding context as the "expert"? The Bad Product Owner: The Stay-in-Your-Line, Accept-Your-Fate PO Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "You manage the backlog, you do the customer calls, you write the user stories—but you were not involved in any of the bigger decisions." - Gunnar Fischer   The anti-pattern Gunnar sees most often isn't malice—it's resignation. Most Product Owners aren't given the access or the permissions they need to be successful, and so they accept their fate. They manage the backlog, take the customer calls, write the user stories, sometimes talk to management—but they aren't part of the bigger decisions: ROI on a feature, whether to build it at all, the product vision a year out. Management keeps those decisions to itself, and the accept-your-fate PO doesn't challenge that arrangement. They stay in their line. They don't push back when sales drops in an urgent request that ruins the plan. They don't challenge the developers when an estimate feels wrong. They become very protective of the things they can control—their privileges, their processes, the artifacts—and when the bad times come, they get thrown under the bus. Gunnar's diagnosis is direct: the role of a great PO is to have constructive, respectful disagreements at every level—with the client, with management, with the team—and to be okay disappointing people. "Once you see that people go down to the mechanics, then it's a really bad smell, I would say." Saying yes to everything doesn't make you safe; it makes you replaceable.   In this segment, we refer to Geoff Watts' Scrum Mastery and its line about the great Scrum Master being dispensable and wanted—a frame that applies to Product Owners just as well.   Self-reflection Question: Where in the past month did your Product Owner say "yes" when the right answer was a respectful "no, not yet"?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

I ask Tony Khan. Mercedes Monè and Thekla questions at the 2026 Forbidden Door Media Scrum. My Official Website + Demo Reel - https://www.justindhillon.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thewrestlingclassic/ TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thewrestlingclassic X - https://x.com/twcworldwide Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWrestlingClassic/  Limited Edition TWC Tee https://headquartersclothing.com/products/headquarters-x-the-wrestling-classic-logo-tee?_pos=1&_psq=wrestlinhg&_ss=e&_v=1.0 WWE Shop Affiliate wwe-shop.sjv.io/RGRxQv 500 Level https://www.500level.com/ Join the Discord Community https://linktr.ee/thewrestlingclassic All Episodes are on "The Wrestling Classic" Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOQOYraeFlX-xd8f3adQtTw#AEW #MercedesMone #Thekla #TonyKhan #ForbiddenDoorBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/twc-show--4417554/support.

Gunnar Fischer: Healthy Flow of Value in a Healthy Work Environment—The Ecosystem Definition of 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.   "A successful Scrum Master is healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment." - Gunnar Fischer   Gunnar's definition of success comes in one phrase that hides a lot of work: healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment. The work environment, he says, is an ecosystem—it doesn't have tigers, but it has plenty of layers and forces that can throw the balance off. You start at the team: are we reaching our goals most of the time? (If always, you might be playing too safe.) Then you move outward to the customer: who are we doing this work for, and are they succeeding? Then to the company: what's good for the customer might still be bad for the financials. And finally back to the individual: a team can be hitting its goals, the customer can be happy, the company can be making money, and a person on the team can still be quietly under-challenged and ready to leave. Gunnar measures the flow side with the four Kanban guide metrics—cycle time, throughput, work item age, and work in progress—but he keeps reminding himself that finishing isn't the same as getting feedback. Did the customer use what we built? He's been demotivated more than once by seeing a "very important" piece of work go untouched after delivery. And then there's the social side: the level of healthy, constructive disagreement, and reading the room when colleagues from a culture that doesn't say "no" go silent.   In this episode, we refer to Kanban flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, work item age, WIP) and the importance of treating the backlog as options, not promises.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you measured not whether the team finished something, but whether the customer actually used it? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What, So What, Now What? Gunnar's favorite retrospective format is What, So What, Now What?, one of the Liberating Structures (and free to read up on online). He used it after a tense production deployment that succeeded but left the team rattled. Instead of jumping to "we need to do exactly this," he forced the team to split their thinking: what are the facts we can describe, so what is our interpretation of those facts, and now what are the possible options going forward. Sounds simple. But the brain hates incomplete pictures—it auto-completes them with speculation. That instinct kept our ancestors alive when they couldn't see the full tiger behind the bushes; it ruins our reasoning at work. By making the team distinguish hard between fact and interpretation, the format produced three concrete ideas. Within three months, the team had implemented all three, and things improved. Gunnar's broader takeaway about retrospectives: don't run them right after the event ("get a coffee, step away from your desk for fifteen minutes"), don't wait two months either, and—above all—"people need to look like winners when they're going into a difficult retrospective." Then honor their time by following up. If nobody else does the follow-up, the Scrum Master has to be the reminder.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

As Wales prepare to face Fiji in the Nations Championship, Gareth Rhys Owen, with the help of players, fans and pundits, reflects on the 2007 Rugby World Cup when the Flying Fijians stunned the rugby world by knocking Wales out and ending the reign of coach Gareth Jenkins.This podcast was first broadcast in September 2023

Gunnar Fischer: Three Transformations at Once—How to Build Momentum When Everyone Is Exhausted Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "You're not only writing for the leadership—you're always writing for the gallery." - Gunnar Fischer   Gunnar brought a juicy challenge to Wednesday: his company is running three transformations in parallel, at three different levels, all at different stages and degrees of success. People are exhausted. The word "change" triggers an allergic reaction. And yet, in the same breath, those same people will tell you the organization needs to change. So how do you create momentum in a climate worn down by theater and abandoned initiatives, when the managers who launched them have moved on? Gunnar's first insight is that the human species is built for change—the problem isn't appetite, it's the feeling of not being heard. Even hinting "I think I know your situation, and I took a note from our last conversation" opens people up. Vasco pushes the analysis further: when three transformation teams each visit the same Scrum team with different topics, the team ends up spending all its time discussing transformation instead of doing the work. Gunnar's counter is simple math—be realistic that 90% of capacity is work and 10% is learning, plan accordingly, and start small with a single pilot team. He recalls one successful turnaround driven by a "wall of concerns" where leaders read out anonymous worries and answered them publicly. The response didn't need to be perfect; it just needed to exist. And the hidden lever, he says, is what Vasco calls "writing for the gallery"—when you ask a good question in a town hall, you're not really aiming at leadership; you're showing hundreds of colleagues "you're not the only one." That's where systemic change actually starts.   In this episode, we refer to Liberating Structures, which Gunnar uses heavily in his change work, and the importance of linking transformation work to bottom-line financials or capability metrics so it survives the next urgent customer request.   Self-reflection Question: In your current change initiative, what visible evidence do people have that leadership is actually listening—not just communicating?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Welcome to Botched: A D&D Podcast! The group continues to trudge their way through this strangely perverted dungeon, in order to find a special wand for the creepy old man who can decipher the ancient tome.Who even built this place? Is it possible, the pervert built it, just to send adventurers through the gauntlet for his entertainment?They must battle against undead horrors and solve dangerous puzzles in order to make it out alive. However, luckily for the group, they're all dirty old men in real life, so it makes it easier to figure out the dungeon.Will the group safely navigate the dungeon? What sorts of puzzles are awaiting them? Why is everything so random in this place? If everyone dies, does that make Scrum full owner of Terry's Tough Guys? Tune in and find out!Dennis has successfully completed a Kickstarter for his 4th graphic novel in his Lycan: Solomon's Odyssey series! Lycan is about the world's first werewolf! It's a mix of horror, mythology, adventure, and history. The 4th book in the series is all about ancient Egypt! Wanna read a story mixing a werewolf with Egyptian Gods? You can still back it on Kickstarter for the time being as we have Late Pledges enabled! Check it out on Kickstarter!We now have a PO Box! Wanna send us something? PO BOX 3178 Gettysburg, PA 17325All of our previous seasons can be found on our new channel!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Archives⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!A special shout out and thank you to all of our supporters over on Patreon. You help us continue to churn out “quality” episodes. With your continued support we can take our show on the road! Check out our store over at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Botched Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ where you can find tshirts, stickers, pint glasses and more!Give us a 5 star review on Itunes. Doing so will help the show grow, but we will also read out whatever you write at the end of one of our episodes!Feel free to email us any questions, comments or suggestions at ⁠BotchedPodcast@gmail.com⁠Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, like us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.You can watch the show live on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!Check out each of the hosts' Twitch streams! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dennis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phil⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tristan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Steve⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Editor: Philip D Keating And Dennis RobinsonProducer: Philip and DennisExecutive Producers: ⁠⁠⁠⁠James Thatcher⁠⁠⁠⁠, Chronic Ejac, Jim Beverly,Disgruntled Furniture, Chris Wisdom, ShinigamiSPQR,  Jayson Haiss, Toaster Bath and Scabby GoosePublisher: Phil and DennisArt by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Emily Swan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gozer⁠

Gunnar Fischer: The Anti-Pattern Bingo Team—When Success Is a Zero-Sum Game Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "This was neither Scrum, nor a team. It was more like the anti-pattern bingo team." - Gunnar Fischer   When Gunnar took his first job abroad, he walked straight into what he calls the "anti-pattern bingo team"—a supposed Scrum team that was neither Scrum nor a team. The company was in trouble, the team had a bad reputation and was used as a punching bag, the manager-of-manager treated them like a stepchild, and the new manager didn't seem to know what he had signed up for. The team members themselves didn't really want to work together. The goals slipped. Decisions were made in back rooms, outside the official meetings. And underneath it all sat the most corrosive belief Gunnar names: that success is a zero-sum game—if you win, I lose. With that mindset, there is no team, just individuals defending turf. One pattern stuck with him so clearly he gave it a name: sandcastle planning. The team would finish a Sprint planning, agree on a goal, and the manager would walk in right after the meeting and overturn the whole thing with his own priorities. Over time, the team stopped putting effort into planning. Why build the castle if someone will trample it? Even worse, when an escalation finally surfaced, Gunnar—an immigrant—was told that as a German, he must be "very authoritarian." A label, served up as analysis. That was the moment he knew the team would never have safe disagreements, never reach the right level of challenge, never recover.   In this segment, we talk about scrum master anti-patterns, the corrosive effect of treating people as labels, and how the absence of an explicit reason for the team's existence makes everything else collapse.   Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a clear, explicit reason for existing—or are you just a group that shares a technology, a building, or a reporting line? Featured Book of the Week: Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts For Gunnar, the book that shaped him most as a Scrum Master is Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts—what he calls "the noble knight of Scrum books." He first read it just after a Scrum course and thought, "What should I even do with this kind of wisdom?" Years later he came back to it and understood. A few years after that, he became modest about it: these are truths, but it's about making them true—and watching for when they aren't. The book is full of phrases like "a good Scrum Master is indispensable; a great Scrum Master is dispensable and wanted." That last line captured it perfectly for him: success isn't being unneeded, it's being chosen. As Gunnar puts it: "In times when everybody is challenged and people are making fun of agile practitioners, this brings back all of the ideals of what a Scrum Master is really about." You can also listen to our previous episodes with Geoff Watts on the podcast.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

I sat down with longtime friend and fellow PMI volunteer Mattias Georgson Petrén to get schooled on Half Double, the Danish hybrid framework that has been around for over ten years but I only just learned about. Mattias walks through where it came from (a frustrated group of practitioners, industrial funding, and research backing from Aarhus University), what it promises — half the time double the impact — and how it blends Agile cadence with the discipline of traditional, stage-based product management. We get into co-location, the 50% staffing rule, and why he treats Half Double as a lens layered on top of existing frameworks rather than a replacement for any of them. We close out with a conversation about where project managers fit into an AI-driven future that left me probably less worried than I've been about this in months. Key Themes - How Dave and Mattias met at a PMI chapter event in Malta back in 2008, and how that network led to real client work together - Mattias's path from engineering physics PhD to "accidental" project manager - The early days of Agile inside PMI circles, and the influence of conferences like Øredev - What Half Double actually is: a hybrid method built on impact, flow, and leadership - The origin story — Danish practitioners, an industrial fund, and Aarhus University research - Why Half Double performs best on complex projects, not predictable, fully-plannable ones - Co-location, the 50% staffing rule, and designing cadence into distributed teams - Why Mattias treats Half Double as a set of lenses layered on top of an existing framework (PMI, PRINCE2, Scrum) rather than a replacement for one - The "chasing tasks vs. chasing impact" trap that both traditional and Agile PMs fall into - Where project managers fit in an AI-driven future — and why Mattias isn't worried Chapters 00:00 The Value of Networking in Project Management 02:47 Mattias Petrén's Journey into Project Management 05:11 The Evolution of Agile in Project Management 07:47 Introduction to Half Double Methodology 10:47 Understanding the Half Double Framework 13:15 Hybrid Approaches in Project Management 16:03 Leadership and Co-location in Half Double 18:47 Embracing Chaos in Project Management 19:51 The Role of Project Owners 21:41 Understanding Project Impact and Stakeholder Management 23:44 Integrating Agile with Traditional Project Management 26:01 The Half Double Methodology Explained 29:23 The Future of Project Management in an AI-Driven World Links from the Podcast Half Double Institute - https://halfdoubleinstitute.org PMI Agile 2026 https://agilealliance.org/pmi-agile-2026/ Dave and John Tanner's session at Agile 2026 - "When AI Starts Doing Your Job: Surviving the PM Identity Crisis" https://tinyurl.com/23jc8uhs Contact Mattias LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiasgeorgsonpetren/ Email - mattias@georgson.com

Gunnar Fischer: Accepting Not Being Accepted—The People-Pleasing Trap That Broke a Scrum 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.   "I accepted not being accepted, and that was a big failure." - Gunnar Fischer   Gunnar's biggest failure wasn't a single bad decision—it was an attitude he carried into work for far too long. As an Agile coach and Scrum Master, he watched a new high-ranking manager arrive who didn't like the team, didn't respect them, never even officially introduced herself. And Gunnar did the worst possible thing: he played along. He did the people-pleasing dance without ever getting feedback, recognition, or even a basic conversation. He formed ideas as a team, did the work, asked for nothing back—and accepted that nobody looked at the work. In hindsight, the Scrum value of respect was the missing piece. "The members of a Scrum team respect each other to be capable, independent people, and are also respected as such by the others." Gunnar respected others. He did not demand that respect for himself. The wake-up came in Ecuador—swimming with sharks in the open sea, he realized he felt safer there than in his own office. So he updated his CV, took an internal switch, and finally stepped out of victim mode. His real insight is uncomfortable: if you read about something good—getting time for your own development, being heard, being respected—and you instinctively deflect it or make excuses for why you can't have it, that's a very clear indicator you've internalized being small.   In this episode, we refer to The Coach's Casebook by Geoff Watts, specifically the chapter on people-pleasing.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time someone described a healthy professional environment to you, and you found yourself making excuses for why you couldn't have it?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The Saturday Scrum crew were back and started the show by asking if the Broncos are done for the season after their loss to the Roosters? Plus, South Sydney continue an impressive few weeks and the news where Bronson Xerri's next club was revealed! Plus, Parramatta Eels coach Jason Ryles joined the team and James Graham spoke to us about the incredible amount of money the Bye Round raised for MND. Plus, Believe It or Not, Tony's Quiz and much more! Check out Triple M NRL's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Olaitan Fashanu: The PO Who Doesn't Care vs the PO Who Always Has the Answer Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   In this episode, we refer to a recurring theme in past podcast episodes—the proxy product owner who can't make decisions because they're not theirs to make. The Great Product Owner: Always Available, Always Decisive, Always Has the Context 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.   "There was nothing you tell, any questions you have about a particular feature that this guy doesn't have an answer to. And that really moved the team so fast." - Olaitan Fashanu   The best PO Olaitan ever worked with was the mirror opposite of every anti-pattern he'd seen. Deeply involved in refinement. Took backlog management seriously. Always brought the context. Always available to the team. And—maybe most importantly—always ready to make a decision when devs surfaced trade-offs. The team could ask any question about any feature, and the answer was right there. Not "let me check," not "I'll get back to you," not "what do you think?"—a decision. That single quality, Olaitan says, was what moved the team faster than anything else. As a Scrum Master, when you see a great PO at work, you also see the amplifying waves of impact: motivation rises, quality rises, ownership grows. Olaitan's takeaway is sharp: the success of our job depends on how well the product owner does theirs.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO made a real-time decision that unblocked the team in a single conversation—and what's preventing that from being the norm? The Bad Product Owner: Doesn't Care About Impact, Can't Make Decisions 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 product owner cares about delivery. We just need to release to the customer. That is something I don't like." - Olaitan Fashanu   Olaitan describes two anti-patterns wrapped into one bad-PO type. The first: the PO who doesn't care about the impact of their work on the team. Tickets dropped without context. No refinement. No problem framing. Just "ship by end of month." The data shows up in Jira if you're paying attention—patterns of churn, quality issues, customer complaints, slow market response. Beyond the numbers, the team loses motivation, frustration creeps in, and eventually you lose the team entirely. The second anti-pattern, layered on top: the PO who can't make decisions. Developers come back with two options and the trade-offs—and the PO can't pick one. Vasco connects it to the proxy PO pattern explored in past episodes—a PO whose decisions aren't actually theirs to make. The cost is the same either way: the team stalls, ownership erodes, and stakeholder conflict grows.   In this segment, we refer to the proxy PO anti-pattern explored in earlier episodes of the podcast.   Self-reflection Question: Is your PO unable to decide—or unable to be allowed to decide? The difference changes which conversation you need to have, and with whom.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Most engineering teams are still optimizing for the wrong thing. They chase the speed of code when the real bottleneck is the speed of context. Matt Watson and Eban Bisong, founder and CEO of Senvi, get into what actually changes when AI moves from a coding tool to a teammate.Eban has spent his career as a founding engineer, and his approach is hands-on: don't tell skeptical engineers AI works, show them, every standup, until the pushback turns into excitement. At Park DNA he built "RTD2," an OpenClaw-powered droid wired read-only into their data sources, Slack, and Jira. It answered support questions before an engineer could, created its own bug tickets, and joined meetings through Fireflies so nothing got lost. The lesson underneath all of it: record everything, because the team that captures the most context ships the right thing fastest.Matt also shares his own three-week rabbit hole with Claude Cowork, $8K in tokens, a fully rebuilt Full Scale website, a thousand dead blog posts deleted, and 200 more rewritten. They go a few rounds on why it's a bad time to be a coder but a great time to be a builder, why "good enough" is a real standard and not a cop-out, and why ownership beats asking permission every time.If you build software or lead an engineering team, listen now. And if you want to try Eban's voice-first AI journal, visit senvi.ai.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:42 From Founding Engineer to Solo Founder01:52 Using AI as an Engineering Leader03:24 Building RTD2: An AI Teammate for Support05:27 The Speed of Context, Not Code06:11 Why You Should Record Everything08:59 Winning Over AI-Skeptical Engineers11:50 The AI Spectrum Across 80 Clients13:35 A Bad Time to Be a Coder, a Great Time to Build14:03 Why "Good Enough" Is Good Enough14:52 Human-in-the-Loop and Reviewing AI's Work16:28 Going All-In on Senvi19:01 Validating the Product With a Beta Group21:01 Bootstrapping a Truly AI-Native CompanyLinks & ResourcesConnect with Eban Bisong on LinkedInSenvi.ai - senvi.aiWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.

Olaitan Fashanu: I Love Data—Why Success for a Scrum Master Means Doing the Hard Measurement Work Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "You don't get better by not trying to be better." - Vasco Duarte (channeling Olaitan's own discipline)   For Olaitan, success as a Scrum Master comes down to two things—team effectiveness and team health—and he refuses to guess at either. Twice a year, in what he calls his winter and summer cycles, he runs a structured team health check survey to capture how confident people feel, whether they hold each other accountable, and whether psychological safety is real or theatrical. Between those checkpoints, he runs constant one-on-ones—and not just with developers. QAs, designers, the PO. Everyone gets the conversation. He pulls outside-in feedback from customers and partner teams too, because effectiveness measured only from the inside is fiction. "I love data. Maybe it's my background in mathematics. I love looking at patterns, comparing things." The work is real, the load is real—but for Olaitan, refusing to do it is the same as refusing to grow.   Self-reflection Question: If you had to prove to yourself today that your team is genuinely effective and healthy, what data would you actually have—and what would you only be guessing at? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start / Stop / Continue (and a twist Vasco offers Olaitan) Olaitan's go-to is the simple Start / Stop / Continue format—the easiest way he's found to get even quiet developers to engage, especially at the start of a new iteration. Vasco offers him a twist mid-episode: what if you only used one of the three? When the team is overwhelmed, run a Stop-only retro. When a release just shipped and energy is high, run a Start-only retro. Breaking the format pattern creates a small spark of "wait, why is this different today?"—which is often exactly the energy a tired team needs. Olaitan also shares a second favorite: the Friction vs. Drivers (or Fuel) format—mapping what's slowing the team down on one side and what's actively energizing them on the other. The two sides of the same coin, made visible.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Hour 4 -- Andrew Baggarly joins the show to break down Buster Posey's comments in yesterday's media scrum and what it might mean for the teams future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As AI becomes embedded in software development workflows, many leaders assume the biggest changes will happen in coding. The reality may be very different. The future belongs to AI Team Systems—the structures, feedback loops, and operational practices that transform rapid development into meaningful business outcomes. During Building Better Developers Season 28 Episode 9, Dave Borzillo explored how Agile principles may evolve in an AI-powered environment and why human collaboration remains essential.   About David Borzillo David Borzillo is an Agile coach, author, speaker, and organizational improvement advocate with more than three decades of experience spanning software development, leadership, Agile transformation, and product delivery. Through his Better Ways of Working platform, he helps organizations improve collaboration, reduce operational friction, and create sustainable delivery systems. He is the author of Sanity at Scale and Who Killed Agile? (co-authored), and United Agility, and hosts the Better Ways of Working podcast. Follow David at: https://betterwaysofworking.com/about.htm Bonus: Free Kindle Promotion

Hour 4 -- Andrew Baggarly joins the show to break down Buster Posey's comments in yesterday's media scrum and what it might mean for the teams future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Olaitan Fashanu: Three Teams, Three Backlogs, One Feature—Can You Make Them See Each Other? 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.   "How do we ensure that these teams actually work together to show the same data?" - Olaitan Fashanu   Olaitan brings a problem most Scrum Masters in scaled environments will recognize. Three teams. Three separate backlogs. One product, accessed across app, web, and support channels. Leadership made a top-down team topologies decision: split the work to move faster. Predictable result—each team optimizes for their own backlog, blind to what the others are building, sometimes shipping the same feature twice with different behaviors. The product owners know there's overlap. The teams love the idea of linking tickets across backlogs. They just won't maintain the habit. Olaitan and Vasco walk through experiments together: a sync between POs, joint refinement sessions, linking tickets, putting "this is also being built by Team B" notes at the top of stories. The deeper insight: the Scrum Master's job is to keep surfacing information until a habit forms. As Vasco's old lifting coach put it—you find the imbalance, you get rid of the imbalance, one by one. That's how you get stronger.   In this episode, we refer to team topologies and the practice of surfacing information across team boundaries.   Self-reflection Question: Where in your organization are teams unknowingly building the same thing twice—and what's the smallest experiment you could run this week to make that visible?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

The Agile Mentors Podcast is taking a short summer break, but that does not mean the conversation is stopping. In this special update, Brian shares what is ahead for the show and introduces a new podcast exploring one of the biggest questions facing modern teams: what happens when AI becomes part of how work gets done?   Overview   As the Agile Mentors Podcast pauses new episodes for the summer, Brian takes a few minutes to reflect on what this community has explored together over the years. While Scrum, Agile, product ownership, leadership, and coaching have been recurring topics, the deeper theme has always been people: how teams learn, collaborate, make decisions, and improve over time.   Brian also shares details about his new podcast, People Over Prompts, which will focus on the changing relationship between humans and AI at work. As AI moves beyond being a simple tool and becomes a more active collaborator, organizations are being challenged to rethink team structures, workflows, accountability, and decision-making. What does a team look like when every person is supported by multiple AI agents? What responsibilities should remain firmly human? And how do we preserve judgment, creativity, and shared understanding in an AI-enabled workplace? This episode offers a preview of those conversations while looking ahead to what comes next for both podcasts.   References and resources mentioned in the show: People Over Prompts podcast #82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton #175: When AI Makes Agile Teams Worse with Hunter Hillegas AI Doesn't Eliminate Agile Teams — It Increases the Need for Great Ones by Mike Cohn 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 a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast 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.

Sana Learning is a revolutionary product in the $400 Billion L&D market. Today I sat down with Rita Azevedo, Director of Client Engagement at Sana, to talk about everything. What is AI-native learning, how does Sana Learning fit into Workday's strategy, and how do companies like Polestar, Rolls Royce, Travelers, and others revolutionize L&D with Sana. And most of important of all, we get Rita's perspective on the reinvention of L&D, which we call “Dynamic Enablement for Growth.” As you'll hear, AI-native learning platforms like Sana can totally transform training teams, turning them into “business enablement” functions working directly in the business. We discuss how Polestar has done this in detail. Rita is an experienced L&D leader (having lead training at Klarna) and has worked at Sana since the company had only 30 employees, so she has a wealth of knowledge and experience in AI transformation in L&D. PS: We are customers of Sana (Galileo Learn is built on Sana, and our new Global HR Excellence Certification is built on Sana), so we can speak to its features in detail if you're interested. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest 01:44 The Revolution in Learning and Development 03:30 Sana's Position in the Learning Market 05:53 Understanding Sana Learning's Unique Features 07:08 The Future of Learning: Proactive vs. Reactive 09:11 Case Study: Polestar's Learning Approach 12:47 User Experience and Integration in Learning 14:07 The Role of AI Tutors in Learning 16:07 Dynamic Skills Assessment in Learning 18:42 The Shift in L&D Responsibilities 21:35 Empowering Subject Matter Experts 24:25 Managing Content Creation and Quality 27:18 The Future of Learning and Change Management 31:02 Advice for Organizations Exploring Learning Solutions   Additional Information The AI Native Revolution in Corporate Learning (research) Our new Corporate Learning Maturity Model HR 2030: The New Role, Operating Model, and Tech Stack for HR Get Galileo: Experience Sana Yourself! Chapters (00:00:00) - Meet Rita Azevedo from sana(00:02:16) - SANAA's Take on Learning & Development(00:04:26) - Sauna Learning: Workday Learning Powered by Sauna(00:06:34) - Sana Learning's AI-based Learning Platform(00:10:12) - Sales Training: The Future of Learning at Sana(00:13:33) - L&D 2.8: User Experience(00:14:44) - L&D: The Tutor, the Editor and the Admin(00:17:04) - The L&D paradigm shift(00:19:22) - How Skills are Being Rated in the Future(00:22:30) - L&D: The Future of Content Management(00:27:56) - Learning vs. Agents: Can Microsoft Win with Both?(00:30:46) - How to move legacy courses to Scrum(00:31:50) - A New Way to Start with Workday's AI in 2020

Olaitan Fashanu: When the New PO Stops Refining—and the Team Starts Self-Destructing Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "If we're actually doing the job of refining this ticket properly, then we will not be creating this tension in the team." - Olaitan Fashanu   The team was working well. They had a strong PO who came to refinement with the problem clearly framed: this is what we want to solve, here's the context, here's the user story, here are the acceptance criteria. The team picked it up, refined it, ran with it. Then change came. A new PO joined—and the routine collapsed. The new PO cared about one thing: hitting the delivery date. Tickets dropped into Jira with no context, no problem statement, no acceptance criteria. Just "this needs to ship by end of month." Within weeks, Olaitan saw the symptoms cascade through the team. Developers asked designers what tickets even meant. QA struggled to maintain quality. Tension built. The diagnosis was clear: refinement had broken. His fix? Bring back the Definition of Ready as a non-negotiable shared standard, and introduce a product trio—business viability, technical feasibility, and design usability collaborating on every story before it reaches the rest of the team.   In this segment, we talk about the Definition of Ready and the product trio collaboration model.   Self-reflection Question: What's the symptom you're seeing in your team right now—and could the real source be how stories are getting refined, not how they're getting built? Featured Book of the Week: The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson Olaitan calls out The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson as the book that shaped how he handles difficult moments. The book teaches the power of asking the right question at the right time—clarifying questions, probing questions, the questions that drive a stuck group forward. "You will understand how, when to ask clarifying questions, ask really powerful questions that will help you drive or probably help you reach your goal in any session you find yourself." For Olaitan, the biggest payoff was learning to manage group dynamics in real time—what to do when something said in a meeting lands badly, when a comment threatens to derail the room. As a Scrum Master, you live in those moments. This book hands you a toolkit for them.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Olaitan Fashanu: The Scrum Master Who Tried to Force His Way In—and Got Schooled 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 you want to make things work, you need to find a way to carry people along. Lead, not by forcing your way on the team, because you're working with smart people, you're working with professionals." - Olaitan Fashanu   When Olaitan transitioned from project management into the Scrum Master role, he carried his old habits with him: enforce, push, drive. Then he walked into a team of senior developers. In one retrospective, a team member casually suggested that someone could help set up Jira properly. Olaitan took it personally—wasn't that his job? The next day in the daily standup, he called it out publicly. The reaction told him everything. The team member shut down. The PO pulled him aside afterward to say, "We could have had a better discussion around this." That moment, Olaitan realized that having no formal authority isn't a weakness to compensate for with force—it's the whole point. The job is to influence, to nudge, to coach—even when the conversations are hard. Especially when they are hard.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you raised a difficult topic in a way that closed the conversation instead of opening it—and what would it have cost you to bring it up differently?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aimé Flemm: Output Owners vs Activators — Two Product Owners Who Defined Aimé's Career Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   In this episode, Aimé reflects on two Product Owners — one who showed him what greatness looks like, and one who taught him the cost of structural malpractice. The contrast is structural as much as personal. The Great Product Owner: The PO As Activator "Our product owner was really able to persuade the larger group of 60 people and activate them." - Aimé Flemm   When Aimé's company moved to LeSS, they collapsed seven Product Owners down to four — and effectively one head PO who had to step up. "All of a sudden had this one product owner who needed to step up his game — to become this leader who's visionary, who has some kind of charisma." The structure forced the role to grow. The new PO had to lead 60 people, not five. And he did it. Not by writing more stories or shoving work harder, but by becoming an activator — visionary, charismatic, able to rally people behind a product direction. Aimé's framing: structure created the conditions for greatness. Reduce PO count, increase scope per PO, and the role has to step into real product leadership. "It doesn't happen too often that you get the opportunity to really have THE product owner in the company, and just the one."   Self-reflection Question: Does your structure give your PO room to be a leader — or does it force them to be a story-writer for one team? The Bad Product Owner: The Team-Manager-In-Disguise "What this product owner really did was just managing the team. He had the power to hire and fire, to decide on promotions, pay raises." - Aimé Flemm   Aimé's second PO ever was the opposite of an activator. He was a team manager in disguise — with full hire/fire authority and control over promotions and pay raises. He showed up about 15 minutes a week. "Just telling them, 'oh yeah, this is good, you should do this and do this,' and then he was gone for the rest of the week." What followed was textbook decay: an avoidant team, no initiative, refusing workshops and improvement work. "It became a collection of individuals, all on their own island. Just fixing their own work, just to make sure that they looked good." Aimé himself couldn't push back — his own job security ran through the same person. As Vasco named it in the conversation: these aren't product owners — they're output owners. Work-shovers. Proxies. The dynamic kills product value over time, because nobody is steering toward the customer.   Self-reflection Question: Is your PO an activator who rallies people behind a vision — or a proxy who shoves work from one inbox to another?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aimé Flemm: When The Team Tells You You're Doing Too Much — That's The Success Signal 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.   "It's when you know you're on the right track — when the teams start complaining that you're doing too much." - Aimé Flemm   Aimé got the feedback nobody wants to hear: "You're being too much in the front of the group." His first reaction was to take it personally. Then he saw it for what it was — the success signal. The team was telling him: let us do it. After months of helping them build self-managing capability, they hit a tipping point. They wanted the floor. He stepped back, started "actively doing nothing," sat down and crossed his arms. When they brought a problem, he asked: "What are you going to do about this? Have you tried that already?" But Aimé pushed back on himself in this conversation, and accepted the reframe: the Scrum Master isn't less needed at the tipping point — they're needed differently. The shift is from teaching and facilitating ceremonies to nudging with questions, helping the team reach out when they're stuck, surfacing issues with the PO and outside stakeholders. The focus shifts when you reach success. Don't take "you're doing too much" as offense — take it as your cue to change levels.   Self-reflection Question: When the team last pushed back on something you were doing, did you take it as feedback to defend — or as a signal that they're ready to take more ownership? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Retromat + Liberating Structures Aimé's favorite retro? "If I don't have to do it myself." Once teams reach the tipping point, he uses a pull system — they run their own retros, he checks in a few days later. But when he does facilitate, he layers two tools. First, Retromat — not just for the techniques, but for the flow: check-in, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, checkout. Second, Liberating Structures on top of that flow. His favorite is Impromptu Networking — small groups answer a question, then re-form in different groups. "It's like a beehive. There's so much energy. It's bubbling." He's used it cross-org, his team and the client team in the same room. And his strong recommendation: do retrospectives on-site whenever you can.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aimé Flemm: Renting The Change vs Owning It — Why LeSS Transformations Get Reversed Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "They rented the change instead of owning it." - Aimé Flemm   A year ago Aimé helped his Dutch employer adopt LeSS. The teams are happy. They're performing well. And now, he's watching it all get pulled apart. The company was acquired by a German parent that's "actually really German" — traditional, command-and-control. The parent wants to "align" all its companies and is pushing to revert the LeSS structure back to component teams. Why? Because higher management never went to the trainings. They never went through the change themselves. They signed off on it, but they didn't internalize it. And now the loud-but-few voices of the status quo are reaching upward, and management is panicking. That's what Aimé means by "renting the change" — you got the lease, you never bought the building, and the moment pressure rises, you walk away. His experiment for the next sprint, sharpened in this conversation: stop trying to defend the structure. Start a conversation with management to co-create success metrics for the merger itself. Decouple the structure from the definition of success. As long as the merger succeeds, the structure can stay fluid. Speak their language. And remember: coaching is the cherry on top — about 5% of the real gains. The big improvements live in the structural changes.   Self-reflection Question: When you sold your last change to upper management, did they buy it — or are they renting? And what's your plan for the moment when they want to give back the keys?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aimé Flemm: Culture Follows Structure — Why Some Teams Self-Destruct By Design 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.   "Culture follows structure. The destructive tendencies of a team are the consequence of how the organization is actually structured." - Aimé Flemm   Aimé doesn't blame teams when they go toxic. He looks at the org chart. At his first gig, the UX-only team grew bitter — making screens nobody used, blocked from talking to customers, drowning in dependencies. The team's behavior wasn't a coaching problem. It was a structural one. At his current company, building backend software for EV charging stations, he watched the opposite happen: leadership flipped seven component teams (backend, billing, etc.) into seven end-to-end feature teams with one Product Owner. Two-week sprints. Switching costs collapsed — they could decide on Wednesday to change direction, refine on Thursday, and have all seven teams pivot together by the next sprint. The org became truly adaptive. Aimé's question to every Scrum Master listening: is your organization fit for purpose? If the work is predictable and specialism-heavy, component teams can work. If you need adaptability, the structure has to match. Don't coach behavior that the structure forces.   In this segment, we talk about Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior, the Star Model by Jay Galbraith, and Org Topologies.   Self-reflection Question: Look at the team you're coaching. Which of their "destructive habits" might actually be a rational response to the structure you've put them in? Featured Book of the Week: Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman This week, Aimé recommends two books that complement each other. First — and his "holy bible" — is Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman. "I remember reading this for the first time. It took me two weeks, the whole book. And I was just constantly texting people — 'this is it! It all makes sense now. I finally know what to do.'" For the how of organizational change — workshop ideas, possible structures, change tactics, and the people side — LeSS is the book. The companion book Aimé pairs with it is 10x Organization by Alexey Krevitsky, Roland Flemm, and Craig Larman — strong on the what and the why, with a 2x2 visual map that helps you explain to management where you are today, where the market needs you to be, and what should change. (You can also listen to our episode with Bas Vodde and our BONUS episode with Roland Flemm for a deeper view.)   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Aimé Flemm: Why Solo Scrum Masters Get Fired — The Coalition Of The Willing 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.   "It doesn't make sense to try and change a system of 2,000 people on your own." - Aimé Flemm   Three months into his first gig out of consultancy, Aimé got the call: you're fired. He was at a Dutch pension fund — 2,000 people, deeply ingrained legacy structure — serving as Scrum Master to three component teams, including a UX-only team that couldn't ship anything end-to-end. Full of ambition and fresh ideas from a meetup, he pushed to restructure the teams to be cross-functional. His manager said "yeah, go for it." But Aimé was the only one pushing. He was, in his words, "poking and fighting the system way too much that they had built." So they didn't extend the contract. The lesson he carries from that firing reshaped how he approaches every change initiative since: do not try to do it alone. Find the coalition of the willing first — other Scrum Masters, other change agents, the volunteers — and build a network before you start pushing structural change. Use Scrum Master Syncs, communities of practice, even pizza budgets. Let the change spread like an oil spill. It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. But you'll still have a job at the end of it.   In this episode, we refer to the coalition of the willing and change management tactics for Scrum Masters working in resistant systems.   Self-reflection Question: Where in your current organization are you trying to change the system alone — and who could become your first ally if you stopped pushing and started recruiting?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Matt Watson sits down with Beth Epperson, founder and CEO of Legacy Purpose, here in the Kansas City area. Beth came up through marketing and branding, including the brand launch for Hyvee Arena, before deciding to build something of her own.Her company is built around two products. Aligned Legacy measures how people think in real time and helps teams see how aware, connected, and aligned they actually are. HICMIT, or Wisdom Illuminated, keeps a company's knowledge governed and accurate so nothing walks out the door when an employee leaves.Beth and Matt get into the messy reality of being a founder. She self-funded the whole thing, learned to code her own prototype, and pitched for over a year through a pile of rejections. She also walked away from a paid pilot because the people on the other side were not aligned on ethics and accountability.Matt shares why he thinks Beth represents a new kind of founder. Sales first, build second, now that AI can help build the thing. They also dig into validating an idea, the pull you want to feel from customers, and why getting your first case studies is the hardest part.If you have ever tried to get a product to market on your own, this one is for you.⏱️ Episode Breakdown00:38 Introduction to Legacy Purpose and Beth Epperson03:37 Beth's Entrepreneurial Journey and Corporate Experiences06:37 The Birth of Legacy Purpose and Its Mission09:52 Understanding Emotions and Accountability in the Workplace12:35 The Development of Innovative Tools for Corporate Growth15:38 Challenges in Building and Marketing the Software18:28 The Importance of Case Studies and Market Validation21:37 Future Aspirations and Closing ThoughtsLinks & ResourcesConnect with Beth Epperson on LinkedInLegacy Purpose Website - https://legacypurposed.com/Email - mailto:Beth@legacypurpose.comWhat Smart CTOs Are Doing Differently With Offshore Teams in 2025Subscribe to the Global Talent SprintFull Scale – Build your dev team quickly and affordablyIf you're trying to get your team out of the basement and into real product ownership, this episode is your playbook. Stop being a ticket factory. Build teams that think, create, and lead.Follow the show, rate it, and send this to someone who's still trying to do “real Scrum.” They need it more than you do.

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