Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

#85: Effectively Managing Dependencies with Ken Rubin

In this week’s episode, Brian is joined by the legendary Ken Rubin, the author of Essential Scrum. Together, they dive deep into the world of dependencies in larger organizations and scaling, drawing from Ken's extensive experience since the early days of Scrum. If you're navigating the complexities of dependencies and looking to optimize your team's flow, this episode is a must-listen.
Overview
In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian welcomes the iconic Ken Rubin to explore the intricate realm of dependencies at scale. They dive into the impact of dependencies on flow, the challenges of scaling, and the effectiveness of feature teams in managing structural dependencies.
Ken shares valuable insights into the myths surrounding dependencies and practical strategies for minimizing their impact, whether they involve external partners, scarce specialized roles, or deliberate component teams.
As a bonus, Ken announces his upcoming one-day live online course where you’ll dive deeper into effective dependency management strategies, Dependencies are Killing Your Agility: Learn to Fight Back!
Tune in as Ken and Brian provide practical wisdom, actionable strategies, and a wealth of knowledge.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:16] - In today’s episode, Brian sits down with the first director of the Scrum Alliance and author of Essential Scrum, Ken Rubin.
[03:03] - Ken defines dependencies as a relationship between two or more entities that requires collaboration or coordination.
[04:31] - Ken distinguishes two dependency types: structural and instantiated.
[06:48] - Brian emphasizes addressing the root cause of dependencies, comparing it to optimizing water flow in plumbing systems.
[08:06] - Ken stresses the importance of addressing structural dependencies to prevent them from becoming blockers and impeding flow.
[10:18] - Brian highlights an upcoming one-day live online course with Ken titled Dependencies are Killing Your Agility: Learn to Fight Back! on March 14th, emphasizing its relevance for Scrum Masters and product owners.
[11:10] - Ken defines the concept of flow and compares it to the concept of utilization.
[13:04] - Leaders listening should prioritize optimizing flow over squeezing individuals for efficiency.
[14:23] - Ken underscores the importance of managing structural dependencies by balancing system-level WIP.
[16:28] - Ken debunks the myth that 100% feature teams can eliminate all dependency issues.
[19:14] - Ken shares how feature teams are compelling but face exponential challenges.
[21:45] - Ken explores the need for specialized roles in scaling feature teams, proposing a threshold approach.
[24:57] - Discover why Ken advocates for a combined feature and component team model, suggesting systemic swarming for specialized roles.
[26:55] - Today's episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software's Private Training for Agile transformations. Get your team on the same page through subject-specific training, coaching, and mentoring. For more information, visit the Mountain Goat Software’s Private Training page.
[28:06] - Ken challenges the idea of a one-size-fits-all solution for dependency problems, cautioning about tool limitations.
[30:25] - Ken proposes expanding the concept of working agreements to include inter-team arrangements.
[33:55] - Ken highlights the misconception of solving external dependencies through internal escalation, stressing the limitations and challenges.
[35:40] - Ken dispels the myth that identifying dependencies means solving the problem, emphasizing the need for control.
[38:35] - Brian highlights the significant impact of waiting time, using the example of ordering a t-shirt online.
[39:36] - Addressing flow problems in scaling challenges is crucial.
[42:35] - Brian underscores the impact of addressing flow issues and promotes Ken's upcoming one-day live online course, Dependencies are Killing Your Agility: Learn to Fight Back! on March 14th
[43:24] - Brian highlights the value of Ken's insights on dependencies and provides helpful resources and links.
[43:50] - Brian thanks listeners and invites them to share and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts.
[47:26] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM or CSPO. We also have Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.
[48:12] - Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Dependencies are Killing Your Agility: Learn to Fight Back!
Essential Scrum by Kenneth Rubin
Innolution
Dependencies Are Killing Your Agile Flow at Scale by Ken Rubin
#47 Exploring Lean Thinking In Agile Development with Bob Payne
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Mountain Goat Software’s Private Training
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.
Ken Rubin is the #1 best-selling author of Essential Scrum and world-renowned Agile trainer and coach. Ken focuses on full end-to-end business agility, applying agile ways of working with your development teams, technical and business leaders, executives, as well as the important non-development groups that are critical to providing your whole product solutions.

#84: Listener Questions with Brian Milner

Join Brian in this solo episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast as he tackles listener questions, discussing topics ranging from the impact of AI on Scrum teams to managing retrospective challenges and fostering active participation. Don't miss this episode filled with practical advice and thought-provoking discussions.
Overview
In this solo episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian answers listener questions unraveling everything from AI's role in Scrum to the complexities of Agile practices and team dynamics.
Listen in for valuable insights as Brian explores metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of product owners, offering key indicators for project success. He also discusses managing challenges within retrospectives, including strategies for handling upper management involvement, fostering transparent reporting, and the significance of visibility in sprint reviews.
Discover the art of promoting active participation in retrospectives—Brian underscores the significance of psychological safety within teams and offers actionable insights into tailoring retrospective approaches to your team’s diverse personality types.
Tune in as Brian answers listener questions with both practical wisdom and actionable advice.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:18] - In today’s episode, Brian sits down to answer Agile Mentors Podcast listener questions.
[01:59] - Brian briefly shares a personal update about speaking at the upcoming Global Scrum Gathering 2024 New Orleans and invites listeners to attend.
[03:21] - The first listener question explores whether AI can replace members of a Scrum team. Brian discusses the current state of AI and its potential applications in different roles within a Scrum team. He also shares how his team is using “Goatbot.”
[08:10] - For the second listener question Brian tackles the issue of handling resistance to Agile from a team member, sharing some strategies to understand the root cause and address misunderstandings.
[11:48] - Brian introduces the third question about using metrics to judge the effectiveness of a product owner.
[14:47] - Brian discusses handling retrospective issues involving upper management, and the value of transparent reporting.
[16:42] - Brian explores scenarios about the cost of addressing an impediment and the importance of transparent decision-making by the organization.
[17:22] - Brian suggests raising visibility in sprint reviews and seeking assistance from stakeholders or powerful individuals to address unresolved issues.
[18:45] - Today's episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software's Certified Product Owner Course. This is a two-day training course taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers to teach you how to use the product backlog as a tool for project success. For more information, visit the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[24:39] - Brian explores the issue of low participation in retrospectives, and how to tailor approaches to different personality types for more active engagement. He highlights the work of Amy Edmondson, suggesting her research on psychological safety for deeper insights into team dynamics and participation.
[26:15] - Lack of safety may be the Scrum Master's responsibility.
[27:18] - Awareness of personality types is crucial for Scrum Masters. Brian advises varying retrospective formats to avoid monotony, including visual and written formats tailored to diverse preferences.
[30:38] - Brian thanks listeners and invites them to share and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts.
[31:23] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM or CSPO. We also have Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.
[32:39] - Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Global Scrum Gathering 2024 New Orleans
Psychological Safety – Amy C. Edmondson
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Certified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.

#83 Navigating the Challenges of Small Agile Teams with Scott Dunn

Join Brian and Scott Dunn as they journey into the heart of handling conflicts and challenges within small teams for effective teamwork in the latest episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.
Overview
In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Scott Dunn sits down with Brian to delve into handling conflicts and challenges within small teams.
From the impact of hierarchies on team dynamics to the nuances of technical leadership, listen in as Brian and Scott tackle the intricacies of managing conflicts to navigate the delicate balance between individual excellence and fostering a collaborative team culture.
Listen in as Listen Now to Discover:
[01:54] - Today, Brian is sitting down with Scott Dunn to discuss the topic of handling conflicts and challenges in small teams, particularly regarding hierarchies and experience levels.
[03:17] - Scott shares his experience with issues arising from unofficial authorities, highlighting challenges with project managers and leads.
[04:03] - Scott talks about the transition to a democratic process and shares a humorous anecdote about a unique meeting disruption and the resolution.
[07:27] - Brian discusses the challenge of individuals feeling a loss of authority in the shift to self-organization and emphasizes the need for communication to address their concerns.
[08:27] - Brian categorizes leads into obstructive and unintentionally hindering types.
[09:27] - Scott discusses the need for aligning expectations with Agile principles.
[11:34] - Brian discusses the challenges faced by Scrum Masters and Agile coaches in identifying and addressing team dynamics, emphasizing the importance of clear communication, and understanding to resolve misunderstandings.
[12:07] - Scott shares an example of a scrum master effectively addressing a bottleneck issue with a lead.
[13:13] - Brian highlights a leadership misunderstanding where senior individuals are consistently assigned challenging tasks and the unintended consequences of pigeonholing experts into specific roles.
[14:35] - Scott shares experiences of individuals falling into roles they didn't initially choose, and the negative impact on job satisfaction.
[15:32] - The importance of promoting teamwork, continuous learning, and adaptability over being the sole expert.
[16:11] - Brian discusses the issue of knowledge silos and suggests a proactive approach within the team to mitigate risks and ensure knowledge sharing.
[16:32] - The importance of managing resource fungibility and avoiding bottlenecks.
[17:40] - Brian debunks the idea of job security for those deliberately hoarding knowledge and emphasizes the importance of staying marketable and adaptable.
[18:52] - Scott highlights the consequences of being difficult to work with and shares the secret for long-term professional success.
[20:00] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® course. Plus, automatic enrollment in Mike Cohn’s Agile Mentors Community, including twelve months of ongoing coaching and support. To learn more, check out the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[20:42] - How different roles, especially leads, should interact in a scrum team where equality is emphasized.
[21:34] - The importance of a lead developer having a mindset focused on helping others succeed and empowering the team.
[22:31] - Scott defines true technical leadership and the importance of empowering team members to scale workload and creating a culture of learning within the team.
[23:59] - The impact of senior team members as "pollinators of learning."
[24:56] - Brian defines a lead's role using sports analogies to illustrate leadership beyond individual excellence.
[26:48] - Brian shares the ‘see one, do one, teach one model for successful leadership and teams.
[27:57] - Leveling up expectations and helping and asking for help as a lead.
[32:32] - Setting the example by what you do, not by what you say.
[33:17] - The importance of leads in establishing culture.
[34:53] - Brian shares a big thank you to Scott for joining him on the show.
[35:29] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.
[36:10] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM or CSPO. We also have Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®, where we get right into the good stuff and have some deep discussions. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Certified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.
Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum.

#82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton

Join Brian and Emilia Breton as they explore AI and its practical applications in Agile, from enhancing productivity to coaching. Don't miss their insights on AI tools shaping the future of Agile.
Overview
Today, Brian sits down with Emilia Breton to unravel the dynamic intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Agile.
Brian and Emilia share their experiences and experiments with AI tools, revealing how they leverage these technologies to enhance productivity and decision-making and amplify human capabilities.
Listen in to learn more about the evolving landscape where AI and Agile converge to shape the future of work.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:25] - Brian welcomes Emilia Breton to the show to talk about the intersection of AI and Agile, focusing on using AI to enhance human connections.
[03:04] - Emilia shares that it's about using AI to accentuate our humanity and create space for us to connect, observe, and inspire.
[05:15] - Emilia discusses the questions about copyright for AI-produced content, such as code and why It's important to be able to trace where AI-derived information comes from.
[06:02] - Brian reflects on the rapid evolution of mass-consumable AI and its transformative impact over the past year.
[06:39] - Emilia underscores the importance of visibility in AI outputs, and the need to cross-verify AI-generated information with human expertise.
[08:41] - Brian introduces the concept of hallucination in AI, emphasizing that AI can't think or reason, and it may generate false information to please users.
[10:29] - The importance and irreplaceable qualities of human competence.
[11:30] - How tools like Lucidspark can help with ideas during product brainstorms or retrospectives. Otter.ai and Spinach.io can automate tasks like taking meeting notes and updating Jira, saving time for more important work.
[14:16] - Brian introduces Rewind.ai, a tool that records computer activities for later recall, explaining its potential benefits and privacy considerations.
[16:10] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and today’s episode is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software's Certified ScrumMaster Class a two-day class covering the fundamental principles of scrum as well as detail about the different roles, meetings, and artifacts. For more information click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[17:01] - Emilia explores the use of AI to spark inspiration, and shares generative AI art programs DALL·E or Midjourney.
[20:06] - Emilia discusses using Grammarly and AI as a partner in content creation, to iterate prompts to achieve the desired tone and style.
[21:10] - Discussing Google's new multimodal Gemini models, which can translate speech, text, video, and images.
[22:07] - NotebookLM is designed for researchers to organize and refer to research papers and articles. Brian shares his experience with this tool.
[22:48] - The speakers discuss using AI for data analysis to interpret large datasets, capture notes, brainstorm ideas, and facilitate retrospectives to enhance Agile practices.
[25:08] - Brian and Emilia discuss how AI can be a valuable tool in coaching and can assist in facilitating sessions.
[28:08] - What lies ahead with AI?
[29:24] - Brian sends a huge thank you to Emilia for being on the show. If you found this episode useful, please share this episode with others. We’d love your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. You can email us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
[30:09] - If this topic was impactful to you and you want to continue the discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community where we have a topic discussion for each podcast episode. You can get a free year-long membership in the community just by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Emilia Breton
Lucidspark
Otter.ai
Spinach.io
Rewind.ai
DALL·E
Midjourney
NotebookLM
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Certified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.
Emilia Breton is an Agile wizard with over two decades of experience, who effortlessly navigates the realms of startups and global corporations. Specializing in guiding both scrappy ventures and colossal entities, she brings innovative approaches to software development and team building. Emilia's commitment to injecting playfulness ensures a dynamic and creative touch to Agile practices, making her the go-to coach for those ready to elevate their software development game.
Auto-generated Transcript:
Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner, and today I have a very special good friend of mine who's come on with us. Miss Amelia Britton is on with us. Welcome in Amelia.
Emilia (00:15)
Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.
Brian (00:17)
So glad we've finally been able to do this. I've been trying to arrange our schedules to do this for a while. So it's hard to really pin Amelia down on one thing that I would say, here's who she is, because she's a lot of things. I think coach, if I just said coach, I think that would be a very good term, because she's a very, very good coach. And... She's credentialed with the Scrum Alliance in that area. She's got the highest credential with IC Agile in this area. She's an IC Agile expert. She's worked the gamut. She's worked with startups. She's worked in very, very large companies. And we got to see each other in person at Agile 2023 last year. And really, that was the first time I think I've seen you in person in a while. And it just was really fun to see you and get to catch up there. So we thought we'd get Amelia on. And she's been doing some talks recently along a certain topic that I know people are really, really interested in. But it may not be exactly where you think we're going with this. But really it's talking about AI and Agile as it plays into AI. But like I said, it's not going to be, I think, where most people think we're going to go with this. So I'm talking too much. Emilio, why don't you take it from here? If it's not going to be where most people think we're going to go, how would you sum it up where we're going with this?
Emilia (01:49)
I think really it's about using AI to accentuate our humanity and create that space for us to do what we do best as humans, which is connect and observe and inspire.
Brian (01:54)
Mm, I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that. So just to lay the foundation here a little bit, neither Amelia or myself are AI engineers. Neither of us work for open AI or anything like that. We are not in the thick of that AI world. We're consumers. We're consumers of it. And we're tech people. So We've spent our lives in and around software development teams. And that gives us a little bit of a unique perspective. I think that combined with the combining Agile with AI, I think, also is the other unique kind of perspective we're trying to bring to this. So let's kind of dive into this a little bit. When we start talking about AI and Agile, What are the kind of considerations you think are the most important things we should be dealing with when we start to delve into this area?
Emilia (03:07)
Yeah, I think one of the really first important things to know is to really think a little bit about the sort of ethical considerations when you're starting to use AI. You know, there's there are many privacy concerns. You know who owns the thing that you've created. Do you own it. Does it belong to everybody. The ownership of the things that this was trained on and knowing what it was trained on and where the data comes from. How do you keep your data safe and secure? Anything, you know, it all depends on what are the rules of the thing that you're putting your data into. Sometimes you're putting data in and you retain it as exclusively yours. And sometimes you're giving it to the model. So you want to be really careful in knowing what you're doing, knowing what the model is, and then making your own sort of ethical determinations around that. and what you want to use.
Brian (04:03)
Yeah, there's a, you know, I dabble in music sometimes and there's some interesting channels I followed on music with AI. And, you know, there's kind of a, there's one gentleman in particular who talks about copyright and music and AI. And one of the things that he proposes is that if it's AI produced, that he thinks there should not be a copyright for the content because it's not created by a human, it's created by a machine. And I found it to be kind of an interesting take on it. You know, and I wondered how that would play in our space. You know, if a machine writes code, is it private?
Emilia (04:41)
Yeah. And there's a lot of questions that kind of come around that. And right now, it looks like if you're following any of the big legal cases that have happened, that it may actually lean to, if you created it with the AI, you might not own it. So it's a consideration if you're starting to use any of these tools. Another one that's really big for me is explainability. So being able to tell.
Brian (05:05)
Okay.
Emilia (05:07)
where the AI got this information. Different models, different applications, you are better or worse at this. Certainly a lot have gotten better over the last few months. I mean, we're only really a year into this mass consumable AI world. I mean, certainly AI has been around since forever and big blue, but the mass consumption of it being available to you and I to just...
Brian (05:24)
Right.
Emilia (05:34)
go on the internet and use really came with chat GPT and those a year ago this week. So it's a new field. And we've gotten this much in a year, which is just, you know, we're in technology, we're in one of these growth curves. So everything's changing. But explainability like Google's model probably does it the best. They give you really great links. Others, you just don't know.
Brian (05:41)
That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah.
Emilia (05:58)
And there's a lot of push within the AI ethics community to really make that visible and be able to see. Because AI actually isn't competent, right? It doesn't actually know the things. In pretending, it is performing of being intelligent and competent. And so it's also important to keep that in mind. And that's one of the powers that we have as humans, is intelligence.
Brian (06:09)
Yeah.
Emilia (06:26)
We actually do have that competence to be able to check the AI, to be able to figure out, you know, is what it's saying true or not. There was an instance I was creating, I had a list of books and I said, OK, great list of books. Tell me more. Give me some more answers that are like this. Right. And one of the books it came up with, it was perfect. It was talking about
Brian (06:43)
Yeah.
Emilia (06:53)
Agile in Enterprises versus Startups. This was like exactly the book I wanted to read. I was so excited about it and it told me that it had been written. I think it was Diana Larsen and someone else. I don't remember who the other person was, but I was really excited because these were two people who I was like, oh, yes, I know they collaborated on a book. This is gonna be fabulous.
Brian (07:13)
Oh wow. Yeah.
Emilia (07:21)
Um, and I went to Diana's site and it wasn't there. It was like interesting and then Amazon and wasn't there. Um, and I went to the other individual site and it wasn't there. And I went to Lean Pub because you know, a lot of times we as Agilist will start something on Lean Pub. Um, and it wasn't there. Um, and I DMed Diana. I was like, I'm so excited. Tell me more. She's like, uh, not a book.
Brian (07:25)
Ha ha ha. No idea what you're talking about.
Emilia (07:50)
like, well guess what book you should write? Because it would determine like this is the book that you want to read and it fits with these other books. So interesting and scary but I totally hallucinated this thing existing. Had an ISBN number, had the authors, had a publish date, had a publisher. All the things that looked like a proper citation.
Brian (07:53)
Right. Yeah, that's an important thing for people to know. If you haven't really gotten too far into it or if you really kind of stayed out of it, the term hallucination is a term you'll become familiar with at some point because like Amelia said, it doesn't think, right? It can't think, it can't reason, but it is programmed to try to please you. It is programmed to try to give you what you want. And if it doesn't have the data, Sometimes it does this thing called hallucinations where it'll make it up. It'll kind of create it based on the data that already has. Yeah, I remember I've tried to push it in certain ways. I like to do a lot of just testing the boundaries. So I know from early on to, you know, for the past year, there have been times when I've done things with things like Chat GPT, where I've tried to push it and say, what's the answer that you have for this or... You know, and one of the things with Chat GPT is it's not, or at least for a period of time, I guess now it is kind of connected, but for a period of time, it was not directly connected to live data. So there's no way you could have it search the internet and find something out. Now there are ways that you can have it do that. But I remember early on trying to get it to tell me the score of a game. And it was a professional sports game. And it said, oh, yeah, here's the score. Here's what happened. These are the stats from the game. No, that game hasn't happened yet. It's this date, and that's not happening till. And you'll get that typical response. I apologize. You are correct. I did not. I apologize for giving you incorrect data. Right.
Emilia (09:55)
Yeah, I've only been trained till September 2021.
Brian (09:58)
Right, right, right. So that's something to just be familiar with is, like you said, it can't reason. It's really approximating what it's doing to you based on all the huge volume of data that it has and trying to craft a response that is similar to the data that it's already been fed. So I'm probably telling people things they already know, but just in case you didn't know that, wanted to state that.
Emilia (10:23)
But it's super important to always keep that in your head. And this is one of the places where AI really can't replace us. We are truly competent. We are truly creative. We are truly innovative. And that's the place where we as humans really stand out. And I've been using AI for a bunch of things and experimenting with at my work. Fortunately, I work for a startup, so things are much easier to get through. It's a matter of having a conversation. having one of our wonderful legal team take a look at things and then give me the go ahead. I don't have a lot of red tape that I'm sure some of your folks who are in larger enterprises may have. But I've had the opportunity to play with a bunch of things that have been really helpful. I sort of, there's like two sort of categories of things I've been looking at. The first one is stuff that automates the non-promotable work. So.
Brian (11:15)
Yeah.
Emilia (11:16)
All of the little things that we have to do that take a lot of time, but nobody's gonna remember you for. Nobody is going to remember you for taking wonderful notes of that meeting. Nobody's gonna remember how accurate you were at updating Jira. People are gonna remember the impacts that you made on them and their teams. And that's the work I wanna spend my time doing and not spend as much time on the other stuff.
Brian (11:43)
Right.
Emilia (11:45)
So I've played with a bunch of different apps. I don't know if it's okay to talk about specific ones. Yeah.
Brian (11:48)
No, yeah, please go ahead. Yeah. I'm sure people want to know some, want some tips. Yeah.
Emilia (11:53)
Yeah, so like one I love is Lucid Spark. So they are one of the mass of collaborative whiteboards and they have some really beautiful AI features. They're just ubiquitous built into their product that help when I'm facilitating. So I can have it take our massive wonderful, creative, messy ideas that we've all come up with when we're like doing a product brainstorm. And then... sort them all up so that we can really quickly like in moments as a team look at okay here's some different ways that this might be sorted where do we want to go next what do we want to do next um and that's just a super useful piece that they have and then say i'm done with that or i'm done with a retrospective to be able to get a okay let me select all the stuff and then give me a summary of what are all the things that happened
Brian (12:42)
Yeah.
Emilia (12:50)
And then I edit it because we're humans and we need that part, but it saves a lot of time. These are pieces that are just, it's using the technology to give us time to have better conversations, to have to work better as a team. It's just taking that out. So that's one that I love. There's another.
Brian (12:56)
Yeah. Yeah, I think of that, you know, I've tried to say to some people that it's more on the level of like a spell check, you know, like I don't I don't look at it like, you know, like I said, it's not it's not creating its own ideas. It can help you brainstorm, it can help you do things, but it does still have that human element that it requires to refine and to push back a little bit and say, yeah, but what if we went this way? So it's good if you look at it as this is another tool, this is a tool that can help me do things, yeah.
Emilia (13:43)
snack them. And there are a ton of tools that do that. You know, there's some great tools that will take your meeting notes for you. Otter.ai, Spinach.io are two that I've used that are pretty good. You know, Spinach has the plus of, it'll go update my JIRA for me, which of course we love. But they're things that are, they just take all of the bits and pieces and they do them for you. so that you can spend the time on the important stuff. And that's one of the things I'm loving with a lot of these nutrients.
Brian (14:14)
That's awesome. Yeah, there's one that I've come across as well. I'll just throw out there. And we're not plugging anything, trust me. We're just sharing our own experience. But there's one that I have used a little bit often on an experiment with, it's called Rewind. And yeah, now some people might think it's a little creepy. So let me explain and then you can decide if that's something you wanna experiment with or not. But Rewind basically kind of records everything on your computer.
Emilia (14:21)
No. Yeah, that's a pretty good one as well.
Brian (14:44)
I mean, you can tell it what not to record. You can say, don't do this. And you can set it up so that it will ask you any meetings. Should I record this one or not? But basically, it's sort of there in the background. And then you can call it up and say, I saw a website that was about this, or I saw something this week, or there was a meeting I was in where we talked about this topic. Can you recall that for me? And it'll say, yeah, here's the meeting, and here's the transcript of that part of your meeting where you talked about this thing. So I've heard people say it's sort of like my extended brain. And it does, I mean, my understanding is it's just local. It's not putting that out into the. world anywhere, it's not saving your data anywhere else, and you can control how much data it saves and everything else. But I understand that might have some privacy concerns, especially depending on someone's industry. If you're in a very highly secure industry, that might be a huge warning flag. So it's to each their own, I get it. But that's kind of where it's at, that boundary of let's see if it can do this. Oh yeah, it's actually. It actually can do this and it can do this pretty well. Yeah.
Emilia (16:04)
Yeah, and there's also like that's consent at that point becomes really important. Right, you're putting on your choosing, you're giving your consent to this thing. It's something you know, you wouldn't want somebody to impose upon you. That's when it goes from the useful tool into like creepy dystopian world, right? It's all about the consent and all about knowing and traceability and that kind of thing. And I think, you know, when you talk about some of the
Brian (16:23)
Right.
Emilia (16:32)
ethics folks, they are worried about crossing that line. It's just a matter of being aware, I think, at this point. And the other play way I've been using a lot of AI is for really working and helping it to spark and inspire stuff. And I've been doing a lot of that with using it to create metaphors. So.
Brian (16:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Emilia (16:54)
One of my favorite things I've used it both in one-on-one coaching and then also in like team retrospectives is using some of the generative AI. I've used some of the generative AI music, some of your generative AI art programs like Dolly or Mid Journey to take what somebody is feeling, thinking, seeing about the situation, the sprint, and then having them write the prompt. to create that piece of generated art that they can then share because it takes us beyond our words as humans. And into that so that you can see visually or hear what I'm feeling and it creates this lovely emotional tone that lets us go into different places and ask different questions of each other in say a team environment or of an individual ourselves in a coaching kind of environment. It's really powerful because it's taking, you know, before we would say, okay describe it, tell me more about that. But to be able to show it, put it on the table, and then for that individual to look at it, or to listen to it and pick a part and tell me about this part, tell me about that, how does this connect? It just creates all of these other areas that we can explore. And that's the stuff like we're humans when we really excel.
Brian (18:16)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And it's, you know, when we forget that, when we forget that and try to lean too heavily on it, then it's painfully obvious. It becomes really easy to spot and you're like, this is not human. This is not, this has no soul to it. This has no, you know, creativity or imagination. It's just spouting back stuff that I've seen and heard before.
Emilia (18:46)
million.
Brian (18:46)
But yeah, I think you're right. You know, if it can inspire me a little bit and say, yeah, I'm looking for something like this, give me some examples. You may get 10 examples back and then think, no, none of those are exactly right. But I like kind of how number seven talks about this. What if you gave me several examples like number seven, but tweak it this way? So that's the kind of. For me, that's the kind of back and forth that it takes to get something usable. It's just not write a book, here's the book, you know?
Emilia (19:20)
Yeah, I think one of the things that really we as Agilent have the power when we're using some of those AI things like chat GPT to generate content is the iterations that we're so good at. You know, I've done some work with like, okay, I'm going to use GPT. I'm going to use one of the large language models. Let me to get me started on writing a large piece of content. And then you iterate, you're like, no, more this, less this. What I actually like in that is less than starting the content and more, here's my piece of not very well-written content with all of my ideas and all these things. OK, so help me turn this into a tone that is more ABC. I love Grammarly for this. But give me a more playful tone. Give me a more.
Brian (19:58)
Thanks for watching. Right. Yeah.
Emilia (20:14)
business tone and you can take the same piece of content that you've written and then tailor it to different situations. Well it's still you. And iterating on that prompt like, you know, less marketing jargon, more, you know, and really till you get that piece. Kind of acts as a partner to help you inspect and adapt. To get it just the way you want it.
Brian (20:24)
Yeah. Ha ha ha. That's awesome. Yeah, and I like the idea of thinking of it kind of like a translator. You know, like when you talked about the images and stuff, that's what was going through my head is, you know, there's some people who do really well at creating images and drawing and digital artwork and everything. And there's other people who don't really know that language, don't know how to do that as well. But if we can have something that I can describe it to and it can create it for me, it's just a translation. It's taking my words, it's taking what my idea was and showing me a version of that. I can tweak it, I can push it one way or the other, but it's just giving a vocabulary, if you will, to my idea.
Emilia (21:26)
Exactly. And I think these are the things that are only going to get better. You know, we just recently had the release of Google's new Gemini models, which are multimodal, which is a whole other realm. So how can I take and translate, you know, speech and text and video and still images?
Brian (21:37)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.
Emilia (21:51)
and bring them all together into something. I'm really excited to play with them as they start hitting because I think that's the thing that's really going to unlock our power to do some really neat things together.
Brian (21:56)
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. By the way, there's a tool I'll mention as well that I've played with recently that I'll give a shout out to. Because for some of the stuff I've been trying to do, gather research and draw some conclusions from it and everything else, it's been a really helpful tool for that. Google has this tool out that's called Notebook LM. It was designed specifically for researchers. It allows you to, it's in the same mode or realm as sort of a custom GPT kind of thing, but you feed it research papers, articles, you feed it things that you've been using as a basis, and then it can help you. to refer back to the right thing and say, show me all the research about this, and it'll bring it up for you. So it's sort of just like a research assistant that you can use and you can create different little notebooks for different topics and other things. So I found that to be really, really useful. And that's kind of one of the newer tools that's out there in their experiments as well.
Emilia (23:08)
Yeah, I've been experimenting with OpenAI's data analysis and feeding it. So I have a set of surveys that I use with teams to really kind of look at, you know, where's your agile fluency? What are some of the markers of this team on their journey and different things like product, et cetera? And then feeding it these things and having it, you know, tell me more, you know, give me some analysis on this.
Brian (23:13)
Hmm, wow.
Emilia (23:33)
And I found it one that I had done previously. Usually when I take in a bunch of them, it takes me about a week to compile things, look at standard deviations, pull some things out about what I'm seeing as patterns. And it was able to produce the stuff that usually takes, again, I'm both human, around a week. I was able to do it. I mean, it did stop and start and feed and ask questions. And so there's tweaking. but probably within about 10 minutes on not terribly well clean formatted data. And its conclusions matched very closely with what I had done as far as analyzing the data. Now, of course, we take that and then based on that data analysis, what does that really mean? That parts us as humans. But it's a huge time saver when you're looking at large pieces of data.
Brian (24:19)
Right. Yeah, it's fascinating the kind of tools that are available to us, like you said. So this is great. I just want to reiterate a few things here. If you're... Working on Scrum teams, and you haven't considered doing something like this in the past, there are tools that could help you capture notes from maybe a sprint planning session or a sprint review. There are tools where you can help brainstorm new ideas for a retrospective or even take action items from that retrospective when you're done. So. This is what I'm saying, this is what I meant at the beginning. We're not going into the typical kind of areas with this. There are small little things that you can use this for today that I think can really give you a boost and enhance your practice.
Emilia (25:16)
Exactly and give your team the time for the stuff that your team is really great at It gives you the time more time to collaborate more time to have the conversations about how might we or what might we? Where we are wonderful Nope like I said before nobody's gonna remember you because you took great notes
Brian (25:21)
Yeah, that's great. Right. What about, and I know we're pushing up against our time, we'll try to wrap things up here, but what about because you have a lot of experience in the coaching realm, what about tools in that kind of aspect? How have these tools helped in sort of coaching practices?
Emilia (25:54)
Yeah, so one, obviously the metaphor I spoke about earlier, helping inspire those ideas and let us ask deeper questions, kind of, it's really great to put, say, a picture out and be able to tell me about this, tell me what's the significance of this, what do you see, what do you, or with team, what do you notice about this pattern of pictures? That's one I've used. Another one is I've used it just for my own sort of self-improvement.
Brian (26:21)
Hmm.
Emilia (26:22)
Um, I have a custom GPT that I trained and I fed it, you know, a bunch of stuff around ICF coaching ethics and how to be a great coach as far as those things. Um, and then I fed it some other, um, agile resources like the agile coaching growth wheel, um, and I've used it just to sort of have it ask me questions as I start exploring where do I want to go next. What do I want to do next? And I certainly have deeper more meaningful conversations with my human coaches Who coach me because I believe everybody needs a coach But they help me sort of sort my ideas and think about different areas and different things That I might not have thought of They're certainly not actually coaching me, but it does do pretty well at you know
Brian (26:57)
Sure. Ha ha.
Emilia (27:15)
pulling out those pieces so that I can think about what I need to think about and get a little bit out of my head. And it's useful for that.
Brian (27:21)
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I haven't even thought of using it for something like that, but that makes perfect sense. Again, it's just a tool. It's something that you can use to give you a push maybe in one direction or the other. But at the end of the day, it's still on you. It's still on you to actually do the work. That's awesome.
Emilia (27:37)
Exactly. Yeah. Another quick one I do is like, it's really good at taking all of your notes for a session and building a nice facilitation guide. It's easy to follow.
Brian (27:50)
I hadn't even thought of that. That's awesome. Yeah.
Emilia (27:52)
And like pieces like that are just like, just, it's like having, you know, it's like having an intern. Doesn't know anything. Who's brand new and fresh. But that fresh set of eyes can be useful.
Brian (27:59)
Yeah. Yeah. It's such an exciting time. I mean, I really, to me, it's just, like you said, it's only really been publicly around for about a year. And what we're talking about here is more these large language models. And we're not even really getting into machine learning and what might happen in this coming year with the combination of those two things.
Emilia (28:22)
Exactly.
Brian (28:28)
And then we're really cooking with gas, right? Then we're like, that's going to be amazing to see what kind of things come out of that combination. 2024, I think it's just going to be a really interesting year. You know, I know when that happened last year, I thought, you know, this feels a little bit like when the internet kind of launched. It's that kind of wild west kind of feel to things. And It feels a little like that's happening now, in this realm.
Emilia (28:56)
Yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting.
Brian (28:57)
All right, well, this has been. Yeah, I agree. Well, Amelia, this has been really interesting. I've had a really good time talking with you about this stuff. It's, you know, we could talk about this for a long, long time. And it might be interesting for us to check in maybe next year and say, look what's happened since the last time we talked. Here's where it was then and let's see where it is now. But thank you for proposing this and coming on and talking with us. And I really appreciate you sharing your research and learnings and insights on this recently.
Emilia (29:30)
Thank you.

#81: Unleashing the Power of Visual Storytelling in Product Ownership with Stuart Young

Ever wondered how visuals can transform your role as a product owner? Join Brian as he sits down with visual storyteller Stuart Young to unravel the power of visualization in product ownership. Join them on a journey to discover the art and science behind being a successful product owner.
Overview
Ever wondered how to elevate your product ownership game? In this episode, we delve into the world of visual storytelling with Stuart Young.
Join Brian and Stuart as they discuss the diverse tools, such as story mapping and the product disposition canvas, that can bring your product visions to life.
From storytelling techniques to the neurodiversity lens, we explore the art and science of communication that transcends traditional boundaries. Listen in to uncover the impactful ways visuals can shape your product strategy.
Learn how being more visual can sharpen your skills, foster collaboration, and create a more inclusive and successful product development journey.
Listen Now to Discover:
[00:23] - Today welcomes Stuart Young, a Certified Scrum Trainer and visual storyteller to discuss storytelling through the product lens and more.
[03:32] - Stuart discusses drawing large-scale pictures at conferences and recommends Visual Meetings and Visual Leaders by David Sibbit.
[06:54] - Stuart emphasizes the impact of visual storytelling on individuals, highlighting the universal language and information retention through visuals.
[08:46] - The benefits of visual representation in capturing the flow of ideas and aiding memory.
[10:26] - The importance of varied methods for engaging different learning styles.
[11:41] - Stuart discusses the value of visualization tools such as roadmaps, post-it notes, and story mapping to provide clarity and a clear narrative.
[12:14] - The importance of blending Stuart references Pixar and Ed Catmull's book Creativity, Inc., discussing the importance of blending exciting elements, like storyboarding, in motivating teams and creating a compelling narrative.
[15:13] - Stuart emphasizes the importance of authentic storytelling, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending, he references TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht - Steve Denning - “Leadership Storytelling" for further inspiration.
[15:25] - Brian recommends Simon Sinek's TED talk on "Start With Why" as an example of effective storytelling despite not being visually polished.
[16:09] - Stuart praises Henrik Kniberg's impactful video on product ownership, acknowledging the simplicity of the drawings but highlighting the potency of storytelling. He recommends the Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rhodes for those interested in delving further into storytelling.
[17:08] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Certified Scrum Training Classes. For more information, click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[18:38] - Stuart highlights the significance of visual elements in crafting compelling visions and underscores the value of utilizing available templates, from sources like the Gamestorming book.
[20:06] - Stuart discusses the role of visualization in making the intangible tangible, particularly in the tech space.
[21:50] - Brian emphasizes the imprecision of words. He also discusses the value of showing rather than just telling, especially in product requirements, to enhance understanding and avoid delays caused by miscommunications.
[23:34] - Stuart reflects on how visual communication can enhance inclusivity. He shares, “For people with reading and writing difficulties, pictures and symbols are better. The worst, the most abstract form, of course, is the word.”
[25:22] - The role of a visual storyteller as a "human cursor" connecting diverse conceptual thinkers. Stuart recounts an illustration experience, emphasizing the challenge of visualizing details without clear specifications and underscoring the mantra of "process over art" in product ownership.
[28:06] - Stuart underscores the product owner's role in leveraging the unique skills of team members to converge on a shared understanding of what "good" looks like.
[29:19] - Brian references the episode of the show they did on Navigating Neurodiversity and the importance of understanding and accommodating different communication styles within a team. He highlights the need for product owners to be aware of the preferences of their team members and adjust communication methods accordingly.
[30:54] - Stuart introduces the product disposition canvas and shares a personal revelation.
[32:54] - Brian acknowledges the potential superpowers that come with neurodiversity, sharing his own experience of a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis and the benefits of leveraging the unique qualities each team member brings to a team.
[33:36] - Stuart reflects on the importance of recognizing individual strengths and blind spots, emphasizing that everyone has a valuable contribution.
[34:20] - Stuart encourages recognizing individual strengths for collective success.
[35:23] - Listeners can connect with Stuart on LinkedIn and at Agile Nuggets | Agile Tips
[37:38] - Please share this episode with others if you found it useful. Send feedback and suggestions for future episodes to podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
[38:21] - If this topic was impactful to you and you want to continue the discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community where we have a topic discussion for each podcast episode. You can get a free year-long membership in the community just by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Stuart Young on LinkedIn
Agile Nuggets | Agile Tips | Cprime Learning
Scrum in Under 10 Minutes
#76: Navigating Neurodiversity for High-Performing Teams with Susan Fitzell
David Sibbet
Visual Meetings by David Sibbet
Visual Leaders by David Sibbet
Creativity, Inc.
Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rohde
TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht - Steve Denning - “Leadership Storytelling"
Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action | TED Talk
Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell by Henrik Kniberg
Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Certified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.
Stuart Young, a Certified Scrum Trainer and Visual Storyteller, merges Agile methodologies and design thinking to empower individuals and teams. As a thought leader, he champions Visual Storytelling for engaging stakeholders, addressing customer needs, and expediting learning. Through workshops, Stuart encourages teams to embrace visual methodologies to achieve business success.
Auto-generated Transcript:
Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. And as always, I'm with you, Brian Milner. Today I have a guest with me that I've been trying to get on for a while. Our schedules have been kind of misaligned a couple of times, but we're really, really fortunate to have him with us. Mr. Stort Young is with us. So welcome in, Stort. I'm glad you're here.
Stu (00:22)
Hello, it's lovely to see you. Yeah, time zone differences and the bit of water between across the pond has stopped us, but we are here. It's lovely to see you.
Brian (00:31)
Just a tiny bit of water between us, tiny. Stuart, for those who aren't familiar with his work, Stuart is a product trainer, a visual storyteller. He's a certified Scrum trainer, as I am. And if you ever attend a conference that Stuart's at, you will know who Stuart is, because he does this wonderful thing at a lot of conferences where he documents
Stu (00:33)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
Brian (00:58)
the content of the conference on this giant kind of mural. And it's really amazing to see. I remember feeling like a celebrity at Agile 2023 because my talk, you know, Mike and I's talk ended up on the big board. And I'm like, wow, now I've made it. Stuart captured our talk onto the big board. That just was a great feeling. So, Stuart is a very, you know, tell them, tell them a little bit about visual storyteller. What do you mean by visual storyteller?
Stu (01:28)
Yeah. So apart from sort of looking very tired at conferences and holding lots of pens and being with big bits of paper. I think that it's becoming more and more common in training classes and in the business space, the use of visuals, which is wonderful. I think it's a great thing. We think about different preferences of learning. And I guess the best way to describe it is visual literacy. the days of school, you know, we, we learned to, uh, we learned to navigate a children's book using our visual literacy. So that's really what it's all about. And, um, and when you see me in a conference drawing in sort of large scale pictures, the, the idea is really to, to minute, minute meetings and conferences and talks in pictures to make the information more engaging, try to synthesize the key points. and help with the retention of memory. So that's kind of it. The focus should be communication over decoration, but of course I like to make things look nice.
Brian (02:33)
And they do, they always look amazing. Stuart was also speaking at Agile 2023 and he had a talk that was using this kind of same visual storytelling, but it was storytelling through the product lens. So I know that's what we're gonna be talking about a little bit here throughout the course of our conversation. I mean, loosely, we might dabble in some other areas as well, but... Yeah, I know I encountered this, you know, when I first started going to conferences and started to see this and, you know, I'll share with you Stuart, probably what a lot of other people think when they think about doing this kind of stuff is, boy, I'm a terrible drawer. Like I can't draw at all. You know, my penmanship is horrible. I can read what I write, but you know, lots of other people can't read what I write. unless I'm really careful and taking my time. So I'm sure you get a lot of people when they see this and think about being a visual storyteller and trying to capture notes and story noting things that they kind of have that objection of, well, I just can't do that. How do you respond to that kind of real common objection?
Stu (03:38)
hopefully. Well, you know, the thing is, it's so common and it's really sad. And, you know, it's a cliche and it's obviously, we've all heard the Picasso's quote, we're born artists, but we grow out of it. And I think that's the real problem. And the sad thing is that as adults, we have so many inhibitions that we can't draw. And I think that that's the really the key point to make. And I've mentioned it, my little quote about communication over decoration and process over art. You can get better, you can focus on improving your pen mastery, but the focus should be on trying to communicate information. And there are tricks and tips to do just that. I think that people need to sort of change their mindset that they're not trying to draw a lovely picture that they're gonna frame as a wonderful output, but it's more a case of a facilitative tool. And especially in the sort of space that we're both in. And as I'll talk a little bit more about product ownership, you know, you're the gift of drawing is to bring people on a compelling journey or bring developers closer to end users. It's all about the art of storytelling. So you've got to really just let go of your inhibitions and, and remember that you're there to help people to communicate. There's a lovely, uh, saying, well, not saying it cool. There's a guy called. Dave Sibbitt from Grove Consulting in San Francisco. And he's a guru in the visual facilitation space. A couple of books that I'll bring out here, just by Dave, just so that any of you are keen to learn more. There's a lovely book called Visual Meetings and Visual Leaders by Dave Sibbitt. And he calls himself the human cursor. Not that he's smart, but like a laptop cursor in that you're not there. If you spell something badly or you draw something badly and you get that terrible cold sweat when you're at the flip chart, it's really not about you. It's really about the communication that you're trying to create. So I think that would be my first sort of tip.
Brian (05:53)
Yeah, yeah, that's really good. And, you know, when we think about this, I don't want people to get lost in this. I don't want you to think, well, I don't speak at conferences, so I don't really need to tell a story to a big group of people. Or, you know, I don't routinely hold big meetings in my organization. I know this is something that can even be really impactful just individually, right?
Stu (06:21)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that there's some of the key motivations for using visuals is the way in which we receive information and we can obtain information and it is, it's a universal language, which is really powerful, how we can retain that information and so even if you're thinking things through, you know, I have a lot of people come to me and say, Oh, you know, I don't really draw Stu, but sometimes I'll just scribble in my sketchbook, some ideas and like, I'm sorry to tell you. That is drawing, that is thinking conceptually. So I think that the process of the patterns that we create, in this very volatile and certain world that we live in, some things that are so abstract with the written word that just drawing something out is really important. So I like that you say, it's a really good point that's worth emphasizing on. I think a lot of the benefits of visual storytelling. in the product space is really about that collaboration and great thing about visual storytelling is it's, it's impactful for you as an individual, as much as it is for a group. I think a lot of the focus I have when I'm, I'm training in teaching and facilitating this stuff is all around that collaboration, but you as an individual. you grab a sketchbook and you're drawing out ideas and you're thinking through things, that's the sort of the power play really and it really does help with that sort of retention of ideas. So, you know, doing it on your own, working in a group, I think it's always really useful.
Brian (07:57)
Yeah, I know I've had that happen to me. That was something that I had to try to learn a little bit was just the, I would scribble a bunch of handwritten notes and I'd come back to them later and be like, what is this about? And it's hard to really follow my train of thought going through this. But when I started to draw some things and started to have a little bit more of, oh yeah, this idea flowed to this. And then that, the visual nature of that really allowed that kind of to mimic that chain of consciousness that I was having at the moment, you know, when I encountered it. So that, to me, I know personally that became very helpful, yeah.
Stu (08:32)
Yeah, absolutely. So, so just picking up on what you said there, uh, another motivation that I talk about is that divergent convergent thinking. So just sort of separating the two things out there, which is of course, something very useful and from a product ownership perspective, the divergent thinking, that diversity of thought that comes from the drawings. And, um, without going too geeky on you, um, in the world of business and scrum. know, the world is, it's riddled in what we call ideographs. So if you think about refinement or any of the scrum values, they're all, they're all, when you draw a picture to represent focus, for example, it's a picture that represents an idea or concept. And so it's very difficult to draw some of these things. However, it provides wonderful variety and it provides diversity, because we'd all draw something differently. So that's the first thing that's really nice about drawing is it really offers that opportunity to, to generate ideas. And when you were saying about sort of, well, how do I converge on that? How do I know where I'm going? That's kind of the idea behind the product disposition canvas and not just the canvas I created, but the business model canvas, a good old fashioned SWOT analysis, the value proposition canvas.
Brian (09:45)
Hmm.
Stu (09:53)
any, you know, any of the great templates that we see from some of the great thought leaders in our space, all of these things are providing a level of convergence. So, you know, the drawing itself helps with the convergence, the frameworks and the frames that we use, the templates we use, as well as visual metaphors like the sailboat are all anchoring things and then bringing us back onto the same page.
Brian (10:18)
Yeah, that's something I try to talk about with my Scrum Masters a lot is, when you get to that retrospective, you have to have different methods that you go through. You can't just do the same thing every time because like we're talking about, there's different methods of learning and that activates different parts of people's brains. And if I am more of a visual processor, yeah, having something like Sailboat gets my brain to start to work in a way that's having just start, stop, continue won't, because that's just words on a page and it may not excite me as much. This is great. So I think we have an understanding of this. And by the way, we're gonna link something in our show notes. Stuart and I were talking about this beforehand. Stuart did a very lovely little quick overview of the Scrum framework that he used some of this storytelling process with as he described it. So if you're having trouble visualizing what we're talking about, we gotcha. We'll give you a link for that, and you'll be able to see this. So I want to transition that from just in general understanding, because I think we probably have a good idea of this now, into the product space. And I'm a product owner. I'm working with my stakeholders. I've got a product I'm working at day in, day out. How can?
Stu (11:18)
Thanks.
Brian (11:40)
how can being more visual help me in my, how's that helped me discover more about my product?
Stu (11:48)
Good question, good question. So for me, you know, when it comes to product ownership, there are many qualities and we could just talk forever on this, I'm sure. But one of the qualities I think that really matter is that passion, is that storytelling. And so of course, you can create wonderful stories regardless of visuals, but with the visualization, it really helps get people on the same page. And I think that, you know, without getting carried away with Neulen pens and nice big bits of paper and nice highlighter pens, we don't need to make this any more grander than it needs to be. You know, I think that a roadmap, uh, you know, post-it notes on a wall, story mapping, all of these are methods of, um, visualizing the work. And I think that, that for us, for a product owner, that your focus is on the why and the what. You really want to sort of try and create as much clarity as possible. And I think all of the good tools that we use are providing that clear narrative. And I'll take as an example, story mapping, or customer journey mapping, that general narrative of left to right, we're used to that flow. And so we can tell a story and it provides enough information. And I think what's nice in life, I don't know, I find is...
Brian (13:00)
Yeah.
Stu (13:15)
blending your, the things that excite you. So I'm quite interested by Pixar and if anyone's read Ed Catmull's Creativity, Inc. book, it's fascinating. It's talking really about motivating teams as well as everything else. But you think about storyboards, any of the good things that we've been doing for years, like Walt Disney. I think he coined the, there's a gentleman called Webb Smith. who is the illustrator who, and I think Walt Disney sort of, you know, coined the idea of story mapping and story, sorry, storyboarding from, from web. And it's just really interesting how those storyboards can tell a story and those little gaps between a comic provide you with just enough information to fill in the gaps. So it brings people on that journey, not telling people how to do something. but kind of presenting that picture.
Brian (14:16)
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, yeah, there's a lot, when you start to describe it, you think about, oh yeah, this is not uncommon. There's a lot of places where people use visualizations like this to try to help, like you said, thinking about storyboarding a movie or think about advertising agencies that do little storyboards of what their ad might look like or what their, even their. ad in a magazine might, you know, not television ad, but an ad in a magazine might look like. There's lots of ways that people use visualizations in our world that we probably just don't even recognize because we're just so used to it now.
Stu (14:53)
Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I think that, that when it comes to sort of product ownership, you know, the focus is that, you know, if we go, if we talk about some of the, desirability, viability, and feasibility, and for me, product ownership sits right in the core of that. We're not always thinking about creating new shiny features and that desirability factor, sometimes we've got to think about the total cost of ownership and the efficiencies that we're trying to save for the reduced, the reduced cost. So. some of the experiences I've got is really blending some of these practices, like statistical analysis and measuring the non-value add activities in a process and adding that and combining that with a customer journey with some qualitative information that's quite thought-provoking is a really good blend. And to kind of emphasize that, Steve Denning said he did a TEDx talk quite some time ago around leadership. storytelling and he says that you've got to wake people up out of their complacency and you've got to be authentically, you know, authentically true. And so that's what I'm talking about. It's like you don't always tell a good story. The story's not always got a happy ending, but you want to wake people up to go, all right, we need to make some changes here.
Brian (16:18)
Yeah, yeah, you know, one of the people that, for those people out there who think, oh, I don't draw very well, if you, I'll just give you one person that you can go look at and kind of see someone who doesn't draw very well but uses it very effectively. Anything that you would see from Simon Sinek. Go try to find Simon Sinek's talk on uh, why, uh, you know, starting with why, if you, if you find his initial tech talk on that, he draws or any kind of, there's a lot of talks that he'll do where he draws kind of sloppy, you know, it's, it's kind of all over the place, but you, you don't think about it when you watch it, you're not looking at it going, well, he doesn't draw very well. He's emphasizing his point. And it's really highly affected. I don't know if you agree or if you've seen any of those. What do you think about that?
Stu (17:11)
I absolutely, totally agree. And I'd say the same and he wouldn't, he wouldn't be offended by me saying this, but Henrik Kleyberg, you know, probably one of the most watched videos, product owner in a nutshell, he'd say himself that the drawings are quite limited, quite crude, but the art of storytelling is so powerful. The other thing that we might get chance to talk about is structure. The way in which you structure information is really key. So.
Brian (17:18)
Yeah.
Stu (17:39)
you know, Henrik's drawings were like of the stick men were, were sort of very quick and low fidelity, but the structure in which he created that video really reinforced the message. So the power of storytelling in structure really helps. There's a, if any of you again, want to find out more about the art of storytelling, there's the sketch note handbook by Mike Rhodes, and he talks about structure. being the meat and veg and the fancy drawing being the gravy on top. So, you know, again, that kind of reinforces that message.
Brian (18:15)
I love that. I love that example. Well, connecting back with the product owner then, I wanna kind of get practical a little bit in where this would fit in. So let's, and just thinking about what a product owner does, kind of the typical kind of things. I know you mentioned story mapping and I agree, that's a very visual way of seeing our products. Not drawing as much, although it could be, right? You could have some drawings on those as well, but. Just in the normal course of doing things like coming up with our visions and trying to understand our customers and trying to validate assumptions and everything that a product owner typically does, how does something like this help in those kind of specific things that a product owner would normally do?
Stu (19:02)
Well, a couple of things I just wanted to say before I delve into the depths of all these things is that it's worth, and I know you're on the same page as me on this as a, as a product owner, there are lots of things that, that you just need, I think, to be aware of and cognizant of, of doing, regardless of whether it's you doing it or whether you're saying, look, how can we gain more discovery? How can we get more validation? How can we get more alignment? And again, I'm preaching to the converted, you know, a sprung team. It's that.
Brian (19:30)
Hehehehe
Stu (19:32)
cohesive unit, right? So, but as far as the individual tools that you as a product owner may use or encourage others to do so, talking about visions and things like that, I've always felt like it should be a team sport and the more visual that you can make that, there are so many different templates available out there to create compelling visions. And again, it's very much There's two ends right to storytelling. There's, as I've said from Steve Denning, waking people up from their complacency if something's not so great, or the art of the possible, the postcard from the future. All of these kind of creative things are taking people on this compelling journey. So always would make use of any of the templates available. Like you said, you've got to mix things up, but there's some great, great things from the Game Storming book. I've mentioned so many books, I apologies to whoever's got all these links in.
Brian (20:34)
Yeah, our show our show note person's scrambling trying to find all these things
Stu (20:38)
Right now, go never invite this person back again. Um, um, so yeah, there's lots of different vision, vision things available. And, you know, like all of these tools, two things I'd say is it's more about, not the tool, but more about the collaboration that you get from the tools. And I'd also say, um, tools in your toolbox, not a checklist, right? Um, but touching on the other two things you mentioned there, from a discovery perspective, I really do quite like blending, um, you know, a lot of the design thinking techniques with Agile, right? I'm all about blending everything, but I'm very passionate about customer journey mapping and as is and to be customer journey mapping. And again, as I've just, I used the example earlier, sort of blending qualitative and quantitative data. I'm all about outcome metrics and I'd love to say that data beats opinion, but actually opinion does matter. So. Blending a lot of these visuals with real qualitative information from customers is great. And, and again, thinking about the validation very similarly, you know, what can we do visually that can validate design ideas? A lot of us in the product space, work in the tech space. And I think one of the key things that I say about visualization is making the intangible tangible. And that's the thing, right? You know, a lot of us are working in software or we're working with process. How can you define that you're doing a good job if you're working on an MVE or you're trying to improve something and all you've got is just a bunch of code. You need ways to visualize and say things in a business in business language that people understand. So, you know, all these. All of the above, Brian.
Brian (22:35)
Right, right. Yeah, and you know, I'm just reminded, I remember there was, back way back in the day, there used to be an exercise, I know people would do in classes around, you know, you'd have a description of something and then someone would try to draw it. And there was a couple of rounds of this or there was a couple of different ways of doing it, you know, one team or one round, basically you wrote out the instructions and the people just had to follow them. Uh, and there's, you know, another round or another team that they got to ask questions back and forth, clarifying questions about things, uh, and you know, there's rounds or I may be misremembering this, but I thought there was sons where they could show you the picture and you could say, Oh no, that's not quite right to do this. Um, and one of the, the kind of key, uh, learning points of that was to try to say, you know, at the heart, when we have. requirements, when we have something that we're trying to express, you know, from a product owner standpoint to have a team work on, we're we have a picture in our head. And it's very visual, right? We have a picture in our head of what it is we want. And matching the picture that's in our head, and trying to describe it, you know, I heard of I've used this phrase quite a bit. I don't know where it came from. But words are imprecise. They are right words are just imprecise. They have different meanings. And even when I notice this in my classes, when I give descriptions of exercises, a lot of times people will come back and say, yeah, but you say this and that in instruction, but do you mean this or do you mean that? And that clarification is needed. So yeah, all this is just to say that matching pictures, if it's visual, it's helpful to see it. It's helpful to say, you know, it's not just, let me tell you what I need, but let me show you what I need. And, you know, that oftentimes can clear up those miscommunications that can cause the back and forths and, you know, having delays in a team just because you didn't really try to match the pictures.
Stu (24:46)
The, the, some of those motor key motivations I've said, simplifying complexity, uh, helping people to generate ideas, solve problems, but gain alignment is worth going back a little bit in time here, cause what you've touched there is a really pertinent point, um, before I'm a design graduate, as, as you could probably imagine with my passion, that doesn't really give me any more right to be, to be talking about this specific thing, uh, many important milestones in my life, being a business analyst, project manager before I was.
Brian (24:51)
Yeah.
Stu (25:15)
brought into the world of Agile and also spent time looking at design thinking. But they're 10 years working in social care and frontline services with adults with learning disabilities. And working back then on before the days of Agile for me, activity boards introducing symbol and picture communication to make it more inclusive and make people more involved with reading and writing difficulties. was really powerful. It's quite interesting going into the agile space years later and going, we were doing this then in social, but you touched on a really good point in that there's something that, you know, speech and language therapists talked about then, which was the symbol hierarchy of need, which suggests that there's different kinds of ways in which you can represent an object with different levels of abstraction and, um, without being tokenistic.
Brian (25:48)
Yeah.
Stu (26:09)
for people with profound and multiple learning disabilities, objects of references or, you know, things that miniature objects are better. But for people with reading and writing difficulties, pictures and symbols are better. Then the one at the worst, the most abstract form, of course, is the word. So you're absolutely right. And, you know, as someone back in the day as an illustrator, you'd get someone saying, oh, Stu, draw me a skyscraper and I'd be like, yeah, but, but how anything will be fine. And I'd be like, what, you know, and then, you know, you sure? Yes, yes. I'll draw it and they'll say, we wanted seven windows, you know, this brings me back to another point that, that I think is important to any, anyone out here that wants to use these skills for product ownership is again, another little phrase I like to say, which is again, process over art. I remember forgetting the importance and significance of this, ignoring everything I've told all of you, being commissioned to come in as the live visual storyteller, as this team that are working within a high street bank improving their agile transformation, were telling me about their journey and they wanted me to visualize it to create a storyboard. So there I was with all my specialist pens and the paper. And I'd be, you know, I was paid to be there as this visual storyteller. I even had like a little, like a, like a, uh, electrician's bag, you know, on the side, like a, like a cowboy with my pens in, I mean, like very professional. And, um, I had all these different people telling me about their process and about what it looks like. And it was just, I had that cold sweat, right? You know, I was just, all it was, was a pipe, a bit of paper with, with just. mess was the mess of lines and everything else. And at the end of the day, they looked at it much like that sky skyscraper analogy and said, this is great. You know, this is it's a mess. I saw, I said, I'm sorry. I feel like I failed. Said, no, this is great. You've managed to conceptualize what we're all saying. And that, that night I went home and I had some, maybe some classic music on. And I went all precious and I drew up as a wonderful storyboard. I thought, oh, phew, again, forgetting all the important things.
Brian (28:18)
Aha.
Stu (28:30)
And I brought it in to have a bit of integrity. And I said, right, everyone put a post-it note over anything that needs to change when you couldn't see the picture. And once again, once again, I feel like I'd failed, but not again. They're like, this is great Stu. You've got us on the same page. So again, you are that human cursor and you know, you're there to help with that connections because like you say, we're all conceptual thinkers and we need to join the dots and we're thinking differently, which is a beautiful thing.
Brian (29:00)
Yeah, it just struck me as we were talking about this thing. And maybe this will highlight a difference in personality. And some people might answer this one way or another. But if someone's going to give you directions, would you rather have the directions written out or would you rather have a map? I know for me, I'd rather have the map. To me, I like to see, oh, yeah, you go here and you go there. But when someone starts to rattle off, well, you go about a mile this way, and then you turn left, and then you take the roundabout. I'm lost already. If it's more than two directions, that's it. But if I have the map, yeah, I'm following step by step, and I can visualize where it is I'm trying to go.
Stu (29:41)
I think that that's another really beautiful thing about Scrum, right? And about sort of you as a product owner, trying to maximise value and get, and make the most from those amazing humans that you're working alongside and rubbing shoulders with. And like you say, you know, what are people's preferences? That's the beauty, I think, for me, is that diversity, the diversity of thought, reducing those assumptions and sort of thinking, thinking outside of the box. Um, and embracing that divergence a little bit more. And it's interesting. And Lee, if there's anyone listening, they're thinking, well, I, I can't visualize anything, there's actually something called aphantasia, which is the inability to imagine visual images, uh, which, which I only heard about sort of not so long ago. And I find that fascinating. And there's other people and there's like apparently 2% of the population as opposed to aphantasia. which is the condition of having extremely vivid mental visuals, which is around 10%. So it's just, I just think it's beautiful how people think differently, but you, you know, you as a product owner, bringing this back, I think from a facilitation perspective, you're using the skills of everyone to kind of come together to converge on, on what, what good looks like.
Brian (30:51)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we, we had an episode of a few episodes back now, but we had an episode on, uh, kind of, uh, neurodiversity. And so speaking about some of the same things you're talking about here. And again, just to reiterate, you know, one of the reasons that's important is because you have differences in people on your team. So it's not necessarily important for you to know every single kind of person that could be out there in the world, but what's important for you to know. is the people on your team and the people you're communicating with. So if you have someone who does have a preference of a certain communication style and they are more visual, then yes, we need to be more visual. If you have people who would rather, you know, are more data-driven and want to see facts, then maybe we need to present things in a different way. Yeah, I saw something recently stored about kind of along the same lines. two people having a conversation and they were talking about how when, the person was questioning the other person saying, when you say the alphabet, when you say A, B, C, D, you're telling me you actually see the letters in your head every time you do it and the woman was like, yes. When I say A, I see a picture of an A in my head. I see the B, I see C, and I can't say it, I can't go through the alphabet without seeing in my head those letters visually. And the man was just stunned by it. He thought, wow, that's so foreign to me. I can't imagine that. I just, it's just, I'm speaking it. It's just words to me. But they're highlighting, right, kind of the differences in their brains. Their brains are wired a little bit differently. And... I just thought that was brilliant. I never heard anyone kind of express it that way, but that was a great way to kind of capture that, you know?
Stu (32:52)
You know, you're bringing it back to the product disposition canvas. And I should probably share that or a link to that. It's basically, um, uh, a vertical and horizontal axis. And you've got structure strategic to tactical, but visionary to implement it. And just sort of aligned to what you were saying there. And for the folks listening, uh, it's called the disposition canvas. Not so I'm using very clever big words, but because if you Google disposition, you look at, you know, uh, the encyclopedia and
Brian (32:58)
Yeah.
Stu (33:22)
dictionary even, it's got two definitions. One is a person's inherent qualities, which is what you're talking about. And the other is around your orientation. So whenever I'm delivering certified product owner classes or any product oriented classes, everyone has a different position, whether they're a glorified product backlog administrator or they're working very strategically, but also the thing that people forget to talk about. is what about you as an individual? Because I'm much more of a visionary than an implementer. And for the first, this is the first crowd that I've shared this with, but you talked about neurodiversity at the age of 44. Yesterday, I had a clinical assessment for ADHD and positive, yeah. So just quite liberating. I wish I'd learned earlier, but you know, it's kind of like all the people that know me are like, And you're telling us something we didn't know, but it's the, the thing about product ownership as well, that people forget, I think is that people assume that everybody, when you talk about scrum mastery, it's all around people and we feel kind of more comfortable talking about, about neurodiversity, all of these things. But product ownership is it's a job. It's, it's an accountability, but it's, you know, you are a, you're, you've got a, you're not a superhero. You're, you're a, a person.
Brian (34:23)
Yeah. Yeah.
Stu (34:50)
mining for truth and sharing your inherent qualities with the team is wonderful. So for me, hyper-focus, creativity, problem solving, big picture thinking, sometimes slightly impulsive, you know, but again, that's the Johari window. It's that openness, that transparency that needs to come through.
Brian (35:03)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they can be, I'm with you. It's there, you know, by the way, it's same here. Everyone who listens knows I've said it multiple times that, you know, I had late in life diagnosis as well. Um, but you know, it's kind of one of those things where there's superpower to it, you know, there's, there's kind of this superpower that comes along with it, but then there's also things that we don't do as well. And if you want, you know, this is not a neurodivergence thing. This is not an ADHD thing. This is a human being thing, I think, to just say,
Stu (35:16)
Thanks, Steve.
Brian (35:38)
we cannot accept and mine the superpowers of a person without also accepting and helping them with the things that they struggle with, right? Because they're a whole human being and they're someone on our team. So yeah, absolutely. I love that point. I think that's a great point.
Stu (35:59)
And I, this is, and I hope this sort of resonates with everyone listening in. Cause I think we, we are all good at identifying the things we're not good at. And we're never very good and we're blind to the things that we're good at. And so, you know, there's a seat at the table for everyone. And that's why I love talking about product because regardless, if you've ever delivered a service, I've talked about working with adults with disabilities to whatever you've done, worked in a shop, you're, you're trying to like deliver value to someone. Um. And just wanted to share a story, which is product related. I remember having massive imposter syndrome back in the day when I first became a business analyst, because I'm not a number cruncher, um, actually I quite do like numbers these days, especially when it comes to running and cycling, but, um, I didn't feel like I'd found my home and then something, um, those of you that may be dialing in from the listening in from the UK may remember in the news some years ago, there was a thing called the baby P incident. which was a terrible situation, safeguarding situation where a child died due to a lack of connections and joining the dots between social and healthcare providers. No individual was wrong, but the system was wrong. And due to that, working for local authority, I was tasked to work with the safeguarding teams in visualizing their processes. And that was the first time I'd gone from frontline services with a passion for drawing with some post-it notes in hand, visualizing and working with stakeholders to visualize a journey. And I'm like, you know, Visio process mapping galore, but I'm like, oh, I'm home, this is what it's about. So, you know, in everything we do, you know, never under emphasize the way your brain works.
Brian (37:43)
Hmm.
Stu (37:50)
and the qualities that you can bring, but it's that diversity together, that collection, which is the power.
Brian (37:57)
Awesome. That is very well said. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. This has been a great conversation. And I know we may have caught in a few different places, but that's the way conversations are. They get messy sometimes. And I'm all for that. But I like to ask, usually at the end, is there any, people wanna know more where they go to, but I feel like we've sprinkled throughout this, a lot of good...
Stu (38:23)
Hehehe
Brian (38:24)
follow on things that people can go and find out more about. But is there anywhere else that you would say, anything, anywhere people should, if they wanna get in touch with you, can reach out to you.
Stu (38:33)
More than welcome. We create agile nuggets, little agile nuggets of insights from different, different people around the globe. And I draw these little pictures. So I'll share that with you, but more than welcome to reach out. I usually make quite a bit of noise on LinkedIn. So, you know, I'm sure I'll be talking about this or sharing a post or something in the foreseeable future. So that's good with me.
Brian (39:00)
Well, Stuart, I can't thank you enough. Thanks for coming on and making time for us and sharing just your knowledge and wisdom with us.
Stu (39:08)
Thank you so, so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.

#80: From Struggling to Success: Reviving Agile Teams with Mike Cohn

Are you part of a struggling Agile team? Join Mike Cohn and Brian Milner in this episode as they uncover the primary signs of a team in distress. Listen in as they share the common causes of underperforming teams, and what to do to boost morale, enhance collaboration, and transform your Agile team from struggling to thriving!
Overview
What is the primary sign of a struggling Agile team? It's when the energy in the room feels like a deflated balloon, and laughter is a distant memory.
In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software help listeners identify the signs of a struggling Agile team and the common culprits.
Listen in as they unveil the key principles of cultivating a positive work environment and the vital importance of addressing CYA behavior.
Plus, they share their top-notch tips on boosting team morale and enhancing collaboration, all while preventing unfinished projects and ensuring consistent delivery.
Tune in to transform your Agile team from struggling to thriving!
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:23] - Brian welcomes back Mike Cohn to the show to discuss how to identify the signs that your team is struggling and what to do about it.
[01:54] - Common causes of unfinished work.
[04:45] - Do developers use Scrum as an excuse to be lazy? No—that’s rare but can be easily corrected.
[07:36] - How to manage underperforming teams.
[09:04] - Teams that lack excitement and laughter may be struggling. Work should be fun and enjoyable. How to create a positive work environment.
[10:32] - How to break the habit of rolling unfinished work forward.
[12:44] - The power of small wins to improve job satisfaction.
[14:12] - How to boost morale and deliver small wins that create a sense of accomplishment.
[14:30] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Certified Scrum Training Classes. Whether you want to be a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or even take an advanced certification, all courses are designed to give you the skills that agile teams and organizations value so you’ll stand out in the market. For more information click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[15:35] - What CYA is really telling you about your team.
[16:59] - The role of managers in creating an environment of openness and collaboration
[19:03] - How individualistic behavior—working in isolation, not collaborating—hinders teamwork.
[21:08] - Introducing Swarming—a horrible way to work, you’ll get less done—but a great drill to help teams discover new ways to collaborate.
[27:54] - Thank you to Mike Cohn for joining us on the show.
[28:18] - Please share this episode with others if you found it useful. Send feedback and suggestions for future episodes to podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
[27:54] - If this topic was impactful to you and you want to continue the discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community, where we have a topic discussion for each podcast episode.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
#70: The Role of a Leader in Agile with Mike Cohn
#39: The Art of Writing User Stories with Mike Cohn
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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 back Agile Mentors. Very glad to be with you again. My name is Brian Milner as always. And today I have my good friend back with me, Mike Konis here. Welcome back, Mike.
Mike (00:11)
Hey Brian, thanks for having me back.
Brian (00:13)
Really, really excited that Mike could join us again. And wanted to talk about something that I think is, maybe it can hit on multiple fronts. And that's really signs that your team is struggling. What are some things that could be going on with your team? And what do they mean? What does it kind of symbolize? What do we do about it? There's lots of common issues I think that teams face. I know Mike, you probably, You do classes all the time as well, and I'm sure you hear kind of the same questions over and over in classes. Yeah. So there's kind of a set of the same issues that seem to rear their head again and again. So we thought we'd maybe make our way through a few of those and just talk through them, and maybe we can find some things here that would help you if one of these things happens to be something you're experiencing.
Mike (00:45)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (01:06)
So the first thing, if we're kind of working along in our team and we find out that they're kind of frequently reaching the end of their sprint and stuff's just not done. I know I had this a lot in teams I've worked with where we had carryover, we had stuff that just wasn't finished. I remember even one team early on I had that just kind of told me, hey, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter we don't finish it. We'll just do it next sprint. So what do you think is kind of at the core of something like that, Mike?
Mike (01:40)
I think there's two common causes for a team not finishing work. And one's kind of an obvious one, which is excess pressure from management, right? Management's pushing them on how much to do. Management is not letting the team have full authority over how much work they bring into a sprint. And that could be a misguided scrum master, misguided product owner, or management outside the team, but somebody is putting some excess pressure on the team. And then the second one, I'm going to call it a second one, but it's, it's pretty related. is over optimism from the team. And the team just thinks they can get that much done. And they have a really hard time learning the lesson that they can't. And I'm thinking of a team I worked with outside of Sacramento, California. Absolutely phenomenal team. Phenomenal team. One of the best I've worked with in my entire career. But I don't know that they ever finished what they said they would. Literally, I don't know if they ever finished. And a lot of it boiled down to the optimism kind of their weed guy. And he was great, phenomenal guy. I've stayed in touch with him for many years. But he just always had the attitude of, yeah, we can do it. We can do the one more thing. And always bringing that in. And so the product owner and I would talk after a planning meeting going, I wonder how many they won't make. It's like, you think it'll be two or you think it'll be three. And after a while, the product owner just had to kind of take an attitude of like, okay, you committed to these many things, but you know, let's not work on this one until all the others are done. We'll kind of keep this one.
Brian (02:46)
Ha ha. Hahaha.
Mike (03:06)
kind of on deck or ready to go in next. And that worked better, but it was just their overoptimism. And now the reason I said, I think both of those go together, that somebody's putting pressure on the team or the overoptimism, somebody's putting pressure on the team and I cited management, Scrum Master, product owners, could be the team itself, right? The team is putting more pressure on itself. That's why I think they're related. So I think that's the, those are the two most common reasons for this to happen.
Brian (03:24)
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, you know, I get questions a lot of times in classes or when I talk to leaders where they, there seems to be a concern, which I think is completely unfounded, that the developers are going to just goof off. And that, you know, somehow this whole Scrum setup is just a shell game to kind of give developers a chance to just fool around and do whatever they want to do.
Mike (03:53)
the
Brian (03:58)
I don't know, I mean, I'll share my personal experience. What I tell those leaders is that, you know, it's actually just the opposite has been my experience. You know, developers want to please the others in the organization. And so when someone comes to them and says, hey, you know, can't you do a little bit more in the sprint than, you know, they're usually not gonna say no. They wanna make people happy. So they'll say yes, you know, so it's over optimism, but like you said, the pressure too,
Mike (04:22)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (04:27)
could contribute to that to say, hey, you know, I don't wanna make anyone mad. I don't wanna tell them, no, I can't do this. So I'll make them happy for today. They'll be mad, you know, at the end of the sprint, but for right now, you know, they'll be happy for a few days.
Mike (04:41)
Yeah, I'd rather have people mad later instead of mad today. I think we have to be careful though. There are some small percentage of teams that will use it as an excuse to be lazy. And I've worked with thousands of teams at this point. I have worked with a few of those right there. They were using scrum as an excuse to be lazy. Like, you mean we get to pick how much we do? Okay. We'll do that little. Right. Um, and normally that's fairly easily corrected.
Brian (04:51)
Sure. Right.
Mike (05:07)
because it normally boils down to one or two people on the team that are kind of creating that mindset. And I'll go back to the guy I talked about on the amazing team, right? His name was Todd. And he had an outsized influence on the team, just kind of by his seniority and by his personality. You're kind of a big personality, people liked him. He was the one that would occasionally have like parties at his house and things like that. I was referred to him as the glue that held that team together. And again, an amazing team. But his personality, had an outsized influence, right? And so his optimism drove that team to picking too much. If you had somebody, his evil twin, it's like, oh, let's commit to a little, right? That could have the same influence there. And so when we have that problem, it's often fairly easily fixed. You need to talk to the one person or you move the person onto a different project or out of the company if you have to. Other times the problem is caused when we have two people together, right? It's the combination of these two that make it happen. So... It hasn't ever been a really hard problem to fix, but I do want to acknowledge that is a, it's a, it's a concern. It could happen. Right. But I think what we tell, we would tell leaders is it's pretty rare. Right. And if you have a team using Scrum to, to deliberately go slow, deliberately take it easy, not do a lot of work. Pretty easy to notice. And it's pretty easy to fix, right? You know, fire somebody if you have to. Right. I mean, I hate saying that, but I mean, that's an option. And if we have people that are just, you know, deliberately.
Brian (06:15)
Yeah.
Mike (06:33)
underperforming and it's a valid option. So I don't think it happens off but I do want to be fair there that it can happen.
Brian (06:41)
Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out because I do agree it's kind of a you know, the percentage of it I don't know I don't have any studies to say this but the percentage of it is probably so small that you know It's kind of one of those things again. Are we managing towards the majority? Are we managing towards the small minority? Are we making all our policies around the small minority? Are we making around what the majority would actually do?
Mike (07:05)
I love that point because I get some criticisms on my blog or YouTube videos or stuff sometimes where people will tell me, yes, but this advice doesn't work for such and such a team. And they're always describing some horrible team, right? You know, this is some totally, you know, where you've got the total command and control manager or the architect that's also the scrub master and abusing their power. It's always just some horrible messed up situation. And somebody will tell me my advice doesn't work for those teams.
Brian (07:10)
Hehehe
Mike (07:32)
I'm totally okay with that. I made the decision many, many years ago that I want to offer advice that will help good teams become great. I don't really want, I don't care if they do, but I don't really wanna focus my life on helping really poor performing teams become mediocre. Right? This doesn't motivate me. That doesn't get me excited. I wanna help the good team become world-class, right? And so I'm gonna write things with the assumption that we're...
Brian (07:39)
Yeah.
Mike (07:57)
We all have positive intent. We are trying to get better for making a mistake. We're going to own it. We're going to, we're going to go from there, but I don't want to, I don't want to give advice for all the horrible teams to get mediocre. That's it. That just doesn't get me excited.
Brian (08:10)
Yeah, completely agree to that. It's, you know, there will be other signs. It's not like it's gonna be hidden if you do have a team that's trying to abuse it in that way. It's gonna be fairly obvious that that's happening.
Mike (08:23)
Yeah, I'll get it asked. You know, leaders will say, how will I know if the team is underperforming? And, um, one of my, um, professors back in graduate school has got him, Peter Drucker, who's often, um, considered like the, you know, the management guru of the 20th century. And, um, he had a term management by walking around, right? You just walk around and you will notice. Right. And, um, you know, we started out, you're talking about, um, struggling agile teams and one of the things I was thinking there, like, what is, like, what is the like primary sign of a struggling?
Brian (08:34)
Yeah. Hmm.
Mike (08:52)
agile team. I think one of them for me is they're not having any fun. Um, I love, I love building stuff, right? I love creating products and, um, it should be fun. Um, you've heard me before say that I hate work is called work, right? You know, I get it. We got to call it work, but work should be fun. We spend most, you know, not most, but you know, half a third of our day working, it should be fun. And if you go into a company and nobody's having any fun, you're not hearing any excited voices or laughing ever. That's a sign that the team is struggling. So.
Brian (09:25)
Yeah, that's a great point. And I completely agree. You know, I get it, right? I mean, it's not recess. Like, there's a limit. There's work, and we're trying to make money in what we're doing. But you're right. If there's no need for our workplaces to be overbearing and just stuffy, I can't stand being in this. I can't wait to get out of it.
Mike (09:50)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we all have days like that, but work should be fun, right? And that should be one of our goals, to make it fun. I mean, people are gonna get more done when they're having fun.
Brian (09:54)
Yeah. I don't know that we've addressed this, but I just want to throw it out there in case you have anything else you put in there. So if we do have a team that's sort of missing delivery, and they're not really being able to complete things by the end sprint, any kind of quick tips you would give teams like that to try to turn that around?
Mike (10:19)
The biggest one for me has to do with this being one of the worst habits that an agile team can fall into. I think it's a horrible habit to get into the mode where we don't finish things. And I'm a user of a phrase you used a moment ago, you were kind of quoting teams. It's okay. We'll just roll it forward. Right. I think the attitude of roll it forward is horrible because it implies that the iteration or sprint boundaries are meaningless and we're just going to roll things forward and I don't want that. I want the thing to go, the unfinished thing to kind of back on their product backlog. and we make a decision, do we still want them? We probably do, but not always. And so I try to get teams to stop using that phrase. I know you weren't using it. You were referencing a team calling it that. But I think it's just a really bad habit and I wanna break that habit. The way I do that is I ask the team in their new sprint, whatever we're planning, the new sprinter iteration, to under commit. They know what it feels like to not finish everything.
Brian (10:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike (11:14)
I want them to see what it feels like to finish everything, right? To get everything done. And we do that by getting them to go deliberately light in the, in the next sprint and then add work hopefully at the end of the sprint, right? And so being able to add work is going to feel very different to them. It should be a positive experience. They should be excited about it when they, when they get to work that way.
Brian (11:39)
Yeah, that's a great tip. I completely agree. If we can, don't, you know, there's oftentimes lots of stress about just the idea of, oh, but you know, my managers are gonna be mad at me that the team didn't really commit to. Yeah, but what we're looking for is consistency. And if they're consistent, then we can forecast and we can start to look ahead. But if they're inconsistent, we can't do that. And what...
Mike (12:00)
So you would point, we want to be clear though, that we don't want a team to make it every time, right? You don't want a team to, I'll call it succeed. You don't want a team to succeed a hundred percent of the time at finishing what they said in a sprint. If you see a team making it every time, they're playing it safe, right? They're under committing. They're like, oh, let's not grab that extra one item. Let's play it safe. And I always use sports analogies for this and pick a sport. It doesn't matter what sport this can map to any sport, but you know, let's go with football, soccer.
Brian (12:04)
Right.
Mike (12:29)
Right. Um, I don't want a player who scores every time they kick the ball. Right. That, that sounds awesome. Right. Who wouldn't want that? Except what it means is the guys, the player is only kicking. They're only trying to score when they can. Right. They're not like, Oh, I think I can make it. Let me give it a try. They're playing it safe. They're only going to kick when they're assured of making a goal. Basketball player, baseball player, hitting the ball, anything, um, quarterback throwing the ball in American football.
Brian (12:33)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike (12:54)
And you don't want them to make it 100% of the time. And managers have to embrace that with teams that it is success when we can make it. I kind of target 60 to 80% of the time, the team finishes what they said they would. And so I like to reduce the commitment, get the team to feel what it's like to add instead of remove. There's a Harvard professor, Theresa Imabile, who's written one of my favorite papers, it's called The Power of Small Wins. And what she did is study what improves job satisfaction. And her research led to the idea that the number one determinant of job satisfaction was the frequency of small wins. And I consider finishing or mostly finishing what we said we'd do in an iteration, a small win. And if we can do that, have a team make it most of the time, every two weeks, you're getting a small win under their belt. That's gonna feel good. It's gonna feel a whole lot better than the team I described in Sacramento at the beginning that never finished anything.
Brian (13:51)
Right, right.
Mike (13:52)
never finished everything. They finished lots of things and they never finished everything.
Brian (13:55)
eah, and it goes to Dan Pink's, one of Dan Pink's big threes, mastery there, that if we start to see progress, we're saying, oh, we're getting better. We're actually improving as we go along. Great tips. Okay, let's talk about another one. Let's see if we can get another one in here. And this is one that kind of, to me, I think is a team dynamic issue that I've seen quite a bit. Not a ton, but I have been on teams that have had this. And that is when a team starts to develop kind of more of a...
Mike (14:06)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (14:25)
um, shall we say a CYA, uh, kind of approach, uh, cover your, um, the, the backside, uh, put it that way. Um, yeah, yes, CYB. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Um, but, you know, kind of, kind of when the team sort of feels like, you know, I'm, I'm being really scrutinized here and I better deliver or.
Mike (14:35)
That's a CYB behavior. Cover your backside.
Brian (14:54)
I'm gonna be in trouble, or if there's gonna be someone who's in trouble, it's not gonna be me, I'm gonna make sure it's somebody else. What is that kind of indicative of on a team? What is the most important thing
Mike (15:04)
the biggest thing is just kind of a lack of respect for your co-workers, right? You know, if you're really working as peers and you have this shared goal of deliver an amazing product, then you're looking out for your team members. You're not making sure they're the one that gets in trouble if there's a problem, right? And I remember early in my career, and I don't remember if this project was Agile or not. I don't remember if we'd gone to Agile on this project, but I remember it very much being a case of what I called project deadline chicken. Nobody wanted to be the one to admit that they weren't gonna make the deadline, right? So we had a software group, we had the database group, we had the testers, probably another group or two. And everybody knew they weren't gonna make the deadline, but nobody wanted to be the one that was gonna admit it, right? Because if they're the one that admits it, they're gonna get all the heat from the boss, and that was a yelling boss, he'd yell at somebody.
Brian (15:37)
Yeah.
Mike (15:57)
And the other teams would just go, oh yeah, okay. We, you know, relax today. That's fine with us, but we would have made it. Right. And, um, we need that type of openness, transparency and trust in teams. And when I don't have respect for my teammates and I don't feel like we're in it together, um, or that they don't have my back, I think that's where the CYA behavior comes from in many cases.
Brian (16:21)
Yeah, there's a, you know, I tell this in classes sometimes, there's an old boss of mine who had this phrase I thought was really good. He said, you know, bad news is not like wine, it doesn't get better with age. And I completely agree, right? I mean, if something is not going well, there's no good that comes from just pretending that it actually is going well. And let's not find out about the issue until now it's too late for us to actually adjust or do anything about it.
Mike (16:32)
That's good.
Brian (16:49)
The earlier we find out about it, the more runway we have that we could say, all right, well, let's make sure that people are aware. Let's make sure the dependent parties know and that if we need to, we can, you know, change staffing, we can do whatever we need to do when there's runway. But when there's none, it's done, right? It's history.
Mike (17:09)
Yeah, it's too late to alter behavior.
Brian (17:11)
Yeah, I've been a part of some teams that are kind of finger pointing and backstabbing a little bit. And there is sort of a CYA approach in that. And I think that is, there's a trust issue there obviously as well. It does come down to a little bit of just not. We got kind of a cancer as a team. We're not really working together as a team then, yeah.
Mike (17:29)
Mm-hmm. I think managers are doing better at this. I'm not, you know, cause this, the manager has to create an environment where we're going to listen to people and root out the truth, not just blame one group for something and not let a team or a team member get away with this type of behavior. And I think managers have gotten better at this in terms of knowing that, you know, well, it's not listening to the first guy that blames the other person, right? Let's go check into it. So I think managers have gotten better at this over the years, at least what I've seen.
Brian (18:00)
Yeah. What about like, this is one that I know I encountered multiple times, but you get the scenario where you have that team that say, hey, we're kind of more independent. We like to work on our own and kind of the frequent. mode is, hey, we're gonna decide in sprint planning, but then you see everybody go off in their own corners and put their headphones on, and they're kind of in the zone for like eight of the 10 days of the sprint. They're just all on their own doing their own coding, and they're not really working together as a team. What do you think is kind of at the root of that kind of behavior?
Mike (18:34)
Mm-hmm. Lack of teamwork. One of my favorite movie scenes is Robert De Niro in the movie Untouchables. And he gives a speech about, basically about baseball players and how the baseball player stands at the plate and you make this your cricket player if that's your sport, but you know, they stand at the plate, it's just them, right? They're the only player from their team on the field. And he talks about that being a very individual thing. And he makes the point to his mafia associates, whatever they were, that he needs teamwork.
Brian (18:40)
Mm.
Mike (19:07)
right? And he makes it in a very interesting way. It's worth, go watch this little three minute snippet on YouTube. But he uses it to make the point that he needs teamwork. And I think when we see this, when you know, you grab your thing, I grab my thing, and, you know, I'll see you in 10 days at the end of the sprint, we're not a team, right? We're just this loose collection of individuals doing things. And that's often the result of not breaking up work very well. It's often the result of defining our roles in very specific ways. You only do the front end or I only do the back end. That can happen or you grab one user story and it's yours front back end all the way through. And I grab another one. It's just not a good way to work. I want people collaborating on things because one of the things that we're after with Agile is kind of a faster turnaround time on each item that we work on. So that, you know, we grab an item and three or four of us might work on it. we get it done very quickly. And then we grab the next item. We get it done very quickly. One of my early agile transition efforts was a company that was transitioning a few hundred people, which was big at the time. And they were very much in this mode. Each person would grab a thing to work on. They would work on it for three or four months, or six months even. And then they would hand it over to a tester. And the testers have to verify everything. But it'd be done over three, four, six months. Not an agile way of working.
Brian (20:29)
Yeah, well, we should also probably define a term here because I know there's a term that gets used a lot when we talk about this kind of thing, and that's swarming. It's another one of those kind of agile words that we hear sometimes and think, ah, swarming, what's swarming? What's your experience with that? What does swarming mean to you?
Mike (20:46)
To my knowledge, I was the one that first used that. And I used it a little bit differently than people use it today. When I talked about it, I said swarming would be the entire team working on one item. And this is a horrible way to work. It's an absolutely horrible way to work. But it's a worthwhile exercise to do. It's a good drill. And I think when I first wrote about it, I was a swimmer. And I was comparing it to a drill that
Brian (20:52)
Hmm.
Mike (21:14)
my swim coach had me do, which was called closed fist swimming. So you swim through the water with your fists, right? Picture doing that. It's not a good way to swim, but what it does is it really helps you get good arm position in the water. And then when you open your hand up and make kind of a palm, you're much faster because you've learned proper arm position. So a good drill. And so swarming have the whole team work on one thing's good drill and you'll get less done that sprint velocity is not going to go up with people working this way. Absolutely not. But when you.
Brian (21:23)
Yeah.
Mike (21:43)
open your fists when you let the team work in a more normal way. Um, all of a sudden they're going to have found ways to collaborate that they would not have found. So it's basically an over collaboration technique because you're going to have six or seven people work on one item. Right. And today people will use swarming to mean, you know, we're kind of batch mode, right? You know, we'll have two or three things in process at a time. And you know, maybe that's okay if the team's pushing good team size boundaries, but I legitimately met it as. one item and we all work on it. And that is gonna be very inefficient, but we're gonna have to find ways to break it up into smaller pieces, find ways to collaborate on it. And those skills, what we learned from doing that will be handy when we go back to working on now, two, three or four items in process at a time.
Brian (22:31)
See, this is why it's so great to have Mike Cohn on, because terms like this that I've heard my entire career in this area, I had no idea that came from you. So I'm glad I got some of the history of it. See?
Mike (22:44)
Well, I'm pretty sure it did. I'd have to look up when I first wrote about it, but I do know when I wrote about it, I hadn't heard it from anybody else. Doesn't mean somebody else hadn't, you know, done it on a blog I'd never seen 20 years before me, but that's, that was where I started with it.
Brian (22:56)
Sure. Yeah, and I think it's a great concept. And yeah, I mean, that sounds a little like what we would call mob programming today. If you're going to take everyone and work together at the same time on the same thing, that might be a little bit more like the original concept that you had when you were doing that.
Mike (23:16)
Yep. Except we'd also have the testers, the designers, everybody, right? The whole team on one thing.
Brian (23:21)
Ah, okay, yeah. Yeah, and it's just, you know, when we think about how teams work today, you know, I think one of the things I try to help the team understand is that we don't want everyone to just grab their own thing and then go off and work on their own, you know, because then, you know, you use a sports analogy, sometimes I apologize in class and just say, hey, look, I apologize that there's gonna be sports analogies, but hey, Scrum is a sports analogy, right? I mean, it comes from a sport. But yeah, I mean, when you think about any team sport and how a team works together, they have different jobs, but they have a same goal, and their goal is to win the game. I can't just say...
Mike (23:50)
Yeah. Mm?
Brian (24:11)
You know, if I, if I play, you used soccer earlier or football to the, you know, 90% of the rest of the world, you know, 10% of us here, yeah, we call it soccer, everyone else is football. But yeah, just, just kind of the, the concept that if, if I know my position, let's say, you know, I'm a midfielder, well, I can't just stay right, you know, on the left midfield and never move. You know, I'm not touching anything unless it comes in this little square box. Well, I'm not a very good player.
Mike (24:17)
Right.
Brian (24:39)
And am I doing kind of what I'm in charge of? Sure. But am I being a teammate and am I helping my team to achieve our goal of succeeding? No.
Mike (24:49)
Yeah, you've got to, it's not my job, man, right? Mind telling you, you're doing that. I think the analogy that I find that works really well is a restaurant, right? Let's suppose you go to, it doesn't have to be a fast food. You're gonna go to some Italian restaurant, low end, high end, doesn't matter. You go to this Italian restaurant and you got one guy gonna make your meal, right? He's gonna make the salad, he's gonna bake the croutons, he's gonna make the dressing, he's gonna put all that together, then he's gonna bring it to you, then he's gonna start making your main dish. Your dinner's gonna be three hours, right? Because you've all got to bake the termissu.
Brian (24:52)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
Mike (25:19)
Right. I don't want one guy, one person, just a guy, but I want one person making my whole dinner. Right. I'm hoping that a dozen people worked on my dinner, right, including the dessert or whatever back there. So that's where we'd have a team in it. One of the things, I'm gonna stick with the restaurant thing. One of the things I talked about with my wife is I get mad at bad service at times. And I've said, if I were owned a restaurant, I would make sure that servers helped tables that weren't their own. Right. Because I love that at restaurants, right. Because I drink a lot of water when I'm out or iced tea, whatever I'm drinking. And I'm always empty. Right. And I always wish I like it when I'm at a restaurant where somebody is not my weight, my server fills it up. Right. And it's just a little touch. Right. Just a little touch. But it's like I'd probably want to train my staff like, look, 20 percent of the tables you touch shouldn't be your own. If everybody's doing that, we're all going to be happier. Right. And, you know, I'm sitting there parched with no water and
Brian (25:49)
Hmm, yeah. Yeah.
Mike (26:18)
three waiters walk by going to other tables. I'm like, please.
Brian (26:23)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's water, please. Yeah, I've heard our friend Lance Dacey use this analogy as well as far as the kitchen. And I like what he says. He kind of talks about how if you have people back in the kitchen, just talking about cross functionality of a team, if you have a team back in the kitchen, they all have different specialties and you have the grill master, and you got the pastry chef and all this other kind of stuff. Yeah, they all have their own specialities, but.
Mike (26:25) Yeah.
Yep. I think they helped.
Brian (26:48)
You know, if there's a table of 20 that all want a steak, you know, the pastry chef doesn't just sit in the corner and say, wow, it sucks to be the grill chef tonight, you know, they all come over and say, how can I help? Yeah. So yeah, the restaurant's a good analogy. I like that. That's a good one. Well, this has been good. I think we're probably.
Mike (27:00)
help. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Brian (27:10)
pushing up on our time and I want to be respectful of your time Mike and also respectful of our listeners time so thank you once again for coming on I know you've got a lot of stuff to do and I just really appreciate you making time out for the show
Mike (27:22)
Thanks, Brian, it's always a pleasure.

#79: Navigating Agile Trends and Challenges in 2024 with Lance Dacy

Join Brian and his guest Lance Dacy as they dive into the trends and challenges awaiting the Agile community in 2024 and the importance of adapting Agile principles to the hyper-competitive world of product development.
Overview
In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian sits down with Lance Dacy to take a deep dive into the anticipated trends and challenges awaiting the Agile community in 2024.
The duo explores the ongoing debate between remote and in-person work, the imperative need for innovation in leadership and management, and the intricacies of forward-thinking strategies as we work toward building organizations tailored for the future.
Join Brian and Lance as they navigate the complex intersection of Agile principles, organizational leadership, and the ever-evolving landscape of the business world in 2024.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:17] - Brian Milner has Lance Dacy on the show today for the traditional discussion of looking ahead at trends and upcoming developments in the Agile and Scrum space for 2024.
[02:10] - Remote vs. in-person work—opening the discussion with this hot-button topic and the evolving debate.
[03:31] - Lance offers his insights on organizations' adaptive strategies, what we learned during the pandemic, and the potential benefits and drawbacks of remote work.
[05:58] - The loss of collaboration and learning when in a remote environment.
[07:22] - The hybrid work solution.
[07:36] - Brian shares a study favoring in-office productivity.
[09:50] - Lance shares his personal work-at-home challenges and the importance of aligning work environments with individual personalities and preferences.
[11:32] - The importance of accommodating individual preferences and working styles, and the need for organizations to match their environments to employees rather than requiring employees to adapt.
[12:58] - The challenges faced by managers and leaders in making decisions about remote work, and the importance of flexibility in work hours.
[15:20] - Brian raises concern about layoffs in the Agile area during tough economic times, questioning if it's the right strategy for long-term success.
[16:23] - Lance emphasizes the need for understanding Agile rather than blindly applying it, suggesting the Agile industry may be bloated and encouraging a focus on culture and effective coaching.
[17:23] - Mountain Goat Software, is the sponsor for this podcast. Whether you’re looking to get Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) or Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) training or want to take an Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (ACSM) class, click here to see what we have to offer.
[19:33] - Leadership and management innovation—Brian and Lance discuss the need for organizations to prioritize human-centric management AND leadership innovation, citing Gary Hamel's concept of building organizations fit for the future.
[23:25] - Lance discusses the devaluation of the human element in organizations.
[24:31] - Brian and Lance share their insight into the devaluation of developers, and the need for discussion on the trajectory of Agile in the face of such challenges.
[25:55] - Lance highlights the need to educate leaders and managers on the criticality of Agile budgeting alongside project management to align expectations.
[27:40] - Lance addresses the challenge in achieving true Agility, and why coaches offer such a long-term ROI.
[28:10] - The importance of educating leaders on the value of coaching, psychological safety, and the need for a neutral perspective in fostering organizational improvement.
[29:15] - Brian predicts a continued emphasis on cost-cutting in 2024 due to economic uncertainty.
[29:57] - Brian expresses his concern about the long-term negative impact of eliminating coaching roles.
[31:34] - Lance anticipates a cultural shift that might make it difficult for companies to attract talent if they don’t embrace more human-focused values that empower individuals.
[32:59] - Lance urges Agile coaches to adapt to a changing paradigm and discusses the challenge for leaders and managers to shed bureaucratic structures and implement an effective strategy for embracing these principles.
[34:17] - Brian urges a reevaluation of Agile's focus, emphasizing transparency and adaptability over rigid structures and roles.
[34:48] - Brian stresses Agile's strength in handling unexpected challenges and calls on Agilists to emphasize the fundamental principles to demonstrate Agile's value effectively.
[35:40] - The need for new thought leaders in leadership, management, and organizational design to guide Agile practitioners in effectively leveraging data and scaling Agile practices.
[36:30] - The importance of evolving beyond rigid practices to embrace Agile's adaptability. Lance uses the analogy of professional sports to illustrate the importance of adaptability, discipline, and rigor in responding to dynamic situations.
[38:03] - Not doom and gloom but a chance for growth and adaptation—Brian expresses optimism and excitement for the upcoming year, seeing it as an opportunity for renewed focus and bringing value to organizations in the evolving world of product development.
[40:20] - Brian extends his thanks to Lance Dacy for being on the show. And don’t forget to share your thoughts and ideas on upcoming trends in the Agile Mentors Community.
[41:09] - Please send feedback and ideas for upcoming shows to podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com. And don’t forget to share and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
[41:14] - Happy New Year to everyone, Brian expresses excitement for the journey ahead in 2024, meeting more listeners at in-person events, and sharing more insights on future episodes of the Agile Mentors Podcast.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
#63: The Interplay Between Data Science and Agile with Lance Dacy
#30: How to Get the Best Out of the New Year with Lance Dacy
#76: Navigating Neurodiversity for High-Performing Teams with Susan Fitzell Humanocracy
Certified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
#4: The Developer Role in Scrum with Sherman Gomberg
DFW Scrum (Dallas, TX) | Meetup
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.
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.

#78 A Year in Review: The Best Moments and Insights of 2023

Embark on a captivating journey through the Agile Mentors Podcast in 2023 with Brian Milner. Explore a spectrum of Agile topics, from Scrum Master challenges to leadership insights. Join Brian for insightful summaries, memorable moments, and a walk through the rich tapestry of Agile wisdom on the show.
Overview
In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian embarks on a retrospective journey through the standout moments of the podcast in 2023. Explore carefully curated episodes, offering solutions to the common challenges and then delving into the world of Agile beyond software development.
Listen in as Brian shares insightful summaries featuring memorable moments and a diverse landscape of Agile wisdom shared by his esteemed guests. Categorized into topics like Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Developers, Agile’s use beyond software, general career advice, and leadership and coaching, this retrospective is a treasure trove of practical advice, actionable insights, and real-world experiences.
Tune in for an inspiring tour through the rich tapestry of the Agile Mentors Podcast 2023 episodes.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:16] - Brian introduces the episode and invites listeners to join him in a retrospective of the year's episodes, highlighting ones that may have been missed or are hidden gems worth revisiting, which he will group by listener preferences and areas of interest.
[02:39] - For Scrum Masters: Brian begins discussing the first episodes tailored for Scrum Masters, kicking things off with #47, "Exploring Lean Thinking and Agile Development," featuring guest Bob Payne, who shares insights into lean thinking, a foundational principle in agile development. Brian recommends this episode for Scrum Masters aiming to enhance their understanding of Agile's fundamentals.
[03:34] - Episode #52, "The Birth of Agile: How 17 Adventurous Techies Changed the World," features Agile icon Mr. Jim Highsmith, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. Jim provides a glimpse into the past and offers insights into the future of Agile.
[04:06] - Episode #59, "Revising the Scrum Guide," features Don McGreal, who played a key role in the guide's revision, shedding light on the thinking behind the revisions.
[05:31] - In Episode #62, "Effective Sprint Goals," Maarten Dalmijn delves into effective crafting techniques and the finer details of achieving success with Sprint Goals.
[06:12] - In Episode #69, "Should Scrum Masters Be Technical with Allison Pollard," Allison and Brian explore the question of whether Scrum Masters should possess technical skills. If you grapple with how technical a Scrum Master should be, this episode provides valuable insights and perspectives.
[06:51] - In Episode #39, Mike Cohn, an authority on user stories, shares valuable insights into the art of crafting effective user stories.
[07:15] - In Episode #65 with Randy Hale titled "Unlocking Lean Portfolio Management," Brian and Randy explore the concept of moving beyond a single-team focus as a product owner, delving into the realm of lean portfolio management building upon insights shared by Bob in episode #47.
[07:50] - For Product Owners: Must listen bonus from last year, Episode #22, with Roman Pichler, who shares his insights on "How to Create Helpful Product Roadmaps," addressing challenges commonly faced by product owners in dealing with the nuanced aspects of their role. The episode covers strategies to avoid pitfalls, especially the dangers of rigidly locking into scope and schedule timelines.
[08:54] - For Developers: Episode #33, "Mob Programming with Woody Zuill," introduces developers to the transformative practice of mob programming. Woody Zuill, a pioneer in this way of working, shares insights and a practical and thoughtful approach that makes it worth exploring.
[10:00] - In Episode #48, Brian hosts a unique episode featuring the renowned Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, experts in Agile testing, in a show called "Holistic Agile Testing." This episode is particularly recommended for developers specializing in testing or involved in testing within a Scrum team.
[11:00] - In Episode #54, "Unlocking Agile's Power in the World of Data Science," Brian and Lance Dacy explore the intersection of Agile methodologies and data science. The popularity of this episode prompted a sequel, Episode #63, on the fusion of Agile and data science.
[11:58] - In the final developer-focused episode, Carlos Nunez joins Brian to delve into the world of DevOps. Carlos, a speaker at Agile 2023, shares insights on the significance of DevOps in today's Agile landscape, emphasizing DevOps as a means of empowerment rather than gatekeeping.
[12:38] - Agile Outside of Software: Episode #32 with Cort Sharp focuses on Scrum in High School Sports—specifically high school swimming. Cort shares his experience applying Scrum principles to create practice schedules and routines for the swim team he coaches, providing valuable insights for those interested in using Agile beyond the software realm.
[13:24] - In #38: "Using Agile for Social and Societal Transformation with Kubair Shirazee," Kubair walks listeners through how his nonprofit employs Agile methodologies to empower micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries. The episode highlights success stories, such as a barber's journey from a rented spot to owning a professional store, demonstrating Agile's transformative impact beyond the tech industry.
[14:40] - Episode #45 with Scott Dunn explores "Overcoming Agile Challenges in Regulatory Environments." This crucial topic addresses the unique challenges faced in tightly regulated sectors like government, legal, and medical professions, offering a compelling dialogue on navigating regulatory hurdles within an agile framework.
[16:00] - Episode #64 features John Grant discussing "How Agile Methodologies Reshape Legal Practices." This episode reveals the transformative impact of Agile in the legal profession and offers a unique perspective on Agile as a philosophy rather than just a practice, illustrating its broader applicability beyond the software realm.
[17:00] - Today's episode is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software's Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course. This is a two-day training course taught by one of our certified Scrum trainers that teaches you how to use the product backlog as a tool for project success and how to respond to changes in business conditions by restructuring the product backlog. For the schedule, visit the Mountain Goat Training Schedule.
[17:27] - General Career Advice: #34: "I'm Trained, Now What? with Julie Chickering" addresses the post-training phase for Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Julie shares insights on taking the next steps, implementing knowledge, and finding opportunities to build a resume in Agile roles.
[18:29] - In #40: "Is it Time to Go Out on Your Own? Tips and Insights with Chris Li" Brian and Chris Li discuss considerations for those at later stages of their careers contemplating the transition to independent consulting. If you're pondering whether it's time to establish your consultancy, this episode provides valuable insights and considerations to guide your decision-making process.
[19:00] - In #42: "The Importance of Self-Mastery with Bob Galen," Bob emphasizes the value of constant learning, even after years of experience, highlighting the importance of staying open to new discoveries and others' experiences. This episode serves as a compelling guide for personal growth and continuous improvement.
[20:28] - Episode #46 with Christina Ambers: In this episode, Christina shares insights on "How to Assess Company Culture Before Accepting a Job Offer." As the year closes and people consider new job opportunities, Christina guides listeners through the crucial step of evaluating company culture and the importance of understanding if a company truly embraces Agile values or merely pays lip service to them.
[21:14] - Episode #50 celebrated the milestone of the 50th episode. Lance Dacy was on the show to discuss "Choosing Your Path: Exploring the Roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner." The episode offers guidance for individuals at crossroads, helping them decide between Scrum Master and Product Owner roles. It serves as a valuable resource for those navigating career decisions in the Agile landscape.
[22:13] - Leadership and Coaching: In the Leadership and Coaching category, Episode #37 features Brad Swanson discussing "Servant Leadership, Not Spineless Leadership." Brad dispels misconceptions and offers valuable insights into the essence of servant leadership, making it a compelling resource for those interested in effective leadership approaches.
[23:28] - In Episode 41, Karim Harbott explores "Cultural Transformations in Organizations." The episode delves into the challenges of changing organizational culture, emphasizing the time and effort required beyond implementing specific practices.
[24:00] - In "#44: Transformations Take People with Anu Smalley", Anu highlights the often-overlooked aspect of involving people in organizational transformations, shedding light on the human dynamics that can either support or hinder the process.
[24:35] - In Episode #53, "Debunking Myths in Agile Coaching with Lucy O'Keefe," we tackle the common myths surrounding Agile coaching and provide insights on unlocking excellence in Agile coaching practices.
[25:01] - Episode #66 is a solo episode where Brian shares his insights into navigating team conflicts, laying the foundation for understanding and mastering the essential skill of conflict navigation.
[26:00] - In Episode #68, Brian hosts Mike Hall for a discussion of "The Pros and Cons and Real-World Applications of SAFe." Whether you're new to SAFe or deeply involved, Mike's expertise provides valuable perspectives and tips for navigating this framework.
[26:42] - In Episode #70, Mike Cohn joins Brian to explore "The Role of a Leader in Agile." Here, Mike shares valuable insights based on his extensive experience, offering sound advice and perspective on the crucial role of leaders in self-organizing teams.
[28:10] - Brian encourages listeners, especially newcomers, to explore relevant episodes based on their roles, with the goal being to offer practical advice and solutions on specific issues rather than lengthy discussions. All episodes are available in the show notes for convenient access.
[29:33] - Brian expresses gratitude to listeners for the past year, reflecting on the unique nature of podcasting and letting listeners know he cherishes the encouragement and connections made, especially at events like Agile 2023.
[31:00] - What do you want to hear in 2024? What are some of the hot-button topics that haven’t been covered on the show or guests you want to hear from? Send Brian an email with your ideas.
[32:28] - And don’t forget to share and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
[33:00] - We also have our Agile Mentors Community, where we have discussions about every podcast
[33:24] - Wishing you a Happy Holiday Season! We'll see you early again in 2024.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
#47: Exploring Lean Thinking in Agile Development with Bob Payne
#52: The Birth of Agile: How 17 Adventurous Techies Changed the World with Jim Highsmith
#59: Revising the Scrum Guide with Don McGreal
#62: Effective Sprint Goals with Maarten Dalmijn
#69: Should Scrum Masters Be Technical with Allison Pollard
#39: The Art of Writing User Stories with Mike Cohn
#65: Unlocking Lean Portfolio Management with Randy Hale
#22: How to Create Helpful Product Roadmaps with Roman Pichler
#33 Mob Programming with Woody Zuill
#48: Holistic Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
#54 Unlocking Agile's Power in the World of Data Science
#63: The Interplay Between Data Science and Agile with Lance Dacy
#71: The World of DevOps with Carlos Nunez
#32: Scrum in High School Sports with Cort Sharp
#38: Using Agile for Social and Societal Transformation with Kubair Shirazee
#45: Overcoming the Challenges of Agile in Regulatory Environments with Scott Dunn
#64: How Agile Methodologies are Reshaping Legal Practices with John Grant
#34: I'm Trained, Now What? with Julie Chickering
#40: Is it Time to Go Out on Your Own? Tips and Insights with Chris Li
#42: The Importance of Self-Mastery with Bob Galen
#46: How to Assess Company Culture Before Accepting a Job Offer with Christina Ambers
#50: Choosing Your Path: Exploring the Roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner with Lance Dacy
#37: Servant Leadership, Not Spineless Leadership with Brad Swanson
#41: Cultural Transformation in Organizations with Karim Harbott
#53: Agile Coaching: Debunking Myths and Unlocking Excellence with Lucy O'Keefe
#66: Successful Strategies for Navigating Team Conflicts
#68: The Pros and Cons and Real World Applications of SAFe with Mike Hall
#70: The Role of a Leader in Agile with Mike Cohn
#49: Celebrating One Year: A Look Back at 50 Episodes of the Agile Mentor Podcast
Certified Scrum Master Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

#77 Navigating the Challenges of Becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer® with Lucy O’Keefe

In this episode, Brian Milner and Lucy O'Keefe share their journeys to becoming Certified Scrum Trainers® (CSTs). Join them as they discuss the challenges, unexpected moments, and valuable lessons learned along the way, offering insights for those considering the CST path.
Overview
Explore the transformative journey to becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) with Brian Milner and Lucy O'Keefe.
From the submission process to mentorship, co-training, and the rigorous Trainer Approval Committee (TAC) interviews, they unravel the intricacies of achieving CST status.
Listen in for valuable tips, reflections, and inspiration for navigating the rewarding but challenging road to becoming an elite Agile trainer.
Listen Now to Discover:
[01:26] - Brian introduces his guest, Lucy O'Keefe, who recently achieved her Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST).
[02:53] - Today’s discussion will explore the experience of becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer® with Brian and Lucy sharing their personal experiences and insights into the process of becoming a CST.
[03:44] - Lucy shares what fueled her passion for becoming a CST and how her mentor—Anu Smalley—inspired her.
[05:00] - Brian discusses his decision-making process for becoming a CST and why it's important to make a decision that aligns with your instincts and career goals.
[06:07] - Brian and Lucy each share their journey to becoming a CST and the steps required before being eligible to pursue the trainer certification.
[08:24] - Insight into the two phases of the submission process for becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer®: the materials phase and the Trainer Approval Committee (TAC) phase and the challenges along the way. [09:38] - Brian reflects on the significance of mentorship in the journey to becoming a CST and David Hawks's crucial role in opening doors and making connections with other trainers.
[09:48] - Lucy acknowledges Anu's pivotal role and emphasizes the importance of these relationships, (especially considering the challenges posed by the pandemic.
[12:00] - Lucy and Brian discuss the relationship-building phase involved in co-training and mentorship.
[13:22] - Lucy explains the (time-intensive) nature of co-training.
[14:26] - Brian shares his approach to initiating co-trainings.
[15:11] - The importance of feedback and obtaining recommendation letters—a crucial element in the submission process.
[16:28] - Brian and Lucy discuss the impact of mentorship on their journey, expressing gratitude for the individuals who opened doors and provided mentorship. Brian mentions David Hawks, Kert Peterson, and Lance Dacy, emphasizing the diverse perspectives and valuable insights gained from them.
[17:20] - Lucy shares about the recent special episode of her podcast where she featured her mentors.
[17:55] - The value of in-person training (and some of the expenses involved).
[20:09] - The challenges of training in a virtual environment.
[22:18] - The limitations of virtual classes and the added value of personal interactions and shared experiences during breaks.
[23:38] -The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® class. This is the only ACSPO that uses our interactive software so that breakout exercises are valuable and FUN! Plus, you will automatically receive 12 free months in the Agile Mentors Community. For more information, click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[25:17] - The lengthy process of submitting materials for Certified Scrum Trainer® approval. Brian shares his personal experience.
[25:35] - Lucy explains the current two-phase process for CST approval and her experience (highlighting the changes since Brian's initial submission).
[26:33] - The rigorous examination process and the scrutiny applied to every aspect of the application during the fine-tooth comb review during the TAC phase of becoming a CST.
[27:00] - Lucy describes the final stages of the approval process.
[27:19] - Brian reflects on the changes in the CST qualification process and emphasizes the importance of following the TAC's feedback for those who reach this stage. (Advice from Chris Li)
[28:49] - Resilience and persistence in the face of potential setbacks during the CST approval process.
[30:42] - An in-depth explanation of the challenging TAC (Trainer Approval Community) interview process for becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer®.
[32:23] - Brian shares his personal preparation strategies and reflects on the unpredictability of TAC interviews, recounting an unexpected request during his own experience.
[33:32] - Lucy shares her preparation methods and also stresses the unpredictability of TAC interviews and the importance of adaptability during the process.
[34:29] - Be prepared to think on your feet. Brian shares the emergency situation he faced and a mistake during his live presentation. Plus the surprising comments he received from the committee.
[37:27] - Lucy shares her unexpected experience after the committee's vote. And a valuable piece of advice for listeners.
[38:33] - Embarking on the CST journey involves challenges and moments of doubt, but perseverance is crucial, as success may require multiple attempts—not everyone passes on the first try.
[39:43] - Becoming a CST is a subjective process and often involves multiple attempts—it doesn’t diminish your capabilities as a trainer. Brian shares the crucial aspects of the journey.
[40:13] - Lucy shares why it's important not to take rejection personally, instead viewing it as a chance to identify areas for growth and become a better trainer in the end.
[41:23] - Brian emphasizes the importance of viewing the CST process as a journey—being prepared for potential setbacks, highlighting the mindset of growth and continuous learning.
[42:30] - Lucy adds that the rigorous Certified Scrum Trainer® requirements aim to ensure that CSTs are among the elite trainers, making the achievement more meaningful.
[43:38] - The importance of embracing each chance to enhance oneself as an Agilist and a trainer.
[44:09] - Brian's words of wisdom: "Hard things that are hard to do, that just makes it all the better when you achieve them.”
[44:45] - Lucy’s advice: “It's not just becoming a CST. It's what you learn on your journey that really matters."
[45:25] - Congratulations to Lucy for getting her CST! Brian extends his thanks to her for being on the show. For listeners interested in continuing the discussion, you can join the conversation in the Agile Mentors Community, where they also have monthly Q&A calls.
[46:58] - If you found this episode useful, please share it. Send feedback and suggestions for future episodes to podcast@mountaingoodsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
#53: Agile Coaching: Debunking Myths and Unlocking Excellence with Lucy O'Keefe
#44: Transformations Take People with Anu Smalley
#17: Getting There From Here: Agile Transformations with David Hawks
#12: Kanban with Kert Peterson
#54: Unlocking Agile's Power in the World of Data Science with Lance Dacy
#40: Is it Time to Go Out on Your Own? Tips and Insights with Chris Li
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Certified Scrum Master Training and Scrum Certification
Certified Scrum Product Owner Training
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Want to get involved?
This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.
Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com
This episode’s presenters are:
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.
Lucy O'Keefe has over 28 years of IT experience and has worn multiple hats in the Agile world - developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and now, Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) where she uses her experience to ensure each student has a great training experience.

#76: Navigating Neurodiversity for High-Performing Teams with Susan Fitzell

In this episode, Brian sits down with Susan Fitzell to unravel the realm of neurodiversity in the workplace. Join them as they explore the intricacies of accommodating neurodivergent individuals, discussing the challenges they face and the strategies to foster an inclusive environment for everyone on your team.
Overview
Today, join host Brian Milner in an insightful conversation with Susan Fitzell as they explore the intricate world of neurodiversity within Agile environments.
Listen in to gain valuable insights into the challenges neurodivergent individuals encounter and discover effective strategies, from reevaluating dress codes to adapting communication methods, to foster an inclusive workspace.
Susan provides practical tips that offer a fresh perspective on accommodating diverse work and communication styles, empowering teams to collaborate successfully.
Tune in to revolutionize your leadership approach by embracing the unique strengths neurodivergent team members bring, and create an environment where every individual can thrive.
Listen Now to Discover:
[00:00] - Brian introduces guest Susan Fitzell, a certified speaking professional, and author to discuss neurodiversity in the workplace.
[03:24] - Susan explains the evolving neurodiversity language, now encompassing diverse brain wiring, including conditions like ADHD and autism, and discusses terminology challenges.
[08:22] - Brian shares his own personal connection to ADHD and a story about his daughter’s autism and her triumphs.
[10:40] - The challenges of diagnosing autism in females and how the criteria are based on male presentations.
[15:16] - The importance of neurodiversity for Scrum Masters and leaders, and the challenges of recognizing neurodivergence, especially in females adept at masking.
[19:19] - The need for flexibility in understanding neurodivergent team members, the impact of past negative experiences, and the importance of soft skills for a collaborative Agile team.
[21:33] - Susan addresses the high unemployment rate (80%) among neurodivergent adults, especially autistic individuals, and highlights challenges in interviewing.
[24:22] -The importance of recognizing and leveraging the unique skills of neurodivergent individuals on Agile teams, and acknowledging their specialized contributions.
[25:41] - Brian shares a study that indicates young autistic individuals choose computer science degrees at three times the general public's rate, emphasizing the likelihood of having neurodivergent individuals on your teams.
[26:04] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Certified Scrum Master Training Class. Despite the name, it's not just for Scrum Masters, it's designed for anyone who wants to understand Scrum and add value to any team. For more information click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.
[27:41] - Susan addresses accommodations in the workplace for neurodivergent individuals.
[28:10] - Brian and Susan discuss specific aspects scrum masters should consider for accommodating neurodivergent individuals within team environments.
[31:30] - Susan shares insights on sensory sensitivities and the challenges of conforming to things like dress codes for neurodivergent individuals.
[34:16] - The significance of recognizing and accommodating sensory preferences for better productivity.
[35:27] - The positive impact of remote work on neurodivergent individuals, allowing them to create a comfortable work environment tailored to their needs.
[37:35] - Susan emphasizes the importance of understanding team members as individuals to recognize and embrace the diversity of strengths and challenges in their teams.
[40:19] - Supporting neurodivergent team members through workspace recommendations, emotional check-ins, and communication preferences.
[41:04] - Brian mentions Susan’s Neurodiversity in the Workplace and "The Autism at Work Playbook" as valuable resources.
[43:36] - Brian thanks Susan for her insights. You can connect with Susan and there are more resources at her website at https://susanfitzell.com/, or by sending her an email.
[44:19] - If this topic was impactful to you and you want to continue the discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community where we have a topic discussion for each podcast episode.
[45:18] - Please share this episode with others if you found it useful. Send feedback and suggestions for future episodes to podcast@mountaingoodsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Susan Fitzell
Neurodiversity in the Workplace
"Autism at Work Playbook"
Autism in Heels
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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.
Susan Fitzell, M.Ed., CSP, is a renowned neurodiversity speaker, coach, and consultant with over 30 years of experience. Specializing in training neurodivergent thinkers, including those with dyslexia, autism, ADD, and ADHD, Susan is a trusted expert and author of 16 books. With a holistic approach and dedication to creating competitive learning cultures, she collaborates with organizations globally to maximize the potential of neurodivergent individuals.