Reflections on User Stories and Agile Coaching Insights

Missed some episodes this year? Don’t worry—Brian’s got you covered with a highlight reel of 2024’s most memorable moments, featuring game-changing insights from Agile thought leaders and innovators. Tune in to catch up, reflect, and set your sights on a stellar 2025!

Overview

In this special year-end episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian takes us on a trip down memory lane, sharing highlights from some of the most impactful conversations of the year.

Featuring insights from Agile legends like Mike Cohn, Clinton Keith, Heather McGowan, and more, this curated selection is packed with golden nuggets that you can revisit or discover for the first time.

Whether you missed an episode or want to relive the best moments, this recap is a perfect way to close out 2024 and prepare for what’s ahead.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

#79 Navigating Agile Trends and Challenges in 2024 with Lance Dacy
#86 Revisiting User Stories with Mike Cohn
#90 Mastering Agile Coaching with Cherie Silas
#93 The Rise of Human Skills and Agile Acumen with Evan Leybourn
#100 Navigating the Future of Agile and Scrum with Lance Dacy & Scott Dunn
#111 Adapting to the Future of Work with Heather McGowan
#120 Agile in Gaming with Clinton Keith
#123 Unlocking Team Intelligence with Linda Rising
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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.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00.622)
I'm Brian Milner and this is the Agile Mentors Podcast, a show about both the personal and organizational journey towards agility. My friends and I will be sharing with you what we've collectively learned from seeing thousands of companies Agile implementations, apparels and pitfalls, as well as the secrets to success. We'll share our personal in the trenches experiences so that you can apply what we've learned in a practical way in your careers. We also hope to hear and learn from you as well. If you're like us and are always in search of better ways of working together, you're in the right place. Join us, mentor, and be mentored. Let's get started.

Brian Milner (00:53.288)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for the final episode of 2024. Believe it or not, we have reached all the way to the end. You might be thinking, wait, there's a few more weeks left. Yeah, there's a few more weeks left, but the next release date would have been on Christmas Day itself and the one following would have been on New Year's Day. So we're gonna take two weeks off to be with our families after this episode. And we encourage you to enjoy that time, take the time with your family as well and friends, and truly wish you the best over that time period. But before we get there, we do have one more episode for you. We thought what we'd do for today's episode might be tiny bit different than normal. In fact, I don't think we've done anything like this before. What I wanted to do is, since it is the last episode of the year, is to look back over the past year and play you some portions of some of the really fantastic discussions that we had over this past year. Just pull out a handful of these to talk to you about. If they sound interesting to you, maybe you can go back and take a listen to those episodes. So let's get right into it, because I don't want to waste time setting it up any more than that. For starters, I want to go back to something that's now kind of a tradition for us, and the next one you'll hear from us after this episode will be the continuation of that. The beginning of this year in 2024, we started things off and we kicked it off with friend of the show, Lance Dacey. And that episode was really about looking forward into 2024. And for us to talk about what we maybe thought was coming and what we saw in the future, and then trying to somehow make some predictions or give some advice about how we might be better prepared for it. And one of the areas that came out in that discussion was really talking about how leadership affected an Agile transformation and Agile with the culture of an organization. So I'll play you a little clip here from Lance's discussion. One of the thoughts that he had in that episode, really talking more about how we need to go to the next level with our organizations and with the leadership in our organization. Take a listen. We've been trying to scale Scrum and Agile for a long time and we've written the practices on how to do it.

Brian Milner (03:13.23)
but we're not allowing the people to practice that. You know, just got through coaching. My youngest son is in fifth grade and we coach his football team. It's like, we're going to sit down and tell you during this play, here's the stance that you take to block. You're basically a robot. Do everything that we say, even if you don't understand it, because the whole scheme for that play is built on everybody doing their job exactly as prescribed. But as you evolve into professional football or high school football, they've learned so much about those mechanics. that's really fun now because they've got the IQ to respond to what's in front of them. That's agile. And that to me is what we have to start learning in organizations, is we know how to run the play at the team level, but how do we build up the people to run the play correctly in challenges when there's adaptations that need to be made? And a lot of times management and leadership is the suffocating part of that where they don't allow for that. It's always interesting to go back and look at those conversations that we have at beginning of the year. and see kind of how it played out. Were we right? Were we wrong? So if you're interested in that, check out that. That was just episode 79 was the first one that we did in 2024. Next up, I'm gonna jump to episode 86. This was one with our very own Mike Cohn. Mike had come back on because quite frankly, we've had for many years a set of user stories that were sample user stories that you could come to our website and download just as a resource for people if they wanted to see what... samples of user stories look like, try to imagine what that would look like in their particular context. So that's why we had this collection of user stories. Well, Mike went back to re-edit those recently, and then he took kind of another look at it and had forced him to kind of reconsider some things, wanted to share some thoughts about those new ideas and thoughts he had about user stories, just in re-examining ones that he had put together previously. So in this next clip, what you'll hear Mike talk about is really kind of a controversy maybe just his own controversy internally, but kind of a shift that he had over the years and really the template itself for a user story. So take a listen to this. I had a bunch of slides. I looked at them a few years ago to confirm this. I looked at them and they all said, I want to blank, right? And it was what the user wants. And sometimes it's not what the user wants. So if you look at slide decks that I create today, they all say, I.

Brian Milner (05:36.866)
They don't say I can, they don't say I want to, they just say I, and then you fill in the verb. For example, as user, I am required to enter a strong password. I don't want to enter a strong password. I want to type in my dog's name and let the system know it's me, right? So I am required to enter a strong password that doesn't fit with I want to or I can. I can enter a strong password? Well, that doesn't really help. I don't want to. I can enter a strong password. I can enter a weak password. Is that possible? So I do think there's problems with I can, but I leave all of that out of the template and I let the situation determine what that verb should be. Always an interesting conversation there with Mike Cohn. Very, very lucky and fortunate to have him come on usually multiple times per year. And that was just one of the times that Mike came on our show this last year, but really, really interesting stuff there about user stories. If that's something you're interested in, I encourage you to check out that. That was episode 86 with Mike Cohn on user stories. Now we're gonna jump ahead to episode 90. Episode 90, we had a friend of mine, Sheree Silas, come on. Sheree is a very authoritative, knowledgeable person on Agile coaching. In fact, she is the person that I most likely am going to point you to if you come to me and want to find out more about Agile coaching. She has some really great classes and other things that she teaches. And we had her on to talk about Agile coaching, obviously. And one of the things that came up is something that I hear sometimes in classes that Some of this coaching stuff you talk about sounds a little bit like counseling a little bit. Is there a crossover there with counseling? Is this a counseling job? So take a listen to what Shree had to say in response to that question. As an adult coach, you are not an organizational psychologist. You are not a counselor. You are not an organizational therapist or any of those things. That is not the job. The job is consulting, mentoring, training. and some coaching, helping people how to learn how to negotiate, learn how to collaborate, learn how to have good, healthy conflict. And there's helping them to get the business results they want. And it's very frustrating when you kind of hear this taking all the way to the other end of, we're just there to do woo-woo touchy feely stuff. I'm the psychologist. No, that's not your job. And you're not trained to do that. And that's part of the coaching work.

Brian Milner (08:03.136)
is to help them understand what they need and what they don't. And even as a professional coach, it is my job to make sure my client understands what coaching is and what it's not. And as an Agile coach, that's part of the work is to make sure the client understands what this work is and what it's not. Yeah, really good stuff there about Agile coaching. If you're interested in finding out more about that, listen to that episode. You'll hear more from Sheree on episode 90 about Agile coaching. Next up, I have a relatively new friend of mine, but one that, you know, feel like brother from another mother. Mr. Evan Layborn was on and he came on to talk about some research that his organization had done in partnership with the Scrum Alliance. And in particular, there was one component of that that I wanted to question him about because when I initially read it, it gave me a little bit of some misgivings about it. One of the things I mentioned was that traditionally we have always talked about being a T-shaped individual on a Scrum team that had a depth of experience in one area. but a breadth of experience in other areas that you just weren't an expert in. You were only really looking to be an expert in one area. But this report kind of brought to bear this idea of what they're calling a pie-shaped individual. So think about the mathematical symbol pie and how it has two lines going down. It's kind of like a T with two lines going down from it, right? And when I saw that, initially my first thought was, well, is this just organizations trying to get by with less head count? Take a listen to what Evan had to say about that. I want to be clear that when we're talking about pie-shaped individuals and companies looking for pi-shaped individuals, we're not talking about companies who are looking for one person to do two jobs. They're not looking for someone who's got two skills because they're trying to fill two roles. They're trying to fill two jobs. We're talking about one person, one job, and using multiple skill sets to do that job better. more effectively. In the technology world, we've had a word for this in the tech world for 10 years, full stack developer. A full stack developer is a pie-shaping, it's a developer with test competence and operations competence. They can deploy a DevOps environment. That full stack developer is a prime example of a pie-shaped person. It's not one person doing two jobs. It's one person doing one job with a variety of skill sets.

Brian Milner (10:30.752)
and doing that job better, exponentially better because of it. There's some really interesting other insights that Evan had in that episode. highly recommend that to you. That was episode 93 with Mr. Evan Layborne. Next up, well, we celebrated a milestone. We had our hundredth episode, if you can believe it or not. And we thought it would be appropriate to celebrate by having two people that we have on quite frequently on the podcast, Mr. Lance Dacey. and Mr. Scott Dunn. So we had something that we don't often have here on the show where we had multiple guests, but we had Lance and Scott on to really look back over the past 100 episodes and look ahead a little bit into what we thought might be coming. And one of the interesting kind of conversations we had there was thinking about some of the changes taking place in the workplace today. You'll hear Scott kind of start in on this with. thinking about the kind of dilemma organizations are facing with the work from home versus work from office kind of situation. And then Lance will come in and kind of relate it more to some larger agility issues as well. Take a listen. Thinking back to the time when people didn't really want to go agile because they thought it was a fad. And it didn't take but a few years, like, I could be wrong. Maybe that is a thing we need to do, right? And then everyone gets on board. But there was a lot of kicking and screaming and doubting the early years. I think we're going to see that with remote work is made like the proving ground of do you really work this way or not as a manager? you get this or not? You cannot lead and manage people currently how you are going to in the future because they were talking about how the new generation. is coming on board and they just won't tolerate certain things. And I think you hit it on the head with that Scott, that if these managers don't learn how to lead and manage with this newer generation, two or three removed from what I'm talking about, you're not going to have any employees because they will not tolerate it. They do not work that way. It was always such fun to have both those people on our podcast and it was even more fun to have them both on at the same time. So I really appreciate both Lance and Scott really helping us celebrate there. The fact that we crossed that threshold into a

Brian Milner (12:38.326)
our 100th episode. Next up is someone that I found really fascinating. is Miss Heather McGowan. And she was the keynote speaker at the Scrum Gathering this year in New Orleans. And she was so gracious to come on the podcast and talk with us a little bit. She had some really great insights. Just listen to what she had to say here in thinking about sort of the place of work in general as a part of our lives today. But what I think what's really happening is we've outsized what work is in our lives. So community used to consist of social interactions, religious affiliations, clubs and groups we belong to, all of those kind of, if you think of them as circles, because everything's visual to me, all those circles shrank and work became bigger. So now part of this generational change, but more and more people are looking for work to provide their purpose. work to provide most of their relationships, work to fill these. It's a little bit in terms of how we're interacting with each other that's causing illness, but it's also an outsize expectation we have around work. So now it becomes table stakes for a lot of organizations for work to be my self-expression, work to be my sense of purpose, work to be where I think about my values. And it wasn't like that a few decades ago. I heard from a couple of people after this episode, just friends of mine talking about it. I want to make sure I'm clear about something here that Heather was saying, she's not saying that we should find our values from those places. She's just saying that's kind of how society has shifted a little bit. So you can debate whether it's good or bad, whether the other circles that she mentioned had shrunk or grown or anything like that. But really that's kind of the reality we're left with is that there's a lot of people who find their belongingness from work today, as I said, whether that's a good or bad thing, you can debate. but that's certainly a reality I think we have to live with. And this was a really interesting discussion. So I highly encourage you to check that out if you want to. That was episode number 111 with Heather McGowan. Next up was someone I found really interesting as well. This was Mr. Clinton Keith. Clinton is a veteran of the gaming industry. And I know there's always some interest in that in our listeners and in the Agile community about how you really can apply some of these Agile principles and things.

Brian Milner (14:55.704)
to an industry that's so fast moving like the gaming industry. Well, as I said, Clint has worked in that industry for a very long time and he's seen pretty much everything there. He's worked in all different kinds of gaming companies. He's helped them to learn and apply these agile principles along the way. So I'll just share a snippet of the conversation that we had. In this clip, he's talking really about how some of these principles we talk about like, individuals and interactions over processes and tools and are we letting something like a new technology drive how we do things or is it really more about what's the value we're trying to deliver, right? And in the gaming industry, it's fun. It's delivering something that's fun. So take a listen to what he had to say about kind of one of these experiences he had about really finding the fun. The big light bulb moment was having a short deadline on showing something of value. led to people making better choices from the player's perspective, not this challenge of, what can I do with artificial intelligence over the next two years? That's part of the big challenge with these big, huge games of saying, it's like, hey, if there's not a payoff, if you can't see value, and this was an early lesson I learned working with Nintendo of Japan, the guy that made Mario and Donkey Kong, we worked with him directly, Miyamoto. You always had this thing, it's like, the fun fast, show the value of it. And it always stuck with me. When you have these short deadlines, you want to encourage the teams and the product owners is judge the game. Not what you see in the potential in two years. Judge your vision of the two years against what you're seeing every other week and adjust your expectations. Don't fall in love with your vision. Judge the game. Don't fall in love with your vision. Such great advice there, and I think it's so applicable to really industry. Don't get caught up in that word game, right? Judge the product. Think about it that way. I think sometimes, especially for us as product owners, sometimes we can look at that and say, we've got these grand visions and grand designs for our product, in two years we're gonna have this incredible product that's gonna do all these things. Well, you may not make it to two years. You may not make it to two years if you don't.

Brian Milner (17:16.897)
deliver a value earlier, right? If you don't capture the imagination and attention of your customers, if you don't solve a problem for them upfront, we know the big idea is gonna take longer to get to, but I think what Clinton is saying here, and it's really an important point, I think, is that that's part of what we kind of focus on as Agilist is trying to find the value and deliver it early. So just a really fascinating episode there as well with Clinton. Encourage you to check that out, especially if you have interest in the gaming industry, lots of good content there from him in episode 120. Lastly today, I'm gonna leave you with one last one that wasn't too long ago here, but we had someone that is kind of a beloved figure in the Agile community. She's often referred to as an Agile visionary. That's Ms. Linda Rising. And she came on to talk about multiple things with us, but one of the things that she talked about in our conversation, was about a research project that Google did several years back called Project Aristotle. They were trying to figure out kind of the components, what went into making a high-performing team. So just listen to what Linda has to say about what their scientific research kind of uncovered about really what goes into making a team high-performing. All these different researchers made the same mistake in the beginning. and it's the same mistake organizations make. They thought in the beginning that what makes a smart team is smart people. Wrong. Not that you don't want smart people. You can have a team of very smart people that doesn't have any of these other characteristics that is not intelligent as a group. We really have to wake up and realize, first of all, that we're doing that, that we're valuing IQ or individual intelligence, smartness, you went to this school or you got that particular SAT score. It has nothing to do with that. It's not that there's no correlation, but it's weak. It's much better to have people who have these other characteristics. I just have to say

Brian Milner (19:38.444)
We are so spoiled Agile mentors with some of the great people like Linda Rising that we get to hear on this podcast and learn from really as sort of a masterclass from some of the best thinkers in this industry. And I know I'm very thankful for them taking their time and thankful for people like Linda Rising coming on the show. If that dialogue that you just heard there sounds interesting, check out that episode. It was episode 123. Linda talks about a lot of lot more great stuff there in that episode. But yeah, we get so many great guests on our show and that was just a handful. It's hard to even pick out just, I think we just had eight of them there. It's hard to pick out just eight over the past year, because there were just so many. And any of the other guests on here, I hope you don't feel like you were not in the top eight or anything. This was just a sampling. I just wanted to pull some different kinds of episodes and I think there was quite a variety of guests and topics and things that we had on the show this year. It just makes me excited about thinking about what's possible in the next year. I know we're gonna be trying some new things. I've been interacting with some of you at the Agile Mentors Community and you've been talking to me about some suggestions about things that maybe we can do. And we're gonna try that. We're gonna try some new things going into the new year. So you may see some shifts from time to time of just a few experiments that we might be trying. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on any of those things, but we're always in search of making this the most valuable use of your time. We think that the quality of the people, like you just heard, is pretty good. We're pretty happy with the people that really decide to come on the show, and we're very humbled by the fact that they choose to come on our show. I just wanna always make it the most valuable use of your time. We want this to be the most valuable Agile podcast that's out there. As always, if there's anything we can do to change that, I'll go ahead and just say that now. email us podcast at mountegoatsoftware.com. Put that at the end of every episode. Truly mean it. If there's things that you want us to experiment with or try, if there's guests you want to hear, in addition to some of these great guests you heard today, there's other people that maybe that you think would be good on the podcast, send us an email, podcast at mountegoatsoftware.com. Or if there's a topic that you want us to cover, let us know that as well. We'd be more than happy to try and put that in. In our planning,

Brian Milner (22:01.666)
we try to always put the listener's suggestion kind of towards the top of our backlog. It may not be the very next thing we do, but we try to make that as soon as possible. Oftentimes we have to find the right guest, but as soon as we find the right guest, we want to get that listener suggestion on as soon as possible. So thank you for those that have made suggestions in the past and keep them coming. I'll just go into a few other things then and wrap up and get you on your way. It's been fun looking back over the last year. And as I said, I'm excited about seeing where we go next year. Speaking of that, just make sure that you like and subscribe to the podcast. That way you don't miss any of these things, like any of these great episodes that you heard little snippets of here in this podcast episode. And with that, I guess that'll be a wrap for another year. So Agile Mentors, my heartfelt happy holidays to you. Whatever you celebrate this season, I truly, truly hope that you get to spend some time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. truly hope that you get some time to reflect on what you're grateful and thankful for. I hope you come back next year refreshed, ready to go. I hope that's part of your sustainable pace, that time of renewing with the people in your life that are closest to you. We look forward to seeing what happens with you in the new year. So join us back next year. We'll kick things off. We'll be back here in just a few weeks. And on the 8th of January will be our next episode that we release. And we'll have our... of annual sit down with Lance Dacey to look ahead to 2025 and see what's coming up then. So join us and hope you have a very, very happy holidays. See you next time on another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.