Get ready for a special Thanksgiving episode where Brian Milner shares what he’s most grateful for this year and why a little reflection on gratitude can go a long way. It’s time to embrace the positives and celebrate the connections that keep us growing.

Overview

In this special Thanksgiving episode, Brian Milner takes a heartfelt pause to reflect on gratitude, expressing thanks for his listeners, cherished friendships, and the fresh ideas that continue to shape his Agile journey. He invites everyone to join him in acknowledging the positive aspects of their lives and to practice gratitude, especially during difficult times.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast
Join the Agile Mentors Community

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Hey there, Agile Mentors. Yes, I'm not saying my typical opening because this isn't a typical episode. I don't want to make anything cheesy here. It is Thanksgiving. It is around Thanksgiving time here in the US. And traditionally, I've given a little message around this time that's just me. And I won't take a lot of your time here today.

But I do want to just kind of focus in a little bit on that concept of being thankful because I do think it's important for us to try to understand and be thankful for the things that we have in our life that maybe we don't always take time to kind of recognize. And this year has been a very kind of challenging years in some ways for our industry, for the profession, but it's also been exciting in some ways as well.

And rather than dwelling on just things that would be kind of hypercritical or negative, I think it's important for us to maybe focus in on some of those positive things. So I'll just give you a quick hit list here of things that I, I just wanted to think about about three specific things that I thought were things that I am extremely thankful for this year at this point in my life. and in my interactions with people.

The first and foremost, I'm not saving the best for last, I'm doing the best first. That's you, the listeners of this podcast. I can't thank you enough for tuning in and listening. You put out a podcast like this, you have no idea. It's kind of like you're shouting into the void. And you have no idea who is listening and who is not listening, what their desires are, what they want from you. That's why I beg you all the time for feedback, because I just want to know how it can be better for you.

I just want to know how I can make this a better use of your time. But I've had the pleasure this year of getting to go to several conferences and going to those conferences is always my chance to kind of talk to face to face some of the people who listen to this podcast. And it is such a thrill. it, just excites me to no end when I'm at those conferences and someone comes up to me and says, Hey, I listened to the podcast. I really liked the stuff you put out there on that. And it really makes an impact for me. Or, you know, I'll hear someone come up and say, Hey, I just found it. I started listening from episode one. I'm now on episode 10 and, it's all been really, really impactful. And I just really appreciate, what you're doing there. So I, I just want to say a huge thanks to you. I mean, we couldn't keep doing this if we didn't have listeners. So I just, I really appreciate you. I appreciate that you're on this journey with me.

We're kind of both learning together as we go through this because every episode I learn something from these guests that come through. And I know that you are as well. You're learning things as we go through these topics. So I just want to thank you for being along the ride with me. And especially thank you for those who have come up and introduced yourself and said hello to me over this past year. Really, really appreciate getting to meet you and learn a little bit more about you, about the things that you want and the things that you need. So thank you for being listeners. Thank you for being, for the people who send feedback and email us over our podcast at mountaingoatsoftware.com address. I really, really appreciate you. because we wouldn't be here without you.

Another thing I thought I was really, really thankful for this year, the kind of in line with that is just new friends. We do a lot of this stuff, or least I should say, I do a lot of this stuff as a trainer out of my home office and spend several days with people in classes. And I make a lot of new friends through those classes just from people that I connect with and people who stay in contact with me. So I'm highly appreciative of those people that are kind of still on my radar and people that have come through classes with me and have stayed connected with me. But I'm appreciative of the people that I've gotten to spend some quality time with at the different conferences I've been at this year.

There's been several conversations that I've had with people that have been so impactful to me, just really, really personal, sometimes emotional conversations I've had with individuals. And it just reminds you that it's human beings that are at the core of this, It's people. getting to know and understand people, I think, one of the joys of getting to do this kind of work. That you get to meet new people and get to hear their stories and learn how they see the world. So I'm really thankful for the new friends that have come into my life. through the course of the last year. And then I'm really thankful for new ideas.

The guests that have come through here have, you know, many of them have kind of given me new ways of seeing things, kind of seeing things through a new lens that has challenged me. And I'm always really grateful. when an assumption or an opinion I have is challenged, I don't think of that as being kind of an aggressive thing towards me. I think of it as, well, that's kind of pushing my boundaries a little bit. I thought that I knew and understood this in this way, but now someone's challenged me to look at this from a different perspective. I look at this from a different viewpoint. And I am just enormously thankful that as I've... grown in this profession as I've been doing this now for, gosh, I've been a software developer maybe 25 years now, I'm that old. But given that, there are still plenty of concepts and ideas that they're never ending.

There's never an end to the things that would challenge my assumptions or my beliefs about things and get me to really re-examine them. That doesn't mean I'm going to change all of them. But I tell people who come through the class, I don't have any problem with you challenging an idea. The idea isn't me. The idea is an idea. And I change ideas all the time. If I get presented with better information, if there's new data that comes out that says, hey, know that way we've been thinking about this, that's actually wrong, I embrace that. I welcome that. Because it's the reality. Right?

And I don't want to continue down the road that's false. So I just really, really appreciate that idea that these ideas are not stale. These aren't ideas, aren't things that would just go by the wayside. These are things that constantly challenge us and get us to look at things in a new light. This isn't an awards acceptance speech, so I'm not going to go through the list of specific people.

There's lots of people that I would thank and they know who they are. There's lots of people who work really hard for this podcast to work. And people like Mike Cohn who have mentored me and helped me to understand things that I would never have if I had not come in contact with them. So just really, really am thankful for all of those things.

And I encourage you, it may sound like a silly thing, But take five minutes, take 10 minutes and just sit down with a blank piece of paper and just write out, if you were gonna make your top 10, right? What are the top 10 things that this year that you're thankful for, right? You don't have to go through, you know, just the stereotypical things that you might put down, but you know, if you were to think back over the past year, what would be the things that you are most thankful for over the past year?

And as I said, I know it's been a hard year for a lot of people. But I think that when we are able to stop and do that and really understand, hey, here are the things that really have gone well. Here are the things I'm really thankful that I encountered or that happened to me in this last year. It really can have a dramatic impact on your outlook and how you see things and really what you look for moving forward, what you focus on moving forward.

So I just encourage you, it's a week for that. It's a time when we do that here in the US especially, but if you're somewhere international and maybe you have a Thanksgiving on a different part of the year or a different day, or maybe you don't have one in your country, I encourage you to just take time out to do it. I think you'll appreciate it. I think it'll make an impact for you. So that's really all I got for you today.

As I said, short little message, kind of traditional for us to do a little brief little Thanksgiving message here. again, I just want to thank you. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for being with me on this journey, especially this past year.

And I'm excited. I can't wait to see where we go from this point forward. Who knows, right? We might do changes. We might try some new things. All kind of depends on what you guys want to see in here. So thank you so much for where we've come so far. And we'll call it. So. We won't do any of typical outro stuff I normally do, but you know what I normally say. So just kind of think that in your head.

Thanks, everybody. I really appreciate you listening to this special message. And next week, we'll be back with just a regular episode. You're going to really enjoy it. So talk to you next time on another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.

Curious if your product team is caught in common traps that limit success? Join Brian and David Pereira as they explore how to simplify workflows, make smarter bets with prioritization, and shift from output-driven thinking to delivering real value.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, host Brian Milner chats with David Pereira, author of Untrapping Product Teams. Together, they dive into the common traps product teams face, the differences between project and product management, and practical strategies for prioritization.

David shares insights from his book, offering advice on building healthier backlogs, creating adaptable roadmaps, and moving beyond a feature-obsessed mindset to focus on delivering true value.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

David Pereira
Untrapping Product Teams by David Pereira
Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
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 [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

David Pereira is a seasoned Product Leader with over 15 years of experience guiding Agile teams to deliver real value faster. As CEO of omoqo GmbH and a top writer on product management, David is passionate about helping teams overcome challenges, unlock their potential, and simplify their workflows to drive meaningful outcomes.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome back Agile Mentors. We are here for yet another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have Mr. David Pereira with us. Welcome in, David.

David Pereira (00:12)
Let's be here.

Brian (00:14)
Very excited to have David here with us. David is the author of a new book called, Untrapping Product Teams. So product owners, this is going to be a discussion that I know you're going to find very interesting. We're going to be talking about a lot of things that have to do with product teams and sort of the ins and outs of working with your products. So David, just for starters, what inspired you to write the book? What was the main problem you were trying to address when you sat down to write this?

David Pereira (00:42)
pain. I have worked as a product person for many companies throughout the years, different countries, different sides. And one thing that I realized is that there many things going wrong. And sometimes we just don't know that it's wrong and it hurts. Then when we realize the question is, what are we going to do about it? So I started writing about untrapped products. From this perspective,

Brian (00:43)
Ha ha ha ha.

David Pereira (01:12)
of there's something wrong, we might not see, but let's start from this and then maybe we can transform how we work for the better.

Brian (01:23)
Awesome. Yeah, that's a great take on it. Cause I agree. There's certain times when as a product owner, know I've, you you're kind of chugging along and things are going okay, but then something happens and it's sort of like, wow, this is painful. I don't know where it's, I can't put my finger on what's going wrong, but there's something happening here. And you you try to push through it and just get past it sometimes. And it's, that's not always the best strategy. I know you talk about there being sort of these dangerous traps that are kind of typical traps that product people fall into. Can you share any of those with us? What are some of the dangerous traps you identified here?

David Pereira (02:01)
Sure, there's the classic one called the gigantic backlog. So the team looked at it and we're talking about product owners, but sometimes product owners get demoted to backlog owners and they don't even notice that. So that's one of the most classic traps, but there's also another I call the calendar driven framework. You may think you work with agile, but then you realize that you only do what is in your calendar. So that digitates what you're doing and so on. And you fall prey to what I call as a meeting marathon.

Brian (02:38)
Yeah. I want to go back a little bit to your, to the big backlog kind of, idea there, because I, I know that's a issue I've talked with people about in class a lot. And, I just want to get your take on this. Cause I, one of the things, you know, we'll, we'll discuss in classes sometimes just the idea of having too big of a backlog and, and kind of wrestling with it and trying to get it in shape. But the question always comes up, you know, you what's the. the right number. We ask a question in class and say, how big is your backlog? And you'll see different reactions from people. Some people, less than 50, other people 250, other people 1,000 plus items. Is there a number? Is there a number that beyond which it's all of sudden now too big?

David Pereira (03:24)
Yeah, for sure. So for me, first is understanding what is the backlog about. It is a vehicle to drive whether when you look at the backlog, should be able to tell a story. You should know where you're heading to. But when you look there, if you see a 60 year old Christmas wishlist that has everything in but you cannot connect anything, that's when it starts smelling. So for me, a good backlog will have no more than I would say two, three things ahead of us. There might be some things that are directions that we will continue refine and get it better and so on. But if we would have something that takes us like six months of work to get it through, maybe we are doing project management.

Brian (04:12)
So that's an interesting distinction. if we're moving into product, how would you define that then if we're saying project management versus product management, how do you define that difference?

David Pereira (04:23)
So project management in general, we assume we know what needs to happen. So we start planning on when we do what and how long we're gonna invest in this and so on. Product management is more about starting what is value, what do we want to achieve? And then we start embracing the unknown, facing reality, learning from it. And then the backlog will emerge from our learnings. So it means we know where we want to land, but how we're gonna get there. We know where to start, but not the next 3, 4, 5 steps.

Brian (04:56)
Love that. So that gets us kind of into talking about road mapping a little bit because I know that's one of the things you talk about in your book and kind of the idea of trying to plan a little bit far in advance. So if we have a backlog, it's really more two to three sprints versus six months. Do you recommend the product owners roadmap for longer than two to three sprints or is the roadmap just a two to three sprint roadmap?

David Pereira (05:24)
Sure. So the roadmap for me, it is about a different flight level. So the backlog is the now. What are we doing right now in the next two sprints as we talked about? The roadmap, we're looking at what is the overarching goal we are pursuing. So that could be, for example, a milestone that we aim to achieve for the next two, three months. And then the backlog will march towards that. But for the roadmap, I think it's still important to have something like, what is the direction for six months that maybe we are considering. But the farther we go, the more I would say blurry it becomes. It's more like a direction and we can feel free to adapt that.

Brian (06:13)
So help me understand here, because one of the things I think that I hear a lot of questions about in class is, since 2020, the Scrum Guide has added this idea of a product goal. And we've always traditionally thought about having a vision for the product. So now we have sort of this nested nature of having a vision, a product goal. And of course, we've always had sprinkles. How do you see those things related? relating to some sort of road mapping.

David Pereira (06:45)
Let's take a company here as an example. I like looking at the SpaceX. What is the vision? The vision is something audacious, inspiring, that people can connect with. Might be very hard to achieve, but it gives us guidance. For SpaceX, would say two words, populate Mars. That's the vision. It's very far. And what would be a roadmap goal? For example, something they achieved already. It's a step to get closer to the vision. Build a reusable rocket. That's something they spent a lot of time doing, and that could be a roadmap item. Then when you go to the sprint ghost, it's just a smaller step towards that.

Brian (07:35)
Gotcha. Yeah, that's great way to put it. I like that idea and I appreciate you using kind of a real world example. I think that kind of drives it home for everybody. I think it's obviously one of the things we talk about quite a bit in Agile is that idea of that we don't have any problem with planning. Planning is a good thing. What we have a problem with is plans that are so concrete that they're inflexible. So when we... I've always thought as a product owner, when we try to create these roadmaps, the further we get out from today, the looser, the less defined it is, the more rough the idea is, and the less people should count on there being any date that's going to be met based off of that longer term horizon. Of course, there are exceptions to this. You mentioned SpaceX, mean, SpaceX has a multi-year goal. I mean, they have something that's kind of further out to the future. So I think that there are some exceptions that we probably could make in there. But I think you're right. Think about them in that steps as far as vision to product goal to sprinkle. One of the other things that I found kind of interesting in reading up and thinking about your book is you talk about the difference between coordinated and collaborative workflows. Can you define those? Tell us a little bit about what you meant by that, the difference between those two.

David Pereira (08:31)
Yeah, of course. I start with a question. When we are talking about coordinative development flow, step back and then reflect. Do you talk more about work than you do it? Or you just go and do work on it? If you feel like you are all the time talking about work, everyone is talking about it, you have so many meetings discussing and so on, but then you wonder who is doing the work, then there's a chance you are in the coordinative development flow. The collaborative development flow, it's a little bit chaotic. There are many things happening. Teams are looking at what can we do right now? What can we do next? They are adapting all the time and so on. Plans are actually means to an end. They are not reached. They point a direction. Teams may have a plan, but it's very simple. It is not a predictive thing. When you are in the coordinative development flow, things take long. For example, you may have a lot of ideas in the beginning, then that means you need to find the most promising idea, speculation. So you may use frameworks to have the best scoring and understand what is the idea most promising. Then you invest time and crafting high fidelity prototypes and so on. There's a lot of coordination back on Perf. But if you go to a collaborative, you say, all right, I have all of these ideas here. Which ideas are worth? That's the first question. Then you say, how do they meet our, for example, product vision? How do they relate to our strategy? How do they contribute to our goal? And if you don't have answers to that, you use your friend called trash bin. So you put the things in your trash bin and then you start moving forward. And you say, all right, how do I know this has desirability? It's viable from the business. How do I know we can do it? then start running experiment. And then some things you realize, actually customers don't need it, then you don't pursue. So that's why it looks like chaos because you don't know what will get to the end, because things will fall apart on the way because you learned they don't make sense. On the coordinate, you know what gets to the end. You just don't know if it's the right thing.

Brian (11:18)
That's a great point. And you're right. If we think of this from an experimental mindset, the product development game here as more experimentation, think you're right. There's going to be things that don't, the experiments that don't turn out the way we expected, just like there is in any kind of experimentation. that can be some of the most productive moments actually is when you have those experiments that turn out differently than you anticipated because that can lead you in areas that are surprising and new and have value that you might not have otherwise recognized, I think. So yeah, I love that. I think that's a great way to talk about it. It makes me think a lot about prioritization as well because I know that's a big area for us as product owners and... You know, someone sent me an article the other day that, that I share sometimes with people that's, it's a blog post that someone put out there. was like 127 different ways to prioritize your backlog. It's just, they're all methods, right? They're all the things that you probably, all of us have probably heard and, you know, things like Moscow and, and other things like that, that people are typically use, to prioritize their backlog or rice or. relative weighting or something like that. But one of the things that I find kind of interesting with that, and I want to get your take on this David, is sometimes when I will use something like relative weighting, for example, or rice, very much more of an analytical approach, right? And we're trying to try to analyze it based on several factors and see what the score comes out at the end, which one's higher than the other. but one of the interesting kind of a sideline effects that I've noticed in myself as a product owner is sometimes I'll find that I'll run that kind of a process on several features and I'll get to the end and you know, I've got three features and know, a feature, a, and C and, you know, I'll take a look at the results and look, you know, it looks like feature B is number one feature C is two and, and a is three and Sort of in my head, I kind of feel this dialogue happen where I think, huh, really B is number one. Wow. would have never thought that would have been the case. That's surprising. I can't believe B came out as number one, but maybe I answered those questions incorrectly. Maybe I should go back and change my answers in doing this analysis because that can't be right. B shouldn't be one. B should maybe be two or three. And I kind of call it the the gut instinct, you know, it's kind of that gut instinct moment where you look at the results and it feels wrong, right? And I know you talk in your book kind of about, you know, opinions without evidence and kind of the idea of, know, it made me kind of think about that scenario where sometimes you'll run it through some kind of a prioritization technique and there'll be a definitive answer, but you kind of have that instinctual moment that feels like maybe this is not right. How do you handle those moments, David? Do you have any problem overriding results or do you always take the results of some kind of a prioritization technique that you've tried to use?

David Pereira (14:44)
Mm-hmm. So prioritization is something quite interesting. What I see is many companies search for certainty. We need to ensure that we find what drives value. So we take some time analyzing that. The problem is that we start injecting a lot of speculation. We think what it's right, but we don't. What I see is prioritization is a bet. So I think about placing bets. Say, all right, so there are all of these cool ideas here. I try looking, for example, at potential. As of now, what do we know about it? How many customers would care about it? How much would they care about it? Can we deliver something of that? I say, all right, let's invest one day and see what we can learn about it. Then we can move to the next. And then we can invest maybe two days. And if we don't like what we learn, then we just stop. And if you like what we learned, then we say, let's invest another week. And then we keep going to the point we say, this looks cool. And then we can do something about it. So I say like, let's have a bias toward actions. We can face reality as fast as possible. Then we can learn what makes sense and what doesn't. And I give you a concrete example. When I started about the book, I was thinking, Does it make sense for me to write a book? How do I know that? I got invited to give a keynote. I said, I'm going to speak about something that I would write and I will see how it resonates. I gave this talk 10 times. And then what happens after each talk? Few people would come to me and say, Hey, I like this thing. I like this. I like this. And everything you didn't mention, I started questioning. And then what they like to explore. And after the 10th talk, someone said, when are you writing a book about it? said, aha, now it's coming. I said, I need you to do another experiment. I posted on LinkedIn. said, I'm writing a book. And I had in my mind, if at least 200 people show interest in that, I'm going to interview people to understand their challenge. So I did that. When I decided to write a book, I didn't write the book. I explored. where to write and so on and all of this. Because I was placing bets, small investments that give me information that I can use as evidence. And that's the same what I do with digital products. It is about learning from reality, not from a meeting room.

Brian (17:25)
I love that. Yeah. I think we've, I know that I've heard that language used quite often, the idea of making small bets or making bets on things, but it really is a revolution. And you're worried way to think about it. like your, your concept of, of thinking, is it worth a day? Right. Is it worth a day to do this? Is it worth me betting a day on, on trying to find out more information about this? is that really how you look at prioritization then is, is, is you prioritize it? Is it, is it kind of, Is it worth the effort to do what it's gonna take to do this thing and think of it that way as a bet?

David Pereira (18:01)
Yeah, in this direction, because for example, when we explore what is the potential outcome, how many users would care, how much do they care about it? I say, let's see if that is true or not. Let's start learning about it. Then we can have a better understanding of the expected result. Because the danger is when you start talking about these things, it just do a scoring, like a rise, eyes or something else. then you get false confidence. So I want to move away from the false confidence to get closer to reality because in the end of the day, we don't know what we don't know.

Brian (18:41)
Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make. I know I've run an experiment sometimes in classes where we'll have a couple of different ways of prioritization. I'll give them something complicated like relative weighting or rice. And then I'll give them something, you know, ultra simple, like stack ranking and, you know, have them compare and say how, what's the difference. I know you talking to your book about kind of how important it is to simplify the decision-making process. And so I'm just, what are some of your strategies for that, for trying to simplify that decision making process?

David Pereira (19:19)
So you need to know what is priority right now. So you can filter out things. For example, if your product is scaling, what matters most? Is it retention? Is it growth? Customer satisfaction? Which is the game you are playing? Because if you don't know the game you're playing, everything is a priority. Then you need to discuss everything. So that's the reason I like starting with what matters most. Because then you remove everything else. then you can look at, so if growth is what matters most, let's think about what will contribute to that. Then we go from this.

Brian (19:56)
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. I think you're right. I it's the outcome that we're trying to drive, right? I mean, we're rebuilding features or we're proposing to build something so that we have this outcome. And if we're not really driving that outcome, then we're wasting our time. We're not really doing what we're trying to do. Yeah, that's a great point. I know one of the other points you talked about in your book is kind of this idea of periodically doing product health checks.

David Pereira (20:12)
Exactly.

Brian (20:23)
And that was kind of an interesting new concept for me. I not heard that really spelled out in any way. Can you help the listeners kind of understand what you mean by a product health check?

David Pereira (20:34)
For me, it's a falling. We may start doing things without challenging them. We don't know if they are good, we don't know if they are bad. We know how to do them. And then that becomes our routine, our habit. On Monday we do this, on Tuesday we do that, on Wednesday we do the other. And we keep doing, and they give some results. But the problem is, is it the right thing? So I like stepping back. and looking at a few aspects so we can say, where do we stand? And then you may uncover something that is, I'm not doing it or something that I'm doing that contributes to a bad result. I always ask teams, when was the last time you retired a feature? And sometimes I hear only crickets. And then I say, when was the last time? I say, we never retired a feature. Said, what is your definition of a good product? And some people tell me, well, a good product is the one you have all features you need. There's nothing else to add. We're not there yet. And then I asked them, can you open Google? How many features do you see in the homepage? For me a good product is the one you have nothing else to remove. It's a bit different. So when you have these health checks, you have the moment of challenging, having a different perspective. And then you have the chance of saying, I want to change. I want to do different. Then you can improve how you work.

Brian (22:10)
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it too, because you're right. we're, you know, I think about this oftentimes when I talk to people about, you know, kind of their vision or even their customers and users. And really, if you can't understand or you can't really define who it is you're targeting or what it is you're trying to achieve, we shouldn't be doing it, right? We should stop and understand those things first before we move forward. I know one of the other things that you'll you talk about in the book is kind the feature obsessed or feature focused mindset. And just kind of wondering, you what kind of practical advice could you give to different product owners, product managers that are struggling in some way with that feature focused mindset?

David Pereira (22:57)
Ask more questions. That's where I start. Whenever you come with a feature, you say, what is that for? What does it enable the user? What would be the other options? Let me give you an example. In one of the places I worked, we realized that we had trouble with signup. And then someone came with an idea. Of course we have a problem. Because, let me do this again. Of course we have a problem. Because... We have to create a login all the time. If we have social login, then it's amazing. And then we put the Google login there. And we said, with Google login, we will simplify the sign up process. Nothing happened. Sign up rate remained the same. Then I started interviewing people who came to our website, but didn't sign up. What I learned from them was, I don't understand your value proposition. And then you asked me to create a user, you're going to load me with emails. Why am I going to do that? I'm not going to do it. And then I realized that the friction was something else. The value proposition was unclear and they didn't want to give their data. So we could put whatever login method, it would not help. We started with the wrong question.

Brian (24:17)
Yeah, that's a great example. I appreciate you sharing that because I think that's a common problem I think we have in the product area is kind of we see a response or we see that something's not going the way that we thought. And I know I can have the inclination at least to jump to what I think is the reason behind it. without actually verifying that that's the reason behind it. And that's a great example, right? mean, hey, we thought if we add a sign up and do it through Google, that's going to remove friction. It'll make it easier for people to sign up and we'll get more signups. Well, not if they don't really understand what your value is and why would I come back to this site? Why do I want to get emails from you? I'm not clicking on the button to go through giving you my Google information if you haven't sold me. Right? Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point to make. Well, the only other thing I'd say is I know one of the kind of time-honored discussion topics here when we talk about this stuff is really people who focus more on the output and getting distracted by outputs versus really focusing on value. What kind of advice would you give to people who either don't really understand the difference or find themselves kind of slipping back into being more focused on output versus value.

David Pereira (25:53)
Talk about assumptions. We all assume something is gonna happen. Sometimes it's just in our subconscious. We need to bring to our conscious level. For example, we say, this feature is gonna be a success because, then come your assumption, because customers want, because customers will understand how to use it, because the business can collect value. These are assumptions. And then you can say, How can I test these assumptions before I invest time into creating the feature? Then you learn.

Brian (26:29)
Yeah, I agree. That's so important. Honestly, that's one of the biggest paradigm shifts I think I went through as a product owner is that kind of shift in understanding these things in my backlog, they're assumptions. They're not requirements. They're not things that have to happen. They are things that could possibly happen. And the idea is to determine if they're the right thing to happen or not. And if not, then we should move on. Well, this is awesome. I think the books, the topic of your book sounds really fascinating and I hope everyone goes to check that out. It's called, Untrapping Product Teams. And again, David Pereira is the author here. We're put links to all this into our show notes. So if you wanna click on that and find out more, we'll put you in the right place so you can find out more. just, I'll give you kind of a sampling here just so you kind of understand my... My own boss here, Mike Cohn, has a quote here about it that says it's his new favorite product management book. So it's just, he's got people like Marty Kagan, Martin Dalmigeon that's kind of weighed in on this. Petra Willie has given quotes about this. So there's lots of big names that have read this and given it good reviews and said this is a really important work in the product area. Really encourage you to check that out. David, I can't thank you enough. Thanks for making time to come on the show.

David Pereira (27:59)
Glad to be here.

What makes a team intelligent? Brian and Linda Rising explore the surprising factors that foster group intelligence, from psychological safety to diversity, backed by groundbreaking research from MIT and Google.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Agile thought leader Linda Rising to explore the concept of group intelligence. They dive into what makes teams intelligent, discussing the importance of diversity, psychological safety, and social perceptiveness.

Using research from MIT and Google, Linda also highlights how storytelling and a growth mindset can enhance team dynamics, leading to more effective and innovative collaboration.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Linda Rising
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising
MIT Center For Collective Intelligence
Project Aristotle
The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmonson
Amy Edmonson’s TED Talks
3 ways to better connect with your coworkers - Mark T. Rivera’s TED Talk
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Agile For Leaders
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Linda Rising is an internationally recognized consultant, speaker, and author with a Ph.D. in object-based design metrics. Known for her expertise in agile development, retrospectives, and the intersection of neuroscience and software, Linda has authored five books and numerous articles. In 2020, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Agility Forum for her impactful contributions to the industry.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here with you for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I am with you as I always am, Brian Milner. And I wanted to introduce you today to someone I think you're really gonna enjoy here on this episode. I have the one and only Linda Rising with me. Linda, thank you so much for coming on.

Linda Rising (00:09)
Okay. It is my pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a beautiful day here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Brian (00:32)
In Nash Vegas, yes. I actually spent a couple years in Nash Vegas. So I know that area back in the day, back in the day, because I worked at Opryland. So that'll tell you how long ago it was. Yeah, back in the dark times, right? But Linda, for those, if anyone who might not be aware, Linda is an author. She is...

Linda Rising (00:33)
Yeah! wow okay

Brian (00:58)
really what people would call an agile luminary. She has been involved with this movement for quite a while and has really, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say shaped the conversation around this a lot with her research and other things that she's provided. we wanted to have her on because she, well, because it's Linda Rising, right? We wanted to have her on for that, but. Recently, she spoke at the Scrum Gathering, the regional Scrum Gathering that took place in Stockholm, and her topic just sounded really fascinating. I thought it would be fascinating for us to talk about. It was a topic of group intelligence. So Linda, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there like me that when they heard that the first time thought, I have no idea what that means. What does group intelligence mean?

Linda Rising (01:43)
Yeah. Actually, normally when I do anything, give a keynote or an interview on a podcast or the interviewer or the person who's inviting me will say, what would you like to talk about? That's what you did. What would you like to talk about with the idea that I could come up with a list of things I was interested in that I wanted to talk about because I knew something about it.

Brian (02:09)
Yep, it's true.

Linda Rising (02:20)
But in this case, no, it was, want you to be the opening keynote for this amazing gathering in Stockholm. and by the way, we want you to talk about group intelligence. So. That was about a year ago and I thought to myself, I don't know anything about, well, maybe I do. Maybe I do know something about group intelligence. But I have spent the past year getting ready for that talk. It was just a few weeks ago and along the way, what I found was it pulled together the research around this topic. pulled together a lot of things that I have been thinking about and it is still not over. I had to give that talk, there was a date for that, but now there are little threads that, as you say, I'm following those down various rabbit holes because they're connected to other things that I'm interested in. So this turned out to be, even though I didn't pick it and I didn't know a whole lot about it, It's turned out to be a great introduction to a different way of thinking. So we know what intelligence is, I think. Don't you? Do you know you have an idea? And aren't you intelligent?

Brian (03:41)
That's so awesome. Well, that's a quite a loaded question, right?

Linda Rising (03:53)
Of course you are and and so are our listeners our listeners are intelligent and what's interesting is that the psychologists who measure that They don't really have a definition for intelligence. What they do is they can test for it So have you ever had you know an intelligence test You know, an IQ test. Have you? Have you ever had one?

Brian (04:25)
You know what, I don't think I ever have, but I know my wife has, my daughters have, I'm very familiar with them, but I can't point back to one to say, hey, I know what my score was.

Linda Rising (04:28)
I'll bet you have. Well, sometimes you're given that test at a particular point, maybe in high school, and they didn't tell you that it was an intelligence test. You just took it along with the other battery of tests that you were taking at the time. And maybe they didn't tell you, you have an IQ of 145. They didn't tell you how smart you were.

Brian (04:47)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (05:06)
but somebody, somewhere, somehow along the way, they did. They measured it. And that's without having a definition for whatever it is. So what that test does is it says you're pretty good at solving a bunch of problems. And that's what the test is.

Brian (05:17)
That's amazing.

Linda Rising (05:32)
it asks you to look at some math problems, logic problems, spatial problems, different kinds of problems, and you either solve them pretty well or not so well, and when they are finished with that, that score on that test says something about how well you do at solving those problems. And that's what they're calling intelligence.

Brian (06:03)
I think I see where you're going with this because to me, if we're going to try to be very precise with words on that, I would say that sounds more like education. If I know how to solve a particular kind of math problem, that's because I've been educated to learn that. It's not a measure of my...

Linda Rising (06:13)
Yeah. Yep, yep. And so those tests, yeah, those tests do have a bias. They're biased toward people who have a certain kind of education biased against people who maybe didn't have that kind of education. Also, it doesn't even begin to talk about music. Here I am in Music City. Doesn't talk about musical talent.

Brian (06:43)
Yeah

Linda Rising (06:46)
It doesn't talk about your ability to perform, say, some sports activity, whether you're going to be a great basketball player or a baseball player. There are a lot of things that intelligence tests don't even, they don't even think about. Now, it doesn't mean this isn't a valid exercise because those IQ tests have been around a long time and they do measure what they measure, they measure it very well. And they do correlate with a lot of performance activities. In fact, if you were hiring somebody, the absolute best thing, if you could just do one thing, would be to give them an IQ test. That correlates most strongly with any kind of performance on the job. So it's a valid test, even if it has some biases, some problems. So that's individual intelligence and we call that IQ. So now the question is, can you do that for a group or a team?

Brian (07:53)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (08:03)
Could you say this group, could we measure it somehow? And if so, would it have the same kind of validity? That is, if they do well on this test, would that mean they would do well in the workplace? If we had that, then could we use it to say, all right, this team. is really going to be great for whatever it is that we wanted them to do. Is that possible? So obviously the answer is yes, or I wouldn't be here talking about it. Yeah. So the research is fascinating and it would take a long time to actually go into it, but it was started at MIT. The organization is called the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. and they have been doing this now for over a decade. So this is not brand new out of the box. We're not sure where this is going. This has been happening and has been happening successfully. They do have a test. They can give it to a group. And what they find is that if the group does well, that group will also do well on other, just like IQ, other kinds of things that the test measures. And so, yes, they can measure group intelligence.

Brian (09:38)
Very interesting. This is really fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. I'm going to interrupt you for just a moment because I know, and forgive me if I'm taking you off track with where you were intending to go. But I know, having heard some of your other talks in the past on agile mindset and what you've written about, I know there's kind of this fundamental idea of the fixed verse.

Linda Rising (09:39)
It is interesting. Yeah. No, no, no, it's okay.

Brian (10:05)
growth mindset and the idea of intelligence being not necessarily a thing you're born with, but really something that you have the potential to change and grow. And how does that translate then to the group environment and the group's intelligence?

Linda Rising (10:23)
Yeah, so that's a great lead in because the next part of it was, well, okay, so we have this test and we can give it to a group, but we'd like to tease out some attributes of teams to say, you know, the teams that do really well on this test, they all seem to have, and they found there were three things that characterized

Brian (10:26)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (10:52)
intelligent group. The first one was called social perceptiveness. That is, are the people on the group, are they able to relate to each other? If one of the persons in the groups having a struggle for some reason, are they able to pick up on that? It's kind of hard to say, well what is that social perceptiveness? and we can come back to that, but that's first on the list. The second attribute is that when they have any kind of a discussion, that everybody talks. And that's pretty easy to see, and I know that you've probably been on teams as I have, where really not everybody talked, where maybe mostly one or two

Brian (11:24)
Yeah. Okay.

Linda Rising (11:49)
You know the loud people they did all the talking and the rest of us We just kind of sat in the corner and we said well, you know, whatever Yeah We've been there. Well, have we have we have seen that and I don't know how you're gonna feel about the third one But we all are concerned about diversity

Brian (12:00)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Linda Rising (12:17)
We know that diversity is an issue. All organizations are struggling with the best way to deal with that. But the third attribute has to do with the percentage of women on the team.

Brian (12:34)
Really?

Linda Rising (12:35)
So this isn't like 50-50. This doesn't mean that you should have some women. It means the more women you have, the better. Ooh. You wanna think about that one?

Brian (12:38)
Yeah. You know what? I would not argue with that one bit because all the women that I've had in my life have been the most intelligent people I have known. So I would wholeheartedly concur with that. We're just a bunch of knuckleheads, the guys are. So I completely...

Linda Rising (12:58)
Ha!

Brian (13:17)
You know, I'm having some fun, but you're right. I can see that, you know? Like, I could see how that would be a really distinguishing characteristics.

Linda Rising (13:22)
Wow! So the researchers say maybe it's really not a gender thing because women are very good at social perceptiveness. And maybe what this third attribute, and they did a lot of statistical analyses, you you have to really dig down into the statistics and we don't want to do that. Maybe this third attribute is really a reflection of the first. And then if you, and here we're going to come to your growth mindset, if you could work with the people on the team who were not women, but who were these nerdy guys, know, could you somehow have them grow, improve, get better at social perceptiveness, then that would have the same effect as having more women on the team. And that's kind of where they are right now is can you do this? Are they equivalent? Are they really measuring the same thing? But they know that somehow that's what you've got to have is this ability to read. It's called theory of mind. Read the minds of the people on the team and that typically You know, we're stereotyping here. Typically men are not as good. So can you, could you, can you grow that characteristic? Can you get better? Can you get better at that?

Brian (15:06)
Yeah, I'll take a slight little side trail here and say that that makes perfect sense to me because one of the things that I found when I was doing my research on neurodiversity and specifically autism was that there's a book out there that I think I've shared on the podcast before, but it's called Autism in Heels. And basically the point of the book is to really examine autism in women. And one of the key points that's made in the book is the fact that when you see statistics about autism, you'll find that there's a huge number, there's a disparity. There's a large number of men, of males that are diagnosed and a few, a smaller percentage of females. And it gives the impression when you look at the data that you might think, well, this is a male thing, right? It's something that happens much more often than male. But this book is making the point that really,

Linda Rising (16:02)
Yeah.

Brian (16:04)
the criteria that was set aside to designate whether someone was autistic or not was really geared towards how it presents in males. So women were vastly underdiagnosed and still are to this day vastly underdiagnosed. And one of the things that makes it difficult to diagnose them is women are better at masking their symptoms. very much, they adapt to the environment around them. They pick up on the people around them.

Linda Rising (16:18)
Yeah.

Brian (16:34)
and they will mask the things that maybe are naturally a part of them, but they've learned in other parts of life how to do that. And so they're applying that to their autism as well. So that makes perfect sense to me.

Linda Rising (16:43)
Yeah. Yep, exactly. And of course, if we want to talk about women who have this tendency or on the spectrum, we have to mention Temple Grandin, who is one of the most famous female autistics in the world. I she's done more to gain attention for this problem, and she's definitely female. yeah, it's not it's not a male thing. But you're right that what's happened is that the women have had a growth mindset and whatever they inherited or were born with, they've done a better job at learning how to adapt given what they had as a limitation, adapting to working with others and using that as a strength. So that means that possibly, We could do that kind of thing to improve our teams if we included men in, well, what would it be? Would it be a training program? Would it be just coaching? Maybe this could be the job for a coach can certainly watch. The behavior of the team can notice, for instance, for that second attribute, is the discussion.

Brian (17:54)
Ha Linda

Rising (18:10)
Does that involve everybody equally? That could be a first step. And to encourage the growth in that direction. So one of the experiments that was done to follow on with that was to try to get male members of the team who didn't do well, you can actually measure social perceptiveness. And you mentioned autism, one of the tests. for autism is called reading the mind in the eyes. And with that test, you can show that people are better than others. And so maybe this could help us identify people who might benefit from this experimental approach. And that is to have something like, you know, I'm a patterns fan. So a collection of patterns that we used to talk about back in the day was written by Joshua Kerievsky and it was for running a study group where you read a book together a chapter at a time and you talk about it. So in the experiment the hypothesis was that reading a book together would improve the theory of mind or the social perceptiveness if it were a book that was fiction.

Brian (19:37)
Huh.

Linda Rising (19:37)
It's a story. A story. There's a hero and a beautiful princess and an adventurer and a bad guy and a good guy. in reading that, you learn to identify with the characters. And you talk about it. What was the character feeling when the handsome prince ran in to rescue the what was he thinking?

Brian (19:39)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (20:05)
So in a structured study group situation like that, reading fiction together and the results so far are positive but not enormous. It does help. It does help.

Brian (20:20)
Yeah. Yeah, I can see that, because you're trying to collectively interpret and you're getting a peek into someone else's mind of how they might interpret a situation and that can help you to interpret other situations. Yeah, I can see that.

Linda Rising (20:23)
May not. Yeah! Yeah, especially if someone was not in the habit of doing that. There are a lot of people who say, I've never even stopped to think about how the other members of my team are feeling.

Brian (20:43)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (20:56)
So attached to all of this is an enormous project that Google also started called Project Aristotle. And their idea was we wanna know what the secret is, what makes great teams. And they looked at everything. They spent years. mean, Google collects data, data they've got. and statisticians and analysts, they got it. And they spent years collecting and analyzing. And the summary at the end of all that was they found nothing.

Brian (21:38)
Hahaha

Linda Rising (21:40)
Did you read that? Did you read about that study? Yeah.

Brian (21:44)
I I'm familiar with that study. I really like what they did. Because when you have that kind of data available to you across cultures, across business units, it was an ambitious kind of study. I'm really thankful that they did it because I think they had some good findings there that came out of that as well. you're right.

Linda Rising (21:52)
Yeah! Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, they didn't find anything.

Brian (22:12)
Right, they thought it was gonna be, you know, it's a skill, it's the right mix of skills that makes it a high performing team or expertise and none of that really had a bearing. Yeah. Yeah.

Linda Rising (22:15)
Get off! And what was interesting about all of this is it sort of all came together because the folks at Google kind of looked over and said, well, look at what these folks at MIT are doing. And they said, maybe we're just not looking at the right thing. And they had talked about this social perceptiveness and what is that anyway? And it was kind of serendipity at about this time. Amy Edmondson wrote a book called The Fearless Organization, and it was about something she called psychological safety. And it was bigger than what the folks at MIT had identified. This has, I am free, I feel safe. Well, that would mean that you could speak up in a discussion and that would make the discussion more, okay, now we would think about what, I mean, what she talked about kind of put a big blanket around all of it and said, hey, I think we might be all talking about this. And the folks at Google said, well, you know, that makes sense. Maybe that's what we're looking for. And how do we do it? How do we do this? So your listeners might wanna just wander out to the Google site because now Google's been very transparent about this. How do you make this work? How do you bring about this psychological safety? How do you get people feel free to talk and to discussion? How do you help people be aware? of what other people are feeling. And they've got a whole raft of suggestions for managers, suggestions for team members, for, you know, and they're really all singing the same song. It's about this awareness of others, feeling that you are safe and that thinking about what other people are thinking. can lead your team to behave in more intelligent way.

Brian (24:41)
That's so, that's awesome. Right, right.

Linda Rising (24:41)
It's kind like a miracle. It's like a miracle. It all just came together. They weren't planning that. know, here at MIT, going one direction, Google going another direction. Here's Amy Edmondson at Harvard, and that it all kind of came together.

Brian (24:48)
That's awesome. You came together now. Yeah, Amy Edmondson is definitely one of my heroes. we've tried to get her on. We tried to get her to come on, but I know that there's layers to get to people like that. so if anyone's listening and has an end to Amy Edmondson, tell her that this is a welcome, this is a psychologically safe podcast to come on. We'd love to have her, but yeah.

Linda Rising (25:07)
Yeah. Well, yeah. think she did go out and talk to Google. I think there's a Google talk about psychological safety. So they did have her come in and give them some ideas, some suggestions or yeah. And she's on to failure now because her book, After Fearless Organization, which was about psychological safety, the one that, in fact, I just finished it is about failure.

Brian (25:44)
Yeah. That,

Linda Rising (25:59)
and their case studies of failures and what can you do about failure and yeah but anyway so she she's on she's she's on to whatever but yeah.

Brian (26:07)
That's awesome. Yes, she does great research and it's it's chock full in her book So I highly recommend her writing to anyone who's listening if that if this interests you Yeah, definitely read Amy Edmondson's work. You'll really enjoy it

Linda Rising (26:14)
Yeah Yeah. So, and if you do, then the story is not over, it's still going, which is, not just Amy Edmondson, but there's a fellow named Kevin Dunbar. This is not Robin Dunbar who did the 150 is kind of the magic number. This is a different Dunbar, same last name, but he did a lot of studies about thinking and. especially in science, how do scientists think? And in particular, he was interested in failure. And you know that as a scientist, you propose some hypothesis and then you test it in an experiment and then you stand back and you do an analysis and you say, well, did this work out or not? And he found that some scientists don't... like it when things don't go well. What a surprise, huh?

Brian (27:26)
Yeah, right.

Linda Rising (27:28)
Yeah, and they just ignore it. They either pretend it didn't happen or they put it in a drawer saying, we'll come back and, you know, we'll look at it later. But some scientists do a really good job of accepting that failure, working with it, and building on it. saying, hey, this is something we didn't think about. Maybe we can, they, you know, and they're off and running. It doesn't slow them down at all. And it turns out that the scientists who have that characteristic, who are able to do that, are scientists in groups. and they're in groups that are intelligent. They're diverse and open. They let everybody speak. They think about what other people are thinking if they're discouraged or not with this bad result. So the characteristics of those groups of scientists who do well with failure is the same.

Brian (28:22)
you

Linda Rising (28:40)
as the groups that MIT identified, the groups that Google is trying to grow. And I think it's really what we want in Agile development. We want groups like that. Not just because we think, intelligence is what. No. We want groups that have that characteristic. We want groups that feel psychologically safe. We want groups that feel free.

Brian (28:54)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (29:08)
to express their ideas. We want groups of people who are aware of what other people are thinking. That's what we want.

Brian (29:16)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's so cool.

Linda Rising (29:18)
So they're all talking about the same thing. They may be using different words, but they are really, and one thing that we might wanna note right here is that all these different researchers made the same mistake in the beginning. And it's the same mistake organizations make. Is they thought in the beginning that what makes a smart team is smart people. Wrong. Not that you don't want smart people.

Brian (29:48)
Yeah. Right.

Linda Rising (29:53)
But that's just an okay thing to have. You can have a team of very smart people that doesn't have any of these other characteristics that is not intelligent as a group. So I think we really have to wake up and realize, first of all, that we're doing that, that we're valuing IQ or individual intelligence, smartness, you went to this school or you got that particular SAT score. It has nothing to do with that. It's not that there's no correlation, but it's weak, it's very weak. It's much better to have people who have these other characteristics.

Brian (30:33)
Yeah, let me just, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let me connect it just a second to maybe someone who's listening who's a Scrum Master or someone like that, right? You might hear this and think, those foolish leadership people, they make these kinds of mistakes. I wouldn't make that kind of mistake. I know better than this kind of thing, right? Well, how much emphasis are you placing on whether your team knows all the details of what they should be doing in Scrum versus... helping them to know and understand each other, communicate with each other, right? How much effort and energy are you putting into those things versus the facts, right? I think that's where it can hit home for us is, these other areas, I think are, as you said, really much stronger predictors of success. And I think as Agilist, that's where we should be pouring our attention into because that's what's going to make the most significant difference.

Linda Rising (31:40)
Yeah. And I think since software development and I've been in it for a long time has had this really strong emphasis on smartness. We like smart people. And it's not that that's a bad thing necessarily. It's that it's not enough. So as a mathematician, you could say necessary, but not sufficient. Not even close. and that all of these researchers all said the same thing, that we thought it was going to be about smart people. We thought it was about IQ, that teams of smart people would be smart. And you and I both know that's not true.

Brian (32:32)
Right, right, right. I've been on some teams with some very smart people that were horrible teams.

Linda Rising (32:35)
Yes. Yes, yes, exactly. And I guess without belaboring it or beating it up, what's happening to me right now is that in reading about all of these different research activities, more and more things start to bubble up. that sort of are like the glue that holds all of this together. And the one that just, it just happened yesterday has to do with brainstorming. So I've been on a ramp to not, you know, I'm against brainstorming because there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't work. They've done experiments, they've said, okay, here's a group of people and they're gonna get together and they're gonna come up with ideas. Okay, we know how many ideas they came up with and whether they're any good or not. And now let's just take individuals and tell them individually, you come up with ideas and then we'll just measure. And the results are always the same, the individuals do better. So I have come up with explanations for that and I'm like, okay, well here's what. Well, I was wrong. Because in the research, it just was like an accident. I just happened to discover it in one of the papers that the groups that are intelligent, the groups that are aware, the groups that embrace failure, the groups that do well also do better at brainstorming. Why is that? Well, because everybody feels free to talk. Everybody feels psychologically safe. Everybody's aware of how other people are feeling and that impacts how they come up with ideas or think about things that other people suggest. So as a group, they do superbly at brainstorming. So it's not the brainstorming, it's the group and how they...

Brian (34:43)
Yeah. Ha

Linda Rising (34:48)
get in a room together and discuss things and share ideas. And so, you know, I hate to say this is gonna be the answer to all our prayers. And of course we still don't, we're still working on, well, how do you do this? How do you make this happen? And I remember a story. It's in fact, it's in one of the documents, I'm trying to think now on the Google website. It's a story of a team.

Brian (34:58)
Hahaha Yeah.

Linda Rising (35:18)
where the team leader tells the other people on the team that he has a terminal illness. And when he did that, everybody else on the team realized that they didn't really know anything about this guy. And they in turn began to share, well, I'm also having some struggles and here's my story. And going through that. cause that team to move up a notch, if you will, to become more intelligent, to be more aware, to suddenly be a little more respectful of how the discussions were. It was just telling stories about what you're going through so that everyone will be aware of how you feel, what you think is gonna be your...

Brian (35:48)
Yeah.

Linda Rising (36:11)
future in the next six months that they didn't have any training or study groups or they just told stories.

Brian (36:26)
They got to know each other as humans. And it's amazing how often we forget that that's who we work with. At least right now, we work with other human beings. And I hope that never changes, because that's where the best ideas, that's where the best creativity comes from. And yeah, it's fascinating, but you're absolutely right. I can see that point.

Linda Rising (36:28)
Yes, exactly. think for me, this is all, it's been really a hopeful journey because in the beginning, I wasn't even sure how it would go. I didn't know anything about the intelligence of groups. And in the beginning, it was all, okay, here's what MIT is doing and reading through, I mean, there were a lot of papers that I slogged through and it wasn't until about halfway through that, I discovered. Project Aristotle and I saw, this really connects. And now all these other things start to bubble up that really make a lot of sense. And of course, that it fits. It fits with Agile. It fits with the Agile message that the big things like that cause you, especially if you've had any experience with Agile, to sort of wake up and say, how do I miss this?

Brian (37:50)
Ha ha.

Linda Rising (37:52)
I should have seen this and it's news to me. So, wow, we're all still learning, I guess, aren't we?

Brian (38:03)
Yeah, I mean, you get presented with something like that and think, I've kind of intuitively known this all along, but I didn't have words for it. And now, now there's a vocabulary that can describe it. And I agree, right? That's exactly what it is. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Well, Linda, this is, this is such a fascinating discussion. And, you know, it's, I had no idea where, you know, group intelligence would lead us, but that it's all just fascinating.

Linda Rising (38:09)
Yeah

Brian (38:32)
the different threads of the spider web and where this kind of ends up. So I know it led you in a lot of places with your research and everything else. I really, really appreciate you sharing that with us and helping us to try to understand a little bit of the journey you've been on and kind of discovering this over the past year or so is what you said.

Linda Rising (38:53)
Yep. And I was going to say, anybody, I know most people don't want to spend the time reading the original research papers, and I don't blame you, that does take a lot of, you know, have a lot of investment in that. But there are some, I would call them sort of lightweight. There's some excellent, excellent Harvard Business Review articles that do a very good job of talking about. what is happening at MIT, what is happening at Google, that kind of a high-level summary, like Harvard Business Review does that like nobody else. And of course, there are TED Talks that Amy Edmondson has given, and there are all the Google Talks, of course, are also out on YouTube. And she has been to Google as well, so you can go listen to what she has to say there. So if you want to dig into this for yourself, there's a lot that you can get without having to read the book or read all the research papers.

Brian (39:57)
Yeah, we'll try to link to as much of this as we can in the show notes of this. So anyone who's listening, if you want to go down one of these rabbit holes like we talked about, maybe we can point the direction and say, hey, try this one. So we'll also include in the show notes some links to some of Linda's work as well so that you can find out more about her and maybe read one of her books as well and see some of the

Linda Rising (40:11)
Yeah!

Brian (40:27)
some of the insights she's already brought to this Agile community. And if you like what you heard here, I know you'll like her books as well. So Linda, thank you so much for making your time. I know it's very busy. Thank you for coming on the show.

Linda Rising (40:41)
It's been my pleasure. Can we close with some good wishes, some thoughts and prayers for all the people who are in Western North Carolina or in Florida who have just been two horrible disasters and are going to be a long time recovering. And that includes my good friend and co-writer Mary Lynn Mans who's in Asheville, North Carolina. So fingers crossed, prayers, good thoughts.

Brian (41:11)
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly concur with you on that. So I agree. Well, thanks again, Linda.

Join us as we explore how Agile in Color is breaking down barriers in the Agile community and empowering people of color through mentorship, support, and leadership. Learn how you can be an ally and foster a more inclusive environment in your own Agile journey.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner is joined by Nosa Oyegun and Luria Lindauer from Agile in Color to discuss the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the Agile community.

They dive into the mission of Agile in Color, barriers to entry and success for people of color in Agile, and the role of allies in fostering a more inclusive industry. The conversation also highlights the power of mentorship, vulnerability, and community support to drive meaningful change in organizations.

The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage with Agile in Color and contribute to the movement for a more diverse Agile community.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Nosa Oyegun
Louria Lindauer
Agile in Color
The Canary Code by Ludmila N. Praslova, PhD
Email For Details of Coaching with Mountain Goat Software
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule

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 [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Nosa Oyegun has over 15 years of experience, and is a seasoned Agile Coach passionate about empowering cross-functional teams, removing impediments, and championing customer-centric solutions. Skilled in Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban, she focuses on fostering collaboration, driving value delivery, and nurturing growth for individuals, teams, and executives.

Louria Lindauer is a dynamic enterprise strategist and coach with over 25 years of experience, known for transforming complex challenges into clear, actionable solutions. Certified in DEI strategy, Agility, and Emotional Intelligence Leadership, she helps leaders build vision, empathy, and bold organizational cultures where courageous truth and sustainable change thrive.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in, Agile Mentors. We are back. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. And today, I have with me actually two guests. I know, you're shocked, right? I only ever really usually have one, but I have two. Two for the price of one today, right? I have with me Nosa Oyegun and Luria Lindauer. Welcome in, guys.

Nosa Oyegun (00:27)
Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Louria Lindauer (00:30)
Yes.

Brian (00:30)
Delighted, absolutely delighted to have you guys here. And I hope I said your names correctly. If I didn't, please correct me. OK, awesome. Well, for the listeners, I did get help before. just so you know. But we're here because both Nosa and Luria work for, or are associated with, I should say, associated with an organization called Agile in Color.

Nosa Oyegun (00:37)
You nailed it.

Louria Lindauer (00:38)
You did. You did it.

Brian (00:56)
And I've known several people that have been in and around and involved with that organization. And I just thought it would be a good idea to have them come on and tell us a little bit about it and kind of help us understand a little bit about the mission and purpose there, what they're trying to accomplish with Agile and Color. So let's start with that. Give us kind of a, if you had to describe it, why does Agile and Color exist?

Nosa Oyegun (01:24)
I would say Agile and Color exists for people who look like us, right? Now, does it include everybody? Yes, we do have members who do not necessarily look like us on the outside, but we all bleed red, right? And so it is a group of like-minded individuals who have come together and said, how do we support our community? How do we support those who are already in the industry? And how do we support those who are trying to get into the industry? Because one of the things that we've realized within the community is there are so many people who might want to get into the industry, but do not have the resources. And so we consider ourselves that resource hub to be able to allow and say, hey, why don't you reach out to this? Why don't you contact this? But that is the sole purpose of being able to mentor and be mentored, just like you always say, Brian.

Brian (02:15)
Love it, love it, thank you. Yeah, that's awesome, that's awesome. That's a great mission and a great purpose. I know, in today's world, I think there's a lot of confusion around kind of the diversity, equity, inclusion kind of whole topic area and maybe some controversy that may be unfounded and just kind of silly. I'm just kind of curious. I mentioned both your perspectives on this. Why do you feel like really that diversity, equity, inclusiveness, why do you feel like that's an important thing for Agilist, for Agile teams, for Agile organizations?

Louria Lindauer (02:48)
Hmm. Okay, so this is one of my loves. do a lot of push-packing inclusion. It's important for no matter who you look like for everyone. I'm sure you love a sport. What sport do you love? Okay, so you go with a group.

Brian (03:14)
gosh, football. Football's my sport.

Louria Lindauer (03:18)
Going with me to a sporting event, I'm not your people, right? But you wanna go with your people. You wanna go have some fun so you don't have to explain why the ball just went out of bounds and why he's down, is he hurt? And I'm asking all these goofy questions, right? And the reason it's so important is because we need diversity of thought. Because in any, like let's think of a group and let's take away the one dimensional just color, which it is very important. That is a important part. It's a part of who I am as a human being. We are multi-dimensional. I'm sure that you're just not Brian. I'm sure you're just like Brian with the glasses. There's so much that encompasses you. know, like me, I'm a mom, I'm a daughter. You know, I'm an agilism diversity, I include them so many different things. And to be able to have that diversity of thought allows us to have cross-functional teams. But the biggest thing is it's a sense of belonging. So I don't have to explain why maybe my hair is like this or the challenges that I embrace in an organization. There's systematic discriminations in almost all organizations. Because that's just where we, as we change, there's still things that were a certain way. And so now what's important is that we start to recognize those. And you may not see them. So like, I'll give you an example. If you came, well, I was gonna say to my dinner, but my family's very diverse. My dad is... white and Jewish. But anyway, if you go to where I am, you know, into my family and we were in a group, I'm the majority. And so we welcome you in. In the organizations, Aladi's organization, was the only, I have a background in South American, the only Black woman, period. And as we move higher, it becomes very lonely. And even CEOs become lonely because they're the only one.

Brian (04:47)
Hahaha.

Louria Lindauer (05:15)
And so when we get together, it's about leadership opportunities, but it's also about that sense of belonging. We can talk about things that other people may not understand. Because this is about people of color as well that come and we can share. It's so important to have a place where we can talk about the things we want to talk about, just like you want to talk about football facts without explaining to me all that stuff I don't understand.

Brian (05:40)
Right, right, that makes sense. Nosa, anything that you would add to that?

Nosa Oyegun (05:43)
would even say that the interesting part about it is, like Loria alluded to, is the fact that we all have the story. And so when we all get into the room, what's that shared story that doesn't create that imposter syndrome? Or just that life experience? I can look at Loria and say, hey, I'm having a bad hair day, and she knows what I'm talking about. And so it's the beauty of having that shared experience and being able to say, it's a safe space. You can talk about your fears and we can lock arms together and make this happen for you.

Brian (06:23)
Yeah, now this is so good. Yeah. Yeah, please.

Louria Lindauer (06:23)
And can I add one more thing is the beauty also, Nosa and I are very different also. So I learned from her. She has a totally different background from me. A lot of people think because we're all per se like black, we come from very different. I have a friend, she's Nigerian and she came here at a very young age and she did not understand why people were like almost, she felt targeted. as a Black person. She was like, what is going on with all of these isms and race? I don't get it. And so that very different experience opens up insights and perspectives that even happen with people of the same color because people know that people are different. We're all different. Yeah.

Brian (07:13)
That's really good. I mean, for the listeners here, I mean, I wanna be real, right? I want us to have some honest discussion here because I think you have to have honest discussion here when we talk about things like this. what you guys said, I think is a really important consideration because we all have our own. kind of biases that we may not even be aware of. And even saying that word, I know there's probably some people who are listening who think, OK, now you're calling me this. No, I'm not trying to place a label on anyone, right? If you can set that aside for a moment, set aside the triggering and just not allow yourself to go to that place for just a moment and just consider, right? The point you make is a great one that we tend to want to find likeness, right? We want to have someone we identify with that that person's like me, so they understand me. They know what I'm going through. They know my considerations. In the past, what I would hear a lot in organizations is this term about they're not a good culture fit, right? Somebody is not a good culture fit. And that kind of language can sometimes, you know, kind of belie something underneath it. It's like, they're just not like us. And, you know, that's the issue, right? That's not a problem that they're not like you. That's actually a strength, right? That's a good thing. You don't want everyone all thinking the same.

Nosa Oyegun (08:47)
Yeah. Exactly. Diversity matters.

Brian (09:01)
You want people who, yeah, that bring different perspectives, different paths, different cultures, that makes us better. So I really hope people consider that, right? And like I said, we all have sort of innate bias. That doesn't mean racism. That just means bias. Right, everyone. I mean, we talk about bias in product owner classes that, you know, like,

Louria Lindauer (09:08)
Yep. Okay. everyone.

Brian (09:30)
a sunk cost fallacy and things like that. That's a bias, you know, and we all have biases whether we recognize them or not. And I think part of the effort in this, from my perspective, is just trying to recognize and overcome those things in all of us, right? Trying to say, where is that boundary line for me? And how do I push past that, right?

Nosa Oyegun (09:32)
Mm-hmm.

Louria Lindauer (09:55)
I would also say there's an awareness that you, my lived experience may be different than yours. And if something happened to me and it didn't happen to you, that it doesn't make it real. So I don't think Brian, you will ever understand the pain of having a baby, but you might just say it's fine. No, it is not. It is you worst pain and you can't describe it. It's something that instead of, if someone feels

Nosa Oyegun (10:07)
Correct.

Louria Lindauer (10:24)
Like if you say something and I feel hurt by it, the always say impact supersedes intent is to listen. And now you become the student. This person also has to speak up and say why that is offensive. And the other person say, it's not really about you. It might be that I got ran over by a bike once and then you say something and it triggers a trauma in me. And so that, you know, when I say, tell people, and if I told no, this is I have to work 150 % as a black woman to, I still, have all these degrees and certifications and years and years. I won't tell my age, years and years, right? And I still, they're like, really? And the other thing, we're talking to a community of practice right now, Agilist, okay? It is how sometimes, how you're in an organization and they're like, there goes those agile people. I know we've all heard it. Like don't pretend like you have,

Brian (10:56)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Louria Lindauer (11:23)
point to you, you've heard it. And the engineering are like, man, here comes his out-y'all coach. It's that type of And if you could step into that, it's just a different context is that it's there. And biases are also, we all have them. And sometimes it is a meaning of safety because something happened to us. know, like my daughter is, she's a teenager, she always says like, teens are bad because she saw teenagers doing bad things.

Nosa Oyegun (11:34)
Absolutely.

Louria Lindauer (11:53)
I'm like, but you're a teenager. That's just a bias that she has. culture fit, I heard you talk about culture fit. Culture fit, sometimes, like Southwest did this. Southwest did where they wanted people who were open-minded and had an agile mindset. Okay? They wanted that leadership. If you came in with a fixed mindset, you didn't fit that culture. But however, what you're alluding to is sometimes people use culture fit. in another way. There's always a yin and a yang, right? And so it's the one that is not right where we're like, it's the culture of it. And, you know, and that's called like a halo bias where we look at people. You can have a HR person and they'll hire 15 new people. And I've had this and I'm in the room and I'm like, all these people, they have different skin colors, but they all are you. They all like they're, they're all introverts. They're all this. They're,

Nosa Oyegun (12:21)
way. Yep.

Brian (12:23)
Right. Yeah.

Louria Lindauer (12:49)
cultural values are the same. They care about labels, they care about power and all these things, they wanna be on time. I'm like, you just hired a bunch of yous. So there's no diversity. And so we still can do that. Diversity and equity inclusion is more than just outside and we look indifferent. Cause I can just hire a bunch of me's and you still won't go anywhere. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Nosa Oyegun (12:58)
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Brian (13:13)
Right, right. Well, so I want to ask you guys this because there's a there's I did some research earlier this year and read this book called The Canary Code that was really focused more on neurodiversity and kind of inclusion programs for the neurodiverse. But one of the things that kind of resonated with me that they pulled from that book that was really something that they pulled from more racial diversity, equity, inclusion programs. was that they divided up to saying that what we're trying to identify is that there are barriers to entry and there's barriers to success. And that started to really resonate with me that there's barriers to just getting your foot in the door. And then there's the barriers that once I'm there, that prevent me from actually being successful. So how does Agile and Color really help in those situations? How do they help with barriers to entry and barriers to success?

Nosa Oyegun (13:52)
Absolutely. First thing I would say is just knowing who you are as an individual. Because it's one thing for us to say, hey, I'm an agilist and I'm in this group, okay, fine. But do I go back to the fact that my foundation, I do have the degrees that I need, the certifications that I need, the education that I need, the experience that I need, the community that I need, right? To thrive in this space that I'm trying to get into. because again, goes back to that imposter syndrome, right? You have an interview, you have a panel interview, and you have nobody in there that looks like you. And you wonder, okay, am I in the right space? Am I in the right place? You know, would they even hear? For example, a lawyer alluded to this. I am originally, my family was originally from Nigeria. A lot of times people joke and they say, no, so you don't have an accent. And I'm like, well, because, you know, but people expect. that if you're talking to a Nigerian or someone who was originally from Nigeria, they have a thick accent. Well, I don't. And actually sometimes don't understand people who do, believe it or not. And so, you you walk into a boardroom or you walk into a meeting and I have to literally program my mindset. so Agile in Color, one of the things we do again that being mentored and mentoring is saying, who are you? Right? Take away your...

Brian (15:16)
haha

Nosa Oyegun (15:34)
limitations, take away the fact that even you're an agilist, put that to the side. Who are you? You you're empowered to do great things. You're empowered to succeed. You're empowered to thrive in whatever organization you choose to go into. And so being able to, again, lock arms together and support each other and remind each other of who we are innately first, and then add on that layer of not only do you know your stuff, right, but you're also educated.

Louria Lindauer (15:40)
Okay.

Nosa Oyegun (16:02)
You're also learned and you're in a community. And that's where our group as a community of practice is really essential. Because when you start hearing other people's stories, know, there are times that we have meetings and we're like, this happened at work and this, this, this. And we're like, you're not the only one that didn't know that. And so again, just being able to come together, remember who we are, one. Two, realize that we do have the skill set to thrive in whatever organization. And then three, to say we have a community that is a safe space. And so Agile and College provides those three steps, right, and more. To say you can come together and meet other people. Yes, we may have been in the industry for years and decades, but I always joke about the fact that

Louria Lindauer (16:41)
Yes. Okay.

Nosa Oyegun (16:47)
Only people who are below six feet below ground level stop learning. We all learn every single day. Brian (16:54) Very true, very well said.

Louria Lindauer (16:54)
Yeah. And we also have some very specific programs, like she was talking about coaching and mentoring. I mentor, I'm professional coach. And also we have a coaching, you can be coached. And that's Noza was talking about, that who you are. So when someone is new, I mentor some very young Agilist. And we have them come in, we set them up with a mentor, and they walk through the program. And we're also in a transition where we're rebuilding a lot of things at Algencolor right now, especially with the change in agility right now. And teaching people how can we use the skills that we have as Algenlists and remarket ourselves. But then we walk. This we help them. I've helped them learn how to interview but a lot of it's self-confidence working on imposter syndrome And we do these one-on-one mentors and coaching. We also have something called colorful voices where I think it notes that she was at the one in new orleans was it Was in global scrum gathering and will be at one in munich in may 2025 And so we help people colorful voices is helping people who have never really maybe spoken, you know, they've never done a speech

Nosa Oyegun (17:52)
Yes.

Louria Lindauer (18:07)
And we help them figure out how do you do that and getting seen to help you through the door. And then we also, because I've had that journey of how do I move up and around? That's what the mentoring is so special about. How do we do that? And the frustration of, you know, some people really want to give up that that being down and you hit a ceiling, it can make you want to give up. it's like. When do we transition? So that coaching and mentoring is really deep and we created a strategy and a plan for people and we walked through, but we do coaching and mentoring because you have to do self and you also have to do techniques because you can have all the techniques in the world. But if you don't know your impact and how to be a leader, okay, thanks. I've been led by super smart with tech and they have no emotional intelligence. And it's like, no, thank you. Please don't do that to me.

Nosa Oyegun (18:56)
Yeah. Yeah. One more gathering that we host as well, share your story. And so we bring in like-minded individuals in the agile space and they could be anywhere from non-tech roles, right, to in the tech space, but have some agile component in there and different roles. So not just coaches. So we have product owners, we have developers, anyone. The beauty about that is you get to see someone.

Brian (18:58)
Hahaha. Okay.

Nosa Oyegun (19:24)
who may not have started on a traditional path or maybe has to share their story and their journey. And then what I love about Share Your Story is the person who shares then nominates the next person to share. And so that just builds that community of, yeah, I know somebody else who may have a different path, but has also been through something that is worth sharing. And so, yeah, so several opportunities.

Brian (19:39)
That's awesome.

Nosa Oyegun (19:53)
And again, like Luria alluded to is because we're in that transitional phase in the season right now with leadership and all the things, we're also looking outside the box because we have some organizations that are saying, Agile is no longer relevant. And we're like, hold on. If you have to make a decision, you have to think through the process. It is a process. It's a framework. It's not, you know, just established. And so being able to recreate and reinvent ourselves and say,

Brian (20:09)
You

Nosa Oyegun (20:22)
Hey, do we need to incorporate change in here? Do we need to incorporate AI in here? Do we need to incorporate something else that makes our role more relevant and makes each person more marketable within their organization? So those are things we're considering in this moment.

Brian (20:38)
Yeah, that's great. There's a lot there, I think, for anyone who's listening who thinks, hey, maybe this could be of help to me in some way, shape, or form. I think that's a great job of explaining some of the kinds of ways that maybe Agile and color can be helpful. And maybe that is part of that barriers to entry, right? Just helping people, giving them that friend. friend, right? The kind of support. They can say, hey, it's someone like me. I think your example, Luria, about giving birth is a great one, right? Because I can sympathize, I can hold your hand and bring you a towel. I can do all these things, but I can't know what it feels like. I can't understand it from the same perspective. And if you want sympathy, you're going to feel better. if you get it from someone who's gone through it, right? You're gonna respect that person's opinion more than you would mine, because all I have experienced is the same thing that you have if you haven't gone through it, you know? So that's a great example to kind of make for this. Kind of flip a little bit, because we talked a little bit about how this can help people in some of the programs you guys offer that would help individuals. But I know there's gonna be a lot, you know, There's a lot of people that look like me as well that are out there that hear this and think, you know what, I support this. I want to do what I can do. I, you know, we understand, like, I think there's a lot of us that understand, hey, no one's saying that we need to be the Superman to come in and solve the problem. But, you know, we can ally, we can come alongside and say,

Louria Lindauer (22:05)
Yeah

Brian (22:29)
How can I be supportive? How can I make an impact in this area as well? What can I do? So what would you say to those kind of people who aren't people of color, but would support Agile and Color and want to see it grow and succeed?

Louria Lindauer (22:43)
Bring it on down. We have someone actually on our core team, Matt Carlson. And we are going to have, as we're transitioning, allyship. How you can come in, how you can help. And as an ally, they also get help as well. We need allies, no matter where we are. And we'll have some allyship training as well of what does it mean to be an ally, because we've had that. in the past where we've helped allies with, I really want to help and how do I, how am I an ally? What is the best ways? What do I need to learn? And so it's very important that we have allies where there is with organizations or, you know, it's, it's about that complete circle. You know, we need all people to help, you know, it's like a family. And then we have, we have extended, you know, like there's, have the allies of, you know, agile in color. I remember When I was a kid, would walk down the street and then it was safe. Okay, so please people don't call the police on my parents. They're too old for that. while I was like nine years old, I could walk to the store, it safe. But along the way, there was people who were always watching me. They were on the porches and they'd be like, bring me something and bring me this. But they watched me all the way to the store. And I came back. Those were my allies, my family allies. So it takes a community, it takes a village to...

Nosa Oyegun (23:44)
You

Louria Lindauer (24:09)
create change and to do things. So we more than welcome allies. And Matt is an amazing ally. Also, the important part of allies is that they give a perspective that we may not see. I always say that sometimes when it is my issue, if it's really close to my heart, I look at people like a tree and I'm, you you can see my whole tree.

Nosa Oyegun (24:15)
AMAZING!

Louria Lindauer (24:34)
But if I'm on that issue, I see the veins in the leaves. Like I'm not on the branches. I'm all the way in the veins. And it's the only part I can see. And so sometimes we need those different perspectives to be able to get it like, never thought about that. And that has really helped us a lot with, did you think about this? Or maybe this as well. And we're like, yeah, we never thought about that. And so that helped we educate one another. What do you think, Nosy? Yeah.

Brian (25:00)
That's so awesome. That's so awesome. Help me then just I'll throw one last thing you guys direction. In thinking about kind of where we are today and we've come a ways but we have a ways to go still. What do you see as sort of the biggest challenges today, the biggest hurdles that we've yet to really

Nosa Oyegun (25:01)
Yeah, absolutely.

Brian (25:30)
overcome that's really holding this back.

Louria Lindauer (25:36)
What do you mean by this? This? do mean this?

Brian (25:38)
Well, holding diversity, equity, inclusion, holding people...

Louria Lindauer (25:42)
You can. That's a great.

Brian (25:44)
barriers in either sense of the word. what are we not doing very, especially in the agile world, like what are we not doing very well right now that we really need to do better?

Nosa Oyegun (25:57)
Now, Brian, how much time do you have? That's the question. So, yeah. So here's what I'll say. And this is the NOSA version because again, that experience of, we have a different experience based on our backgrounds, right? So, and I think Loretta alluded to it earlier saying, well, my background, remember people saying minority. I'm like, who you calling minority? I'm not minority because where I'm from, I'm not minority, right? And so when I hear...

Brian (26:00)
Hahaha!

Louria Lindauer (26:01)
I'll say we are out of this.

Brian (26:24)
Right.

Nosa Oyegun (26:26)
even the term people of color and I'm like we're all a color you know that and this is what I love about our t-shirt right because it's a spectrum right and so going back to your question there is beyond the outside beyond the exterior the question becomes how do we unify and support each other like truly genuinely support each other because everyone always brings something priceless to the table. There's a reason why we all have a unique thumbprint. What I'm great at and what I excel at and what my strengths are, most likely not Loria's strengths. And so if I bring my strengths to the table and I am vulnerable and bring my weaknesses to the table as well, and my weaknesses are Loria's strengths, then we lock arms together and we make this happen. And so two things I would highlight is one, being vulnerable to say, I really don't understand this. Can I get some support? Can I get some help? Can I get some partnership? And then two, that encouragement of not saying, why don't you know this? You've been in the industry for five years. You should know this by now. There's no need to shame each other. Neither is there a need to say, because Brian is of a different hue, he needs to be in the C-suite office and I need to be in the back. No, it needs to be, we all bleed red. let's get out of our mindsets about this whole external thing and let's begin to truly and genuinely support each other as humans. One of the things I love, friend of mine always says is she's like, let's just be human. Let's just be kind and let's be there for each other because at the end of the day, there's so much going on in our world, right? But if we can truly be human and truly say, how can I live in a space where I can support someone else? And then how can I be vulnerable as well, regardless of who am in my career path? We can make things happen.

Louria Lindauer (28:26)
I have to, I love that note. I love the vulnerability because it's really, it is so important in the agile world and it's sometimes harder for organizations. And it's really hard for the minority or a person of color to do that because they don't want us to do it. They don't, sometimes it's just hard to be yourself because You know, there was a time when being LGBTQ or black, was frowned upon. I couldn't wear my hair like this. She couldn't wear her hair like that to work. There was a time where my best friend's a guy, he couldn't wear a beer. You can wear a beer because you had to be clean shaven. And the biggest fear, and I love this question, is people don't want to change. People like the same old same old. I've seen Agile is so hardcore Agile and they come in with all their Agile speak and they're doing, and they're not listening to the team that's right in front of them. Yes.

Nosa Oyegun (29:17)
I job police.

Brian (29:19)
Yeah.

Louria Lindauer (29:20)
They don't see, they're not aware, they don't have group awareness of what is happening and the impact. They go to these classes and grade and they come back and they try to just push. You don't wanna push, you wanna pull. You want people to be coming towards you so they're pulling. They're like, okay, okay, okay. I don't wanna push all my stuff on them. I want them to be pulling me towards. And so one thing right now with diversity, people don't want to change. It feels safe. If I was the majority and you told me I had to change and I'm like, why? know, sometimes that's hard when you're comfortable. So people are like, But now, thank goodness, I can actually look at people who are not my same color and say, buckle up, buttercup, because now you get to feel what I feel because that's so important in the agile community. It is

Brian (30:10)
You

Louria Lindauer (30:17)
taking your experience as an Agilist today and how it feels and saying, this is my experience, I wonder if someone else feels like that. Really taking the time to do that. And I think we do it better in Agile communities where we do the doing and the being. I'm not saying all Agilists, okay, but when we really embrace, the being is so important because sometimes we're technically strong and we gotta get better at that leadership mindset of emotional intelligence.

Nosa Oyegun (30:34)
I'm going to go

Louria Lindauer (30:47)
and being able to say, we need to change. Because if we we're going to get left behind. But in the same thing, know that you might be hurting someone. And to be curious, we need to get more curious, less defensive, and listen. Like, shut up and listen. Just be quiet. Listen.

Nosa Oyegun (31:05)
Exactly. Yeah. I actually coin. No, I was going to just add this real quick. actually coined my role as an agile coach as a therapist. And it's interesting because my colleague and I joke about the fact because I have a master's degree in psychology and she says, see, I wish I did that. And I say this to Laura's point is a lot of times people just want to be heard. And in addition to that is not just being heard. But what are they not saying that they're really saying by being quiet?

Brian (31:08)
I was thinking that too, the whole time. Sorry, go ahead. Ha

Nosa Oyegun (31:36)
Listen for that as well.

Brian (31:36)
That's so good, that's so good. Yeah, and I was just gonna say that it sounds like maybe we just need to all start by listening a little bit better to each other and seeking first to listen rather than to be heard. And if we can do that, then it's so much easier to understand each other and understand and help each other, right?

Nosa Oyegun (32:00)
Absolutely.

Louria Lindauer (32:01)
Yeah, let's lock arms and then let's take action that is agreed upon between us. So sometimes in the lead is called I can leave from behind and doesn't and I'm leading from the front, but we're still there or we're leading side by side. And to listen that maybe Brian, you're the one I need to listen to for this moment. And I'm just still there supporting you. It doesn't matter. We're all leaders. So how do we so that we all get what we need because a lot of people, awareness is great. Please start there first. Please don't move into action if you're not aware. Like go back. But sometimes we just stick, we get stuck in awareness. It's time now for action and it doesn't have to be this huge thing. Sometimes just a mentoring program and a hiring process instead of hiring a bunch of people of color and then they're now in this environment that kind of is awful and then the retention rates. We see that all the time. But having a mentor when you come in to help you and also work on the actual change in the culture, because maybe it is kind of, you know, messed up because sometimes a lot of companies, and I know this isn't your company if you're watching this, they are about money. So that is they won't mess with this very toxic, awful environment. And I'm not talking about diversity. can conclude I'm talking about for everybody in there because it's a money, moneymaker. And so then it has this toxic environment. And so us as Agilent,

Nosa Oyegun (33:14)
Yes.

Louria Lindauer (33:28)
can't help. And that's why at Agile and Color, we're starting to transition to how we can use our skills in project management, change management, because our skills are all the ones that they use anyway. just start. If you're looking for a job and you're an Agile coach, look now for change management, else? Project manager. They just change. And then if you look in the thing, job descriptions. just.

Nosa Oyegun (33:36)
Exactly. Yeah, very fluid. Mm-hmm. Just changed the title.

Louria Lindauer (33:52)
hype up that resume with more change management and those type of things because they can't get rid of that we need to do things quicker and faster and be human. They'll never get rid of that.

Brian (34:04)
That's awesome. I love the phrase too that you said there earlier, just about like it's a time for action. And I think that's a great way for us to kind of wrap up. if the people out there, if you hear this and agree, hey, it's time, I'm ready to act. I'm ready to not just stand up by the sidelines. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a link in our show notes that will put you in touch with Agilent Color. And I encourage you, if you're a person of color or if you are interested in being an ally in some way for Agile and Color, I encourage you to reach out to them. They're a great organization. I'm really happy to have you guys on to share some of that vision and to spread the awareness a little bit of it. I can't thank you enough. Thank you for making your time and coming by and speaking with us.

Nosa Oyegun (34:57)
Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. And for the platform that you all do here, it's amazing just to see not just the topic, but the diversity of the topics as well, Brian. So thank you.

Louria Lindauer (34:58)
Thank you.

Brian (35:10)
Thank you so much.

Louria Lindauer (35:10)
Thank you.

Can Agile tools really teach you Agile practices, or are they just supporting players? Join Brian and Steve Spearman as they unpack the myths surrounding tools like Jira and discover why the process should always come before the tool.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Steve Spearman debunk common myths about Agile tools, with a special focus on Jira. They stress that tools are not a replacement for Agile principles, and the process should guide the choice of tools, not the reverse.

The conversation dives into how Agile tools can enhance transparency, why communication is key to effective Agile practices, and the importance of adapting tools to fit unique team workflows.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Steve Spearman
#43: Cultivating Agile Team Culture in a Virtual World with Richard Cheng
#29: Influencing Up with Scott Dunn
#71: The World of DevOps with Carlos Nunez
Jira
Miro
Mural
Trello
SAFe
LeSS
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Steve Spearman is a Certified Scrum Trainer® and Agile coach, passionate about helping teams thrive, drive business improvements, and master the art of managing change. With expertise in Agile training, scaled Agile, and leadership, Steve empowers organizations to navigate their Agile journeys smoothly and effectively.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have a very good friend of mine, a mentor of mine, Mr. Steve Spearman is with me. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Steve (00:14)
Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here with you. Nice to see you.

Brian (00:17)
Nice to see you as well. Yeah, Steve helped me out when I was trying to become a CST and I got to learn a lot from him, watching him teach his classes. So he's a pro. He's a CST, he's a coach and trainer and if you're interested, I recommend his classes. I think he's an excellent trainer and would have no hesitation sending anyone to one of Steve's classes. We wanted to have Steve on because we had this topic that got, actually, this is a listener suggestion. So we're always happy to take listener suggestions. And this is one that one of you sent in saying that you wanted us to kind of dive into and discuss a little bit about myths that are out there about Agile tools. So Steve, what does that mean to you? are some of the, is there a main kind of myth that you? you've heard more often than others about Agile tools.

Steve (01:16)
I think, Brian, the one we hear all the time, right, is this one that essentially Jira is Agile, right? And we're like, well, Jira is a very popular tool for people to use with Agile. It's might or might not be like most of us who do this. That may not be our favorite, honestly, but it is very popular for some pretty good reasons. So that's, I think, the most common one. And then just the idea that somehow it gets to the confusion people have about being a methodology and stuff, right? That essentially, if you just would implement the tool, then you'd be doing Scrum well, right? And that would be the important thing when in fact, I think most of our recommendations would be a little bit the opposite of that, right? Which is to come up with your own approach to doing things in Scrum and then maybe figure out a tool that helps you with that.

Brian (02:06)
Yeah, I agree. I've heard that quite often. And I've encountered organizations in my career where I'll ask them if they're Agile or if they are familiar with or no Agile. yeah, we have JIRA. OK, well, not quite what I was asking, but I appreciate the sentiment. But yeah, I mean, I agree. There's probably some mixed reviews on that as a tool.

Steve (02:24)
Yeah.

Brian (02:36)
I mean, personally, I'll say I've used it to run, you know, Agile organizations before. I'm not a hater of it. I think it's fine. I think it works. I mean, I don't know what your opinion here is, Steve, but people often ask me if there's a tool I recommend to kind of run projects and. You know, my standard answer is there's not one that I think is better and outshines all the rest. I think they all have their strengths and weaknesses and you just kind of have to tweak and adjust them to make them match, you know, your process. But that's the key, right? Is that process over the tool.

Steve (03:17)
Yeah. I've, you know, Jira I think is popular for a lot of reasons. One is, usually it's about half the per seat cost of a lot of the other ones. And so that for a lot of companies right there, that's that's a pretty big factor thing. I liked about it. Maybe similar to your experience, Brian was that if you're a little bit more of a techie, it's pretty programmable. You can go in and you could tweak it and you can make it do all kinds of things. And so that's maybe it's strength and it's weakness that it takes a little more investment, but you can do quite a bit with.

Brian (03:47)
Yeah, I agree. It is pretty flexible. The main thing I try to tell people who use it and are asking about, this going to be viable? Will it work for our purposes? The main thing I think they have to understand is the history of it. The Jira is really a bug tracking software. Well, let me be clear. It was created as a bug tracking software, right? Right.

Steve (04:12)
Yeah, ticketing system in general, yeah.

Brian (04:15)
Right, a ticket system. And when you know that, and then you get into the nomenclature and you look at the layout of how everything is within it, that makes sense. can see, cause you know, like the standard thing there is an issue, right? There's different issue types, but the standard thing is an issue. Well, that's because it was meant to handle support issues.

Steve (04:35)
Yeah. And also the, you know, we commonly use the word tasks, of course, in Scrum, not an official thing, but a very common thing we talk about. And Jira speak is subtasks. And that's just history again, of, know, where it came from. And, you know, a long, long time ago, you had to have a plugin to Jira to do Agile. It was originally called, I believe, Grasshopper many, many years ago. And then they ended up just calling it like Jira Agile for a very long time. And then as...

Brian (04:57)
Yep.

Steve (05:04)
it became a bigger and bigger piece of their market, they just kind of wrapped it all up in JIRA now, I think.

Brian (05:09)
Yeah, we both been around long enough to have been part of those days. So I remember those very well. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think JIRA will do a fine job for you if that's what you're with. wouldn't, you some organizations using it, I wouldn't say, by all means stop and use something else. I think you can make it work. I think you just have to look at it and say, all right, I understand this is based on this. So now I just need to configure it and adapt it. really for the process we want to do. And I know from my standpoint, I've used it multiple times where when you configure it the right way, it will handle things the way that you, at least from my perspective, the way I usually think is the right way to implement it with a team or an organization. So it works. I can make it work. It just takes some tweaking. I guess for mine, but yeah, it's not Agile. It's not being Agile just because you're using Jira.

Steve (06:11)
Yeah, and it's kind of the good and the bad thing about tools. think people like them because, you know, I can assign people tickets and things like that, you know, and so like, you know, people, it's clear who's got things and stuff. That's also a weakness though, too, because it, you might say, all I have to do is assign it in the tool and I don't have to talk to you now. I just say, look, you, I signed you this ticket or something. And that's not great from my perspective. And then the other one is that when you, when you, change states and things in the tool. That lets everybody know where things are, and that's good, and it gives you tons of reports and things, and people like those. But it's also less visual than a lot of us are, which back in the day, we liked sticky notes on a board. I that was the thing. That was the thing. And so what I'm leaning toward myself a little more these days is tools like Muro and Mural and so forth that are very visual, and they're often sticky note-based kind of things.

Brian (06:55)
Yeah.

Steve (07:09)
And that allows you to do a lot of the stuff we used to do physically, but they don't have the same reporting capabilities. And so that's where we get these trade-offs that I think we're going to see with these tools.

Brian (07:22)
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm the same way. And in fact, you know, when I said that earlier, someone asked me what my favorite tool is, you know, I said, my default answer is usually I don't have a favorite, but, if they push me, what I'll tell them is my favorite is just no cards or post-it notes, you know, like that's really, that's really what I, I have found works best. But, yeah, something like Miro or mural, I think is a, is a great, kind of virtual replacement for that. Cause it's just so open. and you can configure it however you want. It's not going to pull a report for you. You have to understand that. But it is the equivalent of having a virtual wipe.

Steve (08:05)
Exactly. And that's just, it's kind of a halfway physical feeling thing for our virtual world, which I think is helpful. Another interesting thing that I haven't played with a lot myself is that I know now in Miro, a sticky note in Miro can now be tied directly to a ticket in Jira. And so effectively you could have like the backend framework of Jira with a pretty front end on top of it or something is kind of how that looks like to me. So

Brian (08:23)
wow.

Steve (08:32)
I think that's got some promise maybe to give us both that physical thing that some of us miss while still having that reporting structure that a lot of our companies kind of want.

Brian (08:41)
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that speaks to what you were saying earlier about that it's highly configurable. can make it do a lot of things. You just have to get into the guts of it a little bit.

Steve (08:52)
You know, another thing about the tool market here, know, Brian, I was just looking this up, not like I knew this, but apparently it's a $5 billion market this year, Agile tool, and it is projected to go up to 13 in the next 10 or 12 years. So it's serious money. And this is why there are so many players now, right? I mean, the number of tools out there now is just, I've lost track of them. I know it's easily 20 plus tools out there. Now there are...

Brian (08:57)
Haha.

Steve (09:19)
Certainly the most common ones that we think about, Jira is probably number one. Asana comes up a lot. Rally is a long time one that comes up quite a bit. Interestingly, one of our biggest ones from years ago that did such great reporting out on the network for us and great Agile materials was version one. It was a super, super popular one.

Brian (09:43)
Yeah.

Steve (09:45)
And when you look now, they are a fairly small player percentage-wise in the market. So there's been a lot of shifting here. And of course, Microsoft shops tend to go toward Microsoft tools. And so there's that factor that goes on here, too. So it's not trivial to figure out which tool you would want to use here.

Brian (10:02)
Yeah, that often drives a lot of even discussion in the classes, I know, from people who say, what do you, you know, they'll bring up a term like feature and say, what's, how does Scrum define? Well, Scrum doesn't define what a feature is, you know, like that's, that's a term that comes from your tool. And, know, that your tool might have a definition for it, but you know, Scrum doesn't. So, yeah.

Steve (10:23)
One of the challenges I think is also that because scaled Agile has become such a big factor these days, almost all the tools have adopted their terminology. so terms like epics and features and things, most of these come from scaled Agile. And if you're doing scaled Agile, that's great, right? If you're not, it can be a little confusing. So for example, I think it was, Mike Cohn maybe, who said that epic, he famously defined as being a story too big to fit into a script. That was sort of the definition of an epic. And now in most of the tools, an epic is something giant that you have a handful of in three months or something. So yeah, there is some terminology confusion out there now as well.

Brian (11:16)
Yeah, which may have all come from just the tools. You hit on something a little bit earlier that I had as one of my kind of common myths here around tools. And that was that these Agile tools replace the need for just the typical communication that we have. Because as you said, I can assign something to someone else. that way, I don't have to talk to them. I just put it in their queue. And it's there. And I think that's a huge myth here with the Agile tools is, you know, my, my, my goal with any kind of tool, whether it's a software tool or whether it's a, a template or something that I'm using for a specific thing, like story mapping or whatever, my, my goal for any of those things is that it drives conversation, right? That it is an encourager of conversation, not that it is something that takes away from or detracts. from conversation and communication. So I think that's a big myth sometimes is that people, even if it's unspoken, right, there's just sort of with some people an assumption that because the tool communicates and because the tool can communicate between people, I don't have to actually talk to anyone. And that's that couldn't be further from the truth to do Scrum well.

Steve (12:33)
I think it gets us to another subtle thing in the scrum that you know scrum that could say more clearly maybe than it does. But that is shown as a good pattern in our pattern site, you know, the one called scrumplop.org. The idea that we should swarm as teams, you know, is something that I think a lot of us feel is a really important concept. And swarming is this kind of strange idea that says you know, don't give everybody their own work item and then just say disappear, go do it, you know, good luck. Instead, we try to work more closely like teams on the same items, divided up, work together closely. And this of course involves a lot of communication, a lot of needing to talk to each other. And so sometimes people say, well, can we just send out a Slack message or something, you know, every now and then and say, hey, you know, I'm done with mine. You can, but I think it's sort of missing the the really cool back and forth of a true swarming culture where it's like, hey, is anybody ready to pick up a piece of code and run the testing on this one? I'm gonna move on to the next one. Swarming was this idea of doing things in short cycles and gets into issues of test-driven development and things like this. so none of the tools really help you with that concept at all. And they may even hurt you with it little bit, in my opinion.

Brian (13:49)
Yeah, absolutely agree. And I'm absolutely on board with you. I think that's such a vital component of it. I tell people in classes, you know, I know sometimes people get a little frustrated with sports analogies, but I tell them, you know, Scrum is a sports analogy at its core. You know, it's a rugby thing. the other thing I kind of think about is if you've ever gone to see, and I know lots of us have done this in our life, but you've ever seen a kid sport kind of team sport. If you ever stand on the sidelines of a kid's soccer or most of you out there, most of the world would say football. But you know, if you ever stand on a side of a field like that, what the coaches are constantly yelling at the kids is talk to each other, right? Communicate, talk to each other. And they recognize, you you recognize in that kind of a team sport how important it is to, you know, call for the ball or or just let people know where you are or where you're going. And that same thing is what we want with our Scrum teams. We want people to be able to just constantly talk to each other. So you're right. I think sometimes the tool might actually get in the way of that communication and just could create some communication problems. Which tool are we talking on? Which tool do I look for for that kind of a conversation or whatever? And it just can get lost in the shuffle sometimes.

Steve (15:13)
You know, the rugby analogy is such a core one for us, but it's getting to be kind of old history now because the whole rugby analogy came out of this original lean paper, right? Long, long time ago. And the reason they chose rugby, you know, is one of the reasons they chose rugby. Rugby is such an interactive thing. So unlike American football where, you know, you run down the field and you can, you know, you can only throw the ball once and then you run and try not to get tackled. In rugby, you throw the ball back and forth constantly. Continuous interaction and basically the guys from Toyota said look we got to learn to treat our teams like rugby teams When they're on the field don't be on the sideline yelling throw it to Brian You know let them figure it out themselves, and that's the whole concept of a self-managing team Which you know is a really big concept for us in scrum and one that a lot of companies struggle with

Brian (15:54)
You By the way, if there was anything being yelled with my name on it from the sideline, would not be throw it to Brian. It would be don't throw it to Brian. That would be the response. Yeah, absolutely agree. What else, Steve? What other kind of myths have you heard or do you commonly hear about Agile tools?

Steve (16:24)
I think one of them is the idea that there is a right tool because there are real pros and cons to all the tools and some of them are much more advanced than others and yet some of them are a lot more expensive than others. Some of them are tuned for people who work in Microsoft shops. Some of them are tied to particular tools like GitHub or something like that. So figuring out the right tool is a non-trivial exercise, I guess is what I would say. And especially if you're going to wedge yourself to a tool, I think doing some prototyping, some research. The good news is the vast majority of them have free versions. You can go out and try. I often get asked things like, are you going to teach us Jira in this class or something? And the answer is no. No, I'm not. It's just one of 20 plus tools. But the other thing is that The good news is tools are a lot simpler than Scrum and Agile are. Scrum and Agile are tricky, they're subtle, they're hard to understand. They're a lot about humans and interactions and patterns and these tricky things. Tools are relatively straightforward and there are free videos on how to use Jira out there. There's a public version of it you can go get and it's true for the others too. So anybody who's really looking for a tool, that'd be my recommendation. Go out and... Find a few of popular ones, go check them out, get a free version, watch some videos. I don't think you'll probably find you a class for that.

Brian (17:54)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, and if you do, know, you know, again, don't want to make this sound like we're only talking about Jira, but I know for things like that, I've seen, you know, meetup groups that are dedicated to those purposes that you can find on like meetup.com or other things where you can, you know, maybe go once a month or so and learn something about it for free. So there's lots of stuff like that that's out there. But yeah, I absolutely agree that, you know, As I said, I don't recommend one specific tool. And I think the thing that's kind of really important there when you're selecting a tool is to know what your process is first. Don't get the tool to set your process, find what your process should be, and then find the tool that's going to fit with that. It's the whole individuals and interactions over processes and tools. We don't want the tool to drive what we do. And unfortunately, I've been a part of several organizations where, hey, we use this tool and the tool only works this way. So that's the way we work, whether it's right or wrong for us. And that's just a terrible way going about it.

Steve (19:03)
Yeah. And unfortunately, most of the tools do force you to some degree into their approach, right? Because there is a struggle, I'm sure, for toolmakers between you could make it completely general, like here's some sticky notes, just go do whatever with them, you know, which is kind of what you do with a Miro or a Miro board. But most of them have tried to make it more, you know, you do this and then you do this and then you do this and it kind of leads you through it. And that seems like it would be helpful, right? But at the same time, it means they've already decided that the right sequence is to do this and to do this and to do this. And so just got to watch out for when is the tool prescribing your approach and when is it there to facilitate your approach.

Brian (19:50)
Yeah, I agree. I'll tell you another one that I've heard quite often that I always kind of makes the hair on my spine kind of stand on end is when people seem to take this approach that the Agile tool itself is going to teach them how to become Agile. You know, it's kind of akin to the idea of because we have Jira, we're Agile or some, you know, fill in the blank or whatever tool it is that you would be using. But yeah, I've seen different teams or organizations that take that approach of, well, we're buying this software. And so we'll learn by using this software how to be Agile because it's an Agile tool. It's an Agile software. So everything we need will just be, we'll come by osmosis because we have this tool in place. yeah, I found that to be just a terrible approach. If you don't have some kind of a some guide, right? If you don't have somebody to guide you through that in any way, shape or form, then you're lost in the wilderness. You just don't have anyone to help you find your way. And the fact that you have a tool that could be useful doesn't mean it's going to teach you how to be useful, right? You have to know, knowing Agile is not knowing the tool.

Steve (21:11)
It's like, imagine going to a Ferrari dealer and deciding you're going to buy a Ferrari. And you've driven a Honda Civic, so you feel pretty comfortable with driving. And they give you a 10-minute overview of the dashboard of the Ferrari that you just purchased. And they say, I hear you're planning on racing professionally next month. Good luck with that.

Brian (21:17)
Right.

Steve (21:37)
And because I can sort of drive the car, I can therefore win races, you know, at the, no, right? No. So now we both are going to be a little biased here as trainers, obviously, but I think we pretty strongly feel like without somebody to help guide you through the subtleties of things like Scrum and Agile thinking, you may let the tools dictate and that's not the intent at all. It should be your team comes up with what makes your team be amazing.

Brian (21:48)
Right.

Steve (22:05)
And we own our own processes in Scrum, right? That's a key concept is that Scrum tries not to dictate processes and it wants you to continually evolve them. And so even the thinking that says there's a right way to do it is actually incorrect Agile thinking. so, yeah, tools are not gonna be a lot of

Brian (22:24)
Yeah, I agree. We might be a little biased because of what we do, but you know, I like your analogy. I'll give you another one. if you are just because you buy a parachute doesn't mean you know how to skydive, right? And no one would would buy a parachute and think, I know everything. Just I'll just use it and I'll learn how to do it because I'll jump out the plane and you know, I'll learn how to skydive. Well, no, you go through training. figure it out, you probably do a lot of tests and things, so that by the time you get up there, you know exactly what you're doing. you've gone through all the safety checks and all those other kind of things. Nobody would see those things as being synonymous, but somehow we do that in the Agile community sometimes, as we see the tool as synonymous with knowing Agile.

Steve (23:12)
It's a really good example, though I like the parachute. I have never parachuted because I find it terrifying. But if you were going to be a skydiver, this is an area where there is a high cost of failure. It's like one of these things where a certain kind of failure you can only do once because you won't have a second opportunity. And so one of the things that is kind of an integral idea in Agile thinking is that we like to make

Brian (23:18)
Neither have I. You

Steve (23:41)
experimentation and failure inexpensive. And so one of the whole concepts of why we often encourage things like short sprints and scrum is the idea that we want you to feel free to experiment with your processes and to make mistakes. And I'm sure many of you out there have heard the fail fast thing we say all the time, right? And all of this comes out of this mindset of making failure affordable and learning part of the culture. And so all of that is very different than any of these kind of instruction-based follow a tool sheet, follow a standard methodology of Agile or something. None of that is really the right thinking according to the way the Agile Scrum people see the world.

Brian (24:26)
Yeah, I agree. Any others that have crossed your path that you would call out?

Steve (24:33)
You know, it's really hard to avoid the thousand pound gorilla here, which is safe, because safe has so dictated the tools and things that you just have to think through that. I don't want to get us off into scaling, because that's obviously another very large conversation of its own. I have come to think of safe this way. that scaled Agile is as Agile as many large companies can tolerate. Which is to say, it's not my favorite, but it is very prevalent out there. And so, you know, in some cases, you're not going to have a choice, right? Your company will have dictated a thing, whether it's safe or whether it's whatever it is. And just be aware that that decision is also reasonably tightly tied to these tools and things because... You know, you can get a really nice lightweight tool like say Trello, which is, you know, even free sometimes still. And that can be perfectly acceptable in, you know, nice small scrum team environments. But if you're going to do, you know, giant, you know, release train planning exercises, and you want the ability to put all this stuff into tools, then that will constrain you to a certain class of tools. Now it's a lot of them these days, but just be aware that how you choose to approach this and how heavy of a method you use. will also impact your tool choices.

Brian (26:00)
Yeah, I agree. I don't want to get, I know we're not going to dive off into the pros and cons of safe, but the kind of picture in my head that I always think about with safe is it's kind of like one of those Swiss Army knives that has a million different blades and attachments and things in there. It's designed to solve any possible problem. that you could encounter in that arena. you know, just like when you use a Swiss Army knife, you don't open all of them up and say, all right, well, I got to try to use them all at once. You find the one that you need and you use that one. So I don't think it's a problem to have the choice to use these various things. And when I've talked to really, you know, lifelong, safe trainers that really are successful with this, I find a similar attitude from them that it's not intended for you to have to implement every component. It's intended for you to find the things that fix the problems that you're encountering and then implement those things. And if you start to encounter other new problems, well, there's other parts of the framework that you can implement then that will help solve those issues for you. And I think that's one of the mistakes people make with SAFe sometimes is that they just You know, they take the whole, it's all or nothing. And while Scrum does say, hey, you have to implement all of this or you don't get the benefits of it, SAFe, I don't believe says that. At least I haven't heard trainers say that who teach it. So, yeah, yeah.

Steve (27:43)
It's more like a smorgasbord effectively, right? know, if you know different choices and maybe it's worth saying a word about why that is compared to because Scrum tries so hard to be a minimalist framework that it's sort of like saying, you know, I could choose not to eat vegetables and you know, that could be a good choice for me and the answer is no, that's not a good choice for you it turns out. You know, so Scrum, because it tries to tell you so little, it's basically telling you the stuff that is basically essential. You you just can't get along without it. So it's a super minimalist framework. Some of you, I'm sure, are familiar with what happened in the last version of the Scrum Guide, where, you know, typically, like with SAFe, when they add a new one, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger over time, right? And they add more and more details. And that's what people love about SAFe, right? You can go open up a page. and click on a keyword and open up another massive page of exactly how to do everything. And Scrum has taken the exact opposite philosophy to make it the most minimal framework they could. And they actually went from 18 pages to 13 pages in the last version of the Scrum Guide, taking all of the advice out, basically. And so we're just looking at two very different philosophies here. So Scrum is a minimalist framework. SAFe is the... I guess the Swiss army knife, if you will. I would like to say one comment about a Swiss army knife. I used to carry those many years ago, but essentially you have every tool in them and none of them are great, right? So every one of them is basically a tuned down version of the tool. So yeah, there's a corkscrew in there. It's not a very good corkscrew. And yes, there's a screwdriver in there. It's not a very good screwdriver.

Brian (29:06)
Ha ha ha.

Steve (29:29)
So I think sometimes over time we start to learn that you should have the right tool for the right job and not try to get by with the Swiss Army.

Brian (29:38)
Yeah, always whenever I saw, you know, whenever I would see a Swiss Army knife that would have the the kind of saw component of it, I always think, you know, it's it's it's it's, you know, two inches, three inches long. What kind of tree am I going to saw through?

Steve (29:53)
you have to be desperate, right? This would be like, I'm cutting my parachute cord or something, but.

Brian (29:57)
Right, exactly. Exactly. Well, I'll throw one more and then we'll we can call this. But there's one that I've heard that I just thought was I don't hear this as often, but I have started to hear it more. And that's just sort of it's kind of an attitude. It's this attitude of, hey, we're having a problem with and seems specifically around transparency. Right. The team is not being transparent. We're not having much transparency into how the work is going on. And so sometimes I've heard people kind of take this attitude of, well, you know, we're gonna implement this tool. And so by default, we're gonna increase our transparency, because now we're using this tool. And I would caution people on that as well, say that that's not true at all. You know, it's the old phrase we used in computers, you know, way, way back when I was in elementary school was garbage in garbage out. And I think that applies to our tools as well, you know. We can get greater transparency through a tool, but it takes the right input. It takes the right effort. And you could still have the attitude of, I'm going to obscure the way that the work is really happening and do that through any tool. So the tool itself, I don't think it's going to do that. The tool could help you with it, but you have to deliberately seek that out.

Steve (31:21)
You know, I, it's such a mindset for me, this concept of things like transparency and how that relates to how we work as a team and swarming concepts and all these things kind of come together to make scrum a really an effective thing. And the problem sometimes is when you try to force things, it has the opposite effect. I'm, don't disagree with the scrum authors very often, but I very much do with what they did with the daily scrum, you know, and the daily scrum. used to have the three questions, And the three questions, you know, what did you do yesterday? What am I going to do today? You know, do I have any impediments? And then they made it longer. They added more words to it to try to clarify things, which was just more structure effectively. And then finally, in the last version of the Scrum Guide, they threw out the three questions. And I was really happy to see those go. because they sounded like a status report. And so guess what was happening to most organizations? They think of the Daily Scrum as a status report, which developers hate. And now as soon as there's this status call, then the managers are talking and they say, hey, did you hear there's a daily status call we can come to? And now they start coming to another meeting. And now you have completely destroyed the concept of this really simple meeting, which was effectively just to let team members coordinate their plans for the day. It's kind of a swarming based thing. And so it makes beautiful sense once you understand that, but it's misunderstood 90 % of the time because it just sounded like status.

Brian (32:55)
Now, but hey, pass the plate, because I'm a member of that church. I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. I've always said that, you know, I think it's just one of the things I try to tell people to come through classes. Hey, Scrum Masters, if you don't remember anything else about these events, right? If you forget, you know, six months from now, what the exact time box is on something, I'm not as concerned with that. Make sure you understand the purpose of each one. Make sure that you embed that and print that in your memory. I know what each of these meetings is there for, why we are meeting in that situation. And if you know that, then I don't care about the format. The format will flow from that, but we're accomplishing this purpose and we're gonna figure out the best way to do it.

Steve (33:42)
Yep, and we can even take that back to the tools and say, can make most tools work, right? As long as you get the freedom to use it as you, as a team, see fit. You know, one of the guys, the guy who created the kind of the opposite end of the spectrum scaling approach, Craig Larmann with LESS, he says, why do you need more than just a shared Google Doc to do everything? You know, why couldn't you just have your, you know, all your stuff up there in a spreadsheet and, know, good enough for what you needed to have visible and you can generate a few reports and maybe that's all you need and maybe you don't need a heavy tool. that, you know, so there's a spectrum of possibilities.

Brian (34:21)
Yeah, I mean, when teams started out, there weren't any tools, and that's what everyone was using, was things like that. So, yes, it's entirely possible. Very cheap. And you don't have to be a big organization. You don't have to have a massive budget for software. can use the tools available to you and get by very well. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time, Steve. I love this discussion, and I hope that...

Steve (34:43)
Absolutely.

Brian (34:51)
For our listener who suggested this, that we kind of hit the nail on the head and gave you what you were hoping for in this one. But yeah, when it comes to Agile tools, Agile should drive the tool, not the other way around. The tool shouldn't drive how you do Agile. And I think that's kind of where I would sum it up. Any last thoughts?

Steve (35:10)
So if I was going to quote Craig Larvin one more time here, less is more sometimes. And so the concept of minimalism and being more about how you and your team work together and how your meetings work and how you respect each other and how you learn how to work effectively together, way more important than your tools. ideally, let your approaches dictate the tool. Try not to let the tool dictate your approaches.

Brian (35:40)
Awesome, yeah, completely agree. If you've been listening to Steve and feel like, I really clicked with that guy, I really resonate with the ways he's speaking on this stuff, I encourage you check out his course schedule. You can find that at the Scrum Alliance website and see what courses he's teaching and sign up for one. Because as I said, Steve's an excellent instructor. So Steve, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Steve (36:04)
Thanks, Brian. It's been a pleasure to be here with you.

How does Agile fit into the fast-paced, high-stakes world of game development? Clinton Keith, author of Agile Game Development, spills the secrets from his time working with some of the top studios in the industry and explains why adapting Agile to gaming is both a challenge and a game-changer.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Clinton Keith dive into the unique dynamics of Agile in the gaming industry. Clinton shares stories from his decades-long career in game development, explaining how Agile methodologies have evolved in the industry and why traditional approaches often fail.

They discuss the impact of deadlines, the influence of digital distribution, and how finding the "fun" in games is crucial for successful development. Clinton also provides valuable insights into modifying Agile practices to better fit the gaming world and the critical role leadership plays in fostering a productive Agile culture.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Clinton Keith
Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat by Clinton Keith
Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course
Accurate Agile Planning Course
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Clinton Keith is a seasoned game industry veteran turned Agile coach and author of Agile Game Development, 2nd Edition. With 25 years of experience as a programmer, CTO, and production director, Clinton now helps creative teams and studio leaders build better games through effective Scrum, Lean, and Kanban.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. Glad to have you back. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I am with you as always, Brian Milner. Today, have a very special guest. A very special guest was the word I was looking for, but somehow it came out wrong. A very special guest that I'm very excited about having with us, Mr. Clinton Keith is with us.

Clinton Keith (00:17)
You got it right the first time.

Brian (00:23)
Welcome in, Clinton.

Clinton Keith (00:25)
Hey Brian, thank you so much for the invitation.

Brian (00:27)
Yeah, very, very psyched, very excited to have Clinton on. Clinton is a CST, but more importantly, he's the author of a book called Agile Game Development. And he has been in the video game industry and working with different video game makers and production houses and things for a long, long time. And he told me he's been a video game maker since the seventies. So I said, well, that's great. Cause I've been a video game player since the seventies. So I'm sure we could cross. and have some overlapping stories here. Me from the consumer side. I wanted to have Clinton on because he's got this unique perspective of really how Agile has developed and how Agile is kind of implemented and works well in the gaming industry. So let me start with just asking you, Clinton, when you work with gaming companies and they are interested curious about Agile, what is sort of the main holdup or the main objection that they present to you when they first start working with you?

Clinton Keith (01:37)
Well, it's changed. mean, I've been an independent trainer CST since 2008. And back then it was like, this agile stuff doesn't, know, this won't work for us or it won't work for our role playing game or massively multiplayer online game. might work for these small games. But I think since then, what you've seen is there's just such a lot of bad implementations. We call cargo cult implementations of Agile, where we think that standing around in a circle and answering three questions a day is going to result in some productivity fairy flying over our heads and sprinkling this methodology dust on us and wonderful things will happen, where there's a discipline and a change in culture. And so people have seen a lot of poor agile implementations. But at the same time, continuing on with more traditional approaches as games get larger, teams get larger, projects get bigger, that they're saving the worst failures on not adopting a more iterative approach to game development.

Brian (02:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mentioned that there's probably a lot of objection. There's a lot of the companies that kind of take that fixed scope, fixed schedule kind of approach to doing work and kind of think maybe Agile doesn't align to what we do or our industry or how we do things. Hopefully I'm not putting you on the spot too much, but do have any interesting stories or examples of things like that where you've worked with a company that maybe was just very, very resistant that you kind of, that they kind of turned around in the time you worked with them?

Clinton Keith (03:36)
Well, think one of the more clear examples and, and, know, I, being a project manager and someone who's a, started as a programmer and ran studios, you know, and we ended up shipping successful titles on schedule, on budget. that, when I work with teams that have true deadlines, you know, these are teams that, especially sports titles where. You know, if, you know, Madden football misses the launch of their next title at the beginning of the NFL season, they're going to lose half their sales as opposed to, you know, being told it's so called, have a deadline, but you know, that just to put pressure on the team. so when you have that kind of deadline, a do or die deadline, then it gets them serious about doing things like prioritizing scope.

Brian (04:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Clinton Keith (04:30)
We're saying, it's like, hey, we have this new engine to render crowds in the stadium and this is going to be beautiful. And, and it's going to look like these are real stadiums filled with people. They're less willing to take that risk if it has to come out on that specific date. And so we prioritize scope by saying, Hey, we have 32 teams, you know, it be baseball or NFL or whatever. have so many stadiums, we have rosters, we have uniforms that have changed from year to year. Those are things that we have to get in. The things that are like a new technology for mud on the uniforms, well, we can take a different approach to that and say, those would be nice to have, but we're not going to bet our schedule on that. So those were the teams on what we call AAA games. They're games that have large staffs, huge budgets, hundreds of millions of dollars. They kind of learned those lessons early on and it really became proof that an agile approach of saying, prioritizing scope and managing scope and delivering things that work and that show increased value in terms of player fun on iteration, iteration basis was really the best approach to hitting those targets. Which again is really difficult for teams that really have those so -called hard deadlines. but was still with a fixed scope, that they want all those things and at the last minute, end up compromising quality, get those all the, to hit all those goals.

Brian (06:06)
I'm kind of curious about kind of the teaming aspect within the gaming industry because it seems like, and maybe I'm wrong here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like more than some of the other industries in software development that it's a little more of the mercenary kind of attitude of, you know, kind of have the gun for hire that you bring in or guns for hire that you bring in to do some project or some game and then... then when the project wraps, they're gone. People float from place to place. Is it tough to generate, have teams go through stages of formation in that kind of environment?

Clinton Keith (06:46)
Right. Yeah, no, it's less so with now that we had mobile games, these mobile platforms come out where a lot of most of the effort actually is maintaining and building a live product and growing it over time, where it's like, instead of saying, you know, on traditional large games, we're going to spend two years with no customers, no feedback. We're going to build this huge game and then launch it all at once on a disc or on a cartridge. and then cross our fingers. And with that approach, usually with game development, the traditional approach is to have a documentation phase, a planning phase, a design phase, and then a pre -production phase where we build all the mechanics. And then a production phase where we create all the levels, build the storyline, something that people can play through 20, 30 hours. And then at the end of it, alpha beta phase where we fix all the bugs, make it run fast, find, know, make it fun and polish it and then get it out the door. and in terms of staffing, like what you described was very, yeah, it was the big challenge because in pre -production we, you know, we might want 50 people, 30 people. but then when we're building all this content and building the worlds, then we're growing to a couple hundred people and then you ship it on the disk. What do you do with those 200 people that are sitting around? And that's still on large games. You know, I work with some teams that are over a thousand people developing the game. And they're trying to address that problem by having, you know, large publishers or acquiring studios. And they'll have up to half a dozen studios in various locations around the world working on that, especially on building those worlds in that, that production phase. But then that introduces the problem of communication and overhead and time zones. And yeah, it's a very challenging problem that when I started in the game industry, know, a AAA game took less than 10 people, you know, sitting in a single room.

Brian (08:53)
Yeah, kind of, it's such a different paradigm now than it was. And the industry has changed so much, it seems like to me because, well, like for instance, my oldest daughter is a pretty avid gamer now as well. And when we were helping her get settled for her second year of college, we had to replace her monitor, know, so she had something to play on. And we walked in the Best Buy and I tried to explain to her that, Best Buy used to be a mecca for gamers. I remember going there regularly to stroll through the shelves of the boxes and kind of see what was on sale. Now, I can't remember the last time that I bought a physical media for a game. It's all downloaded. How has that changed just the process of developing games? I'm sure that's, previously when you had to have the gold disk version or whatever that was released. I'm sure there was much tighter timeframes, right? Is it much different now with being able to update over longer periods of time?

Clinton Keith (10:03)
Well, just from an Agile perspective, it's gotten much better. You know, we introduced Agile to our studio back 20 years ago, over 20 years ago. And, you know, back then, really, the retailers dominated the industry so much in terms of you had to sell Walmart on the game you were proposing to make, which meant that you had to write the 300 page document that they would approve.

Brian (10:25)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (10:32)
before you even knew it was fun. It's even worse with some of the larger first party companies that own the consoles, that they would say, well, we have a slot for making this type of game, so you have to stay within that slot. And at the end of it, we will determine how many cartridges that we will manufacture for your first release. And so it's very restrictive in terms of how much change we could introduce into the game over the course of development and say, well, the game that we're making is kind of boring. But that's the agreement that we made with Target or Walmart. And so we have to kind of stick with that game. Whereas now you can get early versions, like in Steam, for example, early release. And you can start to get metrics or that if you're a a game that's already out on a platform like iPhone, you can introduce the idea of a new mechanic to a limited number of users to say, it's like, hey, let's release a version of this mechanic to people in the state of New York and see, observe how they're playing it, measure how they're playing it, how many times they come back to it, and then use that information to tweak the next two week iteration or release dozens of different versions of our game you know, to millions of people and see which version that's out there in the wild is getting more response. So we have the ability to, you know, be much more agile and actually measuring what our customers, our players are doing with our game.

Brian (12:07)
That's so interesting. You spoke earlier about kind of like the AAA games with like sports games and how they have much tighter deadlines and they're, they kind of, there's a big, big hit to them if they miss that deadline. What about the opposite? What about the teams that don't have those harsh deadlines? And I would imagine there's an entirely different problem for the product owners of just good enough. how do you... How do those product owners determine, yeah, we have enough or this is in good enough shape that we can release it and we can patch things later?

Clinton Keith (12:44)
think one of the biggest problems you see when you don't have a deadline is this. There's this famous quote, I forget the exact wording of it, is that really tight deadlines, know, kind of restricted, know, restricted, to call it use the word resources, but in terms of money and schedule and things like that, or how many people you have working on it, really focuses you on delivering. And this is something that is a problem for AAA games with no serious deadline is that to say it's the, get these incredibly vast ideas that take years to really show the benefit. And I had this big light bulb moment in my career. I was, I was, I did a lot of racing games really in my career and I was on a game. that had a racing mechanic is based on a movie like what some of the Bourne movies where you have like a 15 minute racing mechanic, know, chasing in the middle of the movie. So late in the development of the game, we had a little bit of extra time and our publisher said, hey, can you throw in like a very short 15 minute car chasing and with police chasing you through an open city. Now that mechanic, police chasing you through an open city, used to take us years to develop with artificial intelligence, know, with police chasing you through crowded traffic streets. And even after years of development, it didn't quite work right. The police would crash into everything and drive on walls and we couldn't get the physics right. You know, we're on a PlayStation or Xbox. You know, you couldn't spend a lot of AI effort, artificial intelligence, on getting that just right. So, but we only had like a month. And so we're sitting around thinking, what can we do? How can we get police chasing us? And so we started asking ourselves questions that we never did ask in the past. Like, why do we have police? You know, why do we have police chasing you? And the answer was that, well, it's to make you drive fast. You know, if you didn't have police chasing you, you know, it's a boring game. And so all we did was we just, instead we just had

Brian (14:47)
Mm. Right.

Clinton Keith (15:02)
We just monitored how fast the player was driving. And if he was driving a little bit too slow, we'd start playing a siren sound. They kept driving slow. started playing flashing lights off the geometry of the buildings around you, blue and red. And then if you continue driving slow, we just played a video of you being arrested. And that took like a couple of days instead of a couple of years. And when we focus tested it, pretty much, half of everyone thought they were really being chased by the police. The other half said, I thought I was being chased by police, but when I looked in the rear view mirror, I didn't see any police. And so we just took out the rear view mirror, tested it the next night. Everyone thought they were being chased by police. And we're like, I guess, and it was actually a better result in the two years of trying to get artificial intelligence right. And so the big light bulb moment was, just like having,

Brian (15:53)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (15:56)
a short deadline on showing something of value led to people making better choices from the player's perspective, not this challenge of, what can I do with artificial intelligence over the next two years? So I think that's part of the big challenge with these big, huge games of saying it's like, if there's not a payoff, if you can't see value, and this was an early lesson I learned,

Brian (16:11)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (16:24)
working with Nintendo Japan was the guy that made Mario and Donkey Kong. We worked with him directly, Miyamoto. He always had this thing. It's like, find the fun fast, show the value of it. And it always stuck with me. And so when you have these short deadlines, you want to encourage the teams and the product owners is judge the game, not what you see in

Brian (16:40)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (16:49)
with the potential in two years. Judge your vision of the two years against what you're seeing every other week and adjust your expectations. Don't fall in love with your vision.

Brian (16:59)
That's so interesting. So I kind of want to dig into this. This is an agile podcast, obviously. And we have lots of people from different walks of life and that they're implementing agile in different ways. And it's always interesting, I think, for people to hear how things kind of fit in other realms, right? In other kind of industries and how that changes a little bit industry by industry. So I'm kind of curious when you are talking about agile and Scrum and in a gaming game development environment, what are some typical kind of modifications that you recommend or that you've seen that are needed or work well that are specific to the gaming industry?

Clinton Keith (17:44)
So as I mentioned, a lot of teams, even Agile teams that are truly Agile, like the sports titles, we still have that separation of discovering what new mechanics we want to put into the game and then building all that content, your stadium. So let's use sports titles for example. Let's say we do alter how we draw or render the stadiums. And we're making much more beautiful, more detailed stadiums because we have a new platform that can draw 10 times as much like a next generation PlayStation or Xbox. So we still want to come out with the new sports title at the start of the season. So we'll, we'll do more of our risky exploration of stadiums and what it's going to take to, to render these stadiums. and how many polygons, how many triangles we're going to use to build these stadiums and how much it's going to cost. Because we do have 32 stadiums. We do have a budget. We do have so many artists that can build these stadiums. So we have to figure that out ahead of time. And then, you know, once we figure that out and say, all right, we have, you know, we've built an example stadium. This is an example of what we want to ship at the start of the season. Now we have to build all the other 31 stadiums to that quality. And we've judged the risk and the cost and the schedule and how many people we have to the artists to build those things. And then we go into that production pipeline with those studios. And that's where, you know, it's like the scrum every two weeks model doesn't quite work. know, a stadium might take. 21 .2 days to build. And it's a pipeline of handoffs of things. Somebody doing the concept art for the stadium and then building the geometry for the stadium and then lighting it, you know, and all the audio effects. And so it becomes more of a production factory pipeline where practices like Kanban and lean come into play. That still have those underlying values of getting things through the pipeline as quickly as possible, continually looking at how we can improve that pipeline. And then judging instead of how much we can get done every fixed time box is judging how long that stadium takes from concept to in -game and trying to refine that to get improvements in the quality of the stadiums and the productivity of that entire pipeline. which leads to, you know, things that we see in Scrum is disciplines talking to each other and improving how they work together.

Brian (20:32)
Yeah. I would imagine the culture, like there's potential culture clash kind of things here with Agile in the gaming industry. Like one of the things I was thinking about is, you find it's a little tougher to get buy -in on a concept like working at a sustainable pace? Is that something that's in the gaming industry, people... Because I've seen a lot of... I've been around some small companies that are working on gaming, and they seem to work all the time. It's like late nights, weekends, it's just like it's non -stop. Is that kind of a difficult concept in the gaming industry?

Clinton Keith (21:18)
Well, mean, the gaming industries had quite a few scandals in terms of crunch time. And a lot of that has to do with not seeing that actual game until the end. As I mentioned, it's like we have these in pre -agile development, still goes on quite a bit, is that, we write this big, huge document up front. We get the buy -off on the stakeholders. We go off and the engineers go off over here, the artists go off over here. And then towards the end of the game, when we finally get all the elements of a story together, we can first start to play it. Then we start to get it so instead of it crashing every two minutes, we're starting to get the game playable and we're out of time. We have to ship this game in three to six months. It's not fun. It's a disaster.

Brian (22:06)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (22:13)
and then what, unfortunately what happens is we've, we put that accountability on the developers and say, well, now you, and, know, as, as a studio director, pre -agile, I was guilty of this as well as to say, Hey, we got it. We, we, we have no choice, but to come in here seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day. And, and as it, yeah, as a team we'll, we'll, you know, we'll, we'll get this thing done. And it destroyed. destroyed marriages, harmed families. I mean, I went through that. didn't see my, one of my newborns for the first three months of his life, pretty much, except when he was sleeping, when I came home late. And it simply doesn't, I mean, it's harmful primarily to the working life and these people that leave the game industry, but it's also harmful to the game is that, you do whatever it takes to get this

Brian (22:45)
Ha

Clinton Keith (23:12)
terrible game across the deadline that you were very passionate about in this first couple years of development. And we've seen disasters, even in recent history of games being released that, you know, it's just unplayable, but they had to get out for a deadline and they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars. And they've just felt like, well, nowadays we can patch games, you know, and, and, and, you know, it, it, it, it kills them from a financial point of view.

Brian (23:41)
Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting. you know, I think this, to me, this is where it kind of, it is so relatable to, to anyone who's, who's trying to do this kind of work. Because I think there that we've all had scenarios and situations where, know, as an agile coach or trainer that we've, we've, you know, we've been up against a constraint of some kind. We've been up against something that is not really the way we would. hope would be the way that the organization would operate or that the team would be run. And we've had to make those compromises in order to continue the work and continue trying to move that organization forward. So I'm kind of curious, I know there's probably lots of people listening who are in those situations and maybe even kind of some self -doubt there about, hey, am I really? Am I really doing this the right way? And am I kind of a sellout and that I'm giving in to the management and how they're making us do this? Would you have any advice or anything that you would say to people in that position that could maybe help them kind of navigate that?

Clinton Keith (24:56)
I mean, yeah, think, I mean, a lot of it is, is, it's a tough question to answer because, you know, a lot of it is, I mean, I, I've been in that position myself where, yeah, I was promoted to studio director and my first studio. It's like, okay, now you're responsible for all these games, seven games in development. And, you know, I committed, I said, all right, we're going to stop doing stupid things. Which means like going to a team that's working very well and saying, this other team, they're in a bad place. So I'm going to take half of your team and move them over there. You know, the old Fred Brooks thing is just like, you know, it's like, Hey, you know, it's like, you know, we're going to double their staff, you know, which is going to make it even worse for them, but it's also going to harm you. We're going to stop doing those things because now I'm in charge. I've been through that. I've run individual games and I know the impact. of what that does. And so I wasn't in the job more than two weeks before the CEO came in and said, hey, we don't have enough money to pay payroll this Friday. And I went into a panic because I was like, I just got promoted to a studio that's going out of business. I go half the people are going to leave if they don't get paid this Friday. And he goes, well, just calm down, relax. You know, what we're going to do is we're going to get a loan because

Brian (26:10)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (26:21)
but we have to accelerate this milestone payment. I need you to, we need to start a new team, an eighth game. And I was like, well, we don't have the people for it to start an eighth game. It says, well, you need to go out to the teams and take people from their teams and populate a whole new team so we can get this payment from this publisher who wants to start a game. And it was such a bad idea to do, but I couldn't go to the teams and say,

Brian (26:46)
You

Clinton Keith (26:49)
Hey, I need to take some of your staff so we don't go out of business. I just said, you know, it's like, Hey, we have to take some people off your team. And they're like, you very publicly said you weren't going to do stupid things and here you are. You know, so I think, you know, as part of it is it's, it's, it's the culture, it's the leadership. You know, I started about five, six years ago, starting to do leadership training. Yeah. And because it's like, you know what? I keep seeing these.

Brian (26:55)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (27:19)
You know, the team's adopting these practices, but the leadership not knowing what to do with this transparency, with what to do when your game isn't fun early on, and how it's so hard to build an agile culture, but so easy to destroy overnight from leadership doing things like I did. So I built a leadership course that was like, I wish this was the training I had got. 20 years ago when I was put into this position to help navigate some of these issues and help these teams. I there's, I mean, there's, mean, occasionally see cultures that just kind of like beyond, you know, their, ability to recover just too late, you know, to make some of these, make some of these changes, because like I said, we have to get this title.

Brian (27:49)
Right.

Clinton Keith (28:15)
Out the door in three months. In fact, these days I just refuse to, I used, I refuse to train a team that's within six months of shipping a, having a big title to ship because it's like, yeah, that sounds great. You know, we'd love to do it, but you know, we're just in the trenches for the next six months.

Brian (28:35)
Yeah, that kind of heads down and then can't, how do you learn a new process, you know, while you're in heads down mode, right? Well, this is fascinating. And I, you know, I'm tempted to take more of your time. I just don't want to, I want to be respectful of your time and in our listeners time. So it's probably a good place for us to stop. I want to just point out to people, again, your book, Agile Games Development, where you talk about a lot of this stuff. If I'm reading this correctly, it was originally out in 2020, right? Is that correct? Second edition, second edition was 2020. So you've added some new stories and some new elements to it in 2020, right?

Clinton Keith (29:09)
The second edition, Well, I mean, it was between 2008 when the first edition came out, we had mobile. You know, it's like the iPhone came out and mobile came out and the entire industry turned upside down. So, and I just, we've just learned so much from working with all these studios and what they have discovered is just incredible. it's, mean, it's, I mean, the industry was very agile early on. You know, the console, the arcade developers used to like sneak out prototype versions and

Brian (29:22)
Yeah.

Clinton Keith (29:47)
count quarters they collected. When then the 90s and early 2000s, things got so huge, we went away from Agile. And so it was a difficult sell. But in the last, yeah, the last dozen years, it's been fantastic with all these platforms, all these new opportunities, all these new markets. It's almost as if we're not using the word Agile anymore. It's just the way to develop.

Brian (30:14)
That's awesome. Yeah, that's what Mike said sometimes. Mike Cohn, when we talk about this, he's like, that was my goal initially was to not have Agile be something we even had to name. It just would be software development. And that's just the way that would be the default in doing things. So it's good to hear that at least in some places that is the case, right? It does feel like that's more of the default. That's great.

Clinton Keith (30:38)
Well, it's no coincidence. Mike was our first coach 20 years ago and my mentor. And I think that I stole that quote from him and glad to see that it's, it's, it's coming true.

Brian (30:41)
Yeah You That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, we'll put all these links in the show notes for everybody. But again, the book is called Agile Game Development. And Clinton, I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for taking your time and chatting with us.

Clinton Keith (31:02)
Thanks for the invite, Brian. Enjoyed it a lot.

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner chats with Murman about the value of attending Agile conferences, the importance of networking, and the impact of volunteering in the Agile community. They share personal stories, advice on making the most of conference experiences, and insights into how volunteering can open up new opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Overview

Brian Milner and Chris Murman dive into the world of Agile conferences, focusing on the upcoming Agile 2025 event and the benefits of attending. They discuss the evolving purpose of conferences, why networking and volunteering are crucial, and how approaching conferences with an open mind can lead to unexpected learning and connections.

Chris also shares his journey from attendee to conference chair, providing a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into creating a memorable conference experience. Whether you're a conference regular or considering attending your first one, this episode offers valuable perspectives on getting the most out of these unique events.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Agile 2025
Chris Murman
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
Agile Alliance Speaker Submission Tips Webinar
#105: Scrum Conferences & Neurodiversity with Brian Milner
Special Episode Scrum Gathering Denver 2022
Mountain Goat Software’s Accurate Agile Planning Course
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast
Join the Agile Mentors Community

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Chris Murman is the Agile 2025 Conference Chair with over 15 years of experience in product management and leadership, He has directed successful launches for top brands like Verizon, NBC Universal, and Chick-fil-A. As the Executive Director of Product at JP Morgan Chase, and leads 20 cross-functional teams, driving innovative financial solutions and spearheading AI/ML initiatives that save over 6,000 man-hours per quarter.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today, a very special friend is here with us, Mr. Chris Murman. Welcome in, Chris.

Chris (00:11)
What's up, Brian? I don't know that I'm a mentor, but I'm here anyways.

Brian (00:12)
You're definitely a mentor. In fact, we're going to explain to people why you are here in just a moment. Chris is an Agile coach extraordinaire. He has been in the community for quite a while. And he is a fellow Dallas native here with me. And we connect a little bit at the last year's Dallas conference here for Agile.

Chris (00:19)
Okay, okay, sure. Sure, sure.

Brian (00:40)
And one of the things that I noted in that conference was they announced the next one, which is coming up in Denver, end of July, beginning of August -ish, we'll put it that way. And he was announced as the chair of that conference. So Chris is actually going to be in charge or leading or behind the scenes for just about everything that's going to take place at that Agile 2025 conference in Denver. So I wanted to have Chris on to talk about that a little bit. Don't think of this as an ad. It's not an ad for it because what I wanted to kind of help people understand was kind of the why behind it. When I normally talk about the conference, it's maybe a month or two before. Well, now it's next summer. So you have some time to plan. And now is the right time to kind of put that kind of stuff in your calendar if it's something that you're thinking about doing. or even maybe thinking about maybe should you volunteer or something like that for it. So Chris, how did you get involved with this kind of thing? How did you get involved with helping out with the conferences? What made you decide to help out in any way, shape or form?

Chris (01:54)
Well, like many, when I first started the work, I I fell into Agile backwards just like everybody else did. None of us did this on purpose. It just came along and we just started doing it and then it became something to do. in the 2010s when Agile was riding high and I... I saw these conferences as really cool learning opportunities and connection opportunities. People that I knew from the, that you and I both know from the local area, from meetups, would tell me about these conferences. I was attending DFW Scrum the last time that Agile 20XX was in Dallas. I did not go, but. cause I, was too late for me to find out and it was kind of pricey. And so I was like, so like conferences are where you just go and meet people and then they're like, yeah, you should just kind of go. So as, as with many of us who are like, well, how do I pay for these conferences to go? just said, well, I'll submit to speak. And, I don't know about you, but my first few submissions were not great. I, I, I. People always laugh when I say this, but I would literally copy and paste the headline and the entire copy of blog posts that I thought would be really cool to talk about. Because I started my blog, that was kind of how Chris Murman .com is kind of how people first started meeting me because I would promote it on platforms and stuff. Agile Twitter used to be really fun back in those days too. So I would just copy and paste the entire blog post as my abstract. And of course, now knowing what I know, like that was, that's just the worst thing to do in the world. but I didn't know what else to do. So I fell flat on my face the first few years and started getting some advice and feedback and such, and started getting accepted to speak around 2016. Spoke at. Spoke at several conferences that year, spoke at several conferences in 2017. 2018 comes along and they're like, and I'm like, hey, how do I help out? Like this is really cool. I connected with the Agile Alliance community, that specific conference community very, very well. And I'm like, well, how can I help? And they're like, here's three or four people, email them until they say yes. And I'm not.

Brian (04:18)
Yeah. Hahaha.

Chris (04:34)
I just was annoying and said, no, I'm not kidding. I want to help. And I got to chair a track. You know, I chaired all kinds of tracks for the next few years. coming out of COVID, I got asked to be on the program team. which is just when people are like, what's the difference between leading a track and leading like the entire program? Think of it as like, The track is like one tiny, tiny sliver in the program team has to go really very narrow across everything to know where everything is. Not that I know every set. I still, I'm like, that was that session was the conference that year. But, so we just have to be more broad in what are the themes that we want to talk about? What are the things that we want to do? and, and, you know, when you join the program team, you know, one of these years it's going to be your year. And then when you. when you're a conference chair, that's your final year on the program team. And then you just go back to civilian life, I guess. I don't know, which is, don't, I don't ask Dana. I don't know what civilian life is on the side of the conference just yet, but I will very soon. So I don't know. It's a, that's a rambling answer, but it's for the most part, that's really how I got going was just, I just wanted to go. You know what I mean? I just wanted to be there. And the only way I could do it was to get a free ticket.

Brian (05:34)
Ha ha ha. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a, well, that's a great answer. I mean, I, I think I'm kind of, I mean, I probably have a little bit, there was probably a few more years I submitted before I got accepted to speak at the Agile Conference, but I probably submitted three or four years before I got something accepted. And that's even after reviewing a few years and seeing what good and bad submissions were like, you know, and trying to understand that.

Chris (06:22)
Thank

Brian (06:25)
But we were talking a little bit beforehand about just the concept of a conference in today's world. I know that we've seen sort of a decline in people who are attending conferences a little bit. And I'm not really sure whether this is a momentary thing or an economy -based thing or what. But when people ask you why attend a conference, what What do you tell people?

Chris (06:55)
Well, there's many things that you can get out of a conference. That's the cool part about it is that you can attend the conference for many reasons. And I would say now in 2024, coming into next year, 25, I don't know that the reasons for attending the conference are the same as they used to be, right? Because when we first started coming, there's this like, I don't mean to sound pedantic or like over inflate myself, but there's a level of like fame in our community. We have a tiny, tiny community. So you can get agile famous a lot of different ways. Like now you can just be an influencer and write like Chris Stone is a perfect example of someone who just cranks out a ton of content that it's for the most part pretty good and get the following that way. And then people meet you that way.

Brian (07:27)
You Yeah, yeah.

Chris (07:53)
there were a lot of ways that you could meet people back then. you could really meet a ton of people there. You could make a ton of connections. So ultimately, I just really wanted to learn. I love learning and I love being connecting with other people. I did theater as a kid, was performing at church as a kid. I was just that person that was always on a stage. so speaking is just another extension of that. You being in a training room all the time, again, it's just a performance. You're just giving a performance where there's hopefully... a few nuggets of wisdom. When I realized that that's all that it was, well then I wanted to do it. You know, I don't think that, but I don't know that that's the same anymore. I don't, you know, I don't hear people say, I learned a ton at this conference every year, right? Because a lot of work, we're,

Brian (08:39)
Right. Yeah. Hmm.

Chris (08:59)
we're rehashing the ideas in a new way. We're trying to explore things in a new way, but we're really kind of taking many people feel like that we're just taking the same rock and turning it over and just getting seeing if we'll be surprised the next time we flip the rock over, right? Like there's only so many times you can flip that rock over before you don't find anything new anymore. So, I, it is interesting to think about why do we What is the purpose of a conference? You know, because do you want to be known so you can get paid, right? Or get a job? You know, there's a lot of people that want a job. So can you get a job by going to a conference? I don't know. I don't, there weren't a lot of jobs in 2023 to hand out. There were some to be had this year. If you attended the conference and were looking like there were several people that had things to talk about and interviews to be had.

Brian (09:28)
Yeah.

Chris (09:55)
some of the jobs are starting to come back. like, okay, well, do you go because you want a job or if you're learning, like, well, what do you want to learn that you can't just learn from watching YouTube or TikTok or, you know, attend like, as you know, training classes are also struggling in the community. like, what is what what is learning in 2024 2025 in the agile community? I think it's worth thinking about, you know what I mean?

Brian (10:23)
Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, from my perspective, I think it's changed a little bit. It's shifted a little bit over time. I think when I first started to go, there was an idea of, yes, I wanted to network and I wanted to understand and meet other people in the community. But as an introvert, I, you know, that kind of scares the crap out of me. And, you know, I can only do a little bit of that before I just feel like my battery is completely depleted. But, you know, when I think when I first went, I did have the idea that I wanted to learn. wanted to kind of be on the cutting edge. I wanted to hear the cutting edge thoughts of people who were out there. And, you know, now I think I still have that mentality when I go, I still want to hear, you know, I want someone to challenge me, you know, like that's, what I really want to hear from, from a speaker is tell me something about this. don't know, or tell me something that, you know, would challenge my, my existing way of thinking about this. so that I can go back and examine it and think, huh, I never really thought of it that way, but maybe that's true and maybe I need to re -examine that. But you know, that's kind of rare. That's not something that you get from just a lot of talks. I know one of the things I try to do when I give a talk is I wanna end with something that I would say, hey, what's the one thing you commit to changing as a result of this? Like what's the one big idea? What's the one... If you left this room and don't remember anything else, what's the one thing that you wanna just star or circle in your notebook and say, I'm gonna go find out more about that or I'm gonna do something about that. And that's where I try to kind of drive toward the whole talk. But I've been in others that, like you said, maybe a little bit more of a rehash of something I've heard before. But I've never left a conference without feeling challenged in some way, even if it's not, even if it's just from a one -on -one conversation that I've had with people, you know, I've been challenged about ideas and had to go back and re -examine and think through things. I'd say it's more, you know, now my balance has shifted. It is more networking now for me than it is that challenging thought, but I still want to find that nugget somewhere in there in the conference time.

Chris (12:41)
So what you said is really interesting and I want to hone in on the specific words you mentioned about challenged, right? the, I do want to, you know, before it sounds like I'm not poo -pooing the idea of conferences in any way, shape or form, but what Brian just mentioned is something that I tell the people all the time. I said it from the stage this year in Dallas, which is like, you get out of it, what you put into it. If you come in with a beginner's mind intending to be challenged, intending to have your assumptions questioned and said, maybe I didn't think about this the way that... I would say that that's probably the thing that I learned every time is that something that I thought was true or wasn't true may not, right?

Brian (13:11)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris (13:35)
You know that half of the conferences are new people every year, right? There's someone new to agile every every year there are there. Thousands of people new to it every year. That's the cool thing about it is that every year there are people that like I just got my CSM like holy cow. That's so like can you imagine showing up to a conference and everybody's like this sucks. I don't want to be here like you're not going to learn anything. I don't get anything out of it like what an awful experience for.

Brian (13:35)
Yeah. You

Chris (14:03)
someone that's new and excited and just wants to, like, there will be something you haven't heard before. But for the most part, the reason why I always get something is because I show up expecting to hear something I haven't heard before. The story won't come out exactly the way you think, right? Or,

Brian (14:09)
Yeah.

Chris (14:22)
the story that they tell, because a good conference is always a great idea plus you, right? It's your stories, your experiences, how this affected you that matters. So sharing your soul, bearing your soul requires the audience to kind of be like, want to be, I want to have someone, you know, kind of bear themselves to me. I want to hear someone be vulnerable.

Brian (14:45)
Yeah.

Chris (14:48)
And those are always the best sessions that you and I always have, is when someone is super vulnerable, super vulnerable with where they are. I thought this was the only way to do this. That's my favorite is when I hear a speaker say, I thought this was the only way to do this. There are so many roads up the mountain that we have for our work. There is not one way to do it. So find a new, come to find a new one. There's a technique that you've probably not tried before or done, or if you have, you didn't do it the way that they did before, that'll seem easier. that's the whole purpose of listening to these things, but it, it, it requires you to show up with more than just here's my tray, man. I have some agile, please. Right. Like that's, this is not a buffet, right? Like you have to like, go find it, right. Seeking positive intent means I have to go seek it. Right. I have to go seek information that I want to have.

Brian (15:21)
Yeah. Hahaha.

Chris (15:41)
and then go get it. Because if I don't, I'm just going to go, yeah, it's cool. I mean, I met some cool people, but I didn't really. OK, well, then you didn't show up with the mentality of being challenged. I challenge our friends, people that have been coming for years, I challenge them every year. You will get something if you want to. Right? If you don't get something, it's because you didn't want to get anything out of it.

Brian (16:01)
Right. I mean, I think we're all kind of guilty sometimes of setting our conference path, choosing the sessions and things that we go to based on things that maybe we already have some familiarity with. And that sounds interesting. yeah, I researched that a little bit. Let me see what they have to say about that. I've tried to intentionally now try to find things that I have no background in. I have no experience in because those are the things that are really going to push me. Those are the things that I don't really have. any knowledge of or forethought on and I'm gonna be taken to a different place. I remember I used to be, I used to get this like really anxious, nervous feeling when I would find out I was wrong about something. You know, I'd be in a conversation at a dinner table with someone and they'd say, well, actually, you know, that's not the way to do it. They'd start to do something else and I'd start to feel kind of anxious about that. But now, now I've like, that's swapped for me. Now when I hear that, when someone says, no, actually there's another way to think about that.

Chris (16:41)
you

Brian (16:57)
I start to get excited. Like it's actually excitement in me because I start to feel like, great, wow, I didn't, this is something new. This is something I had never heard before. And now this is the point where I can grow and break through, you know.

Chris (17:11)
Well, there's, I mean, and there's people that we all, if we've been in these communities before, we can all think of someone that always challenges us, right? Like I can't have a conversation with Michael Sahota without him challenging something that I thought, I just thought was true. And I'm like, no, it's not like, or it might be, but not always. So there's always someone that's just like,

Brian (17:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris (17:37)
sit down so that I can break your mind real quick. And that's always fun. You know, another thing to think about is like, what we get out of the conference also dictates who's going to pay the bill, right? Because we hear in the community a lot, well, companies aren't paying for conferences anymore.

Brian (17:41)
Yeah Mm, yeah, yeah.

Chris (17:59)
That's not true for some aspects of IT. Like all the developer conferences, companies love footing the bill for that. The Microsoft conference, they love footing the bill for that because they send technologists there that come back smarter and can code better and more efficiently and whatever, right? Like better, faster, cheaper, all those things, right? Like they will get something out of it. So the... think the reason why we have to say what do you want at the conference is like, it's gonna kind of dictate who pays the bill. If the purpose of Brian and I who have been to this conference many times and have met so many of the cool people, that's the best part of me going every year is I get to see Matt Barkholm again. Like one of my favorite people in the world that I do not see other than over Zoom, right? Or any number of people, right? Any number of people.

Brian (18:47)
Hahaha.

Chris (18:56)
There's always someone new that I had spoken to online but never met in person. Someone that just, again, someone that just started the work and someone that's like, hey, I read something that you wrote about this years ago and it was really cool. That's cool, right? You won't get that if you don't go out and network and stuff. But here's the thing, if you're there for connections, companies aren't interested in footing the bill for connections. They're interested in footing the bill for...

Brian (19:23)
Right.

Chris (19:26)
learn something, improve something, come away with something. And if Agilent are going to the conferences and just like, I met some really cool people, what else? I met some cool people. All right, cool. I'm not paying next year for you to go to that, right? That's what a lot of companies are trying to do. So we have to sort of imagine like, if the goal is to get companies to pay for people to go again, well, then we need to... That's something that we've asked ourselves in the program team. Like what would get, like what is a program that companies will reimburse for? I think it's, and I don't know that we've got a strong answer either. Everybody's got, I think, there's a lot of I thinks and not a lot of I knows, right? I guess is a good way to think of it.

Brian (20:00)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the other thing I wanted to kind of, because you are, you know, kind of the ultimate volunteer for this upcoming conferences as the chair, you know, I've tried to tell the audience here from time to time about the kind of the benefits of volunteering and why I do it as a speaker, why I've done it in the past as a reviewer. It seems like there's just so many different ways to get involved for something like this so that you don't have to just sit on the sidelines. You can actually be a part of this. And that's a, for me, that's an easy way to have a quick in with the community because you're interacting with people prior to it. So when you show up, it's like, hey, I know you and I know you, because we've been talking and working together on this stuff for a while. So. What kind of case do you make to people for volunteering for a conference like this, like a big conference?

Chris (21:12)
It's so again, going back to like, what do want to get out of it? I think the purpose of volunteering is to kind of learn how the sausage is made to a degree. if someone's like, I'm not really interested in seeing how my sausage is made, then you don't belong in the agile community. Like this is the community of people that want to see

Brian (21:22)
Yeah.

Chris (21:32)
Sausage being stuffed into its casing and just cranked out right like this is this is the community for that like I won't use any more sausage metaphors that although I The the The funny thing about how Volunteering works is that?

Brian (21:41)
Hahaha

Chris (21:50)
You can volunteer in the slightest of ways, just a few hours a week reviewing. When you're like, well, I want to review, that's fine, but I want to be a track chair. Because people always want to be a part of deciding the content. This is what I've always wanted to hear about. This is what I've always wanted to hear about. And of course, then I always ask the question of, OK, well, then someone has to submit that idea. all right, it's one thing to say, want to hear about this. It's another thing to say, how do I get that content out of a group of submissions every year, which we get thousands every year at the conference. And we got thousands, right? Like, you know, for all of the online hubbub over the conference every year over who gets accepted and who doesn't, like thousands of people submit wanting to speak every year. regardless of how they feel about whether they, when they get the rejection letter or the acceptance letter, like thousands of people want to speak at this conference. It's cool. Like it's a cool thing to do, but not everybody is a speaker, right? You can be a purple shirt and volunteer. In fact, some of my favorite people in the community are lifelong purple shirters that have done it multiple years. There are people that do it for a couple of years and meet people and then and they move on to another role. mean, there's just a bunch of different ways that you could be involved in doing something that doesn't involve speaking or deciding who speaks. And also, I will say, it's also really hard to cull thousands of submissions. into something that makes sense for everybody else. Because then you have to go find keynote speakers. There are people that are invited to speak who are luminaries in the industry. And how do you meet those people? So all of that is really like the fact that I can say I can email. any number of people, I won't use the name so I don't offend the people that I don't use, but like I can email any number of them and they're like, yeah, Chris, Agile, Agile 20XX guy. I, it would be cool if they're like, I just like Chris and I want to be friends with them, but you know, that's not the way the world works. so I, you know, networking in ways that don't always show up in a job or whatever is just, I'm, I'm just here to.

Brian (24:00)
Hahaha Right. Right.

Chris (24:25)
find good content and show the community that and the rest kind of takes care of itself, you know?

Brian (24:32)
Yeah. I mean, I'll say to, you know, just to give people kind of an idea of my path with the agile conference, you know, I probably submitted four or five years before I got accepted. And a couple of those years spent as just a reviewer for, you know, a track or, you know, with a certain team, not as a chair, but just as a reviewer. there's a, there's a, if you want to do that, you can do that. Right? mean, it's pretty much, it's easy to get into that kind of a mode if that's something that you're interested in. And I tell people who want to speak like that to me was one of the biggest and best educations I could have had on learning about speaking was reviewing what other people wanted to speak about. Cause you know, there's kind of two parts to speaking. There's the... the marketing side of getting your thing selected, and then there's the actual talk. But the part of trying to come up with your idea of the talk and frame it and put it in an interesting way and learning how to structure your talk in a way that would be interesting for people to listen to, that's a skill in itself. And the best way I learned about that was just reading others, reading what other people were submitting to do and... Chris is right. mean, there's so many submissions that, you know, even as just a reviewer for one track, I was sad for all the ones that I knew would not get to be heard because there's so many good ideas. it's, know, Sophie's choice about how you try to decide which one of these two things or which one of these 10 things, you know, you've got one slot and 10 of them that are 10 or 20 that are just amazing. and you can only take one, you know? So it's difficult, but reading those submissions to me was a really great education.

Chris (26:33)
Yeah, if you think about it this way, we always enter the room to build the schedule with, there's X amount of slots that we have plus X number of alternates and such. we always, you try to look at it like, like you look at the whole schedule and say, okay, is there an aspect of our work that we missed? Well, we didn't really get a, we haven't gotten a retro talk yet. okay, well there was one over here. So, cause you know, you're trying to balance it for like there's meat and potatoes kinds of sessions and then there's like the big idea sort of sessions. Then there's the workshops that are very engaging and meant to create something.

Brian (27:16)
Yeah.

Chris (27:26)
you know, there's a lot of, again, there's a lot of roads up that mountain. I would say that the joy of speaking now, if I could, anybody that wants to do it, the best advice I would say is like, you need to want to speak so that you can be a better presenter and organizer of your thoughts. Because,

Brian (27:46)
Yeah.

Chris (27:49)
Really, the abstract and the basic, there is essentially a formula to filling out a submission to a conference. I, with CP Richardson, who's now on the board, I did a webinar last November on what makes a good submission. It's something that I've gotten super passionate about. Again, it's recorded, it's on the Agile Alliance site if you wanna find it. There is a formula that anybody can follow and get selected, right? I had some, I had several people reach out and say, I watched your video and I follow what you said. And then I got accepted to speak, which for the record, watching what I say will not get you accepted to speak. You can follow the formula. You can, you can follow the formula exactly and still not get it because there's only so many slots and it's really hard to get in. but.

Brian (28:26)
Ha

Chris (28:41)
Once you follow the formula, then it's just down to like, does the idea resonate with the community? And I can't, I can't give you a formula for that because I'm not in anybody's brain, but, you know, I, again, it's always a great top, a great idea. Plus your stories and experiences is what really defines what a good submission is. And so you have to get that straight before you type a single word out. But then once you go through the submission process and there's edits, feedback, all that kind of stuff. Then you got to get accepted. Once you get accepted, then you got to build the session. And we find that a lot of times it's a rare breed of someone that knows how to write a good submission and can put on a good show. Not everybody can do that. And of course, a good show is a relative term, right? You don't got to be big and bombastic and loud to be good, right? Brian's not that and Brian's great in a room, right? So you can...

Brian (29:16)
Yeah.

Chris (29:35)
you have to kind of construct it in a way that makes sense. So, but again, the cool part is, that because I had people help me, mostly because I just annoyed the hell out of them and saying, please, please give me, please give me some help. I just want to keep passing it along. So I mean, I still get people at 12 months a year, I get people saying, I have an idea and I'd love to run it by you that they hit me up on LinkedIn or whatnot. So.

Brian (30:04)
Yeah.

Chris (30:05)
It's just something that I care about now. I got so much better with organizing my ideas and writing them and presenting them that it's a gift that I want to just keep passing on to people. I guess this is because I didn't intend this to be the cross that I bared, it is regardless.

Brian (30:21)
Yeah Well, the only other advice I'd throw out to people, there was a shift that happened with me too, where I went from, I want to be a speaker, let me find a topic. There's a very big difference from having that attitude to living your life and saying, wow, I'm really passionate about this. I'd love to talk about this. If you find the topic first that you resonate with and connect with, then it's, you you're a little more personally connected when you submit. So it can be more painful if you don't get picked, you know, when that happens. But on the other hand, when you do get picked, man, you're so excited about giving that talk. It's not just that you got picked, but it's like, I can't wait to tell people about this, this thing. And to me, that's, that's the magic. Like when that happens, you, you, yeah, you can't, you're, you're, it's not even nervous. You're, just so excited to tell people what you've learned about.

Chris (31:21)
Yeah, another piece of advice I tell people is as you're reading things, it doesn't have to be a book. It could just be an article or a video that you watch. As I always say, when I'm reading a book on something that has nothing to do, like I don't really buy a ton of agile books anymore. I buy a lot of social psychology, social economics, behavioral economics is a lot of my favorites. like Daniel Pink books is a tried and true. I met Daniel Pink once and he's like, what is it with you agile people that just love what I do? And I'm like, I don't know. I just, I don't know. I'm like, we just read it. So, but I read these books with looking for a lens into my world, right? I always read stuff that has nothing to do with IT.

Brian (32:02)
Yeah Yeah.

Chris (32:16)
that or leading teams or whatever it is your world, whatever you think it is. Find something that has nothing to do with your world and then say, how does that identify or how does that relate to my work? That's my favorite thing. I read a book on many years ago on, it was called The Control Heuristic. It was like where control comes from as an idea and psychology and why. We struggle with it. And I immediately turned that into a leadership talk on why we're all control freaks and here's, know, and what, what do we, what do we do about the fact that we're all control freaks? Like, again, I didn't read a book and say, I'm going to do a topic on a book. It's like, no, how does that tie into dealing with executives when I'm trying to get them to release the purse strings or release some of the control of their work, right? comes in handy, right? So you have to be looking for how does that idea sit in our world and then sort of play with that idea a little.

Brian (33:22)
Yeah. Yeah, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you making the time for this, Chris. And for those people listening, just a quick little shout out again. Agile 2025 is happening in Denver. It is the week of July 28 through August 1. So mark your calendars. And if you're interested in volunteering, if you're interested in being a reviewer or one of the Purple Shirt people who help out, Purple Shirt people help out at the actual conference making it kind of flow, right? They make sure it actually works. Yeah, yeah, the talks would not happen without them. Actually, nothing would happen without them. Yeah.

Chris (33:54)
They're the lifeblood of the conference. Yes. Nothing would happen without them. Nothing would happen without them. Yeah, if you hit me up on LinkedIn, my name is just how it appears here on LinkedIn. Toss me your idea. Yes, will, and I said, I shot my mouth off about mentoring people through their talks. That means you too. I... hit me up. Like there's no excuse for you to not because the worst thing that happens is you get to come to the conference. So, yeah.

Brian (34:29)
There we go. So mark your calendars, make sure that you reserve those dates, like I said, just block it off. Even if you don't know whether you can get the money to do it right now, block the dates off, and you're gonna be much more likely to actually attend if you do that, because then you'll see it coming up, and they go, yeah, that's coming up, I should do that. So Chris, thanks again for coming on, I appreciate you making the time, and thanks for joining us.

Chris (34:56)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian.

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Mike Cohn reveal the keys to achieving lasting success with Agile methodologies. From embracing experimentation and fostering a culture of continuous improvement to improving communication with consistent vocabulary, they offer practical, relatable insights for Agile practitioners at all levels.

Overview

Brian and Mike discuss the essential ingredients to Agile success, touching on the power of experimentation, the need for flexible coaching, and building a culture of continuous improvement.

The conversation dives deep into the importance of effective communication within teams, especially through user stories and consistent vocabulary, ensuring that Agile teams stay aligned. With personal anecdotes and actionable tips, this episode provides a roadmap for anyone looking to excel with Agile.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Mike Cohn
Essential Scrum by Ken Rubin
Agile & Scrum Glossary
#85: Effectively Managing Dependencies with Ken Rubin
Dependencies Are Killing Your Agile Flow at Scale by Ken Rubin
Creating a Software Engineering Culture by Karl Wiegers
Private Scrum & Agile Training
Agile For Leaders
Working on a Scrum Team Classes
Story Writing Workshop
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today we have our favorite back with us, Mike Cohn is here. Welcome back, Mike.

Mike (00:12)
Thanks, Brian. It's good to be here. Hi, everybody.

Brian (00:15)
So happy when Mike can make time and be with us here on the show. Obviously Mike has a lot of wisdom and experience to share with us. So we wanted to bring him in because we were talking about doing an episode titled The Secret Staggile Success. I remember back in the day in the 80s, was a movie called The Secret to My Success. There was a really obscure movie. was Michael J. Fox. Yes, it was Michael J. Fox.

Mike (00:37)
Michael J. Fox? Yeah, so it's not that obscure.

Brian (00:41)
But I still hear that theme song in my head. when we talked about this title, that's what I thought about. But we wanted to talk about maybe some hidden things or things that aren't as immediately apparent to people that are crucial to being successful when you go agile or if your teams are working in an agile way. So let's just open things up, Mike. What's one of the things you had thought about when we talked about this?

Mike (01:10)
think the number one secret to Agile success for me is being willing to experiment, to try new things. And if you think back, Agile itself, Scrum itself, began as experiments. They were probably teams going, know, this waterfall stuff we've been doing doesn't work. Let's try something different. Somebody else went, yeah, let's do something unusual, and let's try iterating or something. And so Agile itself began as experiments. And yet I see teams kind of get stuck in the mud and not willing to experiment. And I think that's to their detriment. We want to try things out. And silly, trivial examples, try different sprint links. Don't do a one -week sprint link and go, Agile doesn't work. It's not for us. No.

Brian (01:52)
Yeah.

Mike (01:59)
Maybe one week sprints are for you. Try a three week iteration or I try something different. And I think the the idea of experimentation is how we come up with new ideas. It's how we learn. It's how we get better. And so if you're going to succeed, you better have that that focus on experimentation.

Brian (02:19)
Yeah, there's a surprising number of Scrum Masters I've encountered that I'll hear stories about how they run the same exact retrospective, every single retrospective. And I just think, what are you doing? How can you be trying to communicate this and teach the team that this whole thing is based on doing little small experiments and seeing what the result is, when you're not willing to try something new in just how you run a retrospective? So yeah, I completely agree. I think the key there for me is demonstrate it. If you want them to pick up on that, then do it yourself.

Mike (02:56)
worked with a company years ago that fired their scrum master for basically for being too rigid. He had read something in Ken Schwaber's second book, and I don't want to pick on Ken's book, but he has this wacky sentence in there, and there are wacky sentences in my books, right? So somebody can go find those, and I mean, I get it. But anyway, Ken wrote that the daily scrum must be conducted left to right, starting with the person on the left of the scrum master. And it's like, what? Why is this mandatory? It must be left to right. Anyway, this guy read that in the book and insisted that the Daily Scrum be left to right, starting with the person on left of the Scrum Master. And his team knew that was insane, right? It's just nuts. And so they would mess with him. They would do things like he would call on the person to his left and the person on the right would start talking. he would point to the person on the left to start and they were standing in a semi -circle. They would move, right? So the person on the left was no longer on the left. And they were just messing with him over this. And he would just get mad and insisted it had to be left right because the book said so. And I don't know what it was with him, but he was just stuck on this. Ultimately ended up getting fired for it. Yeah, I heard this story because I ran into him at a conference and I saw him there and he

Brian (04:14)
Wow.

Mike (04:20)
looked a little down. It's like, you know, said his name and how are you doing? And he told me this story. And he said, you know, he'd gotten better since then. But, you know, don't get stuck on things. It's just not the it's just not a very agile mindset.

Brian (04:34)
Yeah. I mean, if you can't, no matter what it is too, I think that if you can't point to what you hope to achieve from doing it that way, or what's the purpose behind us doing it that way, that's questionable part of your process to just say, I can't point to any reason why this, any good that this thing does going left to right person by person, but. Ken said we should do it. I guess, no, I mean, if there's no reason, if you don't see the benefit in it, why would we do that?

Mike (05:07)
Knowing Ken, I think he was just trying to make it easier for people. Here's one less thing you got to think about. Start on your left and go around the room. But the way it's written and the way this guy interpreted it was like, shalt go left to right. It's like you've got to be willing to, I think, out the way that a known proven way start out that way. So yeah, go ahead and start left to right. It says so. I don't know any different. Might as well go this way.

Brian (05:17)
You

Mike (05:35)
But then experiment, learn, figure it out for yourselves. I I can't think of a successful company or team that I've worked with that ever quoted this Scrum Guide at me, right? You know, they may start out exactly the way a Scrum Guide says, or my favorite is Ken Rubin's Essential Scrum Book, start out in a known proven way, but then experiment, make agile your own. Don't throw away the important stuff, and that's why you have to start in a known proven way, but as you get experience, experiment, throw things out.

Brian (05:46)
Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I think that's a really good one. So a good one to start us off. Thanks for that.

Mike (06:12)
Yeah, that's, that's what I'm buying. Brian, can I ask you for one of your secrets to agile success?

Brian (06:17)
Sure. Well, and this one I know it's going to be a little, know, boy, it'd be nice if I could do that, but I, you know, we can't do that. And I understand that this is not going to be for everyone, but one of the things that I think is important is to have some kind of a coaching presence. Now, just to be clear about this, this doesn't mean that you have to, you know, fight tooth and nail to hire some outside consultant or anything like that. I understand budgets are tight and there may not be an ability to do that. But I think if I, you know, if you're a scrum master, then I think that having the ability to continue your learning journey and grow is really important and, and having someone you can go and bounce things off of. So if you can't have someone, if you, if you can't have someone on staff or someone there that's an outside consultant that can help you and coach you through the early stages, I think that could be really, really helpful. And to me, it's an accelerator. I think that kind of thing is something that can really, yes, we will go through training. We understand kind of the basics, but then the coach is sort of like pouring gasoline on that fire to say, now we're going to go from zero to 60 and I'm going to help you get there because I know the pitfalls to look out for and I know how to get you there. But if you don't have that ability, I think it's important to maintain some of those mentorship relationships that you can find through different community groups.

Mike (07:18)
Mm

Brian (07:44)
Maybe you'd find some kind of a weekly meetup or a monthly meetup or something that you could go to. Even if it's just a meetup of peers, right? There's not someone that you would say, that person's been in this for 10 years. No, we're all kind of in the same place. But if we can meet up in their network of my peers and let's talk about what's going on at your place, I'll talk about what's going on at my place, and we can share with each other and... help each other find the best solutions. Even that level, I think of coaching is really imperative and can really make an impact on how successful your implementation is.

Mike (08:25)
I think you're right. I think back to the earliest days of Agile, and at least of Agile training. And I'm thinking back to when I was teaching public courses on Agile in 2003, 2004, 2000, actually, the early days. One of the big benefits of the class, beyond whatever learning somebody had in the class, one of the big benefits was just feeling like you weren't alone in the world. And I remember people describing a problem, whatever it was. Like, my bosses aren't on board with this. and somebody would describe a problem and then somebody else in the class would just merely sympathize. Right. Yeah, mine too. I'm struggling with that too. That was like one level of support that was awesome. It was even better if there was somebody in the class who said something like, yeah, we had that problem and here's what we did. Right. But these were not people who were any smarter than each other. It wasn't like the person who'd worked through the problem was that much smarter. They probably just had a six month head start and Having that ability to go into a class and hear that you weren't alone and that your problems were not that unique was extremely valuable for people even way back then when there were not a lot of people doing this.

Brian (09:32)
Yeah, and I've said this before, and I probably said this to you, Mike, but one of the things I think people love the most when they come to the advanced classes that we offer is really being able to get sympathy from others, the camaraderie of talking to somebody else and saying, yeah, I've gone through that. It's not, I tell people at beginning of the class, it's

Mike (09:48)
Mm -hmm.

Brian (09:59)
likely not going to be a teaching point that sticks with you as much as it's going to be hearing from your peers and actually getting to learn from each other that's going to stick with you as much through those classes. to me, I think that's one of the reasons why those classes are so much fun is because I learned from the people who come to them.

Mike (10:20)
absolutely, absolutely. Some of what you're describing is why we set up our Agile mentors community years ago. Agile mentors community, not just the podcast, is a community we have where people who take one of our courses get a free membership. I hired a consultant to kind of give me advice on some business stuff years ago. he used the try. And I asked him, hey, we're thinking about starting this community. What do you think? I don't remember if he said do it or don't, but I do remember a term he used. He called it a continuity program. And it was a way to continue a relationship with people who taken our courses. And like I said, we give it away free to people who take classes because we know that a class isn't enough to get people successful, but it's a start. It gets people over some hurdles. It gives them the foundations of the education they need. But they're going to have ongoing questions. And our community has been wonderful because we have so many good people in there who helped each other out. And again, they're often somebody who's just six months ahead in their journey, helping somebody who's right behind them or, you know, there's somebody just in a similar industry and can sympathize or give advice on how they worked through a problem.

Brian (11:29)
Yeah, that's awesome. So we talked about experimentation, we talked about coaching. Mike, what was another one that was on your list?

Mike (11:36)
One for me is to focus more on practices than frameworks. The frameworks get all the attention. Should we do Scrum or should we do Kanban? Should we do extreme programming, going back a little bit more when that was extremely popular, still around, but not as popular? Should we do safe? And so people focus on their frameworks because they're these big, visible things. And I think what we want to do more is pick the right practices for us. Now, that's not to diminish frameworks. I think the frameworks are good. They're a good starting point. But I've said for years, if I have a team and they start with Scrum or if they start with Kanban, if they're doing the good old inspect and adapt thing, they're going to end up in the same place. They're going to invent the right Agile for them. And very likely, that's going to be some elements of Scrum, some elements of Kanban, perhaps some elements of Safe if it's big. I don't think it matters all that much where you start. I think it's worthy of some consideration. But if you're inspecting and adapting, you're going to end up in the same place. And that means that Agile needs to be thought of more as a set of practices rather than we do Scrum or we do Kanban.

Brian (12:49)
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And, and, you know, we've talked about the kind of that concept before of, you know, trying to fit the right practices in place. I know when even on this podcast, when we talked about scaling and then couple of those episodes, we talked about how, you know, it may be better for you to, to, find the unique collection of practices that fits your situation. because, know, a lot of these frameworks, they're designed to handle everything. They're designed to handle any possible scenario and.

Mike (13:14)
Mm -hmm.

Brian (13:18)
You're not going to encounter every possible scenario. You're going to encounter the ones that are only particular to you. Yeah.

Mike (13:24)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've thought that there's I don't want to do this. I've never taken the time to really run this as an initiative. But I felt like there are a core set of practices that kind of everybody should do be iterative, right? know, inspect and adapt, right? Those type of things. But then there's a set of practices that are good for startups, let's say there's another set of practices that are good for people in the banking industry. Right. And that everybody in the banking industry should be doing a certain set of practices, and those will differ a little bit than perhaps every company in the game industry. And so there's these set of practices out there that can be grouped, but they do also need to be kind of tailored and hand -chosen for your particular organization.

Brian (14:11)
Yeah, yeah, I like that kind of the idea like a template, right? I mean, like when you use the template on a software program, that's a starting place, but you're expected to kind of customize it a little bit to your specific needs. Yeah, I like that.

Mike (14:25)
Yeah, wouldn't it be great if you're a startup and somebody said, here are the 20 practices you really got to do if you're to be successful as a startup. Here are the 10 you should think about, and then the rest, see if you like them. Same thing, bank. the bank, might have 30 practices you start with. Ivar Jakobson, who's the inventor of use cases, part of the unified method back with Bucin Rumba. He's had an initiative going on the last handful of years where he talks about method prisons and that the practices are all kind of locked up in these methodology prisons like Scrum and Kanban and everything else. And he talks about like free the practices, right? Let the practices loose of these method prisons and let people just more readily select the set of practices that are best for them.

Brian (15:15)
Love it. Yeah, I love it. That's a great concept.

Mike (15:17)
Yeah, I think it's a great, it's a great approach. It's got some traction, but it's something that more people need to hear and do.

Brian (15:22)
Yeah, I think that there's also maybe some stuff mixed in there with what you were saying that I've heard from the heart of Agile people. There's a lot of good stuff that's overlapped there as well. So that's awesome.

Mike (15:32)
Absolutely. What's another secret you can reveal Brian?

Brian (15:37)
Sure. Now, this is a big one, but what I would say is maybe moving in a different direction, the idea of how important the culture is and just setting the right culture even more so than trying to get things like time boxes correct. I was talking with a friend of mine at a conference recently and one of the things we kind of discussed was that whole inspect and adapt process, how important that just getting that ingrained into the DNA of what the team does. And Mike, like you said earlier, if they have that inspect and adapt built into who they are, then the practices come. The practices will actually kind of coincide with those because they'll find the right things to do. Like you said, they'll end up at the same place, right? They'll end up at the things that really are important to them. But I've seen lots of places where they go straight to the rule book and want to implement all the rules as quickly and possibly as they can. If the teams don't understand, when something goes wrong, when something does not happen the way that we thought it should, then that's a target to inspect. and dig in and find out why it happened that way, and then find a new way of doing it. I've told the story in classes before that I've encountered multiple situations, scenarios where I've worked with teams where they'll be doing something that they've identified as a problem. They've said, hey, yeah, this is wrong, this doesn't work. well, that's what I'm saying.

Mike (17:26)
Why are they doing it then?

Brian (17:32)
They'll identify something and say, yeah, that's not good. We need to do something else. But then they'll stop and say, all right, so let's really, we want to find the right thing to do to replace that with. So let's take the next two months and really investigate, find, and then we'll come back and we'll change in two months over this new thing. And my advice to them is always, so you're gonna just intentionally do the wrong thing for two months? Right.

Mike (17:59)
for two more months.

Brian (18:01)
You know, like you should try one of the other possibilities because you could get lucky and that could be the first thing you try. You know, and oftentimes it is something that is better because your gut instinct is usually pretty good about that kind of stuff. So yeah, try it. Something's not going well, all right? Then we're not doing that again, right? We're gonna try something new, whatever that is, and we're gonna try something new and then we'll do the same thing at the end of the next sprint.

Mike (18:27)
Mm -hmm. Yep. One of my favorite comedians, this guy named Bob Newhart died early, he was earlier this year. And he has this one comedy routine that he does where he's a psychiatrist and somebody walks into his office and she describes some problem he has. And he's like, okay, I'm going to give you the advice. It boils down to two words. And she goes like, should I take notes? Should I write the two words down? It's like, nope, you'll remember them. And he just looks her really like stern in the eye and says, stop it.

Brian (18:54)
you You

Mike (18:59)
She has a phone question. He's like, just stop it, right? Whatever you're doing, just stop it. And which is like just hilarious, right? Imagining, you know, some psychiatrist or therapist giving the advice of just stop doing whatever it is you're doing. But it's so reminiscent of what I've seen with agile teams, right? And with what you're describing here, you know, we're doing the wrong thing. We need to change, but we're going to stall looking for the perfect answer instead of just stopping and figuring out something, right? Just try something different.

Brian (19:28)
Yeah. And if our culture is a culture of always inspecting and adapting, then like you said, we'll end up at the right place because when something's wrong, we'll change it. And we won't just sit on something that we, I don't know how many times I've seen the organizations where you talk to people and take them out for a beer and they'll say, well, here's the real problems. everyone knows what the problems are. So why not fix it? Why not change it?

Mike (19:41)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard in a lot of organizations. You and I both do sessions where we'll talk to executives, right? And to me, it's a really fun, like 90 minute training session that we have because the way we deliberately set that up was to talk about the benefits of agile. So we get people kind of interested, right? you know, those benefits. But then we tell them why it's going to be hard and what they're as executives, what was leaders, what they're going to have to change. And what I find is when we do that, if the leader starts arguing with me, because I tell them, look, here's going be hard. You're going to have to change this. You're going have to stop doing this. If they start arguing with me, we'll change that behavior if we get those benefits, then we know we've got them hooked and they want to be agile. But if I say agile's great, here are hard things you're going to have to change personally. And they're like, yeah, that'd be hard. We probably wouldn't make those changes. I don't want to go anywhere near working with that company. They're not going to succeed. They don't have a culture that's going to make those changes. And so I love doing those executive sessions because we hear it's just so instant, it's instant feedback on whether this company has a chance of being successful or not.

Brian (21:06)
Love him. Is there another one on from your list,

Mike (21:10)
One that I want to add is a little bit more about not just having one team be successful, but if you're working to get a set of teams, your department, your group, something like that. I think it's really important to have a consistent vocabulary across teams. Because we're talking about this idea of continuous improvement. And if your team and my team are using words differently, how do we share ideas back and forth? And that sharing of ideas is really important. if we don't have a consistent vocabulary, think it's hard to do. I worked with a team a couple years ago. I worked with this team, and I'm there for like two or three days. I think I'm there on the second day. And they've been using the words sprint and iteration interchangeably, just both words. And I'm sure you've encountered that. It's kind of normal. I think it kind of depends on if you grew up in the Scrum world, you call them sprints. If you grew up more generically agile, you call them iterations. They're using both words. And the second day I'm in a meeting and somebody says, well, yeah, that's how we do it in a sprint, but it's totally different when we're in an iteration. And I'm like, huh? What's the difference? And the guy had a really great answer. He said, a sprint is when we're working overtime and iteration is when we're going at a sustainable pace. That actually, there's a lot of logic to that. It's kind of a cool idea. I could see that.

Brian (22:17)
Ha ha ha.

Mike (22:37)
But I could tell by looking around the room that others were surprised as well. They'd been using the words interchangeably too. They didn't know there was this specific meaning that, I don't know, three Algel coaches had decided three years ago, this is how we use the words. But it wasn't part of, to your word, moment ago, culture. It wasn't part of their culture. And so some teams were calling them sprints, some teams were calling them iterations, and it was just creating a lot of confusion. when we found out that there were different meanings and different rules for whether you were in a sprint or iteration. So.

Brian (23:08)
Yeah. It reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon I saw a while ago, or it's been several years now, it was about, were talking to their big dumb boss, right? And they were saying, yeah, we're in the middle of a project and we're about halfway through, but we need, you know, six more months to complete this. All right. What's the project you're working on? We're taking all of our website addresses and we are transforming them into URLs. Right. Yeah. It's yeah. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, the boss didn't know the difference, right?

Mike (23:37)
That's a nice project, right? That's my assignment next month. Yeah, the vocabulary just creates confusion. like how Ken Rubin, I mentioned him earlier, the author of Essential Scrum, my favorite book on Scrum. You've had him as a guest before. I love how he writes his books. He starts out, I just start out, I just plunge in. just like, just start writing. And I have an outline, but I just start writing. Ken sits down for seriously months, I think it is.

Brian (23:39)
Right. Right.

Mike (24:07)
and defines a glossary, right? Here's how I'm gonna use certain words. then he, man, if he says a word means a certain thing, he uses it that way every single time. And he has a wonderful, agile glossary on his website, inolution .com. And so he's like defined every kind of agile word you could look for. He's got it defined there. But that's how he starts, right? So he defines all these words. And then if he writes a book and he...

Brian (24:10)
Wow.

Mike (24:33)
wants to use the term sprint, he knows exactly how he's going to use it. That's an easy one, but he will define all those words so they're clear up front. We do these working on a Scrum team classes for companies, which is a of a private whole team training class. And some of the feedback we get is that it really helped them get their vocabulary consistent. It allowed them to talk about ways to improve that were challenging until they had a common vocabulary. What is a Scrum master? What are the responsibilities of a Scrum Master? And that's not just defining the word sprint, but it's defining a more complex word and saying, what does it really mean? But if you don't have agreement on what a Scrum Master is or who is on the team or things like that, it's really hard to talk about that across a larger group. And so that, to me, is one of the secrets to Agile success is that consistent vocabulary.

Brian (25:25)
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that class because one of the things that that that we do periodically when we are not here every time. One of things that we do when we have one of those classes is I'll meet with their with a company in advance and have a conversation about what is it that you really want to get out of this. And one of the most consistent things that I hear over and over again from companies that come to us is we want consistent vocabulary. We want a consistent language that people use across this so that When we say something, means the same thing across all our teams.

Mike (25:58)
I think it's become more of an issue the last, I don't know, five, 10 years or whatever it is because we've got so many people that know Agile by now, right? But of course, they were trained by different people. They were trained in different ways. And so they'll be coming to it and using terms slightly differently. I'm going give a little example here. Velocity, right? Velocity can really mean two different things to people. Velocity can mean the amount of forward progress you made. in a sprint, right? How much forward progress did we get? Instead, velocity could mean capacity to do work. How much work did we get done in the last sprint? And forward progress, capacity to do work are slightly different things, right? And if we don't have agreement on that term, we're going to get into those fights about, bugs count towards velocity, right? Well, if you're using velocity to mean capacity to do work, yeah, bugs should count. If you're using velocity to mean forward progress, no. Bugs shouldn't count. And defining velocity, having that conversation with the team, once you get that figured out, a whole set of problems go away. All those discussions about what gets points, they all go away instantly. But most teams don't think to have that conversation. And they will have some team members using velocity one way, others another way. Important to get that defined. It's not hard, but it's important to get that consistency. Brian, do you have another secret, or have we revealed all the secrets?

Brian (27:24)
Yeah, I got one more. I got one more. you might, you know, if you're listening this far, you may notice that I have a sickness. I picked all C words. I don't know why, but that's just what I had to do. But my last C word was communicate. And really just the idea here was, you know, if you've ever gone to see a youth sports team, you know, a kid's soccer, kids basketball, whatever, right? If you ever go to see any of those things, one of the things that you will hear over and over screamed from the sideline from the coaches is, talk to each other. And it's a really important part of learning how to play that sport is, hey, I've got a call for the ball. I've got to let everyone else know, hey, here's what I need. And I think that's an important part of Scrum as well. Scrum is a team sport. It's a...

Mike (28:02)
Haha.

Brian (28:19)
You know, I apologize to people in classes and say, apologize for the sports analogy, but scrum is a sports analogy. You know, it comes from rugby and, it's, it's intentionally there as a team sports so that people can, can recognize and look at that and say, yeah, we're not, we're not playing golf, right? We're, we're, playing this as a team altogether at the same time with the same goal. And so you got to talk to each other. You got to have communication. I know, you know,

Mike (28:24)
Yeah, itself,

Brian (28:47)
One of the main ways that we try to help that here at Mountain Goat is when we talk about things like user stories. That's a main tool that the teams will use in their communication back and forth between the business and the developers. And I know in your Better User Stories course, we go in detail about that. And we also have this thing that we do occasionally called a story writing workshop that's kind of more coaching, where we'll sit down with people and kind of

Mike (29:01)
Mm -hmm.

Brian (29:17)
actually work through stories that they're writing to help them effectively communicate what they're trying to get across to the developers. Any communication takes practice. Any relationship, the communication grows and gets better the more you do it.

Mike (29:36)
I think it's a good point about using user stories as an example, because one of the user story mistakes people make is to think that user stories exist to document an agreement. They don't. They exist to facilitate a conversation. And then the conversation is where we're going to figure out the specific needs and things like that. Yeah, maybe we could document that. It's got to be documented for various reasons. in many organizations, but the story itself is there's a reminder to have a conversation, right? It's not there to document an agreement, which is different from things that came before, like a use case or IEEE 830 document, right? Those did document agreements. User stories, they're there to make sure we talk.

Brian (30:13)
Right, right. Those were in essence contracts, right? I mean, they were, you shall do this, the system shall and whatever. But yeah, user stories, not that. I love the way that you put that and I've said that for years as well. It's a placeholder for the conversation.

Mike (30:28)
Well, let's add one more C then. didn't realize you were on a C theme here. So let's add one more secret to Agile success with a C. Crack the whip, right? Yell at your team, make them work harder, right? That's the secret to Agile success. I shouldn't say that because you'll pull that out as a little clip. crack the whip on your Agile team. That's how you get them successful, right?

Brian (30:30)
Hahaha! Hahaha. I can guarantee you that's gonna be the cold open here for our show. It's Mike Cone saying, the secret is cracking the whip. I love it. Well.

Mike (30:59)
So there was a great book by a guy named Carl Weigers on culture. is like creating a software engineering culture. And he has these little gray boxes in there. There are things not to do, right? Don't do this. But the boxes don't say don't do this, right? You have to have read like the intro to like, hey, don't do the things in the gray boxes. But he also has like anti -patterns in there. And I just remember being a, a, I think it was a director, VP at the company. And I showed it to one of the directors. I'm like, man, look at this. He's got guys highlighted all the things to do in the boxes here. And he was like, really? We should do that? Okay. And he was like, ready to go do these things. I was like, no, no, no, these are the things not to do. So you gotta be careful with things like crack the whip, right? It's, you know, a direct quote. It sounds pretty horrible. It's a joke. It's like, hopefully people understand. So.

Brian (31:42)
That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, I think everyone who's, you know, listening to this would understand that, right? Would understand that that's a joke, but and just in case.

Mike (31:56)
As a guy who had the whip cracked on me as a young developer, I've always been a very much do not crack the whip. I'd rather I'm always after people's energy rather than their time. Right. It's kind of like we do four day work weeks, right? I'd rather have energy than time. And so, don't think cracking the whip is the way to succeed.

Brian (32:15)
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. remember having a boss once that used to take me into the server room to yell at me because he could raise his voice in there and nobody would hear it. So, that was fun. Right, right. Well, this has been great, Mike. I really appreciate you making time for this. And I think everyone's going to get a of good tips out of this.

Mike (32:23)
You I gotta remember that. Great, thanks for having me, Brian. Bye.

In this episode, Brian Milner and Lance Dacy dive into the evolving world of software development, exploring how AI and automation are reshaping the landscape. They discuss the essential skills developers need in this new era, from embracing AI as a tool to mastering emotional intelligence and continuous learning.

Overview

Brian and Lance discuss the transformative impact AI and automation are having on the software industry. They explore the importance of adaptability, continuous learning, and cross-functional expertise, emphasizing how developers can thrive by embracing AI as a tool rather than a threat.

The conversation highlights the growing need for soft skills like emotional intelligence, curiosity, and collaborative leadership, and encourages developers to be open to new technologies and ways of working to stay competitive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Lance Dacy
Big Agile
“Be curious, not judgemental” – Walt Whitman
#54: Unlocking Agile’s Power in the World of Data Science with Lance Dacy
#63: The Interplay Between Data Science and Agile with Lance Dacy
#82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton
#99: AI & Agile Learning with Hunter Hillegas
Accurate Agile Planning
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. How's your week going? I hope everyone's week is going well. Yeah, I'm switching things up. I'm not saying things exactly as I did the past 100 episodes. But welcome in. I hope you guys are having a great week. We are back with you here at the Agile Mentors Podcast. And I have one of our favorites back with us. I have one of our repeat visitors, Lance Dacys with us. Welcome back, Lance.

Lance Dacy (00:28)
Thank you, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian (00:30)
Always excited to have Lance with us because we always have such great conversations. And I wanted to have Lance back because we were talking about something recently that I think might be a good topic for us, might be on a lot of people's minds. And that is really kind of getting into this, what we've loosely termed the new age of development. With the new tools and new kind of the way that AI has worked its way into things and automation. How is this going to change and affect our teams? How is it going to change and affect how we develop? How is it going to change and affect the software industry? Lance, I know you had some thoughts on this. I'm going to just open the floor for you and let you take it from there.

Lance Dacy (01:15)
That's great, Brian. My heart is always with organizations and developers, just trying to help people get better. You and I shared that vision that I remember a long time ago, even at DFW Scrum, one of our vision statements was just trying to help you to do better today than you did yesterday. It's like, what are the things that we can help teams and organizations? And something's real heavy on my mind lately as I work with these teams. You know, we have these notions out there like Agile is dead and, you know, where is Agile headed? And that's not really what this is about here because I think what's happening, as a lot of people have already said, it's just become more of the mainstream. Let's quit labeling it. You know, like Mike always tells us, object -oriented programming won. We don't really call it that anymore. Objects won and off we went. So I'm not really focused so much on the agile type scenario, but we do work in Scrum and agile teams and I see plenty of organizations that need help with that. And I still encounter to this day, developers who are lagging behind on their skills, right? We get so focused in the day -to -day feature development of our roadmap and things like that. that I just fear that developers aren't setting enough time aside or not challenging the organization to help them do that, to learn new skills. And I started compiling this list of like, if I go in and start teaching teams how to do scrum and how to manage your backlog and how to do that, it doesn't matter if they don't have the skills because everything we talk about in Agile is based on reducing waste and the more of these skills gaps that we have. then I find the more handoffs and the more bottlenecks and you know that's one of the eight waste, you know, of lean. And so that's what I wanted to talk about today. And I love the topic like the new age of development. I'm not going to sit here in a spouse to claim to say, here's all the skills you're going to need. But as you and I work, I think we can find plenty of examples to help guide some of these people, even Scrum Masters that are coaching teams or agile coaches, you know, just kind of put some thoughts in their mind about. know, these skills and I have about a short list of five that I've seen growing and then thought we'd go from there.

Brian (03:30)
That sounds great. I want to dive into one that I know is on your list and it's one we kind of talked about here beforehand, but that is kind of how AI is affecting teams and the skills needed to be relevant with that. Now, I want to preface this by just saying my own personal opinion here on this. I'm not a doom and gloom person when it comes to AI. don't really see it much different than...

Lance Dacy (03:34)
Thank So, I'll see you.

Brian (03:59)
how automation really changed things like testing. When automation entered the testing realm, we didn't lose all our testers. We still needed testing. It just was a tool that enhanced the way we did testing. And I think AI is sort of going to be that for how we program. don't think we're at a place where, or I don't know, things could change quickly, obviously, but I don't feel like we're within 10 years. of it completely replacing developers. I think we're still going to need to have expertise. We're still going to need to have that guidance. Maybe 10 years is too big of a window. don't know. Maybe five years? I don't know.

Lance Dacy (04:42)
These days you don't know. I just thought yesterday something changed. No, I'm just kidding.

Brian (04:46)
Right, right. But I don't see that happening in the near term window for sure, just because it does a lot of things well, but it doesn't create. It can do things based on what's already been done, but it can't really then go through and create something entirely new itself. So I think you still need human beings for that component of it.

Lance Dacy (05:04)
Done.

Brian (05:15)
And I think for developers, learning how to integrate that kind of tool set to help you reduce your errors, define bugs, AI is great at looking over a huge chunk of your code and finding potential issues that you can go back and look at. That can save you enormous amounts of time. So I think there's skill involved there for for the developers segment that I think is embracing it rather than kind of holding it at arm's length and saying, that's the enemy, that's gonna somehow replace me. No, think of it like automation. It's not to replace you, it's just another tool to enhance and give you time to do other things.

Lance Dacy (06:02)
I think, you know, you mentioned, don't think you and I either would be convicted of being doom and gloom people. think we're pretty well optimistic, right? It is scary. mean, obviously these things that are changing, you're like, my gosh, I have to, the main word I keep thinking about is adaptability. You know, I've got four kids. I keep telling them the best skill they can do is learn how to learn, you know, and I think you just used a perfect example in development about test automation.

Brian (06:10)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (06:30)
We weren't scared of that. The testers might have been because they're like, well, what do I do now? Well, you got to go learn a new skill, right? But it freed us up. Can you imagine still doing, there's companies out there that still do manual testing, and they have to wait until all the changes are in until they do testing, and you will never compete. in a good hyper competitive marketplace doing things like this. So the test automation freed us up and actually what I used to tell my teams is it gives you more confidence, right? So developers can make more radical changes in the code without feeling like, know, you. You blow on something and then it breaks. know, y 'all ever seen code like that before? And it's like, I think it builds their confidence that test automation helped them to be more efficient and more productive because they can experiment more. think that's the goal is I write this code and I can quickly test to see what happens. And I start building my confidence and I can make more radical changes to the system instead of tiptoeing or walking on eggshells. So I'll date myself a little bit. Your example is probably much better than mine. But can you believe I don't use a Maps Go anymore? Y 'all remember the days of trying to navigate a street address with a Maps Go or a real map? I mean, I'm kind of at that bridge where we started having online maps, but you still had to know where you're going and print it out before you left and then take it in your car. You're still trying to read it as you're driving. I mean, who does that anymore, right? So I get in my car these days and now I don't even have to plug CarPlay or Android or whatever you have. It's wireless. You just get in and I'm now a co -pilot in my car. And we kind of laughed about that. think the last episode we're on and I can just drive around in it. I just do what it tells me to do. But it'll never replace my experience, my opinions, and my knowledge of the world. So I can.

Brian (08:05)
Right.

Lance Dacy (08:20)
you know, sidestep any suggestions it has, but it helps me be more productive. It knows where traffic is. I don't know that. You know, I know the city I live in and I know five different ways to get somewhere, but I don't know if there's a road closed or anything like that. So I feel like with developers, we need to start embracing some of these tools to help you be more confident, help you. mean, goal of agility, right, is to go faster, go faster than our competitors. So I feel like that's the premise of what we're trying to accomplish here is optimism with these tools. AI is just one of them. But we all have that in our day -to -day lives. test automation is good. I've got the driving. What's another one you got, Brian, that's made you more efficient with AI?

Brian (09:01)
Well, just before we move on, one thing I wanted to kind of throw out there because I heard this example recently for AI and I thought this was a kind of a really good practical example. If you've been a developer for any amount of time or if you've ever developed in the past, you've unlikely encountered a situation where you've had to go into somebody else's code. And when you do that and you have to enter, especially if it's like a rat's nest of code that you can't really make it out, it's been there for a long time. and it's fragile, no one wants to delve into it. Well, I read this article from a guy who basically had used this legacy code base and entered into AI and had AI go through and comment and help them learn what the different sections of the code did and how it was structured and organized. And it just saved them an enormous amount of time in trying to understand what had come before. Because you know, Like I said, we've all entered those places where we've had to come in behind someone else that is no longer there and try to figure out where we get started, even if it's not code, right? Even if it's something else, but we've all had to come behind someone else. And if we can take a folder full of documents, feed it into AI and then say, help me understand blah, blah, blah. Yeah, summarize this. Help me understand where would I go for this? That's just an enormous time saver. And that's what I think is really great about it is

Lance Dacy (10:17)
you summarize this.

Brian (10:27)
So as far as skills are concerned, think prompt engineering is a good one. think coding, interacting with code with an AI agent so that you can create your own AI agents so that you can programmatically call that information. If you're a coder and you can do that, man, to me it's like it just exploded. And now the possibilities are endless of what you can do with that kind of stuff.

Lance Dacy (10:57)
just dated myself with Cliff Notes too, right? Just think of it like on the fly Cliff Notes. And I heard Alastair Coburn, one of the thought leaders in our industry, been around for a very long time trying to help humans and machines interact better. And he kind of summarized really well about what it's doing in his life is saving him keystrokes.

Brian (11:03)
Right!

Lance Dacy (11:19)
And that's kind of like what I wanted to focus on with developers. Can you imagine if you got to spend more time being creative and less time writing on a keyboard to the computer, like you just talk to it. I'm getting to the point now, I used to text all the time and I used to laugh at people that hold the phone up to their voice and they talk into it. I fat finger things and misspelled things so much, all I do is just talk into it anymore. So I feel like coding, that's what it's, you're not even going to tell it the code to write. You're going to have to be... more problem solving design engineer, you less code writing, more problem solving and understanding the domain in which you're trying to automate and algorithm design and ethical considerations that go along with that. But the computer won't be able to do that, but it'll save you keystrokes. It'll save you time. And I think Alistair summed that up pretty good that way.

Brian (12:07)
Yeah, it's architecture, right? We have to be better architects at what it is we're trying to develop. that way we can give the rough architecture and let AI do the dirty work of the small details to fill in.

Lance Dacy (12:21)
Well, you mentioned something too about boundaries, right? So AI has to operate within boundaries of what you feed it to learn off of. It's very, I'm not going to say never always really, that's a hard thing to say these days, but it's going to be very surprising if AI can just generate new ideas. It'll probably generate new ideas, but from what? I was working with a client yesterday that comes from more of the manufacturing world and he's really struggling with leadership agility. Like how do I lead and build a culture in a world for people who do the kind of work that we normally focus on with software engineering and development? He said he's a mechanical engineer and I kept using the word knowledge work, right? So the people who do our kind of work, the reason it's so complex, risky, uncertain, unpredictable and all those things is because it's kind of like knowledge and critical thinking and creative work. And he goes, but how is that different? I'm a mechanical engineer. How does that differ from software engineer? And I said, you know, it's a really good point. It's nothing about who's smarter than who, right? So I'm not trying to put anybody down on that. But in the world of mechanical engineering, you are bound by physics. are like you work in the space industry. Yeah, you're doing some cool things and you got to come up with new ways of doing things, but you still have to operate with. physics and astrophysics within those boundaries that we know about with space. But in software, and I sit down and start writing something, there's no boundaries. Like I can use any technology I want, can come up with any, I'm limited by my own skills and abilities. So why not let AI go help me get ideas? I'm not saying you got to write it all for you, because hey, I told one of the AI tools to write me an e -commerce site in Ruby on Rails. and it gave me all the scaffolding and if I would have taken that and start putting it in, then I can start elaborate. But how much time does that save me? How am gonna construct the file? So it kind of handles that architecture, but then I gotta put my critical thinking on it. I just feel like it's gonna make us, if we embrace it correctly, it's just gonna make us more efficient in that way.

Brian (14:22)
I agree. So what was one of the other skills that you had down that you thought of as being a new era kind of skill?

Lance Dacy (14:29)
So I'll just go through the four left real quick. I was thinking about cross -functional expertise and we can dive into some of those a little bit. Most Scrum teams we say, hey, you got to have cross -functional teams. And that doesn't mean everybody knows everything. It just means we have all the skills on the team to bring something usable by the end of the iteration. But I feel like cross -functional these days is no longer about coding. Like I know a front -end developer, back -end developer, database person, tester, UI, UX, architecture. These are more like understanding what we call now DevOps, cloud infrastructure, hardware, software integration, particularly in fields like, I work with some defense people, some aerospace engineering, writing code is like bare minimum anymore. So if you can do that, celebrate that, but you've got to move beyond that and start understanding these machines hardware, which leads me to my next one, which is continuous learning and adaptability. because the rate of change in software frameworks and tools we just talked about has accelerated. And if we're not keeping up with that and learning from that, you're gonna be left behind. So be agile in that regard. The last two I had on my list, one I'm just gonna brand it as cybersecurity.

Brian (15:47)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (15:47)
cryptography, like I got a, went to school and for data science, you know, got my master's degree when just after COVID started, I had no idea what I was thinking, but it actually was pretty good because it was all online anyway. But I had to take a lot of cryptography classes way over my head, but at least I understand the terminology and the nomenclature, but that's going to be the key. is, and I've read somewhere, I can't remember the article, but there's like a shortage of 79 ,000 jobs in cryptography. So if you're looking and you're scared for the future, go start learning cryptography and security because these, you know, specifically zero trust architecture, these things that a lot of blockchains have been pioneering in the last couple of years, we're going to have to start locking these things down because every time we find a better way to do security, a hacker undoes that. And this was the cat and mouse game forever and ever. I don't think that will go away. So cybersecurity and more like risk management, you need to understand coding practices for that, as well as how the hardware, the protocols, how do these things talk to one another? And then the last one I just branded is more like... collaborative leadership and communication. need a stronger, you know, used to we would think of software coders sitting in a dark basement, just leave them alone and let them code. And I think we're getting to the direct opposite of that. They need to be leaders out talking to the people who need these systems, going back to that cross -functional expertise. you need to do better communication to the non -technical people so you understand what you're trying to accomplish and automate for those people in the world of cybersecurity and how software tools are changing. People get tired of the buzzwords, right? The technology jargon. So you're going to have to learn how to do that. And I think data scientists are going to be, they're kind of the first group that I've seen this happen. Like when we talk about data science and analytics and AI and Scrum, We've done a couple of podcasts on that. The issue is not just, I'm going to demonstrate what I've shown you, but now I'm going to partner with you and say what I think we should do next. Like I can model a data system ad infinitum, but my theory is I think I've done the best we can do. You can spend two more million dollars and we'll get this much or spend a thousand dollars. do this. And you have to partner with them on that. So those are kind of the five here. You mentioned the first one. So AI and automation, integration, things like that, cross -functional expertise. continuous learning and adaptability, the cryptography, cybersecurity realm, whatever you want to call it, and then collaborative, more collaborative leadership and communication. So those were the five gaps that I think if developers are scared and want to shore up their skills, those are kind of the five that I'm telling my teams to go look for.

Brian (18:38)
That's a great list. I throw a couple, I don't have a full list like you brought, but there's a couple of things that just popped in my head that I would throw into that list as well. One is what I'm just going to call teaming. Because I think there's a need, there's a real need in the marketplace today of people understanding how to do work in a team. Because regardless of what the work is, regardless of what the industry is or the

Lance Dacy (18:51)
Yeah.

Brian (19:07)
backdrop is, you know, most, most jobs, you work together with a group of people to accomplish something in some way, shape or form. That's part of the reasons why shows like The Office or movies like Office Space are so funny is because it's so bad in so many places that people don't really, we laugh at it because we all painfully are aware of how bad it is. Right? Right.

Lance Dacy (19:35)
It's real. We get it the mark.

Brian (19:38)
So being able to understand how a group of people actually do work together well to accomplish something. And I'm not talking about hokey kind of motivational, hey everybody, let's make sure we put on our happy faces today. Right, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just, we all go, know, the way I explained it in classes, do we think of teaming as sort of the way you would do golf on a team? where everybody goes and shoots their own 18 holes and then we total up the score? Or do you think of teaming more like it would be in football or basketball or soccer or something like that where everyone's on the field at the same time, we all have the same goal, we're all moving towards the same goal and we do whatever is needed to accomplish that goal. We have to work together. If you go to any youth sport in the world that's a team, what's the one thing that you'll hear people say, from a sideline over and over the coaches say to the team, you got to talk to each other. Right, communicate, talk to each other, call for the ball, right? And that's such an essential teaming kind of component of that, that I think that's one of the big things there is just being able to understand how to team.

Lance Dacy (20:37)
Communicate, yeah. Well, and if you don't know what you're supposed to do, ask somebody. So that's the, you know, I'm not going into psychological safety, but how many people feel safe in an organization going, I don't know how to do this because then you're like, my gosh, if I don't know how to do it, I'll get fired. I lose my job. do this. so cultures have to change as well. I don't have that on my list because this was more specific to contributing it as a team. But I think that's a really important call out. know, professional sports get a bad rap when we use analogies. I love them. because I love sports and I know some people don't play sports and I get that, but you at least have seen them. But that's a great example of five people, 11 people, eight people, whoever it is on the field together with one goal. How important is that? And how often do organizations do a good job at centering people around a one goal? Terrible. We do a terrible job at that. But that's out of the, developers, when I say collaborative leadership, they need to start pushing on those things. So that's, I guess we could call those soft skills. What would you call those, Brian?

Brian (21:53)
Well, actually that was gonna be my next thing was kind of more of these soft skills that I know a lot of people really hate that term and you can use whatever term you wanna. Right, I mean, that's one of them, right? But I mean, just being able to navigate conflict on a team.

Lance Dacy (22:01)
emotional intelligence. I've heard that. Yeah, fill in gaps when you don't have a skill. Go learn it. Solve, work the problem. You know, remember Apollo 13 is like one of my favorite movies. It was a really well done one. And Ed Harris is a great example in that, as he plays Gene Crantz, know, as Apollo 13 was having its issues.

Brian (22:17)
Yeah.

Lance Dacy (22:27)
and work the problem people, they don't know what they're doing. They're all smart people getting together, but they need something. They have to talk and collaborate. So I think that's a huge one. how do you learn to do that? You gotta go do it. You can't read a book and say, how do I get more collaborative? You gotta have, I call it attitude, aptitude, and drive. If you don't have the right attitude or tone when you work with people, They're going to shy away from you and not tell you everything you think. So you want to be approachable. You want to be, hey, bring me any problem you have. Let's talk about it. Like you want to be, that's what I call the right attitude to succeed. Aptitude obviously is your ability to learn something new and get up to speed. And then the drive to succeed. How many people have you worked with where they just do the bare minimum getting by just collecting their paycheck, you know? developers face that, right? So if you're one of those people, if you really want to shore up your skill, go figure out how to change your attitude or maybe you're in the wrong business. But how would you, you know, that's a good one to think about. How would you help fine tune those as a person? What could you go do to shore up your attitude, aptitude and drive? I'll put you on the spot, Brian. I'm sorry. you've done a lot of good talks recently on the neurodivergent and I know you've

Brian (23:38)
What?

Lance Dacy (23:44)
you know, the research that you've done on that, that's more of what I'm talking about here is finding your place in the world of every, you know, bring your gift and talent in whatever state it is, but how could you train yourself to be more approachable and have a better drive? What do you think?

Brian (23:59)
Yeah, well, so my biggest advice there is, I'll quote Ted Lasso who's quoting someone else, but right, be curious, not judgmental, right? That old phrase, which is not his, I forget where it comes from, I think it was, I don't wanna get it wrong. Right, right.

Lance Dacy (24:10)
We all knew something from Ted Lasso, right? You'll put it in the notes, I guess, later.

Brian (24:27)
But that phrase I think should be kind of a hallmark for how we approach things is with curiosity. Like why is it this way? Why is it working this way? And what's behind that rather than that's wrong or that's bad or that's whatever. Right, right. You know, someone does things a different way. Well, that's curious. I wonder why they do that that way. Is that the best way to do things? Let's discuss it. Let's analyze it.

Lance Dacy (24:42)
Or what are you making?

Brian (24:56)
I just want to briefly say too, when you mentioned the sports analogies things and how we get in trouble sometimes for using sports analogies, I say this in my classes, at its core, I can't really completely get away from sports analogies because Scrum is a sports analogy.

Lance Dacy (25:17)
In 1986, they used a professional example, team example, of how products were succeeding in 86. Sony, know, Honda, Canon, all of them, and that's what spawned that article for it, right?

Brian (25:23)
Right. And that article says, you know, the relay race approach to doing things is not the right way. That's a sports analogy, right? It's talking about relay races and handing the baton off between one runner and the other runner. And, you know, that's a sports analogy. And think in teaming, there's an inherent kind of, all right, we don't have to get into all the rules and regulations of the different sports. You don't have to follow them. But I think we can, like you said, I think we can all understand. that when you have a team on the field at the same time, there's a big difference between that and, like I said, golf, where I'm just gonna go shoot my 18 holes, right? But what somebody else is doing doesn't affect me, right? I mean, it affects me at the end of the day with the score, but it doesn't affect, if I'm on the fifth hole, I don't really need to even know what anybody else is doing because I'm just, I'm shooting the best 18 holes I can shoot, right?

Lance Dacy (26:08)
Do the best I can in my one skill. Yeah. And you do have a shared goal, right? We're trying to get the best score, but you're more limited. You can't help other people. Like what is the, it's the attitude I really think, I wish I had a better word for it, but when you walk out on the field, you either are there to do whatever you can to succeed within your capacity and have an attitude of, let's pick each other up. Everybody's going to have good and bad days. We know that. So somebody's going to show up on the team and be like, man, I'm sick or. I'm moving and I'm scattered all over the place and I'm going to be a little flighty this week. People pick each other up. Like, how do we learn to do that, Brian? How do we, how do we, how can we teach people, especially developers to contribute on their teams in that way? It's not about your skills. It's about your attitude, your aptitude and drive.

Brian (27:12)
Yeah, and I think what's at the core of that for a lot of teams and I had several conversations with the different agile conferences I went to this year with people about this. There's this cultural aspect that is so much more important than any of the details that we get into as far as meeting length and who attends and all that. It's just at its core, do you inspect and adapt? Right? Do you actually take time when you...

Lance Dacy (27:21)
Yep.

Brian (27:42)
And it sounds so simple, right? But how many times have you been involved with something at work where everyone knows it's the wrong way to do it, right? Everyone knows that's a terrible thing that's happening in our work. And we all can just kind of shrug our shoulders and say, well, I guess that's the way it has to be. Why? Why don't we inspect and say, why are we doing it that way? Is there another way we could do things? And then we try something different.

Lance Dacy (28:07)
Well, and pull it up because the other problem is the hierarchy of a traditional management driven organization is do I have the courage, you know, one of the scrum values courage to raise that flag and stand up for what's right or our fear of losing my job. And I'm going to encourage you developers out there. If you really want to do a great job, you're a great developer and you're not just trying to get by. I would challenge you like I had to learn a long time ago and say, if I do those things and I get fired, I don't want to work at that organization anyway. But that takes a lot more courage because you got a family and you got all this stuff. But you might have your answer if you start raising the flag. don't be an ass about it. Be an attitude, aptitude, and drive. But that's why I said number three on my list here was continuous learning and adaptability. You have to learn that.

Brian (28:54)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'll give you kind of a practical example here. So if you're working on a team and let's say that you need to get approval to do something, okay? If you have to get that approval and you know that approval is going to cause a delay because I've got to go get approval to do this. Well, be curious, ask the question, why do I need to have this approval? What's the purpose behind getting this approval? And if the answer, if there is a good answer, right? Well, we have to do that because compliance is really important with us and our safety or whatever. And if we don't do that, then we can have a catastrophic event. All right, there's a good reason to get approval. But if the reason comes back, well, because that's the way it always has been, we've always had to ask four layers of approval to get something done. Maybe then question it and say, hey, is there a... Can you help me understand the purpose of getting these four layers of approval? Is there really a need to get four layers of approval for this? What's the downside if I don't get approval for this? Is it catastrophic if I make a decision that maybe one of those four layers of approval disagrees with? Can it still be changed later? What I try to tell people is the speed you get from not having to go through those four layers of approval is far outweighing any kind of small mistake that that person might make. So that's kind of a practical example to say, be curious about it. Try to inspect and adapt. Why is it this way? Does it need to be this way? Is there a reason why we're doing it this way? And if there's not a good answer as to why, then I think it's not bad to question it.

Lance Dacy (30:39)
Yeah. And they're never going to say, well, we like ossified and calcified processes. Every time we have a problem, we add more checks and balances to them. We never remove them. And that's one of the bane of the team's existences these days is, yeah, we got to mitigate risk and we can't be haphazard, but that's why you got to shore up your skills on this automation and get better at problem solving, less coding and more problem solving. And I tell you what, Brian, we were going to wrap up at the end of the podcast with what I wanted to talk about is don't be scared about AI because I don't think, like I said, I don't want to use the word never or always, but I really think it's going to be hard for AI to learn and take our place in number one, emotional intelligence and empathy. you know, AI can certainly analyze patterns of what it's been for, but truly understanding emotions, nuance, and the complexities of human relationships, which is what we're talking about here. Tone AI don't, I don't think it'll ever really learn how to do that or well. All right. on top of that, be the ethical side of it, right? The cultural things and ethical, know, you could put boundaries on it. can give it rules. But I think humans have a really good, well, most humans have a good sense of that. So I think emotional intelligence and empathy, I creative problem solving and artistry. I kind of use the word artistry for developers as well, like writing code and architecting code and the hardware infrastructure and all that that goes into that. AI can generate the beginning, like AI can generate art. It can generate music if you heard some of these things. I mean, they're good. I see the art, I see the music, but it's all based on patterns. It lacks the ability to produce truly original works that stem from like live experiences and personal insights. So celebrate that and bring that to your job. And I think alongside that is complex thinking, know, strategic thinking, leadership, critical thinking, things like that. know, AI is effective at optimizing and analyzing data and helps us, you know, like COBOL used to read and write data faster than any other system. Humans can't keep up with that. Our processor is the bottleneck. So use that, offload that to something else. But your leadership requires abstract thinking and foresight and the ability to motivate people is something that AI really is not going to be able to do. So start shifting your focus from, you know, the things of data and analyzing. let the computer summarize that and then you put your critical thinking on it. And I think that's where you're going to find a better place for yourself as developers. You're going to be and need to be technologists, but that blurring of the line between DevOps and coding is coming and coming and coming. So you have to start learning the hardware that's running all this stuff and make higher level decisions and less of the lower level. So celebrate your emotional intelligence. your empathy, build those skills up, never lose sight of critical problem solving and artistry that you bring to the table and complex thinking and adaptability. Those are the things that you need to focus on, I think, as developers and embrace this AI to make you more efficient. That's my opinion.

Brian (33:59)
Yeah. And I'd say, you know, I just tag one last thing on that and it's to say, you know, with the new tools, with the new kind of AI stuff and things that come along, be curious, not judgmental. Ask about how I could use that to my advantage. You you mentioned the music kind of software. I think I know musicians who are using that kind of software to help them, but they see it more as a tool, not as, and now it'll do the job for me. just like I wouldn't go and put in into chat GBT, write me a whole book on something, right? Right, right. I'm not gonna go, if I'm a musician, I'm not gonna go say write a whole song and I'm gonna just take that lock, second barrel, here's everything that that put out and I'm not gonna alter their change. No, but I can get an idea, I can get a melody or a hook or something that I could use and then I can build upon that. So.

Lance Dacy (34:34)
And then just spin that over. Yeah. And those are always patterns, like every music you hear somebody, it could sound like another song. So you're not really violating ethics there. Like I used AI one time, you my son's learning how to do guitar and I play piano, but I was like, give me eight chord structures that are sad. I mean, there's a certain number of combinations and you listen to them and you're like, okay, now I can add a song under that. But I didn't have to sit around and pick forever and ever like they did, you know, in the old days, which I celebrate that. I think that's great. But why not have eight of them there? And I say, I like that one or don't give me eight more, you know, give me eight more.

Brian (35:13)
Sure. Right, right, right. So think of it more as a tool, right? Well, this has been great. think this is, hopefully we've given everyone a lot to think about here. And if there's one thing I kind of sum up, I hope that people look at it, maybe we're a little too Pollyanna about this, if that's a dated reference too, but naive. But I would say,

Lance Dacy (35:32)
Yeah.

Brian (35:57)
try to be more hopeful about these tools and say, can I use them to my advantage rather than how can I, how is it going to destroy it?

Lance Dacy (36:04)
Attitude, aptitude and drive. Have a great attitude, right? Say, hey, I'm going to embrace this stuff and not so much doom and gloom. Go figure out how you can use it to your advantage and you're going to separate yourself from everybody else. Totally agree with that.

Brian (36:07)
There we go. Love it. Well, Lance, thanks for coming on again. I appreciate you taking time.

Lance Dacy (36:21)
My pleasure. As always, I look forward to our next one, Brian. Y 'all have a great week.

What do lizards have to do with product growth? In this episode, Gojko Adzic reveals how unusual user behaviors can unlock massive opportunities for product innovation. Discover the four steps to mastering "Lizard Optimization" and learn how you can turn strange user actions into game-changing insights.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, host Brian Milner chats with Gojko Adzic about his new book, Lizard Optimization. Gojko explains the concept of finding product growth signals in strange user behaviors, sharing examples where unexpected user actions led to product breakthroughs.

He outlines a four-step process for optimizing products by learning, zeroing in, removing obstacles, and double-checking. Gojko also discusses helpful tools like session recorders and observability tools that can enhance product development by uncovering and addressing unique user behaviors.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Gojko Adzic
50% OFF Lizard Optimization by Gojko Adzic
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes
Trustworthy Online Experiments by Ron Kohavi
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast
Join the Agile Mentors Community

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Gojko Adzic is an award-winning software consultant and author, specializing in agile and lean quality improvement, with expertise in impact mapping, agile testing, and behavior-driven development. A frequent speaker at global software conferences, Gojko is also a co-creator of MindMup and Narakeet, and has helped companies worldwide enhance their software delivery, from large financial institutions to innovative startups.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today, very special guest we have with us. have Mr. Goiko Atshich with us. I hope I said that correctly. Did I say it correctly? Close enough. Okay. Well, welcome in, Goiko. Glad to have you here.

Gojko (00:15)
Close enough, close enough.

Brian (00:21)
Very, very, very happy to have Goiko with us. If you're not familiar with Goiko's name, you probably are familiar with some of his work. One of the things I was telling him that we teach in our advanced product owner class every time is impact mapping, which is a tool that Goiko has written about and kind of come up with on his own as well.

Gojko (00:21)
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Brian (00:47)
But today we're having him on because he has a new book coming out called Lizard Optimization, Unlock Product Growth by Engaging Long Tail Users. And I really wanted to talk to him about that and help him explain, have him explain to us a little bit about this idea, this new concept that his new book is about. So, Goiko, let's talk about it. Lizard Optimization, in a nutshell, what do you mean by that? What is it?

Gojko (01:14)
We're going to jump into that, but I just need to correct one of the things you said. I think it's very, very important. You said I came up with impact mapping and I didn't. I just wrote a popular book about that. And it's very important to credit people who actually came up with that. It's kind of the in -use design agency in Sweden. And I think, you know, they should get the credit for it. I literally just wrote a popular book.

Brian (01:19)
Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha. Apologies for that incorrect. Thank you for making that correction. So lizard optimization.

Gojko (01:44)
So, lizard optimization. Good. So, lizard optimization is an idea to find signals for product ideas and product development ideas in strange user behaviors. When you meet somebody who does something you completely do not understand, why on earth somebody would do something like that?

Brian (02:03)
Okay.

Gojko (02:11)
and it looks like it's not done by humans, it looks like it's done by somebody who follows their own lizard logic, using stuff like that as signals to improve our products. Not just for lizards, but for everybody. So the idea came from a very explosive growth phase for one of the products I'm working on, where it... had lots of people doing crazy things I could never figure out why they were doing it. For example, one of the things the tool does is it helps people create videos from PowerPoints. You put some kind of your voiceover in the speaker notes, the tool creates a video by using text to speech engines to create voiceover from the speaker notes, aligns everything and it's all kind of for you. People kept creating blank videos and paying me for this. I was thinking about why on earth would somebody be creating blank videos and it must be a bug and if it's a bug then they want their money back and they'll complain. So I chased up a few of these people and I tried to kind of understand what's going on because I originally thought we have a bug in the development pipeline for the videos. So... I started asking like, you know, I'm using some, I don't know, Google slides or, you know, keynote or whatever to produce PowerPoints. Maybe there's a bug how we read that. And the person, no, no, we, know, official Microsoft PowerPoint. They said, well, can you please open the PowerPoint you uploaded? Do you see anything on the slides when you open it? And the person, no, it's blank. Right? Okay, so it's blank for you as well. I said, yeah. So.

Brian (03:48)
Yeah.

Gojko (03:54)
What's going on? so what I've done is through UX interviews and iterating with users and research, we've made it very, very easy to do advanced configuration on text -to -speech. And it was so much easier than the alternative things that people were creating blank PowerPoints just to use the text -to -speech engines so they can then extract the audio track from it.

Brian (03:54)
Yeah, why?

Gojko (04:23)
and then use that and it was this whole mess of obstacles I was putting in front of people to get the good audio. It wasn't the original intention of the tool. It wasn't the original value, but people were getting unintended value from it. And then I ended up building just a very simple screen for people to upload the Word document instead of PowerPoints. And it was much faster for users to do that. A month later, there was many audio files being built as videos. Two months later, audio... production overtook video production. then at the moment, people are building many, many more audio files than video files on the platform. So it was an incredible growth because of this kind of crazy insight of what people were doing. kind of usually, at least kind of in the products I worked on before, when you have somebody abusing the product, product management fight against it. There's a wonderful story about this in... Founders at work a book by Jessica Livingston and she talks about this kind of group of super smart people in late 90s who Came up with a very very efficient Cryptography algorithm and a way to compute the cryptography so they can run it on low -power devices like Paul pilots Paul pilots were you know like mobile phones, but in late 90s and Then they had to figure out, how do we monetize this? Why would anybody want to do this? So they came up with the idea to do money transfer pumping, Palm pilots, you know, why not? And kind of the built a website. This was the late nineties as a way of just demoing this software to people who didn't have a Palm pilot device next to them. The idea was that you'd kind of see it on the website, learn about it, then maybe download the Palm pilot app and use it in anger. People kept just using the website, they're not downloading the Palm Pilot app. So the product management really wasn't happy. And they were trying to push people from the website to the Palm Pilot app. were trying to, they were fighting against people using this for money transfer on the web and even prohibiting them from using the logo and advertising it. They had this whole thing where nobody could explain why users were using the website because it was a demo thing. It was not finished. It was not sexy. It was just silly. And Jessica kind of talks to one of these people who insists that it was totally inexplicable. Nobody could understand it. But then a bit later, they realized that the website had one and half million users and that the Pongpilot app had 12 ,000 users. So they kind of decided, well, that's where the product is really. And that's like today, people know them as PayPal. They're one of the biggest payment processes in the world because kind of, you know, they realized this is where the product is going. And I think in many, many companies, people

Brian (07:03)
Ha ha.

Gojko (07:18)
stumble upon these things as happy accidents. And I think there's a lot more to it. We can deliberately optimize products by looking for unintended usage and not fighting it, just not fighting it. just understand this is what people are getting as value. And I think for me as a solo product founder and developer and product manager on it, One of the really interesting things is when you have somebody engaging with your product in an unexpected way, most of the difficult work for that user is already done. That person knows about you, they're on your website or they're using your product, the marketing and acquisition work is done. But something's preventing them from achieving their goals or they're achieving some value that you did not really know that they're going to achieve. you know, that's something the product can do to help them and remove these obstacles to success. So that's kind of what lizard optimization is making this process more systematic rather than relying on happy accidents. And by making it more systematic, then we can help product management not fight it and skip this whole phase of trying to fight against our users and claim that users are stupid or non -technical or... They don't understand the product, but they're trying to figure out, well, that's what the real goals are. And then following that.

Brian (08:47)
That's awesome. So the pivot, right? The pivot from here's what we thought our problem was we were solving to now here's what we're actually solving and we should organize around this actual problem, right?

Gojko (09:02)
or here's what we're going to solve additionally. This is the problem we've solved, but hey, there's this problem as well. And then the product can grow by solving multiple problems for people and solving related problems and solving it for different groups of people, for example. And that's the really interesting thing because I think if you have a product that's already doing something well for your users and a subset of them are misusing it in some way, then kind of...

Brian (09:04)
Yeah.

Gojko (09:30)
The product might already be optimized for the majority of users, but there might be a new market somewhere else. So there might be a different market where we can help kind of a different group of users and then the product can grow.

Brian (09:43)
Yeah, I like to focus on the user. There's an exercise that we'll do in one of our product owner classes where we have a fake product that is a smart refrigerator. And one of the exercises we try to get them to brainstorm the different kinds of users that they might have for it. And one of the things that always comes out in that class is as they're going through and trying to describe the types of users, they inevitably hit to this crossroads where they start to decide Well, yes, we're thinking of this as a home product, something for people to use in their homes. But then the idea crosses their mind, well, what about commercial kitchens? What about people who might use this in another setting? And it's always an interesting conversation to say, well, now you've got a strategic choice to make, because you can target both. You can target one. You can say, we're ignoring the other and we're only going in this direction. So to me, I think that's kind of one of the interesting crossroad points is to say, how do I know when it's time to not just say, great, we have this other customer segment that we didn't know about, but actually we should start to pivot towards that customer segment and start to really target them.

Gojko (11:03)
Yeah, think that's a fundamental question of product development, isn't it? Do you keep true to your vision even if it's not coming out or if something else is there that's kind more important than I think? For me, there's a couple of aspects to that. One is, laser focus is really important to launch a product. You can't launch a product by targeting... the whole market and targeting a niche type, figuring out, you know, user personas, figuring out like really, really, this is the product who we think the product, this is the group who we think the product is for and giving them a hundred percent of what they need is much better than giving 2 % to everybody because then the product is irrelevant. But then to grow the product, we need to kind of grow the user base as well. And I think one of the things that... is interesting to look at and this comes from a book called Lean Analytics. It's one of my kind of favorite product management books is to look at the frequency and urgency of usage. If you have a group that's kind of using your product, a subgroup that's using your product very frequently compared to everybody else, that might be kind of the place where you want to go. The more frequently, the more urgently people reach for your product when they have this problem. the more likely they are going to be a good market for it. with kind of another product that I've launched in 2013, we originally thought it's going to be a product for professional users. And we aimed at the professional users. And then we found that a subcategory that we didn't really expect, were kind of teachers and children in schools. we're using it a lot more frequently than professional users. And then we started simplifying the user interface significantly so that it can be used by children. And it's a very, very popular tool in schools now. We are not fighting against other professional tools. We were kind of really one of the first in the education market there. And it's still a very popular tool in the education market because we figured a subgroup that's using it very frequently.

Brian (13:14)
Hmm. Yeah, that's awesome. How do you know when, you know, what kind of threshold do you look for to determine that, this is, because, you know, in your book, you're talking about, you know, behaviors that are not normal, right? People using your product in a way that you didn't anticipate. And what kind of threshold do you look for to that says, hey, it's worth investigating this? You know, I've got this percentage or this number of people who are using it in this strange way. At what point do you chase that down?

Gojko (13:49)
I think it's wrong to look at the percentages there. I think it's wrong to look at the percentages because then you get into the game of trying to justify economically helping 0 .1 % of the users. And that's never going to happen because what I like about this is an idea from Microsoft's Inclusive Design and the work of Kat Holmes who wrote a book called Mismatch on

Brian (13:52)
Okay.

Gojko (14:17)
assistive technologies and inclusive design for disabled people. And she talks about how it's never ever ever going to be economically justified to optimize a product to help certain disabilities because there's just not enough of them. And there's a lovely example from Microsoft where, Microsoft Inclusive Design Handbook where they talk about three types of,

Brian (14:34)
Yeah.

Gojko (14:44)
disabilities, one are permanent. So you have like people without an arm or something like that. And I'm going to kind of throw some numbers out now, order of magnitude stuff. I have these details in the book and there's kind of the micro -inclusive design handbook. Let's say at the moment, the 16 ,000 people in the U .S. without one arm or with a disabled arm. And then you have these kind of situational disabilities where because of an occupation like you have a bartender who needs to carry something all the time or a worker who does it, one arm is not available and they only have one arm to work on and this temporary like a mother carrying a child or something like that. So the other two groups are order of magnitude 20 -30 million. We're not, by making the software work well with one hand, we're not helping 16 ,000 people, we are helping 50 million people. But you don't know that you're helping 50 million people if you're just thinking about like 16 ,000. I think they have this kind of, one of the key ideas of inclusive design is solve for one, kind of help, design for one, but solve for many. So we are actually helping many, many people there. So think when you figure out that somebody is doing something really strange with your product, you're not helping just that one person.

Brian (15:45)
Right, right. Hmm.

Gojko (16:13)
you're helping a whole class of your users by making the software better, removing the obstacles to success. this is where I, you know, going back to the PowerPoint thing I mentioned, once we started removing obstacles for people to build the audios quickly, lots of other people started using the product and people started using the product in a different way. And I think this is a lovely example of what Bruce Torazzini talks about is the complexity paradox because He's a famous UX designer and he talks about how once you give people a product, their behavior changes as a result of having the product. So the UX research we've done before there is a product or there is a feature is not completely relevant, but it's a changed context because he talks about people have a certain amount of time to do a task. And then when they have a tool to complete the task faster, they can take on a more complicated task or they can take on an additional task or do something else. I think removing obstacles to use a success is really important. Not because we're helping 0 .1 % of people who we don't understand, but because we can then improve the product for everybody. And I think that's kind of the magic of lizard optimization in a sense, where if we find these things where somebody's really getting stuck. but if we help them not get stuck, then other people will use the product in a much better way. And I think this is, know, the name lizard optimization comes from this article by Scott Alexander, who talks about the lizard man's constant in research. And the article talks about his experiences with a survey that combined some demographic and psychological data. So they were looking at where you live and what your nationality is and what gender you are and then how you respond to certain psychological questions. he said, like there's about 4 % of the answers they could not account for. And one person wrote American is gender. Several people listed Martian as nationality and things like that. some of these, he says some of these things will be people who didn't really understand the question. they were distracted, they were doing something else, or they understood the question but they filled in the wrong box because, know, the thick thumbs and small screens, or they were kind of malicious and just, you know, wanted to see what happens. when you kind of add these people together, they're not an insignificant group. kind of, he says 4%. And if... we can help these people, at least some of these people, and say reduce churn by 1%. That can compound growth. Reducing churn, keeping people around for longer is an incredible way to kind of unlock growth. going back to what we were talking about, some people might be getting stuck because they don't understand the instructions. Some people might be getting stuck because they're using the product in a way you didn't expect. And some people might just like not have the mental capacity to use it the way you expected them to be used. But if we can help these people along, then normal users can use it much, easier. And you mentioned a smart fridge. I still remember there was this one wonderful bug report we had for my other product, which is a collaboration tool. we had a bug report a while ago. that the software doesn't work when it's loaded on a fridge. And it's like, well, it was never intended to be loaded on a fridge. I have no idea how you loaded it on a fridge. It's a mind mapping diagramming tool. It's intended to be used on large screens. Where does a fridge come in? And then we started talking to this person. This was before the whole kind of COVID and work from home disaster. The user was a busy mother and she was kind of trying to collaborate with her colleagues while making breakfast. breakfast for kids and kind of running around the kitchen she wasn't able to kind of pay attention to the laptop or a phone but her fridge had a screen so she loaded the software on the fridge and was able to kind of pay attention to collaboration there and you know we of course didn't optimize the software to run on fridges that's ridiculous but we realized that some people will be using it without a keyboard and without a mouse and then we kind of restructured the toolbar, we made it so that you can use it on devices that don't have a keyboard and then the whole tablet thing exploded and now you get completely different users that don't have keyboards and things like that. I think that's where I think is looking at percentages is a losing game because then you start saying, but 0 .1 % of people use this. But yeah, I think lizard optimization is about using these signals to improve the products for everybody.

Brian (21:30)
That's a great example. I love that example because you're absolutely right. You're not trying to necessarily solve that one problem because you don't anticipate there's going to be a lot of people who are going to want to run that software on a fridge. However, the takeaway you had from that of, we can do this for people who don't have a keyboard or a mouse. There's another way that they might operate this that could apply to lots of different devices and lots of different scenarios. Now we're talking about a much bigger audience. Now we're talking about opening this up to larger segments of the population. I love that. I think that's a great example. I know you talk about that there's kind of a process for this. Help us understand. You don't have to give away the whole candy story here from the book, but help us kind of understand in broad, terms what kind of process people follow to try to chase these things down.

Gojko (22:26)
So there's like a four step process that's crystallized for me. And the book is kind of more as a, like a proposal or a process. It's something that works for me and I'm hoping that other people will try it out like that. So it might not necessarily stay like that in a few years if we talk again. And I've narrowed it down to four steps and kind of the four steps start with letters L, Z, R and D. Lizard. And it's kind of so learn how people are misusing your products, zero in on one area, on one behavior change you want to improve, then remove obstacles to use a success and then double check that what you've done actually created the impact you expected to make. I think kind of when we look at people who follow their own logic or people who follow some lizard logic you don't really understand, by definition they're doing something strange. your idea of helping them might not necessarily be effective or it might not go all the way or it might. So double checking at the end that people are actually now doing what you expect them to do or doing something better is really, really, really important. And then using signals from that to improve the kind of feedback loop is critical. I had this one case where people were getting stuck on a payment format entering tax details and The form was reasonably well explained. There was an example in the forum how to enter your tax ID and people were constantly getting stuck. A small percentage of people was getting stuck on it. However, I don't want to lose a small percentage of people that want to pay me on the payment form. So I thought, well, how about if I remove that field from there? I speed it up for everybody and then I can guide them later into entering the tax details to generate an invoice. I thought that was a brilliant idea. tested it with a few users. Everybody loved it, so I released it. And then a week later, I realized that, yes, I've sold it for the people that were getting confused, but I've ended up confusing a totally different group of people that expects the tax fields there. So the net effect was negative. then I went back to the original form. so there's lots of these things where people don't necessarily behave the way you think they will.

Brian (24:38)
Hahaha.

Gojko (24:48)
Ron Kohavi has a wonderful book about that called Trustworthy Online Experiments. And he has data from Slack, from Microsoft, from Booking .com and... The numbers are depressive. on one hand, the numbers range from 10 to 30, 40 % success rate for people's ideas. And if leading companies like that do things that don't pan out two thirds of the time, then we have to be honest building our products and say, well, maybe this idea is going to work out, maybe not.

Brian (25:03)
Hahaha. Wow.

Gojko (25:30)
the more experimental the population is, the more risky that is. think monitoring and capturing weird user behaviors, capturing errors helps you understand that people are getting stuck. as you said, you don't want to follow everybody. There's going to be a lot of noise there. We need to extract signals from the noise. That's what the second step is about, focusing on one specific thing we want to improve. Then, try to remove obstacles and then double -checking that we've actually removed them. That's the four steps. And there's like a shorter version of all the four steps. It's easier to remember. It's listen alert, zooming, rescue them, and then double check at the end. that's again, LZRD.

Brian (26:13)
That's awesome. Yeah, I love the process and I love the kind of steps there. Are there tools that you recommend for this that are easier to try to determine these things or chase them down or are there tools that you find are more helpful?

Gojko (26:32)
So there's lots of tools today for things like A -B testing and looking at experiments and things that are very helpful to do this scale. And it's kind of especially useful for the last step. In terms of kind of focusing and things like that, the five stages of growth from the linear analytics are a good tool. Impact mapping is a good tool. Kind of any focusing product management technique that says, well, these are the business goals we're working on now, or these are the kind of user goals we're working on now. out of, know, 50 lizards we found last week, these three lizards seem to be kind of in that area. And for the first step, spotting when people are getting stuck, there's a bunch of tools that are interesting, like session recorders for web products. There's one from Microsoft called Clarity that's free. There's another called Full Story that's quite expensive. There's a couple of open source one, one is packaged within Matomo analytics application. There's a bunch of these other things. Any kind of observability or monitoring tool is also very useful for this because we can spot when people are getting stuck. One of the things I found particularly helpful is logging all user errors. When a user does something to cause an error condition in a product, the product of course tells them like, know, an error happened. But then... logging it and analyzing that information in the back is really critical. for something like that, people sometimes use web analytics tools or any kind of product analytics. I think what's going to be interesting in the next couple of years, and I think if people start doing this more, is we'll see. more like these technical exception analytics tracking tools mixed with this because most of the product analytics are showing people what they expect to see, not what they don't expect to see. And I'll just give you an example of this way. was really helpful. So I've mentioned the screen where people can upload the Word documents. Occasionally people would select weird file types. So they'll select images, they'll select, I don't know, what else.

Brian (28:31)
Yeah.

Gojko (28:49)
Sometimes I guess that's a result of, know, a fat finger press or somebody not selecting the right thing. I have a not insignificant percentage of users every day that try to upload Android package files into a text -to -speech reader. Android package files and application files, I don't know what the right way is to read out an Android application. My best guess is people are doing that. as a, you know, these things where you drop a USB in front of an office and somebody kind of mistakenly plugs it in. So maybe they're hoping that I'll know the Android application on my phone just because they've uploaded it. I don't know, but a small percentage of users was trying to upload files that had SRT and VTT extensions, which are subtitle files. And they were not supported, but

Brian (29:31)
Yeah.

Gojko (29:45)
I kept getting information that people are uploading those types of files. And then I said, well, this is interesting because it's a text to speech system. People are uploading subtitle files, there's text in, so why don't I just ignore the timestamps and read the text? I can do that. And I started supporting that. And then some people started complaining that, well, the voice is reading it slower than the subtitles. I said, well, yes, because...

Brian (30:11)
Ha

Gojko (30:12)
You know, you're uploading subtitles that were read by an actor in a movie. This is a voice that's reading it at their speed. And then we started talking and it turns out that these people were doing it for corporate educational videos where they have a video in English, they need it in French, German, Spanish and all the else, but they don't want to kind of re -edit the video. They just want an alternate audio track. Okay, I mean, I have the timestamps, we can speed up or slow down the audio, it's not a big deal. And we've done that and this was one of the most profitable features ever. Like a very small percentage of the users need it, but those that need it produce hundreds of thousands of audio files because they translate the corporate training videos. And now, you know, we're getting into that numbers game. If I said, you know, there's like 0 .1 % of people are uploading subtitle files.

Brian (30:58)
Yeah.

Gojko (31:07)
then it doesn't matter. if we start thinking about, this is potentially interesting use case, it creates growth on its own because then people find you. And I think my product was the first that was actually doing synchronous subtitles. Competitors are doing it now as well. But it opened the massive, massive market for us. And people, you know, I got there by monitoring user errors, by, you know, the fact that somebody uploaded a file that had an unsupported extension. That was our insight.

Brian (31:38)
Wow, that's really cool. That's a great story. This is fascinating stuff. And it makes me want to dive deeper into the book and read through it again. But I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us, Goiko. This is good stuff. Again, the book is called, Lizard Optimization, Unlock Product Growth by Engaging Long Tail Users. And if I'm right, we talked about this a little bit before. We're going to offer a discount to to the listeners,

Gojko (32:07)
Yes, we will give you a listen as a 50 % discount on the ebook. the ebook is available from Lean Pub. If you get it from the discount URL that I'll give you, then you'll get a 50 % discount immediately.

Brian (32:24)
Awesome. So we'll put that in our show notes. If you're interested in that, you can find the show notes. That's a great deal, 50 % off the book and it's good stuff. well, I just, I can't thank you enough. Thanks for making time and coming on and talking this through your book.

Gojko (32:40)
Thank you, it was lovely to chat to you.

Join Brian and Dr. Tess Thompson as they delve into the complexities of scaling Agile, highlighting the challenges of aligning leadership priorities, fostering transparency, and applying system-level thinking for successful organizational transformations.

Overview

In this insightful episode, Dr. Tess Thompson tackles the pressing challenges organizations face when scaling Agile, with a focus on the critical role of leadership alignment. Drawing from her extensive experience, she explains how misaligned priorities at the leadership level can stall progress and waste resources.

Dr. Thompson emphasizes the importance of system-level thinking, transparency, and communication between teams and leaders to resolve misalignments and ensure success. She also shares her holistic approach, blending practices from various Agile frameworks to meet the specific needs of different organizations.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Dr. Tess Thompson
Scrum Inc.
Scrum.org
#68: The Pros and Cons and Real World Applications of SAFe with Mike Hall
#94: Connecting Teams and Leadership with Anthony Coppedge
Three Questions to Determine If an Organization Is Agile by Mike Cohn
Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Dr. Tess Thompson is a visionary leader in Agile transformations, with over three decades of experience reshaping industries from energy to biotech across the globe. As a professor at St. Mary's University, her dedication to fostering Agile leaders has empowered countless individuals to embrace adaptability and forge their own path to success.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have a very special guest with me. I have Dr. Tess Thompson with me. Welcome in Dr. Thompson.

Tess Thompson (00:13)
Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Brian (00:16)
I'm so happy to have Dr. Thompson with us. And just for people who aren't familiar, let me make sure that I introduce her and give you the background a little bit. First of all, she's been in this business for almost 40 years now. She's been doing stuff in IT since the 80s. She is a principal consultant and RST fellow with Scrum Inc. Scrum .inc, I should say. She is a PST as well with scrum .org. So two different organizations from two different founders of Scrum. She has been a professor at St. Mary's University. So has that kind of educational background as well. And I was asking her beforehand if there's anything else I needed to say. And she said, well, make sure you say I've got nine grandchildren. That's kind of my claim to fame. I love that. So. Nine grandchildren, very happy for that. So that's who we're talking with. And we wanted to have Dr. Thompson because there's a lot of experience here that she brings to the table in the realm of scaling, obviously being connected so closely with those two organizations. So with all that out of the way, let's talk about scaling a little bit. And Dr. Thompson, what I want to start with is just

Tess Thompson (01:27)
I'm

Brian (01:40)
When you work with organizations today that have scaling issues, what are organizations really struggling with? What's kind of the main issues that you see organizations have with scaling today?

Tess Thompson (01:55)
I would say there's a lot of things, but I would say still the biggest problem is getting everybody to align on what the priority is. So at some point, like you get alignment with maybe people that are doing Scrum and they're the people that are above them, but then the people above them are out of alignment. like, for example, one of the clients I have right now brought some consultants in to work on a project.

Brian (01:59)
Yeah, right.

Tess Thompson (02:24)
And those consultants have been stuck now for four weeks. And where the alignment problem is, is actually up at the C -suite with this client. Because one of them says, nope, we were supposed to help. That was a priority in 2023. And the other one's like, no, this is a priority in 2024. And they're not helping each other. So in the meantime, this project is stuck for four weeks. And we're spending money on people that are sitting there doing nothing.

Brian (02:50)
So just when you say alignment, give us kind of a flavor. when leaders are misaligned, what kind of things are they, are there different ideas about priority or different ideas about why they're doing this? What are they misaligned on? Okay.

Tess Thompson (03:09)
Both, both, I would say both. The, you know, especially as the companies get bigger and bigger, we have a CEO who's got some priorities, but then all the C -suite under them have their own priorities and they're not always, and then they break down to the next level and these priorities start to get out of alignment because people start bringing in their own objectives and their own priorities and they often don't match what somebody else is doing. So part of it is the different incentives and just the organizations being so big, they have to get even these priorities aligned at different levels.

Brian (03:49)
So this is kind of an amazing thing, I think, for people to latch onto here, because I hear a lot of people in just regular base level classes talk about how there's a disconnect between them and the leadership on how they're going to do Scrum and how this fits into the overall structure of the organization. just understand, Dr. Thompson here is talking about organizations that The leadership has stated, at least in some way, or form, we're in alignment with this. We want to do this. We want to have Scrum throughout our organization. But even in those situations, we're seeing these misalignments of just priorities and what are the drivers really for what they're trying to do. So I find that fascinating that talking to so many people who just wish that their leadership could get on board. with what it is they're trying to do, that even in those organizations where they do, quote unquote, get on board, there's still these kind of fundamental disconnects.

Tess Thompson (04:51)
Yep, absolutely. In fact, I do very little work anymore on scrum specific. is many organizations, I mean, almost every organization I go into anymore has some shape or form of scrum going on or people with experience with it. Some people, you know, they're not, it's something that they're trying to do anyway, something agile. And they're... They're getting things done quicker. They're delivering with higher quality. They have better communication at that level. But then as you go up the chain, things start to break down and then teams are stuck. So organizations can only get product out the door with high quality as quick as possible. The more the organ... We have to really think the system. So most of the work that I do today is around the system, which is scaling. It's system agility. Otherwise you start having, you just run into optimization in areas, that local optimization problem.

Brian (05:58)
Yeah, yeah, not seeing the whole, right?

Tess Thompson (06:02)
Right, absolutely. So I think that over the years that Agile has been around, we're seeing more and more of it, but then it's, like I said, almost all my work now is system level and not down at the team level. So often I'm not even using Scrum language when I'm talking. It is about alignment. It is about prioritization. So yes, at a Scrum level, your product owner is putting the order of the product backlog, and then the team can pull out off that backlog. based on value from all the different stakeholders that the product owner is working with. But in a big organization, those stakeholders can be a manager, can be a director, it can be another department, it can be, it's from all over the place. And then at some point, how does that work coming into the product owner roll up to the priority of the department or a higher level? And then how does that roll up to the higher level? And that's where we start running into messes.

Brian (06:58)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. mean, it's like you said, with all these various priorities, with all these various drivers, I've always talked to product owners and say, it's a tough job. You're balancing the needs and desires of all these people into one product, and you're having to take them all into account. So yeah, it's not easy. It's not an easy job.

Tess Thompson (07:08)
You.

Brian (07:27)
Well, so I'm curious about, you say you don't really even use the Scrum language as much when you're talking to the leaders, because they're not really interested in that, right? They're not really interested in, we doing this exactly according to what the Scrum guide says? They're interested in the outcome, right? The results that you're getting from this. Yeah, so I'm kind of curious, especially since you're a fellow with Scrum Inc. And I know that the...

Tess Thompson (07:37)
No. Absolutely.

Brian (07:55)
a Scrum at Scale kind of strategy is very specific about how these things are implemented. There's practices and all sorts of stuff that Scrum at Scale kind of implements. Would you categorize yourself as sort of a Scrum at Scale implementation consultant? Or is it more of just, I take more of a holistic approach to the scaling.

Tess Thompson (08:19)
Holistic, absolutely. So actually, I'm certified in Nexus, Scrummit Scale, Less, and Safe. I mean, I have all of them. So I always think you need to bring the best tool to the job. One of the things I like about Scrummit Scale and Nexus is they're just so simple. Like if, hey, if these two teams are not, if we need to coordinate, let's get these product owners together and work together to figure out what is really the order. So whether we call it a meta scrum or we call it something else, I don't think that language matters as much as seeing the need and then bringing in a tool to help meet that need. If these teams are interdependent and they need to be chatting to help get rid of those interdependencies, well, let's spin up a scrum of scrums here.

Brian (08:58)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've had someone on before that we've talked through kind of the safe model a little bit and talked about how, you know, there's so much additional overhead, there's so much additional roles and events and all these other things that get added from the safe perspective, that it can be very, very overwhelming for a lot of organizations to look at that and say, well, gosh, how are we ever going to, I mean, we're barely hanging on with it, trying to understand what Scrum is. And now we're going to layer in all these other things and,

Tess Thompson (09:22)
Thanks. Okay.

Brian (09:38)
It just seems like a recipe for disaster to try to understand all these things. So I guess one of the things that I had in that previous conversation was this dialogue about how you match the problem to the practice. You find the problem that is going on in the organization and you find the right practice that solves that, but not necessarily implementing the whole smorgasbord of practices because you may be trying to solve problems you don't have. Do you see that as kind of your approach when you work with organizations or how do you match the practices to what's actually going on on the ground?

Tess Thompson (10:18)
Yeah, I would say, you know, it's kind of similar to what happened with, so I'm also a PMP. So when we When we put together the PIMBOK over the years, it became this, know, it was supposed to be, these are best practices that you can have. And over time, it became very, big, thick book and people didn't understand they were only supposed to implement whatever tool from that book really helped solve the problems they were having. And started implementing the whole thing. And I think that's what happens too with like,

Brian (10:50)
Ha ha.

Tess Thompson (10:53)
safe or any of these agile practices, even though, know, Ken and Jeff went completely the opposite of PMI and said, hey, we're just going to roll out. This is the absolute minimum that you need for running, running a team or a project or product. And, but it's not enough. So you need to add in some more things to it. You got to bring in some additional tools to help depending on the organization, such as road mapping. I really believe that's one of the. I spend a lot of time helping organizations and product owners think about, we do need to plan ahead. And that is one of the pieces I do like about SAFE is that in their PI planning, have the getting some product owners and teams together to plan together to look out further, I think is pretty essential in most organizations. Now, do we need to do it on a regular cadence of every eight weeks? And do we need to have 200 teams together? I think

Brian (11:23)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (11:49)
Sometimes it's, think organizations end up implementing all of SAFE, kind of like in the pin box, if you will, and it's way more than they need. So I think it's taking the elements of all of these and then using them to meet the need of the organization. I mean, if you're a 30 person organization, do you need a bunch of release trains and engineers and stuff? No.

Brian (11:59)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting to me with your background that you have all of these different scaling frameworks in mind. How much of what you do do you feel is aligned to a specific framework and how much of it is just piecemeal across the different frameworks?

Tess Thompson (12:34)
I would say I'm most aligned to, well, Scrum at Scale, never solely. It's always piecemeal. It is a piecemeal thing because I really do believe that teams do get to need to plan out in almost every company I go into. Teams do need to plan out more than one sprint.

Brian (12:44)
Hmm.

Tess Thompson (12:54)
Okay, we need to plan out and we're never delivering anything alone with one team. It seems like we're always need multiple teams. So we need that coordination and we need some of the scaling practices for sure. I really use a variation of safe of PI planning, but then I layer in, so we put together our plan for let's say the month, maybe we have a product goal for the month. And then I use the version of PI planning to get the teams together to plan out for sprints. weekly sprints to get to that product goal and try to get rid of the dependencies and problems that we see between the teams. And then we let it run. But then I pull in from Scrum at Scale, definitely the Metascrum. Like every sprint, let's still get the product owners together and revise our sprint plans because we've learned a lot in the last sprint or we learned a lot today. So we're not just going to let it ride for a month, for example, we're going to still get together at a regular cadence, like once per sprint. and realign our backlogs based on what we've just really happened. So it's using both, yeah.

Brian (13:55)
I love that. Yeah, taking the best of what these different practices offer,

Tess Thompson (14:04)
Absolutely.

Brian (14:06)
I love that. Well, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about as well is sort of in working with scaling practices, I'm sure you already talked a little bit about how leadership has different ideas than the team level does. And the team level is kind of struggling with a certain layer of complexity. The leaders are struggling with another.

Tess Thompson (14:22)
Okay.

Brian (14:33)
I know there often appears to be sort of a disconnect between these two groups. I've talked to people who feel like they're speaking a different language. It's sort of like the leaders are, especially when teams, the team level will look and see, there's people in leadership who just, they want us to do Scrum, but then they want a lot of things in the same way that they always have, which is really hard for us to translate and put back into that old language. I'm just kind of curious your thought about that. Do you see leaders, the leadership layer as sort of speaking a different language than the team layer and how do you help them understand each other?

Tess Thompson (15:13)
Yeah, I mean, my most successful implementations is definitely when the leaders are on board. Leaders are really important to agility. We need their help and we need their support. What I always find super interesting is when I go into an engagement, I usually run an assessment, an agility assessment. And what I'm measuring is kind of where the organization is on culture, delivery, how well they're continuously improving or optimizing the system, how well they prioritize and how customer centric they are. Because I really believe agility is about those... It's those five dimensions, if you will, that you need to really focus on. And so I run this assessment and I always have them self -assess through a survey, interviews, and then observations. So often I see my assessments different than maybe how they self -assess and I'll compare both of them. But the leadership assesses so different than the teams do. And so at the end of the assessment, it's just interesting how different they are.

Brian (16:13)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (16:21)
The teams are thinking they're delivering so well because they're getting all kinds of stuff done and leadership's like they're delivering, they're not delivering. And it's, like, how do we get so out of aligned it all the time at companies? Yeah.

Brian (16:35)
Yeah, yeah, we will do an assessment to it mountain goat. And one of the things that like became clear to me very early in doing that is that self perception versus, you know, perception of others is very different. And, you know, it was amazing to me, just like you said, to see things like the leadership might think that you have one opinion of something and the teams might have another or, you know, the other thing that I saw was was You know, like the Scrum Masters might think, yeah, our practices are great or they're going really well. And then you ask the developers and developers would say, no, it's horrible. We don't like the way this is working. so, you know, it kind of became apparent to me that you have to factor that human personal perception, right? We tend to be maybe individually more critical on ourselves, but

Tess Thompson (17:18)
Okay.

Brian (17:34)
you know, as a group, tend to give ourselves a little more grace in how we're performing, whereas others, when they look in from the outside, will kind of be more honest about it and say, it's not so great in this situation.

Tess Thompson (17:49)
But what I often find is they are delivering. The thing is they're delivering a bunch of things that the leadership doesn't even know about. So the leadership will have their priority list in their head of projects or things they want the teams to be delivering. But the team is getting hit with all kinds of other stuff that the leadership doesn't know about. So they are working hard and they're delivering. So in their head, they're doing it. It's just this.

Brian (17:56)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (18:12)
the leader maybe not attending to a sprint review and really understanding what the teams got on their plate.

Brian (18:17)
Yeah, and that's kind of that transparency moment, right? mean, if they think they're not doing anything, they may be, they're just not seeing what they're doing and what they're actually spending their time on. And it's not that they aren't really working hard. As you said, they are working hard. It's just the work they're being asked to do is not really in align with what the leadership thinks the priorities should be.

Tess Thompson (18:22)
Yes. Absolutely, that's it. Yep. And then should the people be working on the stuff that they're working on? You know, is it the right thing? And often it may not be.

Brian (19:00)
Yeah. Yeah, I know I've had several instances where I've talked to people when I've been in working with teams where they will, the team level will say, you know, we have all the stuff that we're having to do in addition to the new work. And, you know, we know that that's just kind of a constraint we're under. The organization has asked us to do this as well. And, you know, my comment is always, well, Are you being really transparent about that when you get to something like a sprint review? Are you showing them where you're spending your time? Are you showing them kind of how much of this extra other work you're doing? And I've had situations where we've been in sprint reviews and we've shown them, for instance, like how much support time that they've had to spend. when the lead, right. And the leaders see that and think, my gosh, I didn't know they're spending 60 % of their time doing that kind of work. That's not good. We want them to do,

Tess Thompson (19:32)
right. Yep, eye -opening.

Brian (20:00)
new work. So I've had leaders who have actually spun up support teams when they've been confronted with that just because they didn't know what was going on.

Tess Thompson (20:09)
Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the things I love about sprint reviews is that transparency. And I have seen teams also go into sprint reviews thinking that they just want to show like some progress they made on an increment for a project and not talk about the support work that they did or some of the other buckets of work that come in. And I'm like, you. Part of transparency is seeing, hey, and it doesn't have to be that you show all the support tickets or anything like that. It's talk about something like 50 % of our time, of our capacity was spent on support tickets. Just throwing that in there to make sure leaders are aware.

Brian (20:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I want to go back to something you said earlier too, because you were talking about when we first started about how one of the biggest issues is alignment on priorities. And I want to just dig under the surface in that a little bit, because when we talk about that alignment of priorities, are we talking about more of the product area? Are we talking more about just a general overall? What's our company's priority? What kind of priorities are they misaligned on?

Tess Thompson (21:08)
All, I would say all, all priorities are misaligned. So it's been an interesting move to, for me, to Scrum Inc. Because Scrum Inc's clientele is very much

Brian (21:21)
Right.

Tess Thompson (21:35)
scrum mostly outside of IT. So it's been really fun for me because my career and background was all in IT. So I've been learning so much about all these other different domains out there. And we're doing full transformations of an entire company is doing a version of scrum, right? Or scrum at scale so that they're aligned on priorities. And anyway, so it's very... It's all, all the work tends to be a little out of alignment. And going back to the support, I really like to work companies to help them really understand that almost all support, whether it is support in a field that's doing some kind of drilling or it's or it's IT support or it's HR support, you know, taking phone calls from the employees that it tends to all be tech debt. All support is really some form of tech debt. And so getting that message out there, how much time we're spending on and how much money we're spending on support helps companies, leaders to agree to fund some of these.

Brian (22:44)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (22:57)
projects around reducing tech debt.

Brian (22:59)
Yeah. Yeah. And there's always the having to overcome the kind of more traditional viewpoint of projects and these things based around projects and scope schedule, that sort of thing. How do you help leaders understand kind of this is a new way of doing things and not that we can't talk about schedules, but

Tess Thompson (23:07) 
Okay.

Brian (23:29)
that we're kind of shifting our priorities a little bit, or we're trying to focus on what matters more than arbitrary dates. How do you have those conversations? How do leaders understand that?

Tess Thompson (23:38)
In some organizations it's easier than others. It depends how much the leader above those leaders is on board, to tell you the truth. So I feel like fundamentally they understand. And if we bring up two different priorities and it's two vice presidents, for example, and they're getting bonuses or something based on their performance in their area, we can see

Brian (23:50)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (24:08)
They fundamentally will understand in a meeting together, they'll understand and then we'll leave and they'll still kind of do their own thing. But if I could get even though like the person, the CEO also, a person above them be like, nope, this is important. And for that person to see the two competing priorities and where there's a problem, I mean, it's really about if there's a problem, right? And then they'll agree and kind of one will give up a little bit on.

Brian (24:30)
Yeah.

Tess Thompson (24:37)
on their ambition towards getting their thing done, understanding that it's good for all of us, the whole company, we all, to get to work on maybe the other priority first.

Brian (24:50)
So a lot of negotiation involved, right? A lot of negotiation skills.

Tess Thompson (24:54)
Absolutely, and getting people in the same room so that they can have the conversation together. You know, it's not me talking to one and then going and talking to the other. I mean, there is some of that too, but then we have to get together here and decide. And yes, unfortunately, yeah, and yes, we will probably be working on these at the same time. However, if there comes into, you know, with an or,

Brian (25:10)
Yeah, it's amazing how much easier that is, right?

Tess Thompson (25:22)
With a large organization, when you've got hundreds of thousands of people, of course we're working on a ton of things at the same time. But when there is a conflict, like we need this skill set here and this, then we have to know which one is more important.

Brian (25:37)
Yeah. Yeah, and someone has to make that call, right? Someone has to be given that authority at some point. Well, this is fascinating stuff. I'm really interested in hearing your perspective of working with these organizations in today's world. So last little question here. From what you just see, especially most recently,

Tess Thompson (25:44)
Yep.

Brian (26:07)
from what you've seen in the organizations you've worked with. If you could just blanket, have one thing fixed before they start working with you, or one thing that they were in alignment with that would really give them a boost in their scaling before they start working with you, what would that be? What would be the thing that you think is most often missing in organizations before you work with them?

Tess Thompson (26:33)
Getting their goals, their strategy and starting to build out their backlog. based on those priorities. In fact, I usually do ask that. Start thinking about what are really your goals? What's your strategy to get there? And what kind of things are you doing to get there? What products are you creating? What services are you What projects you're creating for those products? Start thinking about that and start being a list together. And then when I get there, I'll help organize the list if you don't have it. But it's just starting to think about that ahead of time. Because what I see is leaders or people have multiple lists. They have a list over here of their projects. They have a list over here of stuff they're doing. They have all their emails that are coming in, their chats that are coming in, the phone that's coming in. And it's like, can we get it all kind of in one place so we can really look at it to make better decisions on really where we should be spending our time and our money?

Brian (27:14)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. A friend of mine, David Hawks, used to say that organizations are swimming in a sea of opportunity. There's all these different things we could do and really trying to limit that scope and say, yeah, we could do all these things, but what makes the most sense for us to do? What's the most valuable thing for us to do?

Tess Thompson (27:58)
Yep, absolutely. And getting in touch with and constant feedback with your customer helps you figure that out. So many companies don't even, the people are like, have no, I always love when I get a group and I said, hey, let's name our customers. And they're sort of out of the line on who their customer is.

Brian (28:19)
Right, and if you don't know who it is you're trying to serve, how do you serve them? Yeah.

Tess Thompson (28:25)
Yeah, yeah. That's usually one of the first things I ask is, hey, who's your customer? Is it the shareholder? Is it this? Is it that? Let's agree. Yes, you will have multiple customers. Let's get it together and understand who are our customers. Let's all agree on that. Maybe even a priority on some of those customers to some degree.

Brian (28:30)
You Right, love that. Right. Yeah, yeah, this has been great. Well, I really appreciate you taking time out, Dr. Thompson, for coming on and helping us and to see things from your perspective. It's so great to talk to people that are, know, not just, you know, this isn't just theory or book learning. You're actually out there, you know, doing these in these large scale organizations and, you know, hearing from you what those real world problems are that you're seeing on a day to day basis.

Tess Thompson (29:18)
And I'm having amazing, amazing results. tell you, I'm, that's why I only had three hours of sleep last night and I'm still.

Brian (29:27)
Ha ha.

Tess Thompson (29:28)
woke up full of joy to be here with you today is I love what I do because I'm constantly getting phone calls after the factor during it and it's like, wow, this stuff really works. I'm like, yeah, it does. It really does.

Brian (29:41)
Amazing when that happens. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and I just appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us.

Tess Thompson (29:53)
Anytime. Thank you for having me.