The Intersection of AI and Clear Rules: Chess, Coding, and User Stories

The Agile Alliance partners with PMI—what does it mean for Agile’s future? Plus, how AI is reshaping Scrum Master roles and why honesty (even when it stings) is the key to career growth. Brian Milner and Cort Sharp tackle these hot topics in a no-holds-barred discussion.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Cort Sharp dive into the recent Agile Alliance-PMI partnership and its potential impact on the Agile community.

They also explore AI’s growing influence on Scrum Master roles—will it replace them or elevate their value? Finally, they tackle a tricky but crucial topic: when to speak up in the workplace, balancing honesty with career preservation.

If you want to stay ahead in Agile’s evolving landscape, this is a must-listen!

References and resources mentioned in the show:

#32: Scrum in High School Sports with Cort Sharp
#82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton
#129: 2025: The Year Agile Meets AI and Hyper-Personalization with Lance Dacy
#132: Can Nice Guys Finish First? with Scott Dunn
Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course
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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.

Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome in. Welcome back, everybody. This is the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today, we're going to do something a little different. We're in this mode right now. We've kind of been open to some suggestions recently about maybe we should try some experiments and try some different things. And so today's going to be one of those little experiments. We have someone that's going to be with us, Mr. Cort Sharp. So welcome in, Cort.

Cort (00:23)
Hey Brian, thanks for having me on.

Brian Milner (00:26)
Absolutely. Cort is our community manager for the Agile Mentors community. And Cort and I do classes together a lot. He is often the producer in the classes. So we see each other a lot. We talk a lot. Cort's also a certified Scrum professional. So he's been doing this and has encountered Scrum in some kind of unusual circumstances as well. He's a high school swim coach. There's an episode that we talked about that. way back so that anyone wants to dig that out, they can go back and find that and learn a little bit more about it. But we just thought it would be good to have maybe periodically a little check in about maybe some stories that have come up in the news about Agile or things that have been flashing through social media feeds or anything like that. know, Cort and I are a little bit different age groups, a little bit, more than a little bit. And I'm sure the of things that cross court's radar may be a little bit different than the things that cross mine. And we just thought maybe it would be an interesting kind of thing to have a little discussion, the two of us, about some of these major burning issues and things that people are talking about on LinkedIn and Twitter and, I'm sorry, X, anywhere else. I'm going to kind of... Give the reins over to court here a little bit, because I know he's pulled some things that he wants to talk about, and we'll just kind of see where we go.

Cort (01:40)
Awesome, yeah, thanks Brian. Not just X and LinkedIn, we're also looking through Instagram, YouTube Shorts, where the cool kids hang out, I guess is. That's at least what my swimmers tell me.

Brian Milner (01:50)
Okay, okay I Got it I got a yeah, I you know, I had to learn a lot about an Instagram with my daughters and I still don't get it. just I mean I have fun flipping through stuff but I don't I could never like get a following there because I just don't understand how to Do all the but that's old guy talking. So

Cort (02:11)
It's a weird place, Brian. I don't blame you. It's totally good. But I've seen a few things come across my feed, and we've kind of had lighter versions of this conversation, whether it's in classes or just kind of on the side or something like that. So we just kind of thought, hey, let's sit down and actually go into depth about this, because I'm curious what your thoughts are on some of these things. And I don't know.

Brian Milner (02:14)
Yeah

Cort (02:35)
Hopefully I'm able to add into the conversation a little bit more than just here's a young guy yelling at a cloud instead of an old guy yelling at a cloud, right? No, I hope not. But let's come out and I'm gonna come out swinging at you. So the biggest news bite that I have found over the last couple of months or the last month-ish is that the Agile Alliance and PMI

Brian Milner (02:37)
Ha ha. young guy and old guy yelling at each other. That's not what anyone wants to hear. Yeah. Yeah.

Cort (03:02)
have entered, have announced that they're entering a partnership. We don't really know a ton about what that partnership looks like, but it is presumed that the Agile Alliance will be hosting some kind of content through PMI or PMI will be hosting some kind of content that the Agile Alliance has created. So I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's a good move, bad move, any kind of potential impacts that you see? It's a big one.

Brian Milner (03:30)
Yeah, way to start with a softball that we just, yeah, mean, it's obviously a hot button topic right now. I've heard lots, I've read lots of opinions of people on different kind of forums and discussion boards and things where people are talking about kind of, what does this mean? That kind of thing. And so here's kind of,

Cort (03:34)
Hahaha

Brian Milner (03:57)
Here's kind of what I've heard from both sides, right? The people who are kind of anti feel like this is maybe a little bit of a betrayal. And I think that the reasoning behind that kind of feels like maybe historically or somewhere maybe further into the past, the PMI may have been a little bit of an antagonist towards the Agile movement, or some people feel that way. I'm not saying this is my opinion, but this is what I've heard. Some people might feel that way. And so they feel like, would you attach your name to something like that? But I've also heard from people who are pro and have said, look, the basics of the deal are that it's not going to change anything for the Agile Alliance other than the name. It's officially the PMI Agile Alliance. But other than that, what I've heard from people who are board members that have posted

Cort (04:43)
Sure, yeah.

Brian Milner (04:50)
from the Agile Alliance have said, it's just nothing more than our name is now different. We're autonomous. We can still do the things we've always done. And we feel like the connection to this larger organization will enable us and help us. And I know the Agile Alliance has gone through some tough times, as a lot of us in the industry have, with the conferences. At least I know the conferences last year was kind of not what people have hoped, and not just the Agile Alliance conference, but other conferences have had down attendance and other things. Maybe just a sign of the times, I don't know. But personally, I kind of look at it and I got to preface this. got to, before we talk about anything else, right? Because now we're going to get into opinion. But I would just say, let me preface by saying the opinions you are about to hear. are not the official opinions of Mountain Goat Software. They are just the opinions of the individuals that you will be listening to. So this is just one guy's opinion, right? I think I would just say I get it from both sides. I understand. I see kind of the concern. From the people who are pro and they say, look, it's just the name, I don't know why anyone would freak out about that. It's just a, we're just putting letters PMI in front of our name. hear that, but I've also heard other people counter that to be like, yeah, but it would be like Greenpeace saying, you know, we're now Exxon Greenpeace, you know? And I don't think, I think that's quite, you know, a huge overstatement. I don't think that's the same thing at all. And I, you know, I recognize that the PMI has, you know, they've adapted. anyone who thinks that they're the same way that they've always been, I think is wrong. I think that they have incorporated over time more and more agile ideas into their certifications and other things. they certainly, I feel like they've recognized the agile sort of the future and they've tried to invest more heavily. I think this is a sign of that as well. They're trying to invest a little bit more into agile because they see it as, you this is the future of project management. You know. But they also see it as one of the paths. It's one way of doing project work. And it's not the only way. There are other ways that are good as well. I don't know that I disagree with that. Depends on the project. It depends on what it is you're trying to do. But we talk about this in class. If I know what it is that we're going to make, I know exactly how to make it, the customer knows what they want, and we're not changing anything along the way, then

Cort (07:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Milner (07:16)
Agile may not be the right way. But if any of those things are not true, then I think Agile is the right way. end of the world, no. I don't see it as the end of the world. I don't see it as the sky's falling. I think it is a sign of the times. I think it is sort of a benchmark kind of thing to say, wow, things have reached this point where they've joined forces. I think that's not an indication of either side bending a huge amount, but that both sides have bent and met in the middle. And that's kind of my opinion on it. The sky's not falling, but I don't really know how it will change things moving forward. They tell us it's not going to really. We'll see.

Cort (07:58)
I think I agree with a lot of what you're saying. And that's what I've seen as well amongst the social media spheres. Kind of a lot of discourse of, this is really bad, or, this is not as bad as you think it's going to be, or, this is actually really good. Because I think one point that I agree with a little bit more so is, in principle, at face value, This might not be what the Agile Alliance was founded on or anything that goes, or I wouldn't say anything, but it doesn't align with the foundational values of the Agile Alliance. But in the long run, I think this might be pretty beneficial for Agile as a whole, because PMI is massive. They have a huge reach, very big name recognition, and for them to acknowledge, not only acknowledge, but acknowledge in this way and bring in Agile into this space within their reach, I don't see a ton of harm that could really be brought to it purely on the basis of our reach, PMI's reach is significantly larger than the Agile alliances. So it just helps Agile grow a little bit more so and get a little further reach. Do you agree with that? you disagree? Thoughts on that?

Brian Milner (09:14)
Yeah, I mean, I've heard Mike say this before, where he says, you we talk about partnerships, you know, who's bringing more to the table? Is the Agile Alliance funneling more attention, eyeballs to the PMI by this Alliance, or is the Agile Alliance getting more eyeballs and more attention because of the audience of the PMI? I would think it's the Agile Alliance is getting more. Like you said, I think the PMI is a huge behemoth, pretty highly recognizable. their certifications have been out. They're kind of one of the first of those kinds of certifications that existed out there. And I just think that they're probably bringing more to the table to the Agile Alliance than the Agile Alliance is bringing to them.

Cort (09:56)
Yeah, yeah, the Agile Alliance is kind of getting the better end of the deal, so to speak, as far as exposure goes.

Brian Milner (10:00)
Yeah, but I think time will tell. I think that's really what I would say to anyone is just don't freak out too much yet. You need to just wait and see what will happen. When the moves happen, if something happens, it's like all of a sudden now the Agile Alliance can't in any way talk about how traditional waterfall is not a great way of doing things. Well, now I would raise the alarm and say, OK, well, now you see the compromise. But if that doesn't happen, if it truly is, as I've been hearing, it's just a naming, we're autonomous, I don't see the grave harm.

Cort (10:33)
Right, right. Right. I think one thing that's kind of overlooked or maybe just a little glazed over that people didn't pay too much attention to is they didn't announce this as a merger. They announced this as a partnership. So to me, when I hear partnership, hear two entities working independently with a common goal of whatever it may be.

Brian Milner (10:54)
Yep. Yep. Yeah, a little insider baseball on that because I have heard some discussions around that as well. And just what I've heard is, there is a trickiness there because the agile Alliance is a nonprofit organization. And so from a for-profit organization, you cannot acquire a nonprofit organization unless that nonprofit organization changes and becomes a for-profit entity.

Cort (11:28)
in for profit. Yeah.

Brian Milner (11:31)
I'm not a lawyer. I don't know any of that kind of insider, the legalese that's around that. But I've heard a little bit of conversation around the fact that it might have been an acquisition had they been a for-profit company. But since they were a nonprofit, it's a partnership. So that may be the case or not. I don't know.

Cort (11:50)
So that brings up just a question to me then. A lot of times when companies merge, they tend to merge as either an industry or a sector is kind of starting to go down, trickle down a little bit. And they merge as a method of of like bulking up, strengthening where they can, trying to... that they acquire, they merge in order to withstand the rough times. Do you think that that might be what's at play here? Where just from a business perspective, this is kind of the business smart move for both entities, both organizations, so that they can withstand, I think I saw somewhere like a 35 % reduction in middle management positions, postings or something like that, right?

Brian Milner (12:31)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. mean, I think, the, the past few years have been kind of difficult economically. please don't think I'm being political and saying that at all. I'm just, yeah, I can only state what I've, I've seen and heard from other people in the industry. And I've, you know, I've heard about people talking about less job postings, those going down. I've heard about, know, trainers and coaches and other things. you know, losing percentages of their students or their coaching engagements or other things. So I've just heard that it's been, and we've kind of experienced some of that as well, decline a little bit. I don't think it's that one of those two entities had a decline. I think they both are kind of recognizing this is a tough economic climate and strength in numbers. You know, if we can support each other and maybe that's the path forward is that we kind of combine forces and combine and conquer a little bit. So I think you're right. I think that may have forced it and it's just the opportunity presented itself.

Cort (13:37)
Just kind of a contextual thing where the context of kind of where we're at right now. That's really what drove it. Yeah, I can see that. could totally see that. Awesome. Well, let's jump over to our next kind of topic right now. Everyone's favorite topic right now, AI, right? We've talked about it substantially. But kind of with that whole idea of

Brian Milner (13:52)
Sure. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Cort (14:03)
or that little note that we had there of these mid-level management positions, we're not seeing them rise in open positions. We're kind of seeing them get squeezed down a little bit. We're seeing them reduced. And a lot of that is attributed to AI, where a lot of these mid-level management positions are tasks that can be done by AI, because a lot of it is kind of this data analysis stuff and what do we move forward with? Relating it to Scrum specifically with AI being on the rise and Scrum Master roles appearing to be bringing less value as a result, because I think you've seen it, I've seen it a lot. A lot of my friends are talking about it. I've seen it a lot on social media. Actually one Instagram reel that sticks out to me right now is someone was like, hey, do you want to get into tech without having to learn how to code, be a scrum master. It's super easy. You just take a two day course and you're going to make $110,000 a year or whatever. And it's like, you know, little tongue in cheek, but at the same time, I think there's some truth to what that real was saying. Um, however, with that, I think a lot of scrum masters are being shoehorned into roles or have been shoehorned into roles of. Logging meetings. creating meetings, facilitating those meetings and then entering in the next one and saying, Hey, everyone has to show up here and, you need a story point this. I need point values for this bug before we start working on anything. and a lot of that seems to be replaced with AI or at least is able to be replaced with AI. So Scrum Masters now are in a position where they have to drive more value. where, where do you think Scrum Masters? in their role can bring more value? And do you know of any resources that are either widely available, freely available, available at a lower cost to help Scrum Masters learn how to actually bring more value to their role?

Brian Milner (16:04)
Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll start off in saying is, you know, one of the great things about living in today's world is there is so there's such a wealth of information that's free. You know, I can learn how to do, I can learn how to cook anything in the world by just finding the video on social media and not all of a sudden, you know, I've got everything I need to make a great dish. I may not taste the same as the person who did it, but you know, I can learn how to do pretty much anything. I can Google, you know, how to You know change out my doorbell, which is one thing I did over the holidays You know like that's the kind of thing that there's a full video showing exactly it step-by-step Here's how to do everything and and I think that you know for Us a scrum masters. There's there are some skills. I think that are gonna be More and more relevant more and more needed and I think you just have to put yourself in the frame of reference of what would AI do a good job of? this is such a answer because if my job as a scrum master is to just schedule meetings, well, then yeah, I'm in trouble because an AI can do that really easily. And you don't even need AI for that. All you just need is to have people enter when they're available. There's dozens of websites where you can do that. do that. My D &D group does that to try to find the nights we can play. It's easy to do that, and you don't need any AI for it. So if you reduce what a scrum master is down to something as simplistic as let's schedule meetings, well, then yeah, you're in danger. I think what's going to happen is that more and more, it's going to be the soft skill kind of things that are going to differentiate the Scrum Master profession. I think that AI is going to have a hard time with managing interpersonal relationships. It's going to have a hard time helping the team navigate through conflict. It's going to have a hard time picking up on details, how safe does the team feel, how well are they working together. AI can do certain things really well, but there's a reasoning that's not there now. I don't know if that's coming. I don't know if that's tomorrow, if that's 10 years from now, or a year from now, or six months. But I know that now, even though they say thinking or other things like that, it's not really thinking. It's just digging up more data. And it can process a large amount of data and give you some insights from it. That is something that it does well. but it can't intuit, you know? It doesn't have emotional intelligence. And yeah.

Cort (18:47)
Yeah. Yeah, think one spot or one really good definition of where AI is fantastic that I read recently is AI is absolutely incredible when there is a set of very clear specific rules. So the book that was reading that said that they use chess, example, right? Where chess has a very, as a set of very specific rules. and AI can beat any grandmaster easy. Really just like chess.com can beat any grandmaster at this point, right? Because it's able to analyze potential outcomes based on a set of rules and a scenario that it's given in. Whereas a lot of humans, we think, or a lot of human chess grandmasters, they think in a way of like, here's one specific strategy that has worked in this scenario. I'm going to go that down that route. So AI can inference, so to speak, they're going to go down this route because that's what has happened in the past. And based on that set of rules that has happened in the past, here we go. So I think you're entirely right with those softer skills where you're interacting in a space that has some guidelines, but not necessarily a set of clearly defined rules is where AI is going to struggle right now. Absolutely. Yeah, totally.

Brian Milner (20:07)
Yeah, I'll tell you, Cort, too, one of the things that I'm really interested in, and I've talked to you about this and some other people, I'm really interested to see how AI, especially for coding, because more and more coders are taking advantage of coding assistants. And there are some stories out there and some companies that are more and more reducing the reliance on a person to code and using more AI to do coding. Some claim that they can do it all with AI. I would be really suspicious if there's no human involved at all. But what I'm really curious about is how does it change the process? If you are using an AI coding assistant, Does that change any other part of your process? How do you verify that the code that the AI has produced is correct? Is there a pairing? Is there a peer review of that that the team does? I suspect that there's practices and things like that that are popping up all over the place that just haven't been codified yet. There hasn't been a white paper that says, here's what you do. to try to ensure that it matches well with the rest of the code or here's how you know that it matches your standards or other things. I suspect that there's plenty of those kind of things out there and I'm just kind of waiting to hear those reports.

Cort (21:25)
Right? Yeah. Yeah, think, gosh, was, was Mark Zuckerberg was on the Joe Rogan podcast not too long ago. and he was saying like, yeah, by the end of 2025, Facebook is already doing it or Metta is already doing this. Sorry. Metta is already doing this where they're starting to replace their mid-level programmers, their mid-level developers with AI. And Zuckerberg was saying like, it's expensive right out of the gate.

Brian Milner (21:54)
Yeah.

Cort (21:59)
Right. It's going to be a lot of time, but we see the value in this long-term. so I wonder if, if that white paper is going to come from either meta or alphabet or one of those ones, right.

Brian Milner (22:09)
Yeah. Well, the domino effect of this is also going to be fascinating to watch because you said that they're talking about mid-level. I've heard a lot more about junior level being replaced, Like the entry level kind of stuff. And so, okay, let's say you do that, right? And you're hanging on to your senior people who have the experience. What happens when they move on? Right? When those senior people are gone, you haven't had anyone coming up the pipeline because you replaced it with AI for the junior stuff. And you're depending on more senior, more skilled advanced people to verify, to go through and fix the issues that AI is producing. They're going to be gone. They're going to retire. You know? So I don't know how that, that will be my first question to someone like Zuckerberg about that.

Cort (22:54)
Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Milner (23:02)
when they said something like that is, what's your continuity plan for moving up programmers into more senior skill level? How are you going to build that into your long-term process if you're going to replace junior and mid-level people with AI? That's going to be a train wreck that's going to happen at some point.

Cort (23:27)
I, cause a lot of times we talk about in courses or I've heard it a few times and I totally agree with this and subscribe to this idea that the goal of a scrub master is to work themselves out of a job. So I wonder if it's that kind of same kind of mentality that these bigger tech companies have with AI of, know, AI is going to work a developer out of a job or a developer is going to work themselves out of a job through AI being able to. code better than them, faster than them, be more precise, stuff like that. However, caveat to that, Mike was the one that said the goal of a scrum master or a good scrum master should be to work themselves out of a job, comma, I've never seen that happen. So Mike has never seen that happen, right? I don't think you've ever seen that happen. I've never seen that happen. I don't think anyone's really ever seen that happen. I don't think any scrum master has successfully done that.

Brian Milner (24:10)
Right.

Cort (24:20)
so I wonder if it's going to get to that, that kind of same point where it's like a developer will never work them themselves out of a job. It's just the cost of entry to a good developer job or to a developer job as a human. Just got up a little bit more, right? Where, where those senior positions are the only ones open. So you gotta create whatever experiences you can. Right.

Brian Milner (24:42)
mean, should, in reality, it should be like any other tool that people use to do a job. And it should be the kind of thing where, hey, now we have calculators, and I don't have to manually do the computations on my own. Does that mean that I don't need the reasoning and logic of knowing which computations to make? No. Someone still needs to know how to do that kind of thing. And I think that's how it shifts a little bit is. I don't know that it ever, I shouldn't say that ever. think it's, my, I'm not an AI expert, but my experience dabbling with this kind of stuff and reading articles and talking to people in the industry is that it's not there yet. It's, it's, it's good. It does a good job at, you know, being an assistant level, co-pilot level, that kind of thing, but it's not.

Cort (25:29)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (25:32)
hey, let's fire our 10 developers because now we've got an AI that will do exactly what they did. It still takes reasoning and logic to know which path to go down, to ask it what to do. And I think that's just how it shifts a little bit is now there's a tool that does the more mundane part of that, but we still need the information, the logic, the reasoning to design it.

Cort (25:44)
Right. Right. Right. Yeah, totally. This this reminds me a lot of your conversation that you had with Lance. It's the first episode of twenty twenty five. You and Lance sat down and talked about AI and hyper hyper personalization. AI being used as a tool, which you and Lance discussed fairly thoroughly. You guys went into a little bit of depth about that. It's a tool that delivers value, but where do you think it's delivering value to, or who do you think it's delivering value to? Is it developers, the company as a whole, customers? Where do you see that value stream starting? And do you think it could eventually get to somewhere else, deliver value elsewhere?

Brian Milner (26:17)
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like to me asking like, how do you, where do you see streets and roads and highways deliver value? know, like it's, there's a million places they deliver value. There's a million industries. There's a million different things that they do. And I kind of see AI, you know, as a much, much, much more advanced version of that. But just to say, they're, Does it deliver value to customers? Yes, it delivers value to customers. It might make their lives easier or make it more simple to get to what they need. Does it deliver value to the organization? Sure, it delivers to the companies because it's going to help reduce time to market and speed and maybe cost as well. Although cost, we'll see. That's kind of an interesting thing because, you know,

Cort (27:26)
huh.

Brian Milner (27:33)
You read lot of articles about how OpenAI is not profitable yet. And it's taking a huge amount of data, a huge amount of data centers, a huge amount of energy. So that runway runs out at some point. And even charging $200 a pop for their pro model a month, it's not profitable. I mean, they say that membership level is not profitable right now.

Cort (27:46)
Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Right.

Brian Milner (27:59)
So that doesn't continue forever. At some point, that money runs out. And when that does, how does it get paid for? So will it reduce costs by that point when that runway runs out and the consumers of the AI product have to pay the real cost of what it takes to run it? I don't know. Hopefully, it goes down by then.

Cort (28:18)
Yeah. Yeah. In that same episode with you and Lance, you talk a lot about AI as a tool, right? And it's not something that you are scared of personally because it is a tool and you view it as a tool and an aid to you being more productive. I'm just curious your thoughts on, let's take it back over to our scrum masters, right? So. someone starting out as a Scrum Master role or recently got put into a Scrum Master role, how do you think that AI can be used as a tool to aid Scrum Masters? Do you think it should take over kind of backlog prioritization so that Scrum Masters can focus a little more on those interpersonal connections? Do you think it should take over managing meetings or running meeting ceremonies so that Scrum Masters can focus on more important things?

Brian Milner (29:10)
I kind of, the hair on the back of my neck goes up a little bit or I cringe a little bit about the words take over. Because I'm not sure there's anything I would say that it should take over right now. I think that there are some things that it can assist with and do a better job. Like it can, you can offload the manual portion of doing that to the AI. But you know, yeah. We've talked about scheduling meetings. That's an easy thing for something like AI to do. And it does a good job. One of my favorite things that I've learned is you can dump a bunch of data into it and then ask a big open-ended question like, what are maybe some insights from this data that I'm missing? What are some key?

Cort (29:37)
Right.

Brian Milner (29:54)
takeaways that I should have from this mass of data that you sort through. And that's a really good job of interpreting that kind of thing for us. So I think it's those kind of things that, from a Scrum Master perspective, I think you can probably use it to do a lot of things like charting out velocity and tracking other trends in our velocity.

Cort (30:00)
Right.

Brian Milner (30:15)
or the trends in other data maybe that I collect for my team that I'm not aware of. I think it starts to fail a lot in the creative areas. I'll just give you a practical example from my standpoint. I spoke at couple of conferences. I try to speak at conferences on occasion. And when you do that, you have to submit papers of saying, here's what I want to talk about. I cannot use AI and go to it right now and say, hey,

Cort (30:34)
No,

Brian Milner (30:37)
I want to speak at conferences next year about AI or about Agile and Scrum kind of topics. What are some ideas? What are some things I can talk about? It's not going to give me anything that's worth anything if I ask that question. But if I already have the idea, it can help me flesh out the idea. It can help me kind of with the way I present the idea. But the idea is mine, right?

Cort (30:49)
Right.

Brian Milner (31:03)
And I kind of think that's the thing is from a Scrum Master perspective, use it for the things that would take a lot of manual time to do. But you have to know your stuff to know that you need that thing.

Cort (31:12)
huh. OK, so yeah, just speaking out loud here, use an AI as like, hey, I'm noodling on this idea to get a little more engagement in our daily standups. Walk me through how this would go, or something like that.

Brian Milner (31:34)
Yeah, I mean, there's some particulars there. you probably want to prompt it to say, you know, I want you to act as an agile expert. Ask me all the questions that you need to ask me about why my daily scrums are failing and help me figure out, you know, three next steps I could take to try to improve the daily scrum of my team. That would be the kind of prompt I would enter. and kind of hear what the question, let it ask you questions, let it refine it a little bit, and it'll give you some things to try. Now, maybe only one of those things is worthwhile, but if you have one of them that's worthwhile, it's worthwhile.

Cort (32:10)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right, totally. Cool. Let's step away from AI real quick. I got one more question for you. And this can be like a, yep, we'll wrap it up after this one. One more question for you. And this was actually from the last episode with Scott, where the whole idea of it was you need to be nice by being honest, realistic, and I put in quotation marks, mean. Just being nice by being

Brian Milner (32:16)
All right, then we got to wrap up.

Cort (32:35)
Brutally honest, I guess in a good way of putting it when So again as the younger guy in this conversation as the one who doesn't quite have as much experience in having potentially career altering conversations as I like to call them When should I bring those up when should I be that kind of mean nice guy? Is it any time that I have my my foot in the door of? the CEO or someone who has a little more pull? Is it, should I only do it when I'm prompted or is there some other time that I should be bringing up these topics that are probably important, but you know, not the nice guy way of bringing them up.

Brian Milner (33:13)
Yeah, we were talking about the thing that I mentioned about the scenario where the guy found himself in the elevator with the CEO. And yeah, I do think there's an important kind of thing to keep in mind there where, you know, businesses are gonna expect you to kind of follow the chain of command a little bit. so, you know, I think you've got to balance that in with this. I'm not saying that you should... hey, everything that you think might be wrong in the company, go schedule a meeting with your CEO and go run and tell them. Like that's gonna make everyone between you and the CEO really mad and your CEO really mad, right? You gotta follow your chain of command a little bit. If I have a manager, I wanna be always kind of frank and honest with my manager so that they know they can trust me, that I'm gonna tell them.

Cort (33:49)
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Milner (34:02)
the reality and there it's just how blunt are you? How much do you soften when you say those things and try to say it in a polite way rather than saying, this sucks. You have to be able to play that game a little bit. But I I think you should always be honest with the people in your immediate chain of command.

Cort (34:13)
Right, right.

Brian Milner (34:24)
you, there's no, you know, definitive line about when you overstep that and go above and beyond. You kind of have to interpret that yourself. You can't do it too often, but if there are times when you feel like something is vital and it could actually have a real negative impact on your business, then, know, occasionally maybe it is okay to then go out of your chain of command and say, I just think this is really vital. And I think the company needs to know this. So I've kind of gone out of the normal chain of command. You're going to make the chain of command mad when you do that. So you have to weigh that and say, is it worth it? Do I feel like I can defend that I went outside the chain of command in this instance? that people won't see it as I'm always going outside the chain of command, but this was important enough to do it.

Cort (35:10)
Sure. Right. Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks, Brian. Thanks for getting that last one in there. Yeah.

Brian Milner (35:18)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, this has been fun. And we'll do this more often. We'll have some check-ins and try some more experience experiments. All right.

Cort (35:30)
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me on. Thanks for letting me ask these questions. thanks for a great conversation. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Brian Milner (35:33)
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Cort.