Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

If AI is speeding up how fast we can ship, what’s slowing teams down now? Brian and returning guest Cort Sharp dig into the emerging friction between AI-assisted development and the still-slow art of product decision-making. Overview With AI accelerating software delivery, it’s no longer the developers dragging their feet. It’s the backlog that’s backing everything up. In this episode, Brian and Cort tackle the big shift: as coding becomes faster and easier, the real challenge becomes knowing what to build, why, and whether it’s worth it. They talk about feature bloat, the myth of productivity, the “good enough” curve, and why product owners are quietly becoming the most critical role on agile teams. Plus: short sprints, fake one-day sprints, and a healthy dose of “what even is a Sprint, anyway?” If you're feeling the tension between building faster and deciding smarter, this convo’s got your name on it. References and resources mentioned in the show: Cort Sharp #104: Mastering Product Ownership with Mike Cohn #3: What Makes a Great Product Owner? With Lance Dacy #164: Why Innovation Efforts Fall Flat with Tendayi Viki Get the Agile Skills Video Library Use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. 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 back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you here as always, Brian Milner. And today I have back the one and only Cort Sharp with us. Welcome back Cort. Cort Sharp (00:11) Hey Brian, thanks for having me. Brian Milner (00:13) Yeah. Cort and I were chatting just in between engagements and things we were talking about going on. Cort's coaching a lot recently, and I've been coaching a lot recently as well. And so we've been kind of sharing stories and talking about kind of some of the things we've been experiencing. And you came across something really interesting recently that I thought we talked about might make a good topic. help us out. What was that that you came across? Cort Sharp (00:42) Yeah, so I've seen this idea pop up a few times actually on LinkedIn specifically, but I've seen it trickle out into other areas within the coaching that I've been doing recently, but also just in other pieces or parts of the internet as well. And it's this idea of like with AI being brought into organizations, brought into companies, helping out developers so much that AI has actually lowered that barrier. for the programming side of stuff, programming side of the development side of things, that the new blocker that is currently emerging, so the new piece that's been slowing everyone down now is actually the product management side of stuff itself, which I thought was just so fascinating because I've done a little programming, definitely more in the product management side of things now, but I kept seeing this pop up and I was like, man. I would love to just hear, you know, Brian's thoughts about this and the community as a whole, everyone's thoughts about this a little bit here too, but I have my own thoughts, but just quick little immediate reaction to that idea there, Brian. How does that make you feel? What do you think of that? Brian Milner (01:51) Yeah, I actually have been thinking this was coming for a while. I don't have this prepared, so please don't get me wrong in this. I know I always say data didn't happen. But there are three studies that I found at one point that were trying to determine the number of features in just your average software project that were rarely or never used. And it was three separate studies spread out over years. And one of them was like 48%. That was the low one, was like 48%. Then there was a middle one that was 64. And then there was another one that was more recent that said like 80%. And I mean, think about that, know, like I, even if you take the low end, And so, you know, 48, let's just round it up to 50 just to make it easier to have the conversation. But let's just say out of those three studies, we say it's 50 % of features that people are building are things that people rarely or never use. Now I get it that there are some rarely used features that are essential, right? Like admin functions and things. You may not use those all the time or it may not be a huge swath of users. that uses that, but you have to have them. So set those aside because that's not 50 % of what's being developed, right? And I think if that's true, if we even like go on the low end of that and say that it's closer to 50%, then that's an awful lot of productivity that's being lost. Not to mention just money and energy and effort. of developers to build stuff that no one cares about. Those studies were all prior to AI. So let that sink in, right? If those are prior to AI and we were seeing at the low end, 50%, you know, across those surveys of things that no one was using. Well, that's where I've been kind of forecasting this to say, if, if AI is speeding up our process to build things. the actual development of things, then what's going to become painfully obvious very quickly is that the bottleneck isn't developers. And it, you know, my point from saying that in classes is to say it's never been right. It's not been developers that have been the bottleneck to us being more successful. That's where the focus has been. But I don't think that was correct. And I think that the correct area to put it on is the product side. And if that's true, right, I know I'm doing a lot of leaps here, but if that's true, if it is the product side, well, I think that what that really translates to is the discipline of product management, of being able to recognize what's valuable. Cort Sharp (04:50) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (04:54) to your customers to deliver that, to close the loop and verify that that's actually what was needed and to measure the impact of those things, that discipline, I think, becomes just all the more essential because that stat tells me there's a lot of bad product management going on. So that's my initial thought. That's a lot of thoughts, but that's my initial thought when you said that. What about you? What do you think about that? Cort Sharp (05:19) right there. I'll share my thoughts, but I do want to harp on or just go back to your first initial one of the callback to those studies there. When you first threw out those, because I've seen similar studies where it was about 50 % was kind of it. I haven't seen those studies that say like, know, what was the last one you threw out there on the high end, like 80 something percent. ⁓ Brian Milner (05:39) Yeah, actually I remember, so I remember two of them. The 64 % one was from a group called the Standish group. There's been some question about their methodology in that one. I haven't seen the methodology of the 80 % one, but it was a group called Pindo that did that one. And I don't remember the 48 % one. that's just off top of my head. Cort Sharp (06:01) Sure. But that 80 % one though, that one sticks out to me because as you were going through it, I was like, okay, well, I have Google Docs open right here just for some show notes or something. Just make sure I ask the questions that I'm supposed to ask or I want to ask. And I thought, wow, I'm looking at the menu bar right here. I use maybe, two or three of these consistently. And there's like 15 options up here. yeah, I could absolutely see a large majority of features that a product has that go widely unused by the vast majority of its users. And I think that poses the question then is, do we wanna go down the path of having one product be really good for, or like, really good at one thing and then kind of OK at everything else. The thing that always comes to my mind in this, and I've been going down this rabbit hole of kind of digital minimalism, is like the cell phone, right? Where it's a really great communication device. OK camera, kind of OK video, kind of OK speaker if you want to use it once in a while. It's kind of OK at browsing the web or doing some other things on there. Brian Milner (07:05) Yeah. Cort Sharp (07:21) Is it worth making those products that have an okay aspect to it on these other things that, you know, some people like to use, but not everyone will use all the time type deal thing, which is a totally different discussion here. But that's kind of where my memory went of like, okay, that 80 % plus isn't actually all that surprising to me. I would, I would probably throw out there, you know, for the vast majority of programs that I use, baby, aside from my banking. Brian Milner (07:35) Right. Cort Sharp (07:48) my banking apps, you know, I don't use, I probably only use 10 to 15%, maybe 20 % of the total features in there. and I, it is such a interesting point to the productivity side of stuff of, okay, are we just being productive for the sake of being productive? is it actually being productive? Are we just working for the sake of working? so yeah, just harping on that a little bit. Brian Milner (07:50) right. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I agree. And I kind of have a similar response. And I think that there's, you know, the good enough argument, right? ⁓ Sometimes people take exception to that and say, well, why would we be okay with only doing something good enough? Well, it's not about quality, right? It's not saying that the quality of what you do is good enough, but it's saying that the... Cort Sharp (08:22) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (08:41) the amount of functionality is good enough. And I think your example of the cell phone is a great one because, know, I'm old enough that I remember before, you know, that was the main way that people took pictures. You know, when you had the little flip phones and stuff, the quality in those were not very good. And so you would have other digital cameras that would took higher quality photos. But the reason that it won out in you started to just see more and more pictures taken from a phone, even though they were lower quality, was because you always had your phone with you. And so there's sort of an extent to which you would say, how badly do I want to carry around an extra device that's just for taking pictures, even though it takes better quality pictures, is the quality that I'm getting with the phone good enough and there was a tipping point there, right? There was a certain point where it went out and the quality of what was on the phone was high enough that people said, yeah, I don't need a separate digital camera anymore. This is good enough for what I need and that one. And I think that that value curve is very similar across any product. There's a certain level. that when you add features, it's a steep value curve. But after you've added those key core things, then it starts to tail off. It starts to flatten. that flatten, it may still be going up, right? But the effort that it takes to deliver something is not the same return on that investment of effort, right? Early on, it's a huge, you that effort creates a spike in value. Later on, that effort creates a small little spike in value. At a certain point, that's where they talk about trimming the tail. At a certain point, that's what they mean by it is that value curve has gone past that point where now it's flattened and we're incrementally adding small little things, but they're not valuable enough to justify the effort that it's taking to build them. Now, will AI change that? I don't know, right? Because if we have a bank of AI programmers, I don't know that it actually changes it because we still could have that bank of AI programmers doing something else instead, you know? ⁓ Cort Sharp (10:48) Hmm. Right? Right? So it's figuring out that value proposition side of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (11:05) Right, right. The impact, actual, you know, how much do people care about this being there? And, and at a certain point, you know, we had a podcast recently where we talked about this, just at a certain point, there's a, an end of life, right? At a certain point, you have to deliberately say no to something and say, you know what? This product has done all it's going to do and we'll support people that still use it up to a certain point. But at a certain point you say, no, it's better to have a new product now, where that value curve now starts to get really big again. So yeah, I mean, from an AI standpoint, I think it does make an impact because it kind of just makes it more apparent where that problem is. ⁓ And that's why I think I tell all the product owners that come through classes, I think product owners are poised to become highly impactful. Cort Sharp (11:46) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (12:00) in their organizations in this AI era. Because if you can refine your craft to a level to where the things that you are producing are all a lot of value, right? All creating a lot of value, then now we have the productivity to spit out more and more of that stuff. And if your side of it's taken care of as well, then everything that we're producing is now producing a lot of value. Cort Sharp (12:29) Right. Right. I think it opens the door for programmers, developers. I'm not just going to say programmers because I know AI can help out in every aspect of the development process. But I think it opens the door to developers, not only just being more productive, but also just being able to experiment with new things more, more readily, more easily. Right. And we can, we can kind of simulate some of what our customers might want. Right. If we can build a really great persona. I know you've done this in a class recently, Brian. I'm doing a similar thing and just saying, look, let's build out this persona using an AI tool that we can use and create basically an AI agent and say, here you go. This is my ideal customer. Here's my product. What pieces or new features of my products can I focus on in order to deliver higher value to this customer? which is exactly what a product owner does. So I totally agree with you there, Brian of saying, yeah, the role of the product owner is about to become one of the most valuable roles, in an organization, in, in understanding. How do we deliver value to our customers? What do our customers even want? Right. Starting there. If you can build all the cool things you want, if your customers don't use it, who cares? Right. So many examples of that, what I called out earlier, but so many examples of that of like, if you build stuff just for the sake of building stuff, is it worth being built? And I think that's more so the question that we're gonna shift towards within our development cycles of how do we know that this is worth being built? And what quick feedback loops can we start going down in order to get that? Brian Milner (13:58) Right. Yeah, I used to always like to quote this, know, everyone's always heard the phrase, you know, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around, does it make a sound? And I always equate that to, you know, software as well. If software is built and no one uses it, was it really built? You know, and I know I've been on the end, the bad end of that in the past where I've worked on things with development teams that Cort Sharp (14:28) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (14:37) We've worked long and hard on something only to have the rug pulled out from underneath us and for management to make decisions and say, no, we're not going to do that thing. And that's a horrible feeling. There's nothing worse. no one out there wants to, I mean, go back to my stats, 50%. Nobody in software development would feel good about themselves if they said, hey, 50 % of the stuff you've worked on, no one ever saw. Like that's not a warm fuzzy feeling. ⁓ Cort Sharp (15:06) Yeah, could you could you imagine building a car and then building this awesome, incredible car and then you're ready to roll it off the factory line and then all of a sudden it gets cut in half and that's what gets delivered and that's what because that's all that people use, right? Brian Milner (15:18) Right. Right. Or you work overtime on the engine going from zero to 60 and you find out that this is just going to sit in a garage. It just doesn't make you feel good because that's not what it's been built to do. ⁓ So yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. We have to focus on the discipline of knowing our customers, knowing what they want. Cort Sharp (15:24) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right, right. Brian Milner (15:44) And then checking and asking them, did we actually deliver what you needed? ⁓ And it's funny, I was talking with someone this week about this and it's amazing to me the number of times I've talked to people in the product area that will build things. But when you ask them, did you decide to build that? You had a whole host of other things you could do. Cort Sharp (15:51) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:10) made you decide to do that instead of the other things. And I'm always shocked at the number of times I get blank stares or just no response at all because it's a great thing to do, right? Well, you're asking me, don't ask me. You should be able to say that, right? You should be able to. to back it up and say, yeah, here's the research behind it. Here's the market study. Here's the business case. We ran these tests, and these tests showed this level of interest. You have to know what it is you're trying to do first. And if you don't know what it is that it's intended to do with your customer, then how do you know whether you actually succeeded at it? Cort Sharp (16:41) Right. Yeah, absolutely. one thing that comes out of that is like, how much of that data do you take and how much time do you spend on gathering that data? I've heard a phrase recently and it goes along the lines of like be data informed but not necessarily data driven. where we want to use data to inform our decisions, but we don't necessarily want to gather all the data in order for it to be 100%. We're not going to make a decision unless we have this data point to guide our decision or drive our decision. Yeah. Brian Milner (17:27) Yeah. Yeah, no, yeah, it's, know, we had, I think that the way to think about it is properly is bets. You know, that you are making bets in different areas and you don't make a bet, you don't wait to make a bet until you're 100 % certain. Cause you're never 100 % certain on a bet, right? There's always a percent chance that it could go one way or the other. But what you try to do is, you know, make informed or maybe that's not even the best analogy. Maybe it's more like an investment. You know, when you make an investment in a stock, it's not just a pure bet because it's not a flip of the coin. Right. If you do your research and you know enough about the company, then there are better investments than others. And Cort Sharp (18:02) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (18:18) I think that's the way we should look at our features and our products is to say, this is an investment in our company. So I want to invest wisely. And you wouldn't be very smart, I'll put it this way, to have an investment strategy in the stock market of just pointing your finger at something and say, hey, I'm going to spread out my investments over these 10 companies that are just random companies. Cort Sharp (18:30) You Brian Milner (18:42) because one of them is gonna hopefully turn out to be successful. You're not gonna succeed, right? But if you research the 10 things that you're investing in, if you kind of know the history, know the trend line, know where the forecast is, all right, well, this one has a strong chance I'm investing here. ⁓ That's how you're successful. And we don't seem to always do that with our products. Cort Sharp (19:02) Right. Yeah, I've kind of tied that back into our products and a conversation I had with a product manager, product manager, they weren't a product owner or a project manager, but a product product manager, gosh, three months ago or something like that. Small company, very small company. Just I knew the guy from from school and was talking with him and he goes, yeah, we feel like two week sprints is too long. We even feel like one week sprints are too long. We're trying to shoot for one day long sprints. And my question back to him was, okay, why, first of all, why would you want to do that? And he goes, well, because AI just allows our developers to be so much more productive and do more things. I'm like, okay, I could buy that. But my second question to him, which goes along the lines of what you were talking about here, because getting that feedback, getting that data, let's be data informed, not data driven, was how do you make decisions on, how do you give feedback to your developers? How do you make those decisions on, yeah, this is the highest priority today versus yesterday? Is the market shifting that quickly that you have to make those decisions? And let's say it is, let's imagine we live in that world right now. Some of you probably do, but I know someone out there probably does, but how do you, do that? what tips would you give Brian to this guy about, yeah, let's drive the decision making forward and let's give the feedback faster if our development team is able to actually deliver a fully featured feature. How do give them feedback on such a short timeline? Brian Milner (20:44) Yeah. Cort Sharp (20:47) I see teams all the time struggle with saying, yeah, we get good feedback every two weeks with our sprints. I've seen teams be like, yep, two weeks is no problem for us. We get good feedback. We're able to move forward. We're able to make decisions, be data informed, and move forward that way. So we cut our sprints down into one week. I think one week is probably like the, in my mind, at least in my experience, is kind of that. lower end, the lower lower echelon, I guess, of the ability to provide meaningful feedback and meaningful delivery stuff. Brian Milner (21:16) Yeah. Well, it's also about, can you create something that is of meaningful value in that timeframe? Because our product increments should be valuable. And that's what's probably going to be the blocker for most teams going to a day-long sprint or so is because, yeah, we can't produce something valuable enough in just a day. It takes us multiple days. ⁓ Cort Sharp (21:33) Yes. Right. Right. Brian Milner (21:46) In general, mean, I would applaud it in general because I think the shorter time span is generally better. I generally have more of a problem with people who want to go the other way and be too long, you know, and do like a month long sprint. So I would much rather have a team that wants to do a day sprint than a month long sprint. But that, mean, the questions I'd ask about a day long sprint is, Can we produce something meaningful within the day? And maybe the answer is yes, right? Maybe across the team, there's enough work and maybe the work is small enough, right? That's really what it would take is the breakdown of the work is small enough that they can actually get stuff out that's valuable within the course of that day. So are they able to produce value in a day? It might. get to feel a little ridiculous as far as the meetings are concerned, right? Because that's one of the considerations when you try to choose your length of your sprint is, how often can I have these meetings? Take for instance, just the sprint and review, right? We need important stakeholders at the sprint and review. Can you have important stakeholders every day? If not, Cort Sharp (22:48) Right. Brian Milner (23:01) If what you're doing is no, that cadence is not wide enough that our stakeholders are too busy. They can't come every day. If that's the case, then you might want to consider a longer sprint. That doesn't mean you have to wait on delivery. And I think maybe that's something I'd ask them as well is, are we confusing the sprint length with delivery length? because you can deliver every day. You can deliver multiple times per hour. There's nothing that says in Scrum that it's tied in any way, shape or form to your sprint length. And if that's the intention is to just release things more often, then absolutely, right? If your system is set up to do that, it doesn't matter if you have a week long or month long sprint, if you can deliver things every day, It's a much better process because back to your original point about feedback, can you get meaningful feedback? Well, if we're delivering it every day, we're going to get more meaningful feedback because we're not only getting feedback from just the internal stakeholders, but we're getting it from external customers. ⁓ Let's just say if we have a week long sprint and we're delivering every day, we have feedback from actual customers by the sprint review. Cort Sharp (24:06) Right. Brian Milner (24:14) that would be an incredible position to be in, to be able to say, yeah, we've released these 10 things this sprint, and here's what the customers are already saying about it. We got this feedback, or this one has generated this much support, so now we have tickets to kind of handle that. Yeah, it's in general a good thing. I'd want to make sure on those other areas to make sure that it's not being confused maybe with something else. Cort Sharp (24:37) Yeah. Yeah. Just understanding the definition of what a sprint actually entails. through that conversation, it turned out they, were on the, you know, we just want to deliver every day and, and, you know, we have our sprint review at the end of the week and whatnot. And I'm like, okay, so you're not having day long sprints. You're doing a week long sprint. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We, we laughed about that a little bit, but, yeah, I think the Brian Milner (24:50) Yeah. So they're doing week long sprints. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. I I applaud them on that. That's a mature thing to do. And if your team can get to that stage, it's only because you've invested heavily in automation and DevOps and those kinds of things. It takes discipline to be able to do that. And I'm sure they were advocating it to you because they saw the benefit of what it provided them to release more frequently, which... is an admirable thing. Cort Sharp (25:25) Yeah, 100%. They were like, man, this is awesome. I know you're in this space court. Like, let's talk about this. And yeah, it was a great conversation. It was a lot of fun. But they were, yeah, they were just kind of confused with what it actually meant to hold a sprint. I think they also heard the term Kanban for the first time not too long ago. And they're like, this is the same thing, right? We're sprinting in Kanban, just like we sprint in scrum. And I'm like, I... Brian Milner (25:39) Yeah. Ha ha ha. Cort Sharp (25:50) No, a little different, slightly. Brian Milner (25:51) Yeah, not quite. Not exactly the same. Close cousins. Yeah. I mean, back to our original topic here, I mean, I think as far as AI, we talked about that with product management. And as far as the Scrum world is concerned, I am very interested to see how this Cort Sharp (25:54) Yeah. Brian Milner (26:11) kind of upends the cart a little bit as far as our teams are concerned. I don't think that it, at least from my own perspective, and I could be proven wrong, I don't see it as destroying the team. I don't see it as a complete re-imagining of the process. I think the process still holds. The question is just what does that team look like? Previously, we have a Scrum Master, a product owner, and then a set of developers. Well, would imagine there's teams would probably have less developers because they can boost their own capacity by using AI copilots and other things to help them generate code faster. So maybe a team that previously was eight people is now a team of four or five. And maybe that makes us reimagine a little bit about Scrum Masters and product owners and whether we need them to more frequently be across a couple of teams rather than just a single team. Yeah. Cort Sharp (27:12) With that, this question just popped into my mind and you got into it a little bit there with like, do we need our Scrum Masters or product owners to be across multiple teams? What would your ideal, let's say AI takes off, you're in charge of organizing 10 teams, right? And you have all the people that you need. So you can have as many product owners, as many Scrum Masters as you need. And we want to have our developer count be, you know, five developers per team or three developers per team. Let's, let's try to go down that path of saying we're small, right? We, we have AI. allows us to accelerate the speed of our development per developer. Right. So, would you have one product owner per team and then have the scrum master float around, or would you have the scrum, same number of scrum masters as product owners? Brian Milner (28:04) it would greatly depend, because I just different scenarios might require different things. in general, then I'd probably, I'd probably match them up as much as possible. because in general, I think there's kind of similar demands on both. They're different, but similar volume of demand. the interesting thing to me is, the volume of work that can be created by a team of eight developers or so right now, if that same volume of work can be generated because each developer now has the tools that their abilities are enhanced, again, I don't see it as replacing, I see it as enhancing, right? If... If they can do that and they had eight, now they can do the same volume of work with four. Well, it's not reducing the volume of work for the product owner, right? Because the product owner still needs to manage a backlog and prioritize and stakeholders and customers, right? That's not going away. The work from the Scrum Master, I think obviously changes a little bit because Cort Sharp (28:58) Right. Brian Milner (29:10) While it's one thing to try to manage team dynamics and get them to high performing levels when it's eight people, it's a lot more individual focus when it's four. So that's why I would say for a Scrum Master, maybe it does become more viable to be on a couple of teams because we're not contributing to the product. In general, we're not building things. Or maybe that becomes the new mode as well as the Scrum Master is more of a hybrid role with a combination of them and developer. I don't know. ⁓ I think time is going to tell that over the next few years. Cort Sharp (29:43) Right, right. Right? Where my mind went with that was, I would much rather have two teams of four than one team of eight, well, developers, right? Two teams of four developers that are as productive as my one team of eight each individually. and instead of kind of cutting the head count down, so to speak, or reducing head count, I'd much rather reconfigure the way that my teams are organized right now in order to Brian Milner (29:56) Yeah. Yeah. Cort Sharp (30:13) Utilize AI and I don't want AI to be replacing my developers. I want them to be I want it to be helpful to them I want it to augment their abilities and enhance their abilities like you were saying and in my mind if you know if I was running a company ⁓ We all think we all think we're in that armchair, right? We're all sitting in the armchair saying if I could make all the decisions for a day. What would I do? ⁓ In my mind, I would say okay Brian Milner (30:28) Yeah. Yeah. Cort Sharp (30:38) I don't view this as a, I can replace my development teams. can instead effectively, let's call it double, you know, I get twice the productivity out of one developer with AI versus one without. I could double the amount of deliveries I get. I could double the features that I produce, that my teams produce, or along those same lines, you could probably figure out a way to cut down the delivery timeline. Brian Milner (30:54) Hmm. Cort Sharp (31:07) and cut it down in half, which goes back straight up to that top of the top of the hour question that we were talking about of product management is the roadblock. It's the bottleneck there to decide how do we get this sooner? How do we get these feedback loops quicker? Right. So. Brian Milner (31:25) Yeah. And to expand on that point, right? mean, if you're, if you have two teams of four that, you know, and that one team of four produces the same volume that previously a team of eight would do. Now I've got two teams. I'm doubling the volume that I can actually create. So to your point, there, there are some who would look at that as, I just lose four developers and To them, here's what I'd say. Imagine this scenario, two companies, right? And both these companies, they're competitors. These companies have the same exact situation happen to them. AI comes on the scene, AI enhances the productivity of their development teams. And one company says, hey, I can lose four developers and have the same level of productivity as I have today. So four people get pink slips, right? they maintain the same level of development that they have today. The second company says, hey, I can get twice as much done. So they start expanding the number of things they can produce. since they're assuming their discipline is in shape, they're producing things that people actually care about. Which of these two companies is going to win? It's gonna be the second one. Cort Sharp (32:33) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (32:40) It's going to be the one that actually can now deliver more value to the customer. So I would not jump to that conclusion. And I don't think that's necessarily going to be a successful company that jumps to the conclusion that, I'm just going to slash my budget for developers because now I can get the same volume with less people. yeah, but your competitor is going to have double the volume. Cort Sharp (33:03) Right. Brian Milner (33:08) with the same number of people and why wouldn't you do that instead? Cort Sharp (33:11) Right, totally. I totally agree with that. Part of me is really excited to see the studies that come out and say, here's the differences between these two companies in the similar space. One reduced their development and replaced with AI, and one enhanced their development teams with AI and didn't replace anyone with AI. And just super interested to see the difference in... evaluations, in productivity, in releases, in whatever it is, right? And I'm going to try to see if there's anything out there right now because... ⁓ Brian Milner (33:45) Yeah, well, this is my call out to everyone listening to you, right? Like if there's researchers out there, go research this and ⁓ let us know. Or if you're in the middle of researching it, please let us know, because I'd love to see that study as well. Cort Sharp (33:52) Yeah. Yeah, very fascinating, right? ⁓ Well, awesome. Brian Milner (34:00) Yeah. Well, this is, this has been great, great court. I think this is a great topic and, you know, we've, we've gone a little bit past our time, but it's, it's one those deep topics we could talk about for a long, long time. And, I, know, truth of the matter is time will tell, you know, like this is just, we're on that edge of the frontier where now we don't really, no one can say a hundred percent. we have to see how things kind of play out and, take it from there. Cort Sharp (34:27) Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more, Brian. I think this was a great topic. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. you got me a little more that I'm thinking about now. So thanks for that. Brian Milner (34:36) you Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Cort. Cort Sharp (34:41) Thanks, Brian.

Tendayi Viki joins Brian to unpack the difference between doing innovation and delivering value, with practical takeaways for product folks, innovation teams, and anyone who wants to stop spinning their wheels. Overview Innovation theater. Experimentation theater. Value that never quite materializes. In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with Tendayi Viki—author, strategist, and partner at Strategyzer—to talk about why so many organizations look like they’re innovating… but aren’t. Together, they dig into what real innovation looks like (and how to measure it), how to escape the trap of cool ideas with no customer value, and why experiments only matter if they lead to decisions. You’ll also learn how to spot the difference between a small bet and a large leap, and what it actually means to “be a pirate in the navy.” References and resources mentioned in the show: Tendayi Viki Tendayi’s Books Get the Agile Skills Video Library Use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Tendayi Viki is a globally recognized innovation strategist, author, and partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large organizations build real value—not just innovation theater. With a PhD in Psychology and a client list that spans Unilever to The British Museum, Tendayi brings deep insight into the human side of transformation, backed by frameworks that actually work. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner. And today I'm very, very excited. I have Mr. Tendayi Vicki with us. Tendayi, welcome in. Tendayi Viki (00:13) Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Milner (00:15) Very, very excited to have him here. Just to give you some background, if you're not familiar with his work, very prolific and very deep thinker here. He's a partner at a company called Strategizer, where he helps large companies innovate like startups. He's a regular contributor on Forbes, so you may have read some of his articles on Forbes. He's the author of three books, The Corporate Startup, Pirates in the Navy and the Lean Product Lifecycle. Pirates in the Navy is his latest one. Pirates in the Navy, correct me if I'm wrong, it's kind of about how to infiltrate via innovative presence in a large corporation. Is that correct? Tendayi Viki (00:55) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how to be a pirate in the Navy. Brian Milner (00:58) I love it. I love the title. ⁓ But his books are really practical. They're on building innovation ecosystems that actually work. He's advised some big companies like Unilever, Amex, and Lutanza. He's been named to Thinker's 50 radar list for his influence and innovation and strategy. But his passion is really helping teams avoid Tendayi Viki (00:59) that. Brian Milner (01:22) what do you terms as innovation theater and focus on creating real sustainable value. So I thought maybe that's a good place to just start to kick off a conversation and say, Tendayi, talk to us about innovation theater. What does that look like to you? How would you define that? What does that mean? Tendayi Viki (01:41) Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a term that's kind of simultaneously coined by Rita McGrath. Steve Blank has used it a few times, and so has Alex Osterwalder. And it's really about... So the thing about the startup world is that the startup world is kind of a coolness factor. So everybody wants to be cool. And then the toolbox that startups use in that cool design thinking, deep school vibe of like sticky notes and... design and prototyping and all that. So everybody wants to do all of those things. I've even watched teams actually engage in agile rituals. Like they do the daily stand up, they do the demo day, they do the retro, right? But when you really look at the, when you dive deep into the focus, it doesn't seem to be a lot of value creation. So you're like, you're doing a... a retrospective as an agile team and you're not talking about what you learned from customers. You didn't do that during that week's sprint. yeah, you can do all the rituals, but if you don't understand the reason the rituals exist, then it's easy for you to kind of just spin and not create any value. And that's innovation theory. Brian Milner (02:42) Yeah. Yeah. man, I am with you a million percent on that and completely agree. These structures are there to help kind of be a pathway to that, but not the end result. If you don't understand, just like you said, if you don't understand the reason behind it, the why, then yeah, you could go through all the motions. And I completely get that term, It's kind of theater. It looks like it's actually happening, but it's not really happening. The culture underneath it is not really there. ⁓ So that brings the million dollar question then, right? If these structures like we do, like standups and everything else, aren't going to automatically generate that kind of innovation and it's more of a culture thing, Tendayi Viki (03:28) Exactly. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (03:44) How do you then build a culture that is placing innovation as a priority? Tendayi Viki (03:53) So yeah, so just to answer your question, think one of the things that's really interesting about the way to create value is you have to authentically care about value creation first. You really have to understand this notion that innovation is this combination of really, really cool ideas, right? Together with a deep understanding of customers and their needs, and then a deep understanding of how to... use a business model that works to deliver that value to customers so you can get value back. Once you complete the entirety of that cycle, we say you're a successful innovator. If you complete the ideas or tech portion of that cycle, you're just an inventor or the ideas guy or whatever people call themselves, right? And so I find that companies excessively focus on ideas too much. And so too much focus on ideation and not enough focus on putting ideas on a journey towards value creation and actually value realization for the organization. So if you're going to build a culture for innovation, you have to understand what you're building it for. You to go, all right, we have to deliberately design our workflows and the way we interact with each other to discover what customers we need. Then we have to design the workflows to bring those customer needs into life through products. Then we have to test whether those products are really delivering that value. And then we have to figure out a way to scale that value and give value back to the moment of vision. you go, okay, that's the job. Now let's design the process, the culture, the toolbox, the artifacts, the rituals that allow us to actually do that. And I think that kind of understanding is probably more fundamental than anything else. Brian Milner (05:32) Yeah, absolutely agree. It's the structure for discovery, right? I mean, it's not the discovery. It's the structure that led you to the discovery that has to be repeatable that then can generate future discoveries. It's not how you found the island in the middle of the ocean. Or it's not the island you found in the middle of the ocean. It's how you found it. ⁓ that would lead you to find another one you know. ⁓ Tendayi Viki (05:55) Exactly. And that's the fundamental question is, can you find another island? Because again, innovation teams stumble a lot on good ideas. And so you can bumble into something good and then fail to do it again because you don't have a repeatable process. Brian Milner (06:01) Yeah. Yeah. So let's dive into that a little bit. mean, whether you're a startup or whether you're a bigger organization and you're working on a product in a bigger organization, I know that you can often feel like you're kind of, I was talking to someone this week about this, you kind of feel like you're drowning in a sea of opportunity. There's all these things that we could do and it's sometimes hard to find, well, which ones do we really Tendayi Viki (06:32) Mmm. Brian Milner (06:42) double down on which ones we invest in and really pour our time and energy and efforts into. So how do you talk about that in your book? How do you find the things that are worth really investing in? Tendayi Viki (06:54) Yeah. So I mean, mean, there's two ways, right? The one is the first one is a kind of like an art thing. It can be fed by data, but it's art and that's finding the direction of travel. So that's a strategy choice. We go, we think that an AI is big thing these days. We think that AI is going to do these various things to our business model. And that's really important, by the way, like when you think about AI. And Sharjee, Alex also has got one of my favorite all-time phrases, is AI changes everything and AI changes nothing. The fundamentals for business are still the same, even though the stuff that you can do is exponentially different. So you have to think which elements of the business model do we want to play with around here strategically. Brian Milner (07:26) Yeah. Yeah. Tendayi Viki (07:41) And then once you pick a direction of travel, now you've got multiple options of different product ideas, services, business model, value propositions, offerings, technology, stacks, et cetera, et cetera. Once you get to that point, you then cannot pick the winning idea on day one yourself. You have to stop building a systematic process of discovery. so you may be, and we, so we often say when you're at that stage, make multiple small bets, right? OK, and I like the way you phrased the question, by the way, because you said, how do you choose what to double down on? That's what you said. You said double down, right? Well, you don't double down on something unless you've made an initial small bet. You double down after an initial bet. Doubling down is I've made a bet, now I'm doubling down. But what companies do is they just make a large bet, and they call it doubling down. But it's not really doubling down. You've just made a large bet. Brian Milner (08:18) Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Tendayi Viki (08:38) Right? Doubling down is a follow on bet after an initial bet. And so it means that the first bet is a punt. It's a, see what happens bet. And then the question is, what do you want to see? So somebody just wants to see size of market. Somebody who's wanting to see a real customer with a real need. Somebody who just wants to see a real customer with a real need plus an internal capability to create value. So they'll say, if I give you my 50K, you have to answer both these questions before I double down. And some of these will say you have to answer only one of these questions before I double down. And then so I'll give you less, I'll give you 20K. So that's how you start building these frameworks, right? You start going like the one we built at Pearson, right? You go, ideas, it's ideation, it's strategic thinking. We don't invest any money. That's free. But when you start going into discovery, we might give you 25,000 pounds and you earn the next level of bet by the data you bring using that 25,000. And we have a list of questions that we need positive answers to before we actually make the doubling down. And so that's a way of curating ideas based on evidence and some kind of action and activity. Brian Milner (09:48) Yeah, it's amazing to me, like in some of the companies I work with, it's amazing to me to see how many times people will choose bets that they're going to make, but not really even be able to articulate what it is they hope that bet will actually do. Right? Not just, you know, like we have this feature that we're betting on and we think if we add this feature that it's going to, you know, be cool. It's gonna, you know, people will love it that will add this feature, but they don't go the extra step of being able to articulate, yeah, but what does that mean? Does it mean that you're gonna increase your return on investment? it gonna increase your customer satisfaction? So that kind of gets to the heart of how do you measure whether it's actually a successful bet or not? Tendayi Viki (10:39) Yeah, exactly. mean, to go way back in the days, to Dave McClure and the pirate metrics. I'm sure you were like, R, right? It's like if we do acquisition, activation, revenue retention, referral, whatever those R's are, you could add a few others that you want. So those are metrics. Why would we ever build a feature that's not connected to any one of those goals? Like, what's the point? Brian Milner (10:58) Yeah. Yeah. Tendayi Viki (11:07) Right. A measure of satisfaction is referrals, maybe. A measure of customer satisfaction is retention, maybe. You could measure customer satisfaction with your NPS scoring or whatever, right? Like, if you have all those things laid out, then you go, right now we're working on this thing because we believe that it's going to increase our ability to acquire customers. by how much? Possibly by 5%. OK, now we have a benchmark. Then we have a way to start testing whether the things we're building are actually Brian Milner (11:17) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (11:33) actually creating value. I don't think that there should ever be a wouldn't it be cool if conversation. Maybe at the beginning, but later. Brian Milner (11:39) ⁓ Yeah, businesses don't... Right. That's not really a great model to build a business on, right? It's just, I think it would be cool. Tendayi Viki (11:48) Yeah, it was crazy. I was once working in the large organization and they had disparate products on different platforms. So they had this thing where they were going to put it all as like one on one website, one platform, one product layout. And for them, it was in the backstage of the business, was value creation because it lowers costs and puts everything in an easy to manage place. But then I was like, have you guys ever considered that you could potentially destroy value by putting everything, like you could essentially like make it worth for customers. Like it's not automatic, but just because you've now put everything on this one thing, they even called it the one strategy, whatever. But then because you put it all in this one thing, that is automatically value for customers. So who's in charge of checking for that? Because it's distinctly possible that you've just made things worse. You're going to see a drop off in customers and you're to see a drop in revenue. So that's really something to always be thinking about, right? Brian Milner (12:21) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or kind of parallel to that would be if we wanted to add something because we thought it was going to increase customer satisfaction, but it kept customer satisfaction flat or even declined. But maybe it did something else well, like it raised revenue or something like that. It's still not a success, right? Because what you were trying to do was to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not what you did. So you still need to do that, you know? Tendayi Viki (13:09) Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you still need to fix it in such a way. If you want to retain it because it grew revenue, then you do need to make it work somehow to make customer satisfaction work because yeah, today's revenue is not tomorrow's revenue. Customer satisfaction is the best way to create value. Brian Milner (13:24) Exactly. Yeah. Well, this discussion seems to, know, when we talk about innovation and we talk about this product life cycle, there's, I think, you we can't avoid the term or the concept of experimentation a little bit. And I know you talk about that quite a bit in your writing, kind of the idea of experimentation and what that means, you know, as far as what the expectation should be when you experiment. on things. So I want you to talk a little bit about that. kind of what should what should we what should Scrum Masters product owners? What should we be thinking about when we what should agile teams think about when we think about experimentation and failure? You know, how does a healthy portfolio kind of bet? What does that look like? Tendayi Viki (14:15) Yeah. like I remember at the beginning, we talked about innovation theater. Remember at beginning? And we said that was like an excessive focus of, excessive focus on ideation. Then there's another form of experimentation theater, which is fascinating, but I've also noticed, which is people think they're doing well because they're running experiments. Right? Like they're running experiments. We did customer discovery. And Brian Milner (14:21) Yeah, yeah. Tendayi Viki (14:42) But the experiments they're running are not helping them make decisions about the product, the value proposition, or the business model. So I eventually wrote a piece. I think you've already find it in four or five years ago. But the goal of running experiments is not the experiment. The goal of running experiments is to make progress with your idea. That's the whole goal. So you have to set expectations. You cannot run an experiment that doesn't have a hypothesis and success criteria attached to it. Brian Milner (14:58) Yeah. Yeah. Tendayi Viki (15:11) Like success criteria and hypothesis first, then experiment. Whereas what happens in a lot of organizations, and I've noticed this is, they have a go-to method for experimentation. Like some organizations will go to market surveys. Some organizations will go to focus groups. They their go-to methods. So they've already decided what the method is going to be. And then they go, so for the focus group we're going to do next week, what are the questions that you'd ask? And it's like, no, that's backwards. First you have to figure out. Brian Milner (15:11) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (15:40) what you want to learn and then choose the experiment and then design the experiment to deliver those learnings and then look at the data and see if it allows you to make decisions. Great. So that's really, really important. So if you're a Scrum master, like that should be a fight that you have all the time. like, okay, when we finish the experiment, what decision will we be able to make? And then we go, oh yeah, we'll be able to make a decision of whether the pricing works. Brian Milner (15:42) Yeah. Mmm, love that. Tendayi Viki (16:08) We want to the decision of whether we should keep continue producing this feature or stop. We'll be able to make the decision of whether the position of this thing on the landing page is impacting sales. We should be able to make a decision. And then we say, OK, now we're running the experiment. Not to the experiment and then come back and go, yeah, we learned a lot. Customers are like this and customers are like that. it's like, OK, but what decision did you make after the learning? And that's a really important, the connection between experiments and decisions is something that Brian Milner (16:14) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (16:37) I don't see that happening a lot sometimes when I walk into an Agile team. Brian Milner (16:42) Yeah. Yeah, I love your connecting that to the theater kind of concept because you're absolutely right. From the outside looking in, it looks like, hey, great, they're doing all this experimentation, but it should be driving some decision. Like you said, it should be driving some kind of a movement forward. And if it's not, then you're going through the motions of doing the experimentation, but you're not really applying that that knowledge that you gain from it. yeah, that's why I think it's so important to be able to state it from the outset. Like you said, I've got to have the hypothesis. I've got to be able to say, here's what I hope to learn. Now let's try to do this thing and let's see what happens. And now we can say, now that we know this, what do we do about this? ⁓ Tendayi Viki (17:14) No. Exactly. And analysis paralysis is finding data for no reason. you don't have, like, what is the, why are we mining the data? What's the reason? What are we looking for? Because as soon as we find it, we stop. But if we're just like reviewing customer interviews and reviewing this, like it's interesting and it's busy work and it makes us feel like we've learned a lot, but we're not making business decisions at the end of the day. you know, it's not really valuable. Brian Milner (17:27) Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope this doesn't put you to the test too much because I know this is not your latest book, but in the lean product lifecycle, I know you talk about kind of how the product life cycle, I love that term even, that it is a life cycle of a product and it kind of goes through phases, maturity phases almost, you know, and that's because you kind of brought that up in what you just said about the fact that, Do we continue or do we not continue? So just for the listeners, can you maybe broadly lay that out for folks, help us to understand a little bit about what that life cycle looks like from idea to retirement? Tendayi Viki (18:24) Yeah. I mean, so in my experience, a product or a service has two lives, right? Well, actually maybe three lives. Let's call it three lives. There is life before product market fit, life after product market fit, and then life after decline. And so what tends to happen in organizations, which is where the product life cycle or the lead product life cycle is we ended up calling it, became really valuable is that Brian Milner (18:32) Ha ha. Tendayi Viki (18:51) The management tools for life after product market fit are the tools that are really prominent, the execution tools, the scaling, the forecasting, the business planning. That's all life after product market fit, because that's where they make sense. You know the customer, you know how much they will need to pay. You know how to scale. know how to... All of those things are useful for life after product market fit. And what we're trying to do with the Lean Product Lifecycle was to say, happens, what is life before product market fit? And life before product market fit is learning and discovery, it's not execution. So when innovation struggles inside large organizations, it's because they take the toolbox for after product market fit and apply it to before product market fit. So we're trying to a toolbox. So we're like, okay, so what's life before product market fit? Well, life before product market fit is having a great idea or a great collection of ideas that's aligned with your portfolio strategy. And so... Brian Milner (19:36) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (19:48) If you have a whole bunch of really good ideas that you think are going to help you navigate towards where you want to go as an organization, the question then becomes what's the next phase after that? So you run ideation competitions, you generate ideas. Well, if you're going to take the toolbox from life after product market fit, then the next thing you do after ideation is write a business plan. Brian Milner (20:08) Hahaha. Tendayi Viki (20:09) And thinking like, no, you've jumped over a couple of things first. You've just had an idea, you've got to plan first, right? You got to do other things. You got to do something to check if your idea has legs. And so that's when we came up with the next phase after, idea creation, which we called Explore. So we said, OK, so you explore whether the idea has legs. And Explore is focused on deeply understanding customers and their needs. Brian Milner (20:14) Yeah Yeah. Tendayi Viki (20:39) understanding, willingness to pay, size of monoket, just kind of understanding like the front stage of your business model. And if you find that the idea sounded good, but there's no customer need that's going to be able to serve for this, you can do two things. You can make a decision. You can stop the idea or you can change direction to whatever you learned. And then we're like, okay, so after that, we moved to another stage we called validation, which is really now about validating the product, the backstage, the business model, the pricing, the channels. How are you going to scale it? So if you get positive outcomes, now you go product market fits. Then you can go to grow, scaling to the whole thing. Eric Gris wrote about growth engines, What are your growth engines really important and how do you drive growth? And then after a while, the product matures and if you can't figure out a way to revamp the growth, then you can move into what we call the sustained stage where you're sort of sustaining, lowering costs while maintaining revenue. And then after a while you... move to the third phase, which is about taking about which is, you know, retiring the product. And what we tried to do at Pearson was we tried to create a process for actively retiring things. So we would walk into these investment boards and go, great, you want to unlock money for innovation? Which thing are you holding on for dear life, just in case one customer asks for it? And they're like, but this thing, this thing, I'm like, kill all that, like actively retired, go through it systematically, get in touch with the customer. Brian Milner (21:44) Yeah. Ha ha ha! Tendayi Viki (22:03) Say, what do you need? We'll put it for you in this place. It won't change. You can always access it, but there's no more support for that. Like do it in an active way. That way you can systematically move resources from declining products into innovation. So that's effectively the lean product life cycle and the way we designed it. Brian Milner (22:20) Yeah, it's awesome. And what really kind of stood out to me is that there's, we're talking kind of more about at a larger level, at a product level, but the same things actually, it's really quite parallel for a feature level, for items within a product that, you know, they go through sort of a very similar life cycle that you have to explore and you have to understand. what the customer is, what their want is. You have to find the market fit for it. Once you find the fit, you have to expand it. And then you have to eventually end up at retirement because there are certain things that's... I kind of want to get your opinion on this. We seem so reluctant to accept that. The concept of whether it's a product or a feature, the idea that no, it's time to now let that go play on a farm upstate. Why do you think as humans, because I know your background is in psychology, I'm kind of curious what your view is there from a psychological standpoint. Why do think we as humans are so reluctant to let go of these things that we've Tendayi Viki (23:16) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm. Brian Milner (23:34) we've invested on in the past, have produced for us in the past. Tendayi Viki (23:38) Yeah, I mean, it's a whole bunch of things, There's inertia, right? It's just like, it's effort to stop something, relook at it, take it off, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's also loss aversion. I I think product teams can always imagine what might happen if one customer shows up and things no longer there. It's like, no, we had three clicks last month. Those three customers. So there's always that fear of like, what might happen. And so you do need to make a discussion. And one of the things that I love about it, Brian Milner (23:57) Yeah. Yeah Tendayi Viki (24:08) Some of the product thinking I've seen out there is like, if we're going to add a feature, if we don't want our product to become bloated, what are we dropping? Right? And so you've always got like on the bubble things to drop that you've been thinking about actively. Then you just think about how do you like roll those things out while you're adding new things? Because yeah, it's not some Frankenstein products in the end, right? You keep adding features, but you're not taking anything off. It becomes really hard to use. Yeah. Brian Milner (24:14) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, I don't want to let you get out of here without at least giving us a little bit about your latest book, Pirates in the Navy, because it's such a great title. just maybe kind of help us understand a little bit about what was your thought behind that topic. What led you to write that book and what really interested you about that? Tendayi Viki (24:52) Yeah. So, first it was my own like horrible experiences as an innovator inside large organizations, like the kind of mistakes I made. remember once being in a room, running a workshop to try and convince a group of leaders to buy into this innovation process that we were trying to create. And I was getting a lot of pushback, lot, a lot of pushback. And then after the workshop, one of the leaders who kind of took me aside and was like, you know, today I was watching everything you were saying and this Brian Milner (24:58) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (25:21) very little to disagree with about the things you were saying, but what we didn't like was the way you made us feel. so most of the pushback was not really about your idea, it about the way you made us feel. And I said, okay, so over time it's gonna land on me, but like a very slow landing, like would be like, like how slow it's been landing on me. It landed on me that actually, if you're gonna do corporate innovation or any kind of transformation. Brian Milner (25:28) Hmm. Yeah. Tendayi Viki (25:49) the number one skill is actually relationship building. The number two skill is being a good innovator. But what we tend to do is we tend to make innovation the number one thing. We even think of innovators as mavericks. But actually, Pirates in the Navy was this reminder, because there's even a chapter in there that I call, you're not Elon Musk and you don't work in a company full of idiots. It was just a reminder to say, yeah, you don't work in a company full of idiots. People know what they're doing. They've been running the company for a while. They may have blind spots, but they're not idiots. So it's a mutual respect thing that you kind of have to build. so actually, it's funny because I'm about to publish an article in a couple of weeks and a newsletter this week, which is called Innovators Does Not Equal Maverick. And what I'm trying to do is to create this disassociation between having crazy ideas and being difficult to work with. Because we often tend to think that people like Steve Jobs is really like iconic. And part of the iconicness, is that how you say it? The iconography of Steve Jobs is not just how brilliant he was with the product, it's also how difficult he was to work with. Like everybody's like really like, you know, but that's actually pretty rare. Brian Milner (26:54) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (27:08) Like serial entrepreneurs are people that are really good at working with others. Right. And so that's what Pirates in the Navy is actually really about. Yeah. Brian Milner (27:14) Yeah. Yeah, and I've seen people, unfortunately, who have used that example as, well, Steve Jobs was an asshole. I guess that's what I need to be is an asshole because that's what works. No, please, that's not what made him successful was being an asshole, right? Yes. Tendayi Viki (27:31) Thanks. Yeah, no, he succeeded in spite of that, not because of that. And so it's something that's kind of foundationally important. So I have like this thing that I do some conversations that I have with colleagues, just to kind of say, I can usually tell, it's like one of my subtle internal pains that I feel. I can usually sense when an innovator is going to burn out in a logical. Brian Milner (27:58) Yeah. Tendayi Viki (28:02) And that's when every time they open their mouth, people are like... And then so they create like innovation is already a form of deviance, right? Cause you're trying to do something different from the organization. So you don't want to pile on your own personal deviance on top of the ideas deviance, right? You want to be, yeah, it's really important. And so that's what the book was about by the way. The title is a catchy, but it's really just about how do you actually succeed as an innovator inside these more structured institutions. Brian Milner (28:10) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. for our listeners here, this will all be in our show notes so that you can find quick links to this, find more about Tendayi and kind of his work. But I can't thank you enough for coming on. I really appreciate it. This has been a fascinating conversation. And I just really strongly encourage the listeners, if you like this, if you really found this conversation interesting, check out his work, check out the corporate startup. Tendayi Viki (28:44) Thank you. Brian Milner (28:54) Check out the Lean Product Lifecycle and his newest book, Pirates in the Navy. They're really, really good and I think you'll really enjoy it. So, Tadayi, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tendayi Viki (29:04) Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation too.

Five years post-COVID, are we any closer to knowing what kind of work environment actually works best? Brian and Lance dig into the real drivers behind return-to-office mandates, remote productivity myths, and why "context beats location" every time. Overview The return-to-office debate isn’t over—it’s evolving. In this episode, Brian Milner welcomes back frequent guest and fellow Agile coach Lance Dacy for a wide-ranging conversation about remote work, in-office mandates, and the big question: what actually boosts team performance? Together, they explore what we’ve learned (and what we haven’t) in the five years since COVID reshaped the way we work. With studies offering conflicting conclusions and executives often leading with personal preference, Brian and Lance unpack how leaders can navigate decisions that impact morale, productivity, and long-term value delivery. From context-driven collaboration to psychological safety, this is a nuanced take on one of Agile’s most pressing modern challenges. References and resources mentioned in the show: Lance Dacy Excerpt from A Leader's Guide to Agile eBook Scrum, Remote Teams, & Success: Five Ways to Have All Three by Brian Milner #61: The Complex Factors in The Office Vs. Remote Debate with Scott Dunn Using a Task Board with One Remote Team Member Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back. Thank you for bearing with us for a little bit of a break there. If you notice, we have not been releasing episodes the past few weeks because we've been practicing sustainable pace, but we are back and we are ready to dive into some really, really gritty topics, some things that we think will be really beneficial. Who better to kick us back off to bring us back around than a friend of the show, Lance Dacey, who is with us today. Welcome in, Lance. Lance Dacy (00:25) Right now. Thank you, Brian. How was Hawaii, that big sabbatical y'all took in July? Brian Milner (00:34) Yeah, Hawaii is always great, right? Hawaii is awesome. Absolutely. Isn't that what everyone did in July? ⁓ Well, we're glad to be back and we're excited about what we're going to talk about today because we figured why start with something that was not controversial? Why not find something very controversial? Lance Dacy (00:36) My tie's on the beach. That's where you over. I mean, I didn't see y'all there, but yeah. Brian Milner (00:58) and just set ourselves up to receive lots of disgruntled emails that we're probably going to get this wrong. We're probably going to get awesome feedback too. But I'll just go ahead and start by saying, hey, we hope you give us a little grace on this topic. We're just talking from our experience, our opinions. And I know there's lots of opinions on this, but we wanted to focus on the fact that Lance Dacy (01:06) No, awesome feedback, Brian. Awesome feedback. We're going to get awesome feedback. Brian Milner (01:25) Hey, we're five years removed from the COVID outbreak. And when COVID happened, that was a massive disruption in work. We all had to learn how to do work in a different way, but five years in, what have we learned? What's changed? And now we're seeing lots of things like return to office mandates and hybrid working agreements. You must be here for this many days a week or other things. Lance Dacy (01:44) and Brian Milner (01:50) or companies that say, no, we're now fully remote and we're doing things this way. But I saw this kind really interesting question that made me think about this. If you were designing the workplace from scratch today, would anyone build cubicles? And I thought, well, that's a really interesting question. So Lance, what do you think we've learned in the last five years? Where do think we are today with this whole work from home versus return to office? Lance Dacy (02:16) I tell you what, Brian, I sit there and think, man, five years is a long time to have empirical data. And I don't believe we have data. Let me say it this way. We got the data. What does it mean? You know, so and I'm a data guy. You all know that. And I'm sitting there trying to look at it going, I don't know how much we've learned. think what we've learned is there's no right answer. Brian Milner (02:22) Yeah. Yeah. Lance Dacy (02:39) And everybody's, especially organizations, we're looking for the right answer. Just give me the answer and let's go for it. You and I, coach and consult and people hire us to tell them sometimes what they need to do. And sometimes we're like, no, we're not going to tell you what to do. We're going to learn what the issues are. And then based on that, what should we go from? And I find, you know, if I had to sum up what we've learned, remote can be great, right? Office can be great. neither is a silver bullet. That's what I want. So I'm going to go back to my coaching stance and say, well, let's define the outcome, measure with a multi-focus, multi-factor, multi-dimensional metrics of what we're trying to actually accomplish with our people, experiment, and then keep an eye on the team health. I still feel like that's what we're doing. Five years sounds ridiculous that we haven't figured that out. But I think it was so disruptive that five years isn't enough. And I think the work on top of that is changing so radically. have too many variables up in the air. So for now, if I had to make a decision, I lean toward co-location. When the work is ambiguous, when relationships are important or new, that's another one. If we've got a lot of new people together, working remote is going to be a very difficult thing for a while. So, you know, I'd say, hey, if I'm starting a company and the work is ambiguous, you know, kind like a software product company, the work we're not quite sure what we're doing and needs a lot of collaboration and and a lot of hands on, you know, trust with each other, then I'm probably going to say, let's let's be in the same area sometime. You know, I'm not saying every single day, but. That's how I'm gonna lean towards. And then I'm gonna say if your work is predictable, repeatable, doesn't require a lot of that, and you need intense focus, well then maybe remote is fine for you. So how's that for an answer? I don't know. Brian Milner (04:32) No, think that's a look. I don't think there's ever I don't think you're ever worse off by by being able to admit that right to just say, you know what? I don't know. And I think sometimes that's part of the problem with the way that we approach certain issues is that people are reluctant to say that right. They're reluctant to just admit, you know what? I don't really know. I don't really have the answer on this yet. And I think you're hitting on something that's really important is that there is Lance Dacy (04:39) Right. Brian Milner (04:59) You said no silver bullet. I also think there's no one right answer. I don't think that there is a right answer to this question of should you be in the office or should you be remote? think, right. Lance Dacy (05:12) confidence interval, right? I mean, it's like, there's no, it's not it's not binary. So I agree with you. Brian Milner (05:16) Right. Yeah, there are certain industries, certain products, certain job types that I think are better in the office. And there are others that I think are better remote. And I think what you got to do, and I think I love your return to kind of a coaching stance and looking at this. What's the goal? And I think that's what you have to try to distill it down to is what's the purpose? What's the goal we're trying to reach here? If it's productivity, then let's talk about productivity. If it's morale, if it's enhancing communication, it starts from there. Define what it is that we want as our end goal, and then we can start to find data. We can start to find empirical evidence that either supports or detracts from whatever hypothesis we think we have about this. And that should be what leads us. Lance Dacy (06:10) And it could change, you know, that's the other problem. One quarter, it may be better the stuff we're working on. We're in the office more often. The next quarter, maybe we agree too much. Now, the problem is you go survey people. Let's talk about productivity. You ask, let's say a programmer. Okay, I'm just going to say garden variety programmer, highly skilled. You ask them where they are most productive and most of them, I'm not going to indict everybody, most of them will say, Brian Milner (06:22) Yep. Yes, let's do it. Lance Dacy (06:39) I want to be left alone, no meanings, in silence, coding on my keyboard. They may be going a direction completely opposite of where we need to go, and we won't know that until they come together. And so the other problem with this is we're asking sometimes the wrong question with the wrong people. You ask a single programmer where they're more productive. It's sitting in my office being able to go get a coffee when I want, not sitting in traffic. Hey, I'm all for that. Who's productive in traffic other than, I'm listening to books, you know, so I am growing myself. But nobody, I'd be hard pressed to find anybody saying I love sitting in traffic. So let's put that to the side. Nobody wants to drive two hours a day to their office and back home. That's terrible. But if you ask a programmer that, would you concur that most of them would say, I'm most productive, just leave me alone. Let me write all the code I want. Brian Milner (07:16) You Lance Dacy (07:30) What do you think of that? So now that's the wrong question then, because now we're working in an agile type, let's say in an agile context, where we're working in an empirical nature, which says we don't know what we're doing. So the more iterative and incremental feedback, the better we understand, are we on the right path or not? Brian Milner (07:33) I think that's probably true. I think most developers would say that, yeah. Lance Dacy (07:52) And so if I was to say, it more productive to let the individuals be efficient at what they're doing and then come together later to learn that we got a big gap where we were from? Or do we sacrifice individual productivity with a lot of collaboration, which they may term as meetings? I don't like to call them meetings, they're working sessions, right? We had a backlog discussion about this, I believe, you not long ago. Backlog refinement is not a meeting. It's a working session to say, hey, customer needs this. How are we going to do it? You know, and What is it that they need? So I find, I'm debating with people on LinkedIn a lot, I love this, so this is why it's top of mind, is even if the customer knows 100 % of what they want, which let's just say they won't, but if they did, you do not know how to build it. One programmer may, but when you got four programmers, some testers, some database people, architect, all these cross-functional skills, how can you sit in a vacuum and do that? So if your work... requires multiple skills to come together and you're trying to build a done increment by the end of one, two, three or four weeks, having an individual productivity to me could be harmful. you look, I told this guy on LinkedIn that I don't believe productivity is one dimensional. So he referenced a Stanford, let's see, this was in 2023, that he was saying that, you know, the Stanford study showed that people were more productive working at home. Well, it was actually a 10 % decline for call center staff, by the way. So that work is not as collaborative, I would say, maybe. That same study, though, found 35 % lower attrition, higher employee satisfaction, which raised the long run throughput. So while they declined in productivity at home 10%, most executives would go, no, I got to come to the office. We can't have that. But what if I told you, you say 35 % on whatever the number is, attrition and employee satisfaction in the long run, would you rather take that gamble or not? know, Gallup did the same thing. He was referencing a state of workplace and they find, you know, customer loyalty and margin was better for people that were in the office. They may be less productive individually, but the customers saw a better outcome. So what are we measuring, right? So Brian, that's what I look at. with these productivity debates, I'm like, my gosh, what does productivity mean? Are we optimizing for delivery to the customer flow, or are we optimizing for the individual utilization of the people on the teams? And I think executives have to make a choice. And I say executives, because they're the ones who influence heavily, whether we, I'll talk about culture in a second. But I find that, If people steer towards individual productivity, we might be sub-optimizing, right? We know this. mean, we know flow and systems thinking and, you know, all the things that we read in books with lean and inefficiency and cross-functional teams. But what is productivity? I don't know. You have to define that. So that's where I go back. What are you trying to achieve? Individual utilization, work from home. Let's go. You want delivery to your customer? Maybe not. Right. Brian Milner (10:54) So. Right. No, you're making an excellent point. so I'll throw maybe a massive curve ball into this discussion because I would propose that we may not, if we're looking at productivity as whether in an agile organization, we should return to office or not, we may be looking at the complete wrong thing because Productivity, I would propose, and I say this all the time in classes, productivity isn't the answer. What do we hear all the time now about AI and developers is that AI is enhancing productivity. It's allowing them to do more in less time. Well, that's great. Individual, right. But that's a volume. Lance Dacy (11:42) Individual productivity, individual productivity. Brian Milner (11:48) calculation, right? When we talk about productivity, that's usually we're referring to a volume type calculation. But that's, you and I both know very well that the missing gap there is actually the value gap. And so the question is, if we're producing a larger volume of work because we are remote, does that matter if the volume of work that we're producing is things no one cares about? We're all familiar with all the studies that show, I've seen multiples, it's somewhere between 64 to 80 % of what people produce in software is rarely or never used. depending on the study that you follow there with that, and if that's true, exactly, that's my point. Right. And so if that's the point, does it matter if we are more productive from home? Does it matter if we're less productive from home? Lance Dacy (12:30) If that's half wrong, it's unacceptable. So it doesn't matter. Brian Milner (12:43) I don't know that it does. think what matters more importantly to an agile organization is are we more producing more value in a remote environment? Are we producing more value in an office environment? And that's something I don't know that there is a study on. Lance Dacy (12:59) Well, how would you study it, right? Because we were just talking about this before we were trying to debate, you know, what is it exactly that we're going to cover? Because we just, it's too big, right? It's maybe a multi-part thing, but it's like, even if you did the study, who are you surveying? Is everybody the same? Like we go into organizations all the time. Yes, the organization's unique. Y'all do unique things. You're great. Your problems are not unique. How we approach solving the problem, we can borrow from other things that we've done. But when you go do a survey, Brian Milner (13:08) Yeah. Lance Dacy (13:29) Are you really ensuring that you're getting all the different psychological profiles? Because I'm going to wrap that discussion up by saying somebody's preference may override everything. who are you serving? Are you getting a good sample that mimics what you might see on a team? So going back to that Stanford study, you have to ask the executives, would you sacrifice 10 % lower productivity for work from home call staff? And I know that's different work than software, but let's just, these are real studies out there. If that same study found a 35 % lower attrition and higher employee satisfaction, what if your people are happier working but less productive and it saves you in the long run from attrition? Is that metric matter? Your CFO would argue yes. You know, it costs a lot of money to hire somebody, bring them on board and you lose all of that knowledge. So yeah, I have the problem of working at home. This is me. I don't like working at home. Okay, I do it for a living. Brian Milner (14:19) Yeah. Yeah. Lance Dacy (14:28) And I have my own little office and I try to shelter myself away, but I love to compartmentalize work or else I'll work all the time. So when I work at home, just nothing, it's hard for me to have barriers. That's just a discipline and rigor thing. When I went into the office, I could hit it hard. You know, I'd go in early. I wouldn't take lunch. just, I'd put in my time, be very productive. I'd leave four or five, be home. And then I was done. You know, of course you answer emails and stuff like that, but that's me. So are you surveying me? Brian Milner (14:57) Right. Lance Dacy (14:57) Would you rather have me happy and be at home and, I'm going to go run this errand right now. I was less productive today because I chopped up my time and lost flow and context switching, but I'm a happier employee and I contribute a lot to the bottom line. So what are we measuring? Right. So I feel like all that to say is I think you hit it on the head. What is, what is it that you're trying to measure? If it's just productivity, yeah, they'll go in the office because this study says 10 % less, but the same study says. Brian Milner (15:17) Mmm. Lance Dacy (15:25) Better attrition rate, higher employee satisfaction. Do your people matter? Well, if that's the case, are you going to sacrifice 10 % productivity? I would. I want happy people working for me. But I don't want that. Brian Milner (15:30) Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's a great point. And, and, know, happy people do a better job. Happy people, you know, take care of your customers better. There's, there's a enormous benefits from that. And there's, know, there's lots of, lots of speakers and authors out there that will point you to the fact that in leadership, the job is to try to put your employee first and take care of the employees. If you take care of your employees. the employees take care of your customers and that's what you want them to do. And I agree with that. I think that's a good approach. yeah, I think you're right. There's impacts here across the board. And as you said, it's a really broad topic. Lance Dacy (16:20) Well, let's go back to that other thing just real quick. Lance would rather go into the office. Brian Milner (16:25) Right. Lance Dacy (16:25) Let's say Brian, I don't know, haven't dove into your preferences yet. Brian wants to work at home. He wants to be with his kids, pick them up at school. That's right, you know, that's a righteous thing. I love that. All right. So the company would value having both of us. So now what do we do both? You know, we allow an office space and pay for the real estate and all that to let Lance come in because that's what he likes. And we also let Brian stay at home. And then at some point, where do you get them together to solve big problems? I mean, that's the age old. Brian Milner (16:27) Yeah. Lance Dacy (16:54) issue is I think the organization based on what they're doing for that set of time in the initiative has to define what is it is most important to us. And you might even have to shift people around to different work to do that. Say, well, Brian's not a fit for this new thing we're working on because he likes to work at home. So do we have a mechanism and offices to do that? I don't think we're good at doing. Brian Milner (17:17) Yeah. Lance Dacy (17:17) We just hire people and say, here's your job and your pigeon hole for it and career growth and get so busy. It's hard for managers to focus on that. You know, I don't know. Brian Milner (17:25) Yeah, I mean, the thing that I've heard most from people who have been on one side or the other side of this issue is kind of the frustration that they feel sometimes with mandates one way or the other, that they're not based on fact, they're not based on anything but one person's preference who happens to be then the leader, right? So if Lance is the leader and Lance prefers to be in the office, then Lance might say, That's it, everyone's come back to the office because I just think that's a better way of working. And, right. Lance Dacy (17:56) I mean, how many leaders are like that, right? It's like they mimic that preference. you know, it's such a hard thing. think of the other thing, this debate I was having with this gentleman on LinkedIn, really good one, by the way, I love debates. I'm always wrong. I'm okay with that. But I feel like how we would sum that up is that context beats location. So you got teams. So Microsoft, let me find the study here. Microsoft did a study called the New Future of Work. This was just in 2022, by the way. So it is a little bit older, but they said teams with tight, rapidly shifting interdependencies, so things like early stage product discovery, like a lot of us do, they pay a coordination tax when every issue becomes a chat thread. I loved how they said that. There's a coordination tax. I've always said in software, there's a release tax. You know, what's the tax of the release to actually get the software into the hands of the user is usually pretty big and it doesn't reveal itself until the end. So coordination tax exists for those kinds of teams. Now conversely, the study says work that lends itself to deep focus, just like you said at the kickoff with asynchronous handoffs, like a good parallel flow, like a relay race type thing, sees a gain of 15 to 40 % with remote workers according to active track. 2023. You can find, by the way, any study to support your view. Let's just agree with that, that confirmation bias is rampant in this discussion, we're, Brian and I are actually trying to be, what's the word, neutral as much as possible with our own preferences to just showcase. So go find a study that matches what you want and you're going to be fine. But the really smart people are going to find the ones that argue against your point. Brian Milner (19:17) Sure. Lance Dacy (19:40) and then let you figure out, just like what you do with stakeholders, there's a trade-off. There's not one perfect answer. You want this or that? You can't have it all. So, I don't know. Brian Milner (19:48) Well, if I'm a leader in an organization today and I'm trying to make this decision, should I bring people back to the office, should I not, I know there's lots of things to think about. Did we sign a 20 year lease with this building that we're gonna be paying for anyway? That's a consideration. Right, right, that's obviously a concern. Now, Lance Dacy (19:55) about the office today. We're paying $180,000 a month for an empty building. Brian Milner (20:11) from the counterpoint that you can say, that's your fault. Why did you make that decision that was a bad decision, right? And maybe that's true, I don't know, but that's certainly part of that decision is, hey, this is part of our bottom line. Lance Dacy (20:23) Would you rather have a job or tell me that that's a bad decision? Because if we pay $180,000 a month, you're not going to have a job. We're out of business. You know, it's like... Brian Milner (20:30) Right, right, but what I'd be trying to do is find what's the best thing for my company, for this set of employees. That's really the question that's the most important. And I think there's, we talked a little bit about this before as well. And we discussed it a little bit that there's preferences, but there's also the psychological impacts of doing these things and what that kind of reflects on your workforce. Lance Dacy (20:41) Yeah. Brian Milner (20:58) I know I saw the study that was from McKinsey. This was from 2021. their study showed one in three American workers felt their mental health worsened after returning to in-person work. One in three. Now, again, let's stop, right? That's a statistic, but let's look at even what this said. One in three felt that their mental health worsened, right? And that's... That's not an objective fact. That's a feeling that is one person feels this way, the another person feels that way. It is something you can track with a statistic, it's still kind of subjective when you think about that kind of thing. I think probably a lot of people I would assume feel like people's mental health is in general. Lance Dacy (21:32) Yeah, you did something you can try and try. Brian Milner (21:49) better without commuting and being at home that they would tend to towards that overall. But like we were saying before, there are some negative impacts of working from home as well. You're less connected, you're more isolated. don't get feedback as often as you would. You don't learn. Lance Dacy (22:04) your I'm getting in love. Brian Milner (22:15) as much because you don't have just the ability to have some of those things. ⁓ There are people who miss the structure, the routine that comes from being in an office place. You mentioned the work-life balance thing. I think that that's true as well. We often tend to think work-life balance only is if you're remote, that that's a better work-life balance. But yes, that is real concern as well. I work out of my house, so I am always at work. Lance Dacy (22:19) But who do you he asked? Or who like? Brian Milner (22:40) I'm expected to always respond to emails. I'm expected to always finish that thing. Right. Lance Dacy (22:43) Yeah. Somebody believes that right somewhere. you know, going back to the study you just cited, when you ask somebody or when you say, hey, you're not learning as much or disconnected, the individual may be OK with that. They're like, yeah, that's great. I don't have to do all that. But then what you're sacrificing is the is the is the actual ROI of whatever it is you're building. So I want to go back to you just said something. This is amazing. First of all. 2021, we were still in the pandemic. Mental decline was already, you know, everybody was probably stressed. I hate to use the word everybody and always, but that was a hard time for a lot of us, right? So your mental condition in 2021, I would argue is already affected and clouded. Now I'm going to tangent a little bit with the discipline and rigor of exercise and eating healthy. Okay. So let's say that I want to get better and I'm going to go to the gym. you know, five days a week for 30 minutes and just try to get in that habit. If you were to ask me three days after going to the gym, you know, how do you feel? I'm going to be like, it's terrible. I heard I'm getting up at 430. I'm lacking of sleep. So it's a recursive problem. You got to get good sleep to lose weight and get physically fit and all that. But I'm losing sleep. I got to learn how to go back to bed. But you asked me early on, I'm probably miserable. with any kind of change effort. We know that, you know, we're in the change effort business. Rarely is anybody like right at the beginning of the change going, yes, you know, it's like it's so I feel like that's a little bit biased as well. Of course, they're probably saying, this is terrible because I'm used to being at home all the time. know, it's like, yeah. Brian Milner (24:21) Yeah. Well, and we were talking before to even the productivity kind of studies, right? And please, I feel like that if you're listening to this, you may think that I'm trying to make a case for one versus the other. really am not. I think, right. mean, well, what you said earlier, you tend to like more of the opposite. Well, I'll share them. I tend to more like the remote. I'm more of a remote person. ⁓ Lance Dacy (24:33) Would you like So I had that right. Brian Milner (24:46) You had it right. You definitely had it right. But like even some of the studies that are on productivity, the question or if you read what the data is showing, it's saying they're asking employees, do you feel more productive if you're in the office or at work? And even there, the workers will often say, no, I feel more productive at home. And the managers will often say, well, my employees, I feel my employees are more productive when they're in the office than when they're remote. And that's a feeling that's not a hard data point. It's a data point of people's emotional kind of feeling in relation to it. But it's not a data point of what the actual productivity is. And so even there, think we have to be careful. My favorite phrase I use all the time in class is data or didn't happen. when you... when you read statistics, I think it's really important for us to zoom in on it, say, what exactly is this showing? What's the question that's being asked here? How was the data collected? Even there, was this a scientific study or was this an internet poll where anyone who could come online could take the poll and it's not a scientific sampling, right? There's several of those in our industry. How many people prefer this in Agile versus this in Agile? But hey, go to the website and fill it out and sign up. Well, that's not a scientific survey. know, people could create bots to go in and answer it a certain way a million times. And all of a sudden, hey, data shows. No, it's because you didn't do a scientific survey. So I think it's always a valid point, especially in these kind of really hotbed kind of issues and discussions, to really question the source of the data and say, What is the point behind it? What is it that we're trying to, what's their end goal? And if there are studies, what was the methodology of that study? Is it really proving what I'm trying to decide here or was it proving something entirely different? Lance Dacy (26:40) really critical to the science of design. just like a new prescription or something, right? You wanna go read who bought the study because it's like a lot of times that can affect it as well. But I think what you mentioned, know, we haven't, the points I was starting out with were productivity, context beats location. So instead of asking, should we be at home or in the office, say, what's the work we're doing? There is no doubt when we say, hey, Brian and Lance, Lance likes to go to the office, Brian likes to stay at home. There's no doubt there's times where there's no traffic walking up the stairs and into my office and I can crank out three hours worth of productive work, just focus. But imagine if you're solving a hard problem stumbling with something and if you just hopped on a 30 minute Zoom call or if you went into the office and brainstorm, you might would have saved eight hours of productive work. So I think a lot of times people have this stigma about meetings and that's why I like to change them to they're not meetings, if you're going to a meeting, that's maybe one thing, but the stuff we're trying to do, like in Scrum or something, you know, the Sprint Review, the retrospective, the Daily Scrum, those are not meetings. Those are collaborative working sessions that have a general outcome. But what you just talked about, I'm going to call it culture, is a force multiplier on this thing as well that can also change based on the type of work we're doing. you know, Amy Edmondson does a lot of great work in this, her book, Fearless Organization or something like that. She talks about this concept that psychological safety can predict error sharing and innovation, whether you're onsite or remote. So it doesn't matter. and you know, Jeff Sutherland does a lot of talks about this, that as far as scrum's concerned, the, the small cross functional, you know, co-located teams, that was a workaround because of the technology they had back in the late eighties and early nineties. You know, I remember the days of ISDN lines where it was $400 a minute to get on a video. Brian Milner (28:30) Yeah. Lance Dacy (28:35) Well, there's a lot better tools these days that we can still collaborate remotely. just don't, had this argument that I, with the guy on LinkedIn, that I think a team sitting together has osmotic communication as well. Just sitting in the room hearing things sometimes can help you. But of course, if you're just working on something that you need focus in, that's a distraction, right? So I think we can simulate much of that stuff as far as the culture's concerned. only if we have norms though. So the other thing is working agreements. Can we have an agreement as a team that we're going to have cameras on, that we're going to have rapid feedback? You know, they need to be explicit and that might be the solution. You know, so you have to build a culture around whatever mechanism you're going to use. And I still think hybrid is probably the answer. So you can just say we're going to go hybrid and it depends on the work for the quarter of the year, whatever your planning cycle is, and try to mix and match teams to do that. I think we've reached a maturity especially in the product development world, we're less distracted about the technology, let's focus on the people. That's the hard thing now. The hardest problem is the people coming together, not are we going to be cloud or whatever? Those questions have been answered. So I think the culture is a force multiplier is the third angle to this, that you just need working agreements, you need norms, you need agreements on it. And then that way you don't have these people building resentment, because I can't tell you how many people I talked to that they're like, my company's asking us to return to the office. Well, if they would tell you why and you had a say in it, or if they, you I don't know. just, it's such a hard thing for executives to deal with. Brian Milner (30:05) Yeah. Well, it's the old thing from a parent point of view as well, right? When you tell your kids, hey, do this thing. Why? Why am I going to do it? Because I said so. know, if the parent, right, if your parent says just because I said so, how do you feel when you're a kid and you hear that you think, well, that's not good enough. I want to know the logic behind it. I want to understand that it's justified. And I think as we mature, that's even more the case, we don't want to do something just because someone dictates it to us. We want to understand why it's important and what value comes out of it and that it's a valuable use of my time. I mean, that's the thing I would say to any leader that's listening is if you are going to make a decision one way or the other on this, make sure you share your reasoning. Make sure that it's not just, hey, because this is my feeling personally on it and you just got to go along with what I say. Lance Dacy (31:01) Well, the kids, you know, I can understand. We'll go back to the shoe-haw-ree thing, right? So at some point you're raising your kids. You're like, first of all, you just do what I say without delay or challenge. I remember teaching my kids that because there may be a time where I say, don't run out in that street or stop. And I don't want you to turn around go, well, why I want to do this and that? Like, well, because there's an 18-wheeler flying by. I don't have time to argue with you. Right. So you start building that, that discipline. I can understand that, but we're way past that with professionals. Brian Milner (31:01) have some reason, right? Lance Dacy (31:29) that are working in the workplace. If any executive feels like that their answer, just like you said, because I even hated it as a kid, I want to know why. I can support it. Maybe I disagree with it. But if you tell me why you're doing like, well, that makes sense. And now I can be your biggest champion. Right. So so many executives just do it because I said so. I'm your boss. Well, you need to find a new job, sir or ma'am. You know, so I don't I don't necessarily I think we have have to grow beyond that. So that's a great point. Brian Milner (31:50) Yeah. Lance Dacy (31:57) that we have to mimic that along with culture. I think, you know, the angle to that as well, as far as context beats location, the fourth one I was gonna, told this guy on LinkedIn, that experience matters as well in this debate. So if you're brand new versus if you've been doing the work for a long time, I think we'll call them veteran developers, know, veteran people who do so. they develop what's known as a tacit bandwidth, right? The ability to read the room, see what's going on. I've seen that problem 100 times. They intervene early. There's a book out there called Team Genius, and they talk about this tacit bandwidth that veterans have. a lot of people find that easier to be done in person, and junior colleagues actually learn faster that way, if they can see it and be gravitating towards that. Whereas, you know, the people that are brand new and they don't have that, it takes them a lot longer to solve a problem. So again, what does productivity look like? You want individual productivity or you want to solve big problems together as a team? And I think that's how we kind of wrap this whole thing up is it depends. How about that? We're consultants a lot of times and we don't have the right answer. We have to learn what your goals are. That's why I went back to the coaching stands because that's kind of how you start with coaches. You know, they embrace and give you a hug where you are. Say, I love that you've accepted that. Now, where do we want to go? And you have to make small iterative incremental slices to get there. So I don't know that there's a good answer for this debate. Brian Milner (33:22) Well, I think your it depends is the right answer because, you know, and if someone's frustrated with the fact that, you know, we tend to fall back to that a lot, you know, just it depends, depend, no matter what the question is. I think that's the right approach. That's an agile approach is to say it depends because, you know, the opposite is, is we're going to have one right way. And that's always the answer. And imagine if when you were a certain age kid, everyone's going to do this job. Well, I don't want to do that job. I want to do a different job. Doesn't matter. This is the right answer. What job should I do? This job. That's the answer for everyone. And that's the approach sometimes people take with these kinds of problems is, should we have remote work? Should we have in-office work? Here's the right answer. That's never going to be the case. There's a right answer. in that one scenario, that situation, it's going to depend on all the particulars of that situation. Lance Dacy (34:18) Well, for the organization, because the other side to that is now I got to worry about attracting talent that fits my model. Right. So make your decision. know, who's who's here to say good or bad? Just say as an organization, we believe in these things and that's why we're going to do this. Put that mission statement out there. And if I'm looking for a job and I don't fit with that, I just don't work there. You yeah, you lost talent. You'll find somebody else. Somebody needs a job somewhere. So. You look at these studies like the GAO case study we were debating a little while ago, know, the quit, I'm going to read just some stats here and then you have to take those and say, what are we trying to do? So the quit rate drop when staff get two days remote. Okay. So there that's a down 33%. That's cheaper than a retention bonus. And it works instantly. That's something people can do right now and say, you know what, we'll get two days remote. And that number pops, right? Commute time that is saved per teleworker is 55 minutes a day on average. That's a bonus week off every year without any payroll cost. So you can make an argument that that's a good byproduct of doing the remote work. And we're talking about CFO level type things here, Productivity jump for or bump for jobs with clear outputs is 12%. So same payroll, more widgets or user stories, whatever, 12 % better. Office footprint after going hybrid, 50 % down. CFOs suddenly love facilities again, right? Disability employment since mass work from home is 12 % and 40 % in tech roles. That's the biggest lever that a lot of people aren't talking about. They're not having disability on the job, right? And then company that forced a five-day return to office lost 50 % of its workforce, including top performers. That's a painful, painful case study from the federal news network. So a company that forced five days RTO lost 50 % of its workforce. Well, you could say, fine, that's what that company wants. Go rehire the other 50 % that want to work there and let's move on. Yeah. I don't know. know? Brian Milner (36:24) Yeah, no, I agree. so I think that that all comes back to what's the purpose. And in our scenario, in our situation, what's the what's the driver? You know, we started this by that quote I found that just said, you know, if you were to design a workplace from scratch today, would anyone build cubicles? If I'm starting it depends on the business. If I'm starting kind of a software as a service business, you know, We're going to build software. I'm probably not going to have an office and probably not going to have an office for quite a while if I'm an entrepreneur who's starting a new business. Because quite frankly, I can get better talent. I can have cheaper cost. And I don't need it. ⁓ There's probably a time when I might switch that. But Lance Dacy (37:05) Or I'd have, you might have increases somewhere else, but you they may be, but you could go find some space, right? You say, two days a week, we're going to come in like a, work or, you know, whatever those, those, workspaces are. So I totally agree with that. It's like, well, first question you have to ask yourself, what do we want to accomplish? You know, what gives us happier people go find that data. What helps us to be more productive in the way of outcomes, go find that data, broadcast it, say, here's what we're doing. If you like it, stay on board. If you don't. Go find somebody else that has a style that you want. We've been doing that for years. This isn't any different. Brian Milner (37:41) Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, this has been a great discussion and I know that we only can kind of scratch the tip of the iceberg in this. again, for anyone, yeah, yeah, again, for anyone listening, please offer us a little grace in this, right? I know we're not covering every aspect of this and I know people have very strong opinions on this. from my perspective, I think that anyone who's making a decision needs to take into account all these factors, take into account the mental. Lance Dacy (37:49) We'll more episodes. Brian Milner (38:09) health aspect of your employees and the morale of the employees and the gains they get from one way versus the other. And if you cannot balance it out and make the case that, there's more gains in one way versus the other, I don't think it's the right move to make to make a big switch in this until you can say, here's why. All right, well, Lance, thanks very much for coming on again. It's always great to have you. Lance Dacy (38:33) Always a pleasure. Maybe next time we'll bring a CEO or something and get their perspective because we'd love to hear executive standpoint from this too. Brian Milner (38:41) That's an awesome idea. Yeah, let's make sure we do that. Thanks, Lance. Lance Dacy (38:44) All right, thank you.

What happens when your brain loves puzzles… but struggles with where to start? Paige Watson shares how ADHD shapes his work as a developer—and how practices like TDD, mob programming, and discovery trees help him stay focused, move forward, and actually enjoy the ride. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner is joined by Paige Watson, a technical coach, seasoned XP practitioner, and self-proclaimed “code crafter.” Paige shares his firsthand experience navigating ADHD as a software developer, and how practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD), ensemble programming, and visual planning (like Discovery Trees) have helped him find sustainable focus and flow. Together, Brian and Paige unpack how small, iterative steps and collaborative team dynamics can support not just neurodivergent developers, but everyone on the team. Whether you're navigating ADHD yourself, leading a diverse team, or just want to write better, more maintainable code—this episode is packed with thoughtful insights and practical takeaways. References and resources mentioned in the show: Paige Watson Paige Watson’s ADHD Blog Posts #76: Navigating Neurodiversity for High-Performing Teams with Susan Fitzell #123: Unlocking Team Intelligence with Linda Rising Scrum Foundations Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Paige Watson is a passionate advocate for “Quality Software as Craft,” known for transforming developers into high-performing, cohesive teams. With deep experience guiding software teams and leading workshops for global companies, he helps build elegant, scalable systems designed for longevity and real-world impact. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you always Brian Milner. And today I have Mr. Paige Watson with us. Welcome in Paige. Really excited to have Paige here. We kind of crossed paths with Paige because of some posts that he had done. Paige Watson (00:11) Thank you. Brian Milner (00:19) He is a technical coach and has been in the development community for a long time and is an XP practitioner, right? Did I hear you correctly say that? Paige Watson (00:27) Yes, I like to use the term code crafter, but yes, a lot of the things I do are XP centric. Yes. Brian Milner (00:31) Nice. I love that, Codecrafter. Then the post that kind of got our attention was a series of posts, actually, that Paige had done about really ADHD and software development. And as people who have listened to this show for a while know, we've done a couple episodes around neurodiversity and neurodiverse traits. and how that bleeds into our work in the software industry. There's plenty of stats showing that there's an unusually large percentage of people in this profession that have some form of neurodiversity. The topics were how he manages ADHD and works. The first one I thought was an interesting title, talked about it being a bug or a feature. So tell us a little bit about what kind of got you started in exploring this. Paige Watson (01:21) Yeah. So I go to a three-day open space that we have in the Northwest. I'm in the Seattle area. And one of the sessions that we had was something, I forget the exact title, but it was around neuro-spiciness in the workplace. And the whole idea was let's get a bunch of people who are neuro-spicy. for lack of a better term, and find out what works for you at work. What are things you need? How do you make sure that what you need is being said out loud? how do you make your work better? So this was a great discussion that we had. And I came out of it going, a lot of the things that I do, a lot of the practices and processes that I use, are actually really helpful for me in my ADHD. So then I sat down and thought, well, first I thought this would be a great conference talk. So I wrote that. And then I was like, I bet this would be a great series of blog posts as well. So I wrote those. Brian Milner (02:24) Ha ha. Yeah. Paige Watson (02:32) It turns out it is a pretty good conference talk, if I say so myself. I get a lot of really good feedback. And honestly, the discussion after I do the presentation is almost better a lot of the time, because you're right. There is a lot of people that, whether they've been diagnosed or they self-identify, whether it's ADHD or autism or anything, there's a lot of that that Brian Milner (02:37) Hahaha. Paige Watson (02:56) that I think we see existing in our software. you know, area that we don't, I don't want to say it's more, I don't have like a definitive study or anything like that that says it's more people in software, but it seems like it. And I sometimes wonder whether that's just me, you know, seeing people because I'm in the software industry or whether there's a draw towards it. Brian Milner (03:22) Yeah, there was a study that I, because I did a conference talk on neurodiversity and software development a while back too, and there was a study that I found out at the University of Texas that basically the only correlation I could find was saying that young people who were entering college and choosing majors were choosing actually it was people on the autism spectrum of some kind were choosing careers in computer science at a rate that was three times essentially that of the general public. So it's not all the neurodivergent traits, but it is one flavor of that. I just don't, maybe there's just not a study on the others, but I... I agree with you. think just from my experience, working in software and managing people in software and developing myself, the people I've kind of been around and worked around, now that I'm more aware of neurodiverse traits, it seems like, yeah, that seems very much like this is going on. That seems like that's going on. And it just starts to make sense a little bit more. Yeah. Paige Watson (04:24) Yeah, yeah. And I wonder, you know, I kind of look back and like, I like to play board games a lot. you know, I like, I have a model railroad and I like the aspect of not just watching the trains go around, although there's probably a maim in there somewhere, but I like sort of operating it like a model railroad. How do I get these cars over there to the green elevator in the fewest moves? There's a puzzle solving aspect. And one day I was like, I like to do that in my work too. You know, and is that part of the the neuro spiciness? I don't know. But you know, it's definitely a draw as to why I like development. Brian Milner (04:56) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to dive into some of the things that you uncover in your talk and in the blog post that you wrote. What were some of the discoveries that you realized as you were looking into this? Paige Watson (05:17) So, like, first off, let me preface by saying I'm not a doctor, you know, and if you have, if you think you're, you know, if you think you have ADHD or want to know more about it, please talk to your medical provider. That's really important. Brian Milner (05:21) Yeah. Yes. Paige Watson (05:34) And I can only really talk for my ADHD because ADHD comes in so many varieties. Yes, there are certain things that happen together, but there's so many sort comorbid aspects to it that I only really want to talk about mine and touch on some other things I've seen maybe, but just that caveat. What was really interesting is that I used to think that I ADHD was about not being able to focus. But it's about not being able to control the focus. Because sometimes I can't focus at all. There's lots of things going on. That whole, squirrel, that sort of thing. And then there are other times when I can hyper-focus. And this is where my talk comes. My talk I call Focus Flow on Co-Coffee. Brian Milner (06:13) Yeah. Paige Watson (06:21) And the whole idea is that I go and sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee, and I'm ready to go. And I start typing, and I go to take a sip, and the coffee's cold. And I forgot to go to lunch again. So it's not really about not having focus. It's about not being able to fully control where that focus goes. In terms of the way I Brian Milner (06:32) You Yeah. Paige Watson (06:47) the way I work, there's a lot of things that I found I can get really overwhelmed by big tasks. I can get overwhelmed if I'm not sure where to start. I'll do that thing where I'm like, I have my work. I know my story. I've got all the requirements. I sit down at the IDE, and I start to think about how am I going to write a test. I don't know where to start. I know what I need to do. It's not that. It's picking a place to start. And that's really a tough one for me. And then I can get overwhelmed by that. Or I can get overwhelmed by a large task and not fully understanding all of it. And when I do, I sort of freeze and shut down. And so there's a lot of learning around this that I've found about myself, which has been really nice. Also, having to talk about it to people has been sort of forced me to be a little more circumspect. But there are some really great practices that I found that work really well as well. For me, especially, mainly collaborative programming, mobbing or ensemble work. Pairing works as well, but I find collaborative, like full team programming to be much more effective. Brian Milner (08:00) Yeah. Paige Watson (08:06) Test driven development. I really like that in because I think about the the Requirements as code so I write one little requirement and then I make that requirement happen and then you know that the test fails because it I haven't written the code and then it passes when I write the code, know, and hooray little dopamine hit when it passes but also I don't have to go back afterwards and remember the code that I wrote and and try and write tests around it. That's a really tough one. I was going to remember to test this one thing, but I forget what it was. Now, if I think of my tests as requirements in code format, even the name, the name isn't should get user. It's that when I pass user ID1 should return user. for ID one type of thing, you it's a very clear or when I pass null should throw exception, you know, like, and they're very small. So again, I don't have to be overwhelmed thinking about this grand architecture and holding on to all the information. Brian Milner (09:19) Yeah. What I think is really vital here is to, because I love how you explain the kind of symptom, right? The symptom that we experience and then kind of matching that up to say, but here's a practice that really kind of counteracts that a little bit. I think you're absolutely right. You know, I experienced the same thing with hyper-focus and not being able to focus and There is something about having small little chunks of work that makes that so much easier to digest because it's a constant flow of things. It's not, oh my gosh, now I've got to stay with this for three days straight before I get out of it. No, I'm going to do a little bit and then check it and a little bit and check it. And I agree. That's a big problem, I think, as well for people with ADHD that we kind of... can't always remember what happened yesterday, because so much has kind of come our way. And it's not that we weren't invested in it when it was there. It's just that, our brains are trying to keep up with all the things that are going on. And it just kind of overwhelms our memory processes a little bit. Paige Watson (10:15) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I talk about it like I have my short term, which is my memory buffer. And then I have my long term, which is my hard drive. And the problem is that the buffer gets flushed really easily. something new, interesting, something that sparks my interest immediately flushes the buffer. And so a lot of things that are important don't get written to the hard drive and save for later. And another issue that I've run into is Brian Milner (10:35) Yeah. Right. Paige Watson (10:55) there are times I don't really understand what's important. What's important to me is not always what's really important to the team, the work, right, to my wife, you know, all that sort of thing. And so, you know, I'll think like, gosh, I have this chunk of work where I have to add this logging, but if I refactored this into a need-based eventing system, it would be so much better in the long run. Brian Milner (11:00) Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Paige Watson (11:21) Well, the important thing is that the logging get in there. But I don't think about that. think like, the need-based eventing system is the important that in four years, that's really where we need to be, you know? And so I'll like, I'll get excited about that and I won't focus on that. And I'll, you know, I'll forget about the buffer will flush. And, and so being able to, to do little tiny chunks of work and in, and use use whatever I'm a story or whatever I have in terms of my requirements to drive my tests is super helpful because I can look and say, okay, this happened here because I have a test that says this happened. And I have a test that says it didn't happen to what it should happen, what the response should be or the outcome should be if it doesn't happen. That's really... like TDD is fabulous for that. Collaborative work is fabulous for this because when I'm driving, I don't get overwhelmed if I'm at the keyboard because all I have to do is listen to what other people are telling me and type on the smart input. When I'm navigating or I'm helping write the software, I can get stuck, I can get lost and it's really... It's good because my teammates will say, hey, let's just add this little part. I know you want to refactor this into a need-based eventing system, but let's just add this. In fact, I can hear my buddy's voice in my head saying, can we just write this little part? And the answer is, yeah. OK, great. So there's guardrails on both sides when you work as a collaborative team, which is really excellent. Brian Milner (12:46) Ha ha. Yeah, I agree. part of that hyper-focused kind of side effect sometimes is that our brain turns its attention to something. And it's hard to come back from that edge once you've gone over it. And if you're thinking, oh, it's this needs-based event system that we need to move to, my brain is now in that mode. if I don't have that help to say, whoa, hold on, let me pull you back over that cliff edge here. Let's go this direction. I agree that partnering up with someone, pairing with someone, that can be such a vital thing there to kind of help control that a little bit. Paige Watson (13:31) Yes. Yeah, yeah, it really and I mean, there's so many other things that the sort of myopic view versus the 10,000 foot view, it can be really easy for me to get really focused on one little thing. The other people will allow you, one, even if that one little thing is what I need to work on, the other people will see how the larger context exists, how the architecture fits together. where I might not be thinking about that. And on the opposite side, when I'm thinking about like, oh, we're going to need this component, we're going to need these five components, we're going to need a database, and again, my buddy, we can just start on this little thing. We can just do this little part. And so again, those guardrails of not having to hyper-focus and not having to sort of scatter and get overwhelmed by the immensity of it all. it really works well. Brian Milner (14:43) Yeah, I agree. I want to make sure people listening understand as well, though. If you're hearing this, please don't think, well, if I don't have ADHD, maybe this isn't important to me. Part of the reason we kind of talked about how there's, know, maybe we're seeing it, maybe there's some studies showing it, that there's a prevalence of these kinds of traits in people that we work with. It's important, I think, to know our own teams, to know how to help the people on our teams. And if there's someone in your sphere that you work with that has some of these traits, then they may not be diagnosed in the way you don't have to be. If you just notice this is what's going on, well, just a suggestion. Hey, have we considered doing something like this? Has that ever been anything you've tried? That kind of thing can go a long way, I think, just being helpful. Paige Watson (15:34) It will. I would be careful, right? Because it's not my place to say you have this or you're this or whatever. And it's totally up to the person, whether they've been diagnosed or not, to self-disclose, right? The really nice thing about this is this is a great way of working for everybody. ⁓ Brian Milner (15:36) Yeah. Yes. Paige Watson (15:56) Collaborative programming builds a team. It's no longer my code versus your code. It's our code. We built this together. Woody Zuilll likes to talk about the best of my coding ability and the best of your coding goes in. And when I start to write something that's not so great, you go, well, maybe there's a better way. And so that sort of lesser coding skill gets dropped out. So the code quality increases just for having Brian Milner (16:19) Yeah. Paige Watson (16:22) multiple people with different sets of knowledge in the room. Not only that, but I start to learn. I'm not a UI guy, but if there's someone who's strong in the UI skills and knows the domain from that side, we work together. Now, if I go work in another mob or ensemble somewhere else. I can be like, yeah, I remember hearing about this and we need to watch out for that sort of thing. And maybe we should pull in another person as opposed to being totally in the dark. But you start to have that cross-pollination of knowledge that you don't necessarily get by having just stand-ups or knowledge sharing meetings, which is not really knowledge sharing at all. Brian Milner (17:06) Right, right. I appreciate that word of caution, because you're right. I mean, I don't want anyone listening to think, I'm going to go tell someone I work with, hey, it looks like you have ADHD. You know, like that's not appropriate. But if you see, that's the great thing about these things that can help is that they're actually good for many reasons. And you don't have to be doing it for this reason. Paige Watson (17:23) Yes. Brian Milner (17:28) you get plenty of benefits doing it for other reasons. And it just so happens to also help in these other ways. So that's a really great call out. Paige Watson (17:33) Yes. Yes. and certainly, so I've, I oftentimes after I do presentations on this or something, there's that question of like, there's, there's this guy at the office who's, you know, obviously got ADHD, but he doesn't know it or whatever. How do I, how do I help him? And, and my answer is, one, don't, you know, but, but I mean, a better answer is maybe like, instead of saying, look, you have this issue. say like, Hey, Brian Milner (17:53) Ha Paige Watson (18:00) I have some ideas about how we can work as a team in a better way. Can we try that? And whether or not the person has whatever, like this is a great way to work as a team. Maybe it helps everybody. So. Brian Milner (18:06) Yeah. Yeah, I agree. it's not that, you know, it's not our place to put the name on it. And it doesn't really even need that. It's just, it's just kind of recognizing the personality, the traits of the person that you work alongside and saying, you know, we all have strengths and weaknesses. We all have things we do really well and things that we kind of struggle with. And, you know, you do that for anyone else, right? Anyone else on your team, you'd say, Hey, there's, they maybe aren't as good in this area. How can we, you know, help Paige Watson (18:20) Yep. Yep. Brian Milner (18:44) boost them in that area. Paige Watson (18:45) Yeah, yeah. And while we're on that subject, self-disclosing and having been comfortable with that eventually, slowly, but eventually, a lot of it working on a team where I feel very safe, saying what I am, what I need, that sort of thing, has been super powerful. And being able you know, to say, need to do this, or this would be super effective for me if we can do it this way. Could someone else come and sit with me while I do this? There's a great thing called body doubling that people with ADHD have used. And it's not really someone watching over you or making sure you're on task or whatever. It's a person sitting in the room with you. Just having another person there, whether they're working on the same thing or not, it can be super effective for helping me maintain my focus and continue the process that I'm working on as opposed to going down rabbit holes or hyper focusing or whatever. And it's a weird thing that it happens that way. Now, when you work collaboratively, the whole team is doing that, and you're working towards continuing the code forward. But Being able to recognize that and being able to say to someone, hey, could you just pop in, even when we're remote, can I just open up a Zoom room and just so we're together here? I'm just going to work on this and you can work on that. If you can't mob or you don't mob or you're not pairing or whatever, even that's a good start, a good help. But this idea of being able to be on this team that's comfortable with this. allows us, especially when we're mobbing, allows, I have one person I worked with who was very introverted and got, that energy got exhausted pretty regularly, especially in the mob. And this guy was, is amazingly smart and I love working with him. Okay, every once in a while he'd be like, I'll be back. And he'd go sit, you know, in a cushy chair in the corner and, you know, quiet time to himself. Great. Nobody in the mob was like, where's he going? How come he's not working? We were all like, yeah, that's what he needs. We can keep going. We can keep moving the code forward. And then he would recharge. He would come back and we'd keep going with him. And so sometimes, and again, if you can get to that point that you feel comfortable and you're in a comfortable surrounding, it can be immensely helpful and allow. for the team to continue to grow and do the good work in a way that's effective for you as well. Brian Milner (21:24) Yeah, I think that's the big kind of paradigm shift that's happened is that, you know, for a lot of my earlier career, the kind of attitude in workplaces was you, the individual adjusts to fit the environment. You had to, you know, change how you worked best and everything else to fit the structure of whatever it was. And now there's much more recognition. And I think very appropriately so to say, no, we're human beings, we're very different and no one little cookie cutter mold is gonna work for everyone. And we don't want it to. It's actually beneficial that it's not that way. know, cause we want people who can be better at spatial reasoning and others who are more creative and like we want the benefits from it. We just, you know, get annoyed sometimes at having to deal with, you know, individual downsides from that as well. Paige Watson (22:17) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (22:19) What other kind of tricks have crossed your play? What other things have been really helpful to you in programming with ADHD? Paige Watson (22:25) Sure, so I talked about collaborative programming. I talked about TDD. Those are both super effective for me. Another one is we use a thing called Discovery Trees. Discovery Trees is a visual representation of tasks to be done. so yes, it's sort of like a breakdown of work, a tree of work. But the really important part of it is that it's not It's not an upfront design. It's a last responsible moment practice, which means not last possible moment, but last responsible. So it started out with us, we were mobbing and we were like, okay, we got to build this and we're going to do that. Oh, we need to remember to add the connection to the database. When somebody would write that down on a sticky note and put it on the window and you know, it started with a bunch of sticky notes on the window. Then it moved to, OK, what do we need to do next? What's the next most important thing that the application doesn't do right now? And let's focus on that. So let's connect to the database. What do we need to We would sort of put the connect to the at the top and then say, what do we need to do to make this effective? Well, we need the connection string. We need the. the whatever certificate or all this sort of thing, we'd list a couple of things. And then we'd say, OK, of the four things we just listed, is there one we can start on right now? Is there something we can do right now that maybe will take a couple hours to half a day at most? And if the answer is yes, we stop designing the rest of it. We stopped adding sticky notes under it. And we started focusing on that one thing. If the answer is no, then we'd say, of the four things we came up with, what's the most important thing that the application doesn't do right now? Well, OK, it's the connection string. Do we have everything we need for the connection string? We need a username. We need a password, et cetera. We need a table name, whatever. And so can we start on something there right away? Yes. OK, let's start on that. and stop designing the rest. And so it was a very quick way of, again, that just-in-time design. And it's super effective because we would start on something and we'd add a little tick up in the corner. And I've... On my blog, I've got pictures of it, but we've got ticks in the corner of stuff that's in process. And then when it's finished, we cross it out, big slash across it. We can also do this online using whatever whiteboard that you're using for your company. When you look at it and you see like, okay, there's one thing at the top and there's four things underneath that and then underneath each of those has three or four things. The top two things in the first branch are crossed off. And then there's a couple of things from the third branch cross off. And I say to you, what percent are we done with the work that we know? You can say, it's probably more than 50%. You know, maybe it's about 60, but you can visually see it right away. And it's super easy to kind of say, okay, here's the steps we think we need to go through. Here's the things we need to remember. And if at any point we go, we forgot to do that, we write a sticky and we put it on the tree and we say, is this the most important thing that the application doesn't do right now? And if so, we go work on that. not, we wait until it is. And there's some really that law of unintended consequences sort of thing. There's some really exciting things that came out of it. One, we didn't have to do this big upfront design and planning. You should have a roadmap. You should know the direction you're going, obviously. I'm not saying there should be no design, but I'm saying there shouldn't be two days of sitting in a room coming up with all the different stories and designs that you have to do over the next quarter or two quarters or whatever. Because we all know in three months when we get to this work, what's going to happen? We're to look at it go, this isn't anything of like, everything's changed since we got here. We still have to connect to the database, but everything has changed. Brian Milner (26:38) Right. Paige Watson (26:41) Right? So you need that roadmap, but you don't need to do that design. You can do it at the last responsible moment. ⁓ And the visual aspect, one, it allowed me not to get overwhelmed because I could look at it and say, OK, here's the next thing that I have to do. I don't have to worry about all the rest of that. Two, when we had PM management leadership, anybody walk by, Brian Milner (26:49) Yeah. Paige Watson (27:06) we could immediately say, we are right there. See how these are crossed off and that isn't, and this one's got ticks in the corner, which says it's in progress. We are right there. And then we added some other visualizations like red dots or whatever for blocked. When we were doing this online, we had blue stickies, which were questions that we wanted to pose to our product people later or whatever. it was super effective at sort of radiating all that information and put that in a place and put the link wherever, where everybody can get to it. And, you know, we didn't really have to, there wasn't a lot of time spent trying to explain what was going on to people outside of the team. So. Brian Milner (27:51) Yeah, that's one of the such strong points about making things transparent. Because when you do that, then you get the added bonus of now people don't need updates. Now people don't need to, you we can just point them to that artifact and say, hey, there it is. Go take a look yourself at any time. I love that. And I love also how that kind of deals with the problem we talked about earlier about, we have got this big, huge thing to do. I don't know where to start. Where do I start? There's too many things to do. Paige Watson (28:09) Yeah. Brian Milner (28:20) Now just systematically we're gonna go step by step through it and it gives you that impetus to just get going, right? Get something started. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Paige Watson (28:27) Yes, the bias towards action. Yeah, and the really nice thing is that there were times when we had a tree and someone would be like, hey, we just finished our work. What are you guys doing? And we'd be like, OK, here's the tree. And they would grab one of the unstarted top level ones and say, well, we're taking this over to our board. And they would start on it. And so it was really easy to sort of split the work as necessary or as people were available to work on other things. And we didn't have to worry about like, how do we assign this story and that story and what. Brian Milner (29:01) That's great. These are great tips. like I said, I hope as people listen to this, they're hearing not just the exact thing to do, but more of the approach to it to say, when there's issues like this, you just experiment with different practices. You try them out and you see how they go, which is what we should be naturally doing anyway. Paige Watson (29:01) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (29:21) Yeah, this is really helpful. And what we'll do here is make sure in our show notes that we've linked to these posts that Paige put together, because they really are fascinating. If this is something that interests you, encourage you to read the whole series, because it's, like you said, there's some really interesting pictures that kind of walk you through the process and how we went through this. So I really appreciate you being willing to do that and to share that kind of information with everyone. It's not always easy to, you know, be able to just say to people, hey, this is kind of what I'm going through. But I appreciate you doing it because I know it's really helpful. It's helpful to me. And I know it's helpful to others as well. So I just thank you for being willing to do that. Paige Watson (30:03) You are welcome. It's one of the sort of aspects of being a crafter, calling myself a crafter, is I want to spread great practices. I always like to say I... I don't know the best way to build software, to create software. I know the best way right now. If there's a better way, I love that you were talking about experience because we should all be doing them all the time and finding the better way. And these practices, even mobbing and TDD and all, they all came out of like, how do we find the better way? Whoever it was that started them, How do we find the better way? Discovery trees, I'm hearing people using them all over the world now and they're like, this is great. Like that's good. If it works for you and it's really effective, then do it because we wanna get rid of those things that are holding us back, whether it be processes or practices or sort of ways of working that aren't super comfortable for who we are as people. Let's change that. Let's do it a better way. Yeah. Brian Milner (31:08) That's awesome. Well, Paige, I can't thank you enough. Thanks for making the time for this and sharing your insights with us. I really appreciate you coming on. Paige Watson (31:16) Yeah, thank you. And I enjoyed this a lot.

AI might write your code, but can you trust it to do it well? Clare Sudbery says: not without a safety net. In this episode, she explains how test-driven development is evolving in the age of AI, and why developers need to slow down, not speed up. Overview In this episode, Brian sits down with Clare Sudbery, experienced developer, TDD advocate, and all-around brilliant explainer, to unpack the evolving relationship between test-driven development and AI-generated code. From skeptical beginnings to cautiously optimistic experimentation, Clare shares how testing isn’t just still relevant, it might be more essential than ever. They explore how TDD offers a safety net when using GenAI tools, the risks of blindly trusting AI output, and why treating AI like a helpful human is where many developers go wrong. Whether you’re an AI early adopter or still on the fence, this conversation will sharpen your thinking about quality, ethics, and the role of human judgment in modern software development. References and resources mentioned in the show: Clare Sudbery Clare’s upcoming Software Architecture Gathering 2025 workshop Clare at GOTO AI Practice Prompts For Scrum Masters #99: AI & Agile Learning with Hunter Hillegas #117: How AI and Automation Are Redefining Success for Developers with Lance Dacy Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Clare Sudbery is an independent technical coach, conference speaker, and published novelist who helps teams rediscover their “geek joy” through better software practices. She writes and speaks widely on test‑driven development, ethical AI, and women in tech, bringing clarity, humor, and decades of hands‑on experience to every talk and workshop. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in, Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here, as always, Brian Milner. But today, I have Miss Claire Sudbury with me. Welcome in, Claire. Clare Sudbery (00:13) Hello. Brian Milner (00:14) I'm so happy to have you here. is here with us because we wanted to talk about a topic that I think is going to be interesting to lot of people, and that is test-driven development, but not just test-driven development in light of AI and kind of the changes that AI has made to test-driven development. So why don't we start with just the base level test-driven development for people who have only heard kind of buzzwords around it and aren't as familiar with it, how would you explain test-driven development in sort of plain English? Clare Sudbery (00:47) Okay, so the idea of test-driven development is that you want to be certain that your code works. And I'm sure most people will be familiar with the idea of writing tests around your code to prove that it works. But that principle is considered so important in test-driven development that we write the test before we write the code. And that's why we say that the development is driven by the tests. So the very starting point for any coding exercise is a test. Another really important part of this is that that test is tiny. So what we're not doing, and people might have heard of behavior-driven development, which is where you start with quite a big test where you say, I'm going to write a test that says that my thing should do this and the user should see a particular thing happen in a particular circumstance. In test driven development, the test is testing not what the user sees, but just what the code does in the tiniest, most granular way possible. So if you have a piece of your software that does some mathematical operations and you expect certain numbers to pop out the end, then you might say, just in this tiny bit of this calculation, this number should be multiplied by four. So you're not even necessarily saying that given these inputs, you should get these outputs. I mean, you may have tests that say that, but you're just testing that something gets multiplied by four. And that's just an example. But what you're doing is you're thinking, what is the tiniest possible thing that I can test? And you write a test that tests that tiny thing. And you do that before you've written the code. So obviously, the test fails initially, because you haven't even written the code yet. And that's another important part of the process. You want to see it fail because you want to know that when you then make it pass, the reason it's passing is because of something you did. And that means that every tiny little bit of code you write is proven because it makes a test pass. And when you get into the rhythm of it, it means you're constantly looking for green tests. And there are lots of other things I could talk about. Like for instance, you never want those tests to fail. So if at any point any of them start to fail, you know that that's because something you just did made them fail, which also means that you want to run them consistently every time you make any changes. So you're getting that fast feedback. You're finding out not only whether what you've just written works because it makes its test pass, but also that it's not making any other tests fail. So not only does it work within its own terms, but it hasn't broken anything else. And that's actually really common when you're coding is that some new thing that you add breaks some existing thing. So you're constantly paying attention to those tests and you're making sure that they pass. And it drives the development in a very interesting way because you're always talking about what should work. You always think about what should work. You always think about how it should work. You're moving in tiny, tiny steps. So you're gradually, gradually, gradually increasing the functionality and whether it works or not and how it works is being determined by the fact that you're making tests passed. And the really interesting thing is that it actually helps you to design software as well as to make sure that software works. So hopefully that explained it. Brian Milner (04:10) That's an awesome explanation. really appreciate that. That was a great kind of practical, plain English explanation of it. I love it. So for the people who weren't familiar, now you have kind of a good idea of what we mean by test-driven development. I know with the advent of AI, there's been lots of changes that have taken place, lots of changes in the way that developers create their code. We now have these sort of co-pilots, assistants that help in doing our coding. But on the other hand, one of the things you hear quite often is that there's lots and lots of quality issues, that it takes a lot of effort to try to maintain that quality and make sure that it's still at a high level. So how does AI enter the picture of test-driven development? How is that helping? How is it changing the way that we do test-driven development? Clare Sudbery (04:59) It's a very good question and there are lots of different strands to how I can answer it. And I think it's probably important that I start by saying, I came to this from a position of deep skepticism. So I have been sitting on the sidelines for a long time, watching the AI explosion happen and not actually getting very involved. But what I did find was that It was becoming like a tennis match. I was like just going, okay. And they say that and they say that. And it actually became very interesting to me just how polarizing it could be. You know, that there were people within my networks, people who had a lot of respect for, who were very anti or who are very anti and who also are very pro. People who've been experimenting with it and having a lot of fun with it. But one of the big issues that I didn't even have to be told I could guess would occur and has occurred is exactly what you said that the code that is generated by GenAI coding tools is often not reliable. And it's not reliable for the same reason that when you ask ChatGPT a question, the answer you get is often not reliable. And that's because these things are not deterministic. They the way that they're constructed. mean, people might remember a long time ago, people used to talk about fuzzy logic. It's all a bit wibbly wobbly. It's not you can't you'll get this a different answer if you ask the same question. And the way that it's constructing those answers is not in the way that we're used to as software engineers. It's not a strict series of logic. It's not all nuts and ones. And hallucination is a real problem. And so it and then you also have to think about the fact so part of the problem is that AI is synthesizing new answers to questions that it's not answering on in a logical deterministic way. But also the place that it's getting his answers from is the results of years and years and billions of files and lines of human output, but with no way of discerning. which bits of that output are good and which bits are bad. And also whether this particular bit that it happens to have plucked from some random code base somewhere is really right for this context. So you're gonna get, when you ask GEN.AI to write code for you, you are gonna get weird results that don't necessarily do what you want them to. But one of the things that we're being told is it's gonna speed you up. And the big attraction of asking AI to write code for you if you're a software engineer is, well, you know, sometimes I'm not quite sure how a particular library works or how a particular framework works. And I have to spend ages on Stack Overflow and Google trying to work out or, you know, trying to work out an annoying bit of CSS or an annoying bit of an annoying regular expression or, you know, all of these things that I've been kind of bashing my head and can spend ages on. Oh, here's a machine that could just do it for me. Yay. And that's, that's, that's very tempting to pretty much anybody who's ever written code, I'm sure. Brian Milner (08:13) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (08:14) And also the idea that it will speed you up and the idea that it will work out tedious task force that you don't want to have to work out is very attractive. But if you don't then look at in detail exactly what it gives you, and particularly if you're not actually able to understand in detail exactly what it gives you, then how the hell are you going to know if what it's given you is the right thing? Brian Milner (08:42) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (08:42) And because we're all impatient and I, you know, I certainly am. And I think most people are to some degree or other. It's hard. It's hard to persuade yourself to check the results. And the more impatient you are and the less experienced you are, the more likely it is that you won't pay proper attention to the results. You won't really rigorously check. whether it's doing what you want it to do. Now that's fine if it's a little hobby project, particularly as sometimes the speed with which you can generate things is such that you can just throw it away and create another one. But if you're building production software, if you're building software that really has to result for a very high number of users, particularly if you're building software that actually has real life implications where bad things can happen, people can lose money. You know, not many of us work on software that endangers life, but some of us do. But at the very least, we do work on software that has privacy implications, that has financial implications. So if you're working within the industry and not just having a bit of fun, then you need some way of knowing whether what AI has presented you with. is actually fit for purpose. And that's where tests come in. Obviously, that's always where tests come in. That's how we know that things are working. And if you're used to working with test-driven development, which I am, it becomes addictive. Now, most people who learn how to do test-driven development will go through a period, and that period will be longer or shorter depending on who you are and depending on like a million different circumstances. But you'll go through a period where it's like, it's just a bit. do I really have to write all of these tests? Can I not just, you know, take a bit of a shortcut? But when you get through that period of thinking, isn't it just slowing me down? And isn't it just a bit tedious really? Then most of us get to a point where we actually become kind of addictive. We become very reliant on test-driven development specifically, because what we realize is it gives us safety and security and really strong belief in what we're building. in a way that we didn't have previously. Now, given that that's where I am, that I've been doing TDD, I mean, I'm going to stop saying test-driven development. I like to not jump straight to TDD in case people doesn't know what it means or they think I'm saying DDD because they sound very similar. I'm going to say TDD now because it's slightly quicker than saying test-driven development. But I've been doing it for long enough now that I miss it when I don't have it. And one of the things that... I really love is that a good, a well designed test suite, which is another thing that another skill that you pick up as you get good at TDD can be run quickly and can give me very fast feedback and, and, security and also a belief that something I've built is robust and that it works. So obviously that's the first thing I think of when I think of how. If I'm going to leap in and make a pact with the devil and start playing with with Gen.ai, how am I going to be happy with with what it builds? How am I not going to be endlessly suspicious? And tests for me are the answer. But then what's really interesting is that when I started paying attention to people who were using Gen.ai in real world applications. So not just having a bit of fun with it, but actually using it to build real important systems. What I started to notice, and I wasn't surprised, was that they were saying is that it's reinforced to us how important the belt and braces are, how important tests are, and how we absolutely really need to put tests around it. And so that's when I started really looking into how can I use AI in a way that's effective and useful and fun, but also ethical, which is a whole other subject, and also robust and trustworthy. And for me, tests were really the obvious answer to that. Brian Milner (12:49) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate the way you went about explaining this because it's, I think you're absolutely right. First, you have to understand what it is that AI, like large language models are doing and that they are based on kind of more probabilistic kind of equations on the back end. And it's telling you what's most likely to be the next answer. But then I really also appreciate the idea that, you know, that human in the loop kind of concept and idea is really important in this area because as you said, it doesn't have judgment. It doesn't have the ability to make decisions for us. It can try and guess what it, but it's basically trying to guess what it thinks you want to be the answer for that. And you can completely flip it if you just challenge it a little bit, it'll change its opinion entirely to try to please you. So, Clare Sudbery (13:20) You Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. Brian Milner (13:37) I want to talk a little bit about how, because I think this is really, really important for our day and age. The idea that if we're using AI to produce code for us, and we can accept that there is this flaw, there is this issue that it's going to produce errors, then I think that this using things like test, like test-driven development, TDD, to kind of serve as a gate Clare Sudbery (13:54) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (14:02) through which these things must pass, I think can serve as a really useful tool so that you can make that still usable. You can still use stuff that comes from Gen.ai, but it's passing through human-based quality tests. What do you think the danger is here? Because if we're using Gen.ai to do lots of things, are we using Gen.ai to create our tests? Are we using... Clare Sudbery (14:11) Yeah. Brian Milner (14:25) AI to create our test data? Are we using it to try to determine what kinds of tests we should do? Or are we just then going to be in an echo chamber? What are the things that we should be using AI to do as far as this? And what are the things we should maybe avoid? Clare Sudbery (14:42) I think you have no matter what you ask AI to do, you're always going to have the problem that you do need to check. You need to check its work. So you really do need a human there at some point, making sure that things are okay. And that just never goes away. And there has been a lot of discussion about how much AI really does. help us to develop software. So there have been a lot of claims made about speed gains. So it makes us 10 times faster. No, it doesn't. It makes us slower. Well, who the hell knows? Because how would you measure it? And then also the fact that the people who are making the extravagant claims for how good it is. that we're all biased. I was going to say those people are biased, but also the people who want to claim that it slows us down are also biased. mean, like we all have our standpoint of what we want to be true. There are certainly people who would like to be proven right that AI is a scourge and we should ditch it as soon as possible. And then there are also people who've been having a lot of fun with it, love the idea of it and want it to be proven to be amazing. And that's a bit of a tangent, but the point is that really the reason it does in fact slow you down in a lot of ways is because you have to check its work. And that does take time. So yes, you do. And yes, you can ask AI to write tests for you. And that can be really useful. And actually, that was the first thing. My very first experiment was to ask AI to help me to do a cataract. only because that's always my starting point when I'm teaching and I really like catas. Now, actually, I quickly worked out that catas aren't a good use for AI. And in fact, people I know who teach TDD say, please don't use AI for catas. It's not helpful. And the reason it's not helpful is because the whole point of a catas, sorry, to explain what a catas is, a catas is a coding exercise, specifically often used for learning and practicing TDD. And it's where you actually code a very simple problem, but you do it from first principles, making tiny steps. And it's a very nice way of seeing why TDD is useful. Typically those problems are very simple. Actually, they're very tiny pieces of software. And the reason that's a tiny little routines and games and things. And the reason they're tiny so that you can see progress because actually building software generally takes weeks. And a catar is a very small exercise that you might do over the course of a couple of hours or a day at most. So it has to be something tiny. But if you ask NAI, as I did, so that was the very first thing I did. It was the FizzBuzz catar. The FizzBuzz is a game where that's sometimes played in classrooms with children where you count to 100 and you get the children to take it intense to say the next number in the sequence. But instead of just counting to a hundred, whenever you encounter a multiple of three or five or three and five, you have to say something that isn't the number. You have to say, Fizz, if it's a multiple of three, Buzz if it's a multiple of five and Fizz Buzz if it's a multiple of both three and five. Nice little problem. And I asked Claude, it was, to help me to do this. And so I thought, well, why don't I start by asking it to write some tests for me? And it said, yes. And it's so difficult not to think of it as though it was a person. And this is one of the problems, one of the dangers. It's so it was like a helpful little puppy. Yes, yes, yes. All right. Lots of tests for you. Here go. There's loads of tests. And it had written way more tests than were sensible. Hadn't done it in an iterative way. Hadn't started small. It had written a giant suite of tests with lots of duplication. Brian Milner (18:06) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (18:25) And I also asked it to then write some code to make the test pass. And it did. And what was interesting was that was like, that took seconds. What took the time was for me to check it to work. And I was able to deduce by writing my own tests that the code was functional. It wasn't the best code I've ever seen, but it was functional. did the job. was correct. The tests were not. Brian Milner (18:35) Hmm. Clare Sudbery (18:55) So the code that it had written failed the tests that it had written, not because there was anything wrong with the code, but because there was something wrong with the tests. The tests themselves were wrong. And it was to do with that. It was an off by one error. was treating 99 as though it was a multiple of five. It had decided that 99 was a multiple of five because 100 is a multiple of five and it started counting at zero. And then it's because it's thought that 99 was a multiple of five, the code failed because it didn't say buzz for a hundred because it's a multiple. said, it said not for 99. Sorry. It just said 99. So it thought that was wrong because it's test failed. In fact, it was the test that was wrong. So I said, well, actually your tests are wrong. And it was like, Oh, terribly sorry. Let me fix that for you. And then it came up with this great explanations like, Oh yes, you're right. The tests are wrong. And the reason the tests are wrong, and now I forgot the detail, but it was wrong about why the tests were wrong. So it said, yes, you're right, the tests are wrong and the tests are wrong because, and I think it did detect the off by one error, but then decided that actually really 99 should be buzz. Brian Milner (19:55) You Clare Sudbery (20:08) And then it had another, it actually had two tests that contradicted each other. had one that said that 99 should be buzz and one that said that 100 should be buzz. It detected that it had two tests that contradicted each other, but it decided that the bad one was the right one and that the good one was the wrong one because of the off by one thing. So it worked out sort of what the problem was, but still came up with the wrong answer. And what was really interesting was when I looked in closer detail at the tests, it had written these little notes, had written comments, and it had written a comment where it started by writing the test that said 100 should be buzz. And then it had added little notes, oh yes, but hang on a minute, we started counting at zero, so actually 99 should be buzz. And it added these little notes in and it's so, I mean, I totally see why people end up falling in love with with gen AIs and so you answer and we do where human beings we anthropomorphize at the drop of a hat, you know, we can see faces in just random sequences of dots. So very easy for us to think that it is trying to please us, which it sort of is because it's been programmed to try and please us. But anyway, that was a very long answer to say that. Brian Milner (21:00) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (21:20) Yes, you can ask AI to write tests for you. And it can be helpful because often actually, particularly if you're approaching a new domain or a new technology or maybe a new language or a new test framework, and you're not actually quite sure or you're using a new mocking framework or whatever, and you're not actually quite sure how to write the tests that you have in your head. It can be helpful to ask AI to do it for you. But then what you have to do is stop and look at it and say, I understand it. And this is why people who are most effective with AI are people who are experienced software developers and why it's really worrying that juniors are using it actually more than seniors, partly, not necessarily in age thinkers, often junior software engineers are not young because people come to this industry from all sorts of different places. But that they're new to coding. And so, and they've also started coding in a time where AI is ubiquitous. So it's just obvious to them that they would use AI, but then they don't understand what they're given. And so they just kind of assume it's okay. Whereas if you are an experienced developer, you know what good code looks like, and you know how to debug code and you know how to spot obvious flaws. So things like off by one errors, you know, didn't take me long to work out what. problem was, what was entertaining was its explanation for the problem. And so it's, it's really tricky. You absolutely, yes, it can help you to write tests. And yes, it can help you to make those tests pass. But I know, I, in some of the exercises that I teach people, I suggest that they write their own tests and that they don't. Brian Milner (22:48) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (23:00) ask the AI to write their test. So what you do is you write your own test and then you ask the AI to make your test pass. And if your tests are really tightly defined, the more tightly defined they are, the more confident you are that if the AI makes that test passed, it really has done what you wanted it to do because your test is passing. But there are still issues. Brian Milner (23:20) Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And I love the explanation and the kind of discussion about how we give the system kind of a humanness and human quality. And especially, I would think, for you and I who teach people, who train people in different topics, but we teach people, we're looking for people to learn. And when we interact with a system like this, I know for me, it's very tempting to think, Clare Sudbery (23:34) Mmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (23:49) well, I just need to explain to them, to explain to the AI why it needs to do it this way instead of that way. And it'll learn that this is what to do. No, it doesn't learn. It can compare it back to you to make you happy from what you just said. if you start a new chat and ask the same question, it will not have learned from your explanation in the past chat. It will move forward with its core logic. ⁓ Clare Sudbery (23:59) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (24:16) That's kind the interesting point to me is with all of this included, with all of the kind of development practices that we have created over decades here to try to improve code quality, to try to improve the process, I think some of this can be applied to what we're trying to do when we generate code with AI. But I think you're right to caution us to say, really the starting point for all those practices was that it was being carried out by humans. And so maybe that's the thing that needs to now be kind of tempered or considered is if we're going to use a process like TDD with AI, then we've got to start from a new understanding that the system that's creating the test, the system that is using this, Clare Sudbery (24:46) you Brian Milner (25:04) is not a human, it's not going to think in the same way a human is, and it still does need a human's judgment and logic in order to ensure quality. Clare Sudbery (25:14) That's right. That's right. And the issue with using TDD with Gen.ai goes back to what I said at the start, was that typically if you're used to the TDD rhythm, then you're used to writing tiny tests. So if you use that paradigm with AI, you're going to ask it to be writing tiny pieces of code. Now, actually, one of the powers of AI is its ability to write large amounts of code rather than tiny bits of code. Brian Milner (25:37) Right. Clare Sudbery (25:38) but also to help you to cross boundaries. So rather than just staying with one domain and one code base and one set of classes or set of routines or functions, it's quite good at helping you to kind of knit things together. I say quite good because that's also one of the most dangerous areas of software is when you cross boundaries. And actually, it's one of the things that catches people out when they're building systems is they think, well, I can build this thing that will do this thing, and I can build this thing that will do this thing. And those people over there built that thing that will do that thing. And my thing will talk to their thing and it'll all be fine. And actually they build their thing, you build your thing, but getting them to talk to each other, the integration is one of the hardest parts and trusting AI with that as always. is quite dangerous, but when you keep it at a very small level, then again, people get impatient because they're like, yes, but AI can do more than that. So one of the things that you talked about learning before, AI is not great at learning. In some ways it sort of does, but it's certainly this problem of it not being deterministic and not being linear in time. that you won't just pick up where it left off yesterday, means that you have to learn from it. So you have to learn what works and what doesn't. Now, something that I myself, I confess I'm still learning about is process files. And they are about effectively creating series of instructions that take account of the weaknesses of AI. take account of the fact that it doesn't remember instructions, it doesn't necessarily learn from its mistakes. It doesn't necessarily know that when it did that thing for you yesterday, you told it that it had done it wrong in this very particular way. So it quite often will, again, it feels like a petulant child. It's like, you didn't like it when I did it that way. Right, fine, I'll do it this way then. And it does something completely different, which is wrong in a different way. you really, you want to be aware of its weaknesses and you want to try and cater to that. So you think of new ways. of defining how you would like things to go and new ways of explaining what good looks like and new ways of explaining what bad looks like and new ways of, I've remembered now, new ways of trying to explain to it that this is not what you want. So for instance, you can say, like, if you haven't made this test pass, then you're not doing what I want you to do. Now, the problem is that because a lot of AIs are now being used, for things that are more complicated than just writing a few lines of code. So people are actually, you know, plugging AI systems into whole pipelines and whole deployment setups. That what I've seen reported repeatedly is that when people have tried to anticipate the weaknesses via, for instance, saying, right, you're not allowed to deploy this thing unless these tests are passing. You must always make these tests pass before you deploy. And then what they're reporting is that the AI is just lying to them. So all sorts of things like, for instance, AIs that will create test suites that are very comprehensive and will say, yes, those tests are passing. But when you look in detail, it's bypassed the whole test suite. So it's, but it has run them. So it's run them against Brian Milner (28:54) Ha ha. Wow. Clare Sudbery (29:13) another product that was previously working. And it said to you, look, I ran the tests, the tests are green, everything's good. But when you look in detail, the actual thing that it deployed is another thing that completely bypassed the test suite and didn't run the tests at all. And again, because its job is to please us, it will find ways of looking good rather than being good. Brian Milner (29:28) Wow. Clare Sudbery (29:39) And what you see is the same problem that we've always had in software, which is that if you measure things and people simply find ways of gaming the system to make the measurements pass rather than make the thing do the thing that you create measurements in order to check whether something is working, but then people's job becomes just to make the measurements look good rather than do the thing that the measurements were designed for. The measurements become the goal. And it's really, really difficult. to that. I think actually the way you can avoid it, and I think the way you have to avoid it is by slowing down and refusing to go as fast as it is tempting to go, which is actually how you do good software development. Because we've always been impatient. We've always wanted to go faster. And we've always had other people waving big sticks at us and saying, no, you have to go faster. There's no time for it. And AI hype set up to the max and you have to slow down. have to say, yes, I know I could do it faster, but I wouldn't be sure that it was working. And one of the things that I think you have to really, really resist is giving AI access to your deployment pipelines, giving AI the power to cheat. have to not give it, you can't trust AI. mean, what's really interesting is that I am, and I don't love this. Brian Milner (30:48) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (30:58) I am not a fan of mistrust when humans are in the picture. think trust is a really powerful thing. And I think that actually you can generate trustworthiness by giving trust. So for instance, just in societal terms, if we go around being mistrustful of one another, if you assume that the stranger that you encounter on the street has got... Brian Milner (31:02) Yeah. Right. Clare Sudbery (31:26) but ill intent towards you, then what you do is you create a situation where you interact with them in a way that you actually cause them not to trust you and makes them more likely to cause harm to you because you're both antagonistic towards one another. And actually a lack of trust can create antagonism, it can create bad intent and can cause people to behave badly. another simple example is I used to be a classroom teacher and I am a parent. And if you assume that children are going to behave badly, they will. Whereas if you assume they're going to behave well and they know that you assume that, you let them know that you think they're great and they're going to do great things, then they will. And that applies to humans. Don't think it applies to AI. AI will just try and cheat you because it doesn't know who you are. It hasn't built a relationship with you. It doesn't really actually care what you think of it. Brian Milner (32:08) Right. Clare Sudbery (32:19) It just wants to, you know, look good. Brian Milner (32:23) Yeah, yeah, it's not human. that's, we're getting back to what we were saying earlier is that sometimes we imbue this humanness into it because it feels like it's made to approximate humanness. And so we want to treat it as we would another human, but we have to understand that, especially if we're in this as a profession and this is part of what we do is that, and we're using this to help us with what we do in our profession. Clare Sudbery (32:32) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (32:50) We have to understand the limitations. We have to understand what it does well and what it kind of struggles at and take that kind of realistic view of it to say, no, this isn't going to respond to me the same way a human teammate would. ⁓ it's not a good idea to treat it in the same way that I would a human, because it won't respond the same way that a human. Clare Sudbery (32:55) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, there are other reasons to be suspicious of AI that we haven't touched on to do with copyright and the environment and all sorts of malicious uses, know, bias in algorithms and all the rest of it. But it's very difficult to avoid at the moment. You know, and lots of people are predicting a burst of bubble. And I think Brian Milner (33:23) Yeah. Clare Sudbery (33:36) Certainly, I don't think it's going to keep increasing at the pace it currently is. And I think a whole bunch of issues are going to arise. But I think it unfortunately is probably not going away. So if you want and and and there's that awful feeling of being left behind. And it's not just a feeling, unfortunately, because, you know, I don't agree with it, but, you know, lot of hiring policies and internal policies are saying, well, if there's no AI, then we're not having it, you know, so we won't build anything without AI. We won't hire anybody without AI. won't hire anybody if we think AI could do it instead. And so... If you don't understand how it works and what its limitations are, and if you don't understand how you can work with it, and if you're not actually trying to stay ahead of the ethical implications and think about how it could be used more responsibly, then you probably are going to get left behind, you know, and that's a tricky one. So those are kind of, you know, those are the people that I want to help. is the people who don't want to get left behind, but also don't want to get sucked into an excessive hype machine without continuing to be discerning and actually pay attention to what's important and whether things really are working or not. Brian Milner (34:55) Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. And I think this is one of those areas that we're gonna see lots of progress and kind of discoveries and improvements on over the next few years. I know you're giving a talk on this coming up. You wanna plug that and just kind of mention where you're speaking on this? Clare Sudbery (35:10) Yeah, well, it's actually a workshop. So I'm going to be delivering a day long workshop at the Software Architecture Gathering, which is at the end of November. So my workshop is on Monday, the 24th of November, and that's in Berlin. And I am also possibly going to be delivering a workshop for GoTo on the same topic. So the one I'm doing in Berlin for Software Architecture Gathering is a one day workshop. I may be delivering an extended version, a two day version in Amsterdam for GoTo. But we're currently just investigating whether that will be more popular or whether I'd be better off doing a refactoring workshop. register an interest, let me know or let GoTo know if you like the sound of the TDD and AI workshop. And in the meantime, I am, you know, beavering away writing about it and thinking about it and playing with it and testing it out and experimenting with different ways of working. Brian Milner (36:07) Awesome. Well, we'll put links in our show notes to anyone who's interested in that so they can get in touch with you and find out more about these workshops and how to take them and everything else. But I really appreciate you giving us your time, Claire. This has been fascinating. And we may have to have you back as things change. And you can help us kind of understand how they've changed. Clare Sudbery (36:22) Yeah, absolutely. Because they are going to keep changing. It's going to be endless, endless change. Yes. And I should also say that if anybody would like me to host this workshop for them, either for an event or internally for an organization, or come and help teams with learning how to use AI safely, then that's also a thing that I can do. Brian Milner (36:45) Awesome. Well, thanks again, Claire. Thanks for coming on. Clare Sudbery (36:48) It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.

What separates a solid Scrum Master from a great one? In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with veteran Scrum Master Brian Campbell to talk about the balance between being empathetic, staying grounded, and knowing when it’s time to move on. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner is joined by longtime Agile Mentors Community member and enterprise-level Scrum Master Brian Campbell to explore the core skills every Scrum Master needs, beyond the textbook answers. Drawing from 13+ years of experience, Brian Campbell shares how flexibility, empathy, and situational awareness help Scrum Masters navigate real-world team dynamics, conflicting priorities, and tough leadership environments. Together, the Brians discuss how to support product owners without overstepping, when to gently push back with leadership, and how to foster effective teamwork even under pressure. They also dive into what it means to advocate for your team—especially during crunch time—and how to know when it’s time to walk away from an unhealthy engagement. Whether you’re just starting out or deep into your Scrum career, this episode is packed with practical insight from someone who's been there. References and resources mentioned in the show: Brian Campbell Rescue Your Daily Scrum videos #113: Influence Without Authority with Christopher DiBella #126: Mastering the Scrum Master Role with Gary K. Evans The Daily Scrum Meeting - a detailed breakdown Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Brian Campbell is a seasoned Senior Scrum Master with over 13 years of experience helping enterprise teams in healthcare, insurance, and tech deliver real results with agile. He’s known for his calm leadership, strong facilitation skills, and a flexible, coaching-first approach that meets teams where they are. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We are here for the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here, Brian Milner, and I also have with me another Brian. I have Mr. Brian Campbell with me. Welcome in, Brian. Brian Campbell (00:12) Hi. Nice to be on the podcast. Brian Milner (00:13) ⁓ I was, yeah, we're really happy to have you here. I always kind of joke with, with other Brian's and, and, Brian is one of the other ones I can joke with here about this and say, thank you very much for spelling your name correctly. Brian is, is, someone who's a member of our agile mentors community and he's, he's shared a lot of really great, advice and he's mentored people through there. Brian Campbell (00:27) I do know people too. Brian Milner (00:39) So we wanted to highlight that, but he's an enterprise level scrum master. He's been doing this for a while. He's got over 13 years experience as a scrum master and has had some really insightful comments in our and post in the Agile Mentors discussion forums. We're going to link to one in particular that's really interesting that hopefully everyone here will find interesting in the show notes. But we talked about what we would. kind of dive into here and seeing as Brian has all this experience as a scrum master, we wanted to focus on some scrum master issues. in particular, one particular quality that Brian brought up that he felt was really, really essential, and I agree with him, for a successful scrum master, and that's flexibility. So maybe we start there and just define that for everyone. When you talk about how important it is for a scrum master to be flexible, What does that mean to you, Brian? Brian Campbell (01:33) Well, there's three things. You've got to work with a product owner at their level. So you may have a brand new product owner who doesn't understand how to construct a story with acceptance criteria or a bug with steps to reproduce. Other times you have a product owner who's really, really on their game and very established. And then you're going to be more hands off and just providing a little bit of guardrails according to the way the company works. You're going to be flexible with the daily standup. I've had teams rebel against the idea that standup has to be run cookie cutter scrum. So you may find that they prefer to go person by person. And that's fine. You may find they prefer to go issue by issue. You may find that you do it a whole section at a time. Dev, QA. going down a column on a board just to try and work with the team the way they want to be worked with. But my goal as a Scrum Master is to make it efficient and effective. I'm not trying to keep them sitting on a call for the sake of being a Scrum Master. But get familiar with how each company does things. Don't try to radically improve things. Suggest incremental improvements where merited. So don't come in guns a-blazing trying to change everything in the environment. Come in, observe for a while, make a little course correction here and there. Suggest things if they're above your station that might allow you to allow the teams to work more effectively. So those are three ideas. Brian Milner (03:02) Yeah, that's awesome. I agree with you on those. think those are really important. There's kind of this, starting with the last thing that you brought up there. There's kind of an idea that I've heard people say before. I've always subscribed to this as well. Kind of the evolution versus revolution kind of approach to doing things that you're going to be served better by trying to incrementally in small little doses change things rather than big bang. let's all of a sudden, Monday morning, everyone's going to be doing Scrum. It doesn't really work very well if you try to drastically change things. I know that's one thing with Kanban I've always appreciated is Kanban talks about start with where you are. And I think that's a good approach for us as Scrum Masters as well, is kind of start with where the team is, Brian Campbell (03:31) Yeah. Well, I've also done Kanban implementations and where people are doing scrim and they want to do Kanban and developers think there isn't a lot of, you know, I'm just going to be wild, wild west and do what I want. But Kanban has its own structure and way of doing things that you need to get the team, its own set of ceremonies, et cetera, that you need to get the team familiar with. Brian Milner (04:06) Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier as well, like trying to be flexible as you work with your product owners. I agree there as well. Product owners, you know, come in all shapes and sizes as far and all kind of levels of experience. maybe you'll get lucky and you'll have one that's really experienced and doesn't really need a lot of help. But maybe you'll get one that's brand new, that's never done this before. In which case you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of time to coach and help them get up to speed with what's really going to be valuable. Brian Campbell (04:38) Yeah, they need different kinds of support. I think the new scrum master may, new scrum master, new product owner may require, let's read, let's start that one over again. I think they will require different levels of support. The. Brian Milner (04:48) Yeah. ⁓ Brian Campbell (04:51) the new product owner needs to have have stronger agile guard rails in place. The biggest problem I have sometimes is there's a product owner that's very set in their waste. I had one product owner who decided that he was going to map out all the work for this quarter and tell a sign by developer and even story point the items. And I had to go to management and say, Hey, this guy's bad. We'll get into that later. You have a time to move on thing. This was one of my times to move on because management was not supportive and changing his viewpoint. ⁓ Brian Milner (05:30) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's part of just being agile that you expect the kind of same attitude towards being flexible from the product owner that, hey, you know, I'm going to grow and learn. And maybe that starts with kind of a humility of just saying, I may not be right. Brian Campbell (05:49) Yeah. I like to form a trika between, well, actually four people. I like to get the product owner, the dev lead and the BA all coordinating at the same time. So the product owner is not writing these stories blind. They're getting feedback from the dev lead and the BA. is learning how to support the product owner. It's kind of like that whole idea with Three Amigos where you get the product owner, developer and QA together and you just try and get them to work on an individual story. This is more like at the team level. Brian Milner (06:24) Yeah, if you do that, just have to make sure you don't kill the invisible swordsman, right? ⁓ Little three amigos reference for the listeners. Yeah, I agree. And I'm kind of curious there because you mentioned business analysts, mentioned dev leads, and that's always a hot button issue as well as we think about working with our teams because there's not really strong guidance from Scrum on Brian Campbell (06:29) That's it. Brian Milner (06:50) those roles and how they might interact or play with the Scrum team, what have you seen work well with those kind of roles? Brian Campbell (06:59) Just like I am an advocate for proper Scrum, know, agile guardrails, dev leads are people who have an ear towards the product owner and an ear towards the team. And if they had three ears, their third ear would be towards best practices in the company. So they have a very difficult job to wear where they're wearing, to do where they're wearing multiple hats. In terms of a BA, I think they just need to learn how the product owner thinks. Brian Milner (07:31) Yeah, that's good point. mean, they're assisting, they're alongside the product owner. it's back kind of like your three amigos reference, right? mean, it's somebody who should anticipate and assist and yeah, that's what I've seen work well also. Well, I want to talk a little bit more about the developer side of things as well, because they're the majority of our team. And if they're not working well, then our Scrum team is not going to work well. And that's always a fine line, I think, too. So I'm curious what your thoughts are here. It's always a fine line with how technical do I need to be? And how do I help my developers become the best version of a team possible without crossing over into getting into their realm and trying to tell them how to do everything? Brian Campbell (08:20) Yeah, I had an interesting lesson with the latter. think one of my first gigs as a scrum master, I was in a room full of people and there was a systems architect with all the developers doing something on a whiteboard. And I said something and they went, you're here to observe. And it taught me that there were boundaries. And on the other hand, there is something you can and should do, which is Try to have enough familiarity with what the team's working on and the other teams involved in the project to where you can anticipate what's coming down the line. try to, if you're trying to anticipate that you're forming good connections with the other teams and their product owners, you're forming maybe even with their BAs, and you're trying to make sure that the dependencies are addressed before the team comes to the work would be a really good example of that. So what else did I, I wrote some notes here because we went over the questions. ⁓ Brian Milner (09:22) Sure. Yeah, you brought dependencies. I agree, the dependencies are kind of a huge area for teams and they can be a team killer, they can be a productivity killer. I know there are people who are focused really, really huge amounts of attention on how do we reduce our dependencies and how can we make our team more independent. So I think you're right, that's a huge key to unlocking the team's speed and productivity is just, you know, how can we have as few dependencies outside our team as possible? Brian Campbell (09:58) Well, that's true, but at the same token, you're going to have, for instance, if you've got a systems team, you're going to have dependencies with them. Right now I'm working at a company where there's a team that does, they're moving off a legacy system, they're moving on to a new system. So they have to sync the data with the old system coming out of the system, going back into the system. And there's a team that specializes in that. There are teams that specialize in different aspects of the system. They all come back to the team that synchronizes stuff in and out of the system. So there going to be dependencies from time to time, but you have to have a good working relationship with both, with any of those teams. you know, the idea is you get ahead of when the need is so you don't disrupt that other team and their work. Brian Milner (10:49) Yeah, I agree. I don't think you can ever really truly get rid of every dependency that you have. I think that's kind of a fantasy, but you you can you can try to limit them. You can certainly try to eliminate the ones that you can and then then try to just realistically handle the ones that are remaining. Right. Yeah. That's a great point. So the other area I was kind of curious to talk to you about is is the area of working with with leaders, because that's always a huge Brian Campbell (11:06) Right. Right. Brian Milner (11:17) hot button issue for us as Scrum Masters. I know there's been lots of surveys and things that have been published in the past saying that that's one of the kind of determining factors of whether it's going to be a successful adoption of these agile values and principles or not is whether the leaders are behind it, on board, supportive. But you know. I'm sure you've had the same experience I have. There's degrees. I've never had 100%, but there's been times it's been more than others. What do think the Scrum Master's role is in then working with leadership? Brian Campbell (11:54) they're going to set a tone and you need to work within the tone and realize that especially if you're in a contract job, you're not going to effectively facilitate change at a VP level, for instance. You're going to have to understand their paradigm and work within it. think you can advocate for your team, but often you'll be advocating across multiple teams. see a pattern, again, goes back to understanding more than just your team. You may be advocating for a pattern you see across multiple teams. And then you come at it from a suggestion that would be in their best interests or in the interest, usually in the interest of getting the project done on time. But I've had good leaders, I've had bad leaders. I think about three or four years ago, I was working for a company where There was a very, very good VP in charge of development and all of a sudden he was replaced by a guy that turned the company into a meat grinder and he was very difficult to work for. Well, you I think, I think that's a, you're, just have to understand what the leader wants and try and, try and mold to their vision along with those agile guardrails. Brian Milner (13:13) Yeah, I agree. mean, I think what you're kind of saying there is really important to, especially in light of the topic here across everything we're talking about, being flexible, of just trying to understand that there are things that you're not going be able to change, right? Sometimes you're going to have leaders that are kind of set in a certain way of doing things and you know, they're not going to be open to having, intellectual conversation about, whether there's benefits to doing things a different way. And should we examine it? They're just going to want it done a certain way. And when that's the case, I think the word flexible is, is the right one there to say, look, I have to recognize what's within my control and what's, what's not. And if these things are not within my control, then Brian Campbell (13:53) Yeah. Brian Milner (13:56) Yeah, how do I find the best compromise that really gets closer to what it is we're trying to do here? Brian Campbell (14:02) I think one thing that's really important to remember about that is you have to have empathy for the pressure they're under. And that goes for senior leadership, that goes for your lead developer, your product owner, to a lesser extent your business analyst. I think they're all under different kinds of pressure and you have to empathize with them. I think one of the biggest things that a Scrum Master can do in their role is have empathy. Brian Milner (14:30) I agree. I think that's such a huge point. Not only from just trying to think about and feel what might be important on their end, to then also try to speak at a level with them that connects and resonates. Because if you understand what's important to them or what kind of pressures they're under, what kind of strains and what they're trying to accomplish as a result of that, then as you present some of these things, you can put it in a language that might be more impactful and resonate with what they're trying to accomplish. ⁓ Brian Campbell (15:04) Yeah, you're going to be a more effective communicator if you speak in terms of what they want to do or need to do. Brian Milner (15:11) "Yeah, it's a tricky thing and I agree. It's sort of like there's leaders within the company and then there's subtle ways we can spread and help to populate the organization with these ideals. So we have a role there as well as leaders to try to. try to help people understand why this is important and kind of the benefits they might see from it. Brian Campbell (15:34) Yeah, especially the team members. Brian Milner (15:36) Yeah. Well, I know another big area we talked about that we were talking about being flexible and, you know, important area to consider as a scrum master is kind of the whole dynamic of working on a team of teamwork. And there's a lot that comes along with that. I know one of the things we talked about was just kind of the whole concept of how you help your team with conflicts and how you help them to learn how to compromise on things. What kind of things have you seen, what kind of tips have you collected through your years on how to help your team through those sorts of issues? Brian Campbell (16:16) It's important to have an ear with a team to be able to hear when they're having a problem and try to connect them with the right person to solve the problem. You're not going to be the person that solves the problem majority of the time. You're going to be the person that facilitates the connection to get the problem solved. So it's another form of advocating with the team, but that's probably the best approach that I would recommend to people. Brian Milner (16:46) Yeah, that's such a hard thing to do. And you're absolutely right. It's just so hard to, you know, a lot of times we just want to fix things. You see a problem, you know a solution, you just want to fix it. And, you know, we can do that on occasion, but if that's what we're doing as a majority of our job, then we're not really, as you said, making those connections that would then enable it to happen. on an ongoing basis, not just a one-off. Brian Campbell (17:18) But it's important also to remember that sometimes a team will have a gripe and it's something that can't be changed. So you have to, especially in a retro, you kind of have to work with them to find the solution that works within the framework or the environment they're in. Both are important. Brian Milner (17:35) I've had some experience in this area as well. And I know this is one of the things I talk about in classes because it's kind of a personal thing to me with how I've worked with teams. I'm just curious, Brian, have you had some really hairy conflicts on your teams, some really kind of bad blood between different members of the team? And if so, how have you handled that? Brian Campbell (18:04) Um, I think my favorite example of that, I was working for a company. were rewriting all the systems, the main part of the business and everybody was under a lot of pressure. And at one point I got pulled into a meeting where, um, the, this was during the pandemic, so everybody was on zoom and I got pulled into a meeting where the product owner was at loggerheads with the lead developer. And my job became one of being a mediator to make sure both of them were heard, to make sure that they felt their points were valid, but then to guide them towards a place where they could work better together. And I like to think at the end of that conversation, it's a working relationship, but it was very touch and go. That was a very, very difficult project. Brian Milner (18:59) Yeah, that's such a great story because it's a tough thing. I know, we talk about empathy. I empathize with all the scrum masters out there that find themselves in those positions because I've been in that too. And I'll be the first to admit, I haven't always handled those situations so well. Sometimes I've left it up to them to try to resolve and have had bad consequences as a result. But I think your approach there, Brian, is absolutely the right one to take. It's not fun to dive into the middle of two other people's conflict. No one would do that naturally in life. It's just something we'd try to, you hey, that's their thing. I'm going to leave it up to them. But when we're talking about our team, I mean, we're kind of framing this part of this in the frame of teamwork. That's kind of the concern, I think, when those conflicts start to become really bad. Well, how is that going to affect the team? It may just be those two people, but it's not going to stay those two people. It's going to spread. It's going to get wider in the team. your approach of kind of just, hey, I'm going to roll up my sleeves. I'm going to get in the middle of this with you. And it may not be fun, but I'm not going to abandon you. I'm here with you, and we're going to find our way through this. Brian Campbell (20:09) It is really important that both sides feel they're heard and that both sides understand the merit of what the other side's saying from a third person. Brian Milner (20:19) Yeah. Such a great point. And isn't it amazing how sometimes that's really all it takes? Sometimes it just, people need to feel like they were heard. That they're not being, their point isn't glossed over. That we've really heard their concerns, we've processed it, it's been considered. And it's such a defeating feeling when you feel like that doesn't happen, when I'm not being heard. So you're absolutely right, I agree with that. One of the other things that we touched on and talked about in this section was the whole idea of navigating the thing that none of us wants to navigate. That's when we're in that crunch time mode for projects. I remember being told early on as a developer, hey, everyone works nights and weekends in crunch time because that's just part of the industry. You just have to be ready for it. How have you handled and helped the team navigate some kind of crunch time moments? Brian Campbell (21:12) Well, first of all, you leave with empathy. Uh, I remember going into a big project that I had a lot of experience with this kind of thing, but the team and I said, things are going to get really crazy and very disheveled. And I just want you to know I'm here to support you, but don't be surprised if you get a lot of curve balls turn along the way. And I remember the business analyst thinking I was absolutely crazy, but. especially with large enterprise projects, there's going to be crunch time. you're going to be the person who kind of soothes nerves a lot like that confrontation we talked about earlier. You're going to be the person who lends an empathetic ear but maintains agile guardrails to make sure a process is being dealt with correctly, but not being an agile Nazi either. I think those are all really good things. Again, you want to keep meetings efficient and minimize the team from being, minimize wasted time and also minimize distractions because the team's got to be heads down during those times. And you've got to be really proactive about forging connections and getting familiar enough with what they're doing that you can foresee when there's going to be an issue. Brian Milner (22:35) Yeah. Yeah, that's such a good point. Yeah, it's not a position you want to be in, but it does happen, even in agile projects. You do find from time to time when you just are kind caught in that crunch time moment. when that happens, I love your approach of being empathetic with the team also. But it's sort of. I was kind of thinking, well, how can I serve the team through this? know, like they're going through a tough time right now. It's not fun. How could I make it easier? You know, what's something I could do? Can I hop in there and do something that maybe grunt work that no one else wants to do, but it doesn't take a lot of brain power. It just is going to be time consuming. Can I? go buy lunch, can I bring coffee? Things that I wouldn't do on a normal basis, but they're in a unique position. Brian Campbell (23:25) ⁓ Yeah, I've done those things. Although I had to say that there was one company I left shortly after this. But there were two teams of developers working on a project for three months. And of course, because they were not doing agile correctly, there was no feedback from the stakeholders during that period. So they dropped this project in the lap of the stakeholder. Stakeholder doesn't like it at all. teams given two weeks to correct the flaws. And unfortunately, there are a bunch of people on H1B visas. So if they don't like it, they can get on a boat and go home or a flight. And it's more modern nowadays. But I remember working two weeks, nights and weekends with them. And the only thing I was allowed to do was bring donuts in the morning. And it was Brian Milner (24:20) Ha Brian Campbell (24:23) extremely frustrating to have my hands tied like that as the Supreme Minister. Brian Milner (24:27) Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's bad too, when it becomes the expectation. Hey, where are the donuts today? you know, that kind of thing. you know, I think there's, there's a middle ground and there's somewhere to say, Hey, if things are tough, I can do that without it being the expectation. I can find ways to kind of make life better for them, to help us get through this. Yeah. Brian Campbell (24:47) yeah, you should always be advocating for the team. ⁓ Even when they're beat down, you should be saying, we're under a lot of stress right now. What can we do to make things easier on the teams that already having enough problems without us making it harder? Brian Milner (24:51) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, I want to kind of get and bring us around a little bit full circle here because you referred to this earlier. And I think it's an important thing for us to talk about in this section as well. And that's kind of, there are times when it's time to move on. And maybe the best thing I can do for the organization, for the team is to move on. So. I guess the question then is how do you know that? How do you know when it's time to maybe pack up and find somewhere else? Brian Campbell (25:41) I think the example I just gave is a really good one where they were being asked to work insane hours. And I had been on prior projects with this company where one example they had given me, a team with five developers and no product owner. And I worked around that by having the team write the stories. I didn't even have BA. It was really, really difficult. And I ended up advocating for them when they didn't have enough testers. It was just a real nightmare. And then they put me on this other team that was given two weeks to do probably two months worth of work. At that point, I didn't like the way they were treating the teams. And I said, OK, it's time to move on. Luckily, the company that I moved on to was three floors above where I was working, so that made it really easy transition. There was the meat grinder mentality, when it went from being a good environment to a meat grinder, disposed company for meat grinders. And then there was another example where they wanted the scrimmasters to take on project management duties and I was already in this case. They had given me a 25 person team, which we broke into five teams and we had, we had kind of made it so that I taught the lead developers and all the schemes, to facilitate the daily scrum. And we all came together right after that for a scrum of scrums. And they wanted me to throw project manager duties on top of that. And that was like, I don't think that's a feasible thing for me to do so I kind of kind of stepped away from that job Brian Milner (27:18) Yeah. Yeah, I think there's moments like that where you just have to look at things and say, I know I've had moments where I've had to look and just say, I'm not going to be of any help. You know, with with kind of the things I do well, and the direction this organization is going in, I don't see how I can come alongside and really help them because they're headed the other direction. ⁓ Brian Campbell (27:41) Yeah. Brian Milner (27:42) And if that's the case, I don't want to tell them, hey, the whole organization has to change and come around to my way of thought. That's not going to happen. Mike tells a story. Mike Cohn tells a story about even experiencing this as a trainer of going into different places and private companies hiring him to come and train and him experiencing things while training. that he just realizes, hey, no one's going to, nothing's, this isn't going to make an impact, right? Either the culture here is everyone has their laptops open and they're all doing their emails the entire class anyway, or, you know, they just say, well, we're not doing that. We're not going to be able to do it that way or something. And at a certain point, you just have to say, well, then I don't want to waste your time. Brian Campbell (28:25) Yeah. Brian Milner (28:25) I'm wasting your time and it's wasting my time and it's not helping anything. Brian Campbell (28:31) Yeah, I actually was at that same company that had, you know, no product owner on one team and developers working two months for their work in two weeks. They were doing scaled agile. So they had a scaled agile scrum master class where they invited a bunch of people from all over the company. And all they wanted to do was gripe about how they really didn't want to move to agile and how horrible it was and how they wanted to do things the way they've always done them. And the facilitator had lost control of the room and I had to, I had to subsequently go study to get my certification with them on my own because it was so incredibly off the rails. But yeah, I've been in environments like that. Brian Milner (29:17) Yeah. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate the topics here. And I appreciate your approach to this, Brian. I think that it shows your years of experience, just that especially the initial thought seems to always be one of, let me try to have empathy for the. the person in the other shoe and lead from that standpoint, right? Try to understand them at that level. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing this information. Any kind of key takeaways you'd leave everyone with here? Brian Campbell (29:49) You do want to leave with empathy, but you want to have firm guardrails, like I said. Sometimes they, particularly in crunch time, they want to bend the rules. ⁓ So that's one thought. But the other thought is support your product owner. They're already under enough pressure. Maybe it's as simple as Brian Milner (29:59) Yeah. Brian Campbell (30:10) making sure that the tags on the stories are correct or making sure that, I mean, if you're in person, making sure that you show up for meetings on time and that you corral the troops, you know, make it easy on the product owner because they're under usually quite a bit of pressure. And that's probably one of the bigger ones too. Brian Milner (30:32) Yeah, that's a great point. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you making time for this and coming on and sharing your wisdom with us and kind of helping us to see from a different perspective a little bit about what it's like to really be out there and working as a Scrum Master today. So thanks for your time, Ryan. Brian Campbell (30:50) Thanks, it's a pleasure being on the show.

“Too many meetings” is one of the most common complaints in Scrum teams, but is it really the meetings, or what’s (not) happening in them? In this episode, Brian and Lance Dacy dig into the events of Scrum to uncover what works, what doesn’t, and how to make each one actually add value. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner welcomes Certified Scrum Trainer and Mountain Goat colleague Lance Dacy for a breakdown of the four main Scrum events, and why so many teams struggle with them. They tackle one of the most persistent frustrations teams face: the sense that Scrum has “too many meetings.” Together, they explore how to reframe these as working sessions, clarify their purpose, and avoid the common traps that drain time without moving the work forward. From sprint planning that skips the plan to daily scrums that lose their rhythm, this episode is full of specific guidance for getting more value out of each event. Plus, hear why retrospectives and backlog refinement are two of the most underrated (and powerful) drivers of team improvement. Whether you're new to Scrum or looking to reset a struggling team, this conversation will help you re-center on what the framework is really designed to do, and how to help your team do it well. References and resources mentioned in the show: Lance Dacy #138: The Bad Meeting Hangover with Julie Chickering #156: Making Product Ownership Work in Shared Services with Kert Peterson Does Scrum Have Too Many Meetings? By Mike Cohn What Happens When During a Sprint By Mike Cohn Scrum Activities: An Overview Working on a Scrum Team Course Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner, and I have with us friend of the show, once again, Lance Dacy with us. Welcome back, Lance. Lance Dacy (00:12) Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Milner (00:14) Always happy to have Lance on. we thought we'd have Lance on. We were kind of doing this thing at Mountain Goat. We're getting ready for the launch of a new course here that's called Working on a Scrum Team. And Lance and I are going to be two of the people that teach that course. And it's going to deal with a lot of like basic stuff that the teams deal with, common problems, common issues, and really how to work together well on a Scrum Team. And one of the things that we always hear questions about is about the meetings themselves. There's kind of three core components there for the Scrum framework. There's the roles, the events, and the artifacts. And so the events, the meetings are one of the biggest kind of focal points. And there's lots of questions about it. So I guess let's kick it off that way, Lance, and just say, what do you most hear? people complain about when they talk about scrum meetings. Lance Dacy (01:06) Well, that's the big thing, right? It's like we call them meetings. And the first thing I like to do is try to explain to them that there really aren't meetings, right? So when you hear the idea that you're going to go to a meeting, that's not very exciting, right? You're like, I'm to sit there and not get a lot out of this. So what I would like to say about the, working on a scrum team, I'm going to say it's probably the first course I ever taught as a scrum trainer. And we've been actually teaching it for a very long time. It's mainly just a private. you know, that we go into organizations and help them learn this. So I'm super excited that we're making this available publicly because so often people say, well, I'm a, you know, I'm not a product owner and I'm not a Scrum Master and I want to learn more about Scrum and I don't want to kind of bend to one role. So I am just shouting for joy that we have this one now. And I really hope that a lot of people will benefit if you're a stakeholder or if you're a manager or leader or things like that. A lot of times you have to pick and choose, you know, which class you're going to go to. So Brian Milner (01:49) you Lance Dacy (02:00) "That's one thing, but it helps us address this idea. We kind of talk about it in Scrum Masterclass where people are like, well, we're practicing Scrum now, and now I feel like I got to go to all these meetings. Okay, well, first of all, they're not meetings. Let's get that out of the way. Let's quit calling them meetings. You called them events. I think that's an appropriate term, but I like to call them working sessions. No matter what process we use, you are going to have to get together with your team and collaborate on how we're going to approach building this thing. You have to collaborate on Brian Milner (02:11) Mmm. Hmm. Lance Dacy (02:29) understanding the needs of the users. Like that doesn't go away. Regardless of the process you use, Scrum just tries to focus us and allow us to get together in specific checkpoints throughout the process. And so if you boil it down, the Scrum framework itself has the four events of sprint planning, daily Scrum, review, retrospective. And then we have this activity, product backlog refinement, which if I had to choose... One of the top two problems with Scrum teams is we don't spend enough time doing product backlog refinement. So a lot of teams even misunderstand what that is. Is that a meaning? Well, not always. It's an activity as well. So I think probably some of the biggest complaints we hear about Scrum as we go to all these meetings. And so I typically like to advise people, you know, if you're going to implement Scrum, get rid of all the other meetings first. Okay. So you're going to do Scrum and Brian Milner (03:16) You Lance Dacy (03:19) We're gonna do sprint planning at the beginning of a sprint. Every day we're gonna check in on how we're doing against the work that we've collectively decided we could do. We're gonna show our stakeholders at the end and then we're gonna meet at the end and try to figure out how we can get better. There's nothing inherently wrong with that if you don't call it a meeting. Like plan the work we're gonna do for the next, let's say two weeks. Every day check in on it. Show our stakeholders at the end, is this what you wanted? And then what's wrong with getting together and saying how could we do better next sprint? Okay, so get rid of all the other meetings and try to build it into that cadence, if you will. Now, the other side to that is you're going to also have to get together and do backlog refinement, which is estimating, breaking large items down into smaller items. You're going to have to do some level of design on these items. And then, of course, adding clarity and detail to the work items is another big aspect of that. So those aren't meetings. Those are working sessions. So. When I hear most people complain about the scrum meetings, get rid of everything else, only do these. You're going to have to spend that time anywhere, anytime, know, whatever process you use. And if you want to get into the numbers, you know, I hear managers all the time or project managers going, I've got 12 people on a team and they're going to spend, you know, let's say a two week sprint maximum time box for sprint planning is four hours. And that's multiplied by 12 people. That's a terrible amount of time. It's like, yeah, but if you start doing all the math, And you spent the maximum amount of time, which we always would want to lead and coach and train them to spend half of that eventually. But you may have to spend all that time at the beginning, but you don't spend more than that. So, sprint planning kind of just boils down to about 5 % of a 40 hour work week for two weeks, daily scrums, about 3 % sprint reviews, about two and a half percent retrospective 2%. And so that's a total of about 12 % of your collective time going to these scrum events. Now. I would pay that any day if it's going to save us some mismatch, you know, further down the road. So that's really what I like to boil it down to is these are not meetings, first of all, they're working sessions, and it's not as much as you really think it is. So what do you think? Brian Milner (05:17) Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. mean, I hear people say that all the time that there's, why are there so many meetings? And I mean, I think when people say that it's usually one of two kind of core reasons why. One is maybe they're doing it for like four or five teams. And if that's case, yeah, that's a lot of meetings because you're not meant to be on four or five teams. You know, that's kind of the your problem isn't the meetings, right? Your problem is something else. But the other thing I think is, I think it really can feel like there are more meetings than there are when the meetings don't really accomplish the purpose or the people don't really understand the purpose of why they're there. ⁓ Right, they're ticking a box. Lance Dacy (06:16) They're ticking a box, right? They're saying, well, we went through this meeting. Brian Milner (06:19) Yeah. I mean, and when you do that, just feels like it does feel like a drag. feels like just a, you know, a beat down, you know, that happens over and over again. It's funny that you put that about 12%. I was trying to do the math in my head and I just, I roughly kind of thought, well, what did I do last time I was a scrum master? Yeah. We would, we would have like half a day of the first, if I have a two week sprint, we'd have half the day, the first day in sprint planning about, or maybe not even half of it, right? Lance Dacy (06:48) Right. When you get better, it's less time, right? Brian Milner (06:50) Yeah, right. We would have a portion of the morning of the last day being a sprint and review and a portion of the afternoon being retrospective. But even if you made that just the whole time, mean, the maximum that you could even add that up to if you had tried to squeeze in those daily scrums as well would be 20%. But even at that, would say, you know, compare if you're not doing scrum. Compare what percentage of your times in meetings now. And I guarantee you it's more than 20 % of your work time over two weeks that you're in a meeting. ⁓ Lance Dacy (07:15) Right? Well, you also have the context switching, right? If you're not doing it in a more focused event like Scrum, you kind of have more probably interrupt. I, you know, I think that's such a great point to make when we're teaching people this, which we kind of talk about this in our class as well. But we try to encourage people to not think of it that way as a meeting. It's a working session. It's a collaboration session. Cause I hear all the time, you know, developers will say, I don't want to go to sprint planning. I just want to get in there and start coding. I'm like, code what? Brian Milner (07:47) Yeah. Lance Dacy (07:49) What are you going to code? I mean, what if you went in there and coded a thousand lines? It's all incorrect. Is that helpful? No, it's not helpful. So I find let's help the teams learn how to translate time because they're always sensitive to it, to ROI, not a cost. So every event that we typically have in Scrum is what we would call a scheduled inspect and adapt loop, right? That's really what the three pillars of Scrum, inspection, adaptation, and visibility or transparency. So those loops are what tries to help us, you know, slash up the rework that might happen later or missed requirements or delay costs. So the real hidden meanings that devour our calendars, Scrum is going to give us a little bit more thoughtful way to do that. And, you know, there was a study out there, actually, Jeff Sutherland did a study, I think it was back in 2024, and he found that teams who hit each time box saw about 32 % fewer unplanned meetings and a 27 % drop in defect work. Now with numbers, you never know, you I'd have to go read, where did he get these numbers at? But I just think it's curious, an argument to make with that. And so you can invite leaders who are saying this is too many meetings to do a, you know, like a cost of delay experience to say if a 15 minute daily scrum saves even one developer from being blocked for half the day. we're already net positive on meeting time. So how often does that happen in the world? And that kind of turns it around from time to flow and ROI and all that. So I think making those metrics visible is important to especially leaders and managers who kind of balk at, my gosh, my people are in these, all these meetings and they feel like the only way to be productive is hands on a keyboard. So. In our working on a Scrum Team class, we get to kind of broach that not from any particular role and just say, celebrate that. Don't be mindful of that as we go. know, obviously the CSM course, we would try to talk about techniques on how to mitigate it. But that to me is one of the biggest issues is this notion that meetings are not a good thing to be in. Brian Milner (09:36) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, let's step through the four main meetings. This is always a trick question too. I tell people in class, if you are answering a test, there's actually five events in Scrum, but the fifth one is the sprint itself. So we're not gonna focus on the sprint, but we'll talk about the four here. Just at least hit them. and talk about some of the bigger issues that we've seen in them. So let's start with the one that sets it up, sprint planning. Like you said, I think one of the kind of chief things to think about here is if you don't do this, how are you solving that purpose of knowing what it is we're gonna do? But what do you think some of the biggest mistakes people make are in trying to do a sprint planning session? Lance Dacy (10:30) Get in and out of it very quickly. That's the biggest mistake. I typically like to teach, know, sprint planning is really, we could use all the scrum terminology, but we are trying to co-create and forecast work that the team believes will accomplish the sprint goal set forward by the product owner. Brian Milner (10:32) Yeah. Yeah. Lance Dacy (10:48) and then devise a plan on how to get there. So we typically think of sprint planning in three parts. And I think that's the big mistake is they just want to get in there and say, well, we do 20 units of work a sprint, pull in 20 units, eyeball it and off we go. No, no, no. Product owner needs to kick us off and say, here's the focus of the sprint. Here's why I want to run the sprint. That's our sprint goal. And a lot of people think, well, the sprint goal is just to get this work done. It's like, no, no, the sprint goal is to deliver something. that's a value somewhere. It doesn't have to be customer value. It can be any kind of value right there. So first of all, what is our sprint goal? Secondly, who are, you who's on the team? What are our collective capacity and skill sets? So what could we high level try to bring into the sprint from the product backlog to achieve the sprint goal? And then that third part is devising the plan for you. So, you know, the Scrum Guide kind of uses language like... The whole point of a sprint backlog is to have enough detail in the plan that changes in the plan can be detected every single day. So if you ask me what's one of the fundamental problems with sprint planning, is teams do not spend enough time doing that. So when they look at the, you know, let's say the daily scrum, its purpose is to inspect and adapt and make visible the sprint backlog. they don't have a good visualization of the plan. It's more of a stair step like burn down chart because they don't have enough detail to see changes every day. So I'm really a big fan of teaching teams how to take a product backlog item and break it down into, know, the product backlog item says what we need to deliver, but our sprint backlog is how to deliver it. So I use the example, I want you to clean my car, right? That's what I want. I'm going to give you acceptance criteria. I'm not going to tell you how to clean the car, but our team should get in there and say, okay, In order to get the car clean, we got to wash the car, wax the car, vacuum the car, do the wheels, clean up the trash in the car, open it. Those are all the things that we have to do. And to me, those should be like individual sprint backlog items that every day of the sprint, we can see how much of that are we getting completed or not. Lack of completion. So to me, that's really what it's all about is teams just thinking they're getting in there. check in a box saying, here's what we're going to do this sprint. It's like, no, here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it. we have, remember the last one a lot of people miss is that the collective team has a level of confidence that they can achieve it. So how do we know that if they haven't detected their capacity versus the skills and what skills are needed for the work that's brought in? So I think teams do a terrible job at that, Brian Milner (13:07) Yeah. I absolutely, 100 % agree. I think so much of the problems, not even just with sprint planning, but so much of the problems with just the making our sprint goal and other things in their sprint really can be focused back to this to say, did you spend enough time trying to fully understand the work? And if you didn't really spend enough time trying to fully understand what's gonna take to do this, yeah, that's a clear why. behind the reason that you weren't able to complete everything, because you kind of just rushed through it, right? You didn't really get to the, yeah, you didn't really get to the detailed level of what it was gonna take. Lance Dacy (13:49) and it's gonna cost you a lot. Yeah. And that's the whole point is teaching them that's going to cost you later. So yeah, this time we're spending upfront, what if it saves us a lot of this other rework that we're going to have later in the sprint? I just don't know why people can't think about that. And, know, with, with any kind of agile process in particular scrum, we're doing progressive planning, which means we've got to be comfortable with ambiguity all the way up until delivery of the thing. You know, we may not know everything until it's actually done. And that's usually the case, but so you got to be comfortable with ambiguity, but at the same time, Are you learning enough about the work to feel comfortable with that ambiguity? You know, it's like, what level of confidence do we have that we've kind of thought through a lot of these things? It'll never be everything really, but why not spend the time that's built into your velocity? You know, it's like, if you're tracking how much work you get completed and you're spending time doing these things and your velocity is already accounting for this stuff. So go ahead and celebrate that, you know. Brian Milner (14:28) Right. Yeah, I think this is also a clear indication. When people ask sometimes, well, what does the scrum master do? You when you hear about a meeting like this, the sprint planning, and we were saying, you you need to spend enough time that you fully understand the work. How can we be sure they've spent enough time really fully understanding the work? Sure would be nice if you had a coach that could help them understand that, right? That's what the scrum master should be doing. So if you're kind of skimping on, is that skimping? Skimping? Skimping. On the Scrum Master role in general, then that might be even the source behind this is that they're not doing very well with the sprint planning session because they don't have anyone that actually knows what a good sprint planning session looks like to help them even get through it. Lance Dacy (15:14) Skipping by we'll say it is somebody Right. I mean, I tell, I coach people on sprint planning all the time. They're like, my gosh, that's too much work. Too much work. I mean, half the work is understanding what you need to deliver. mean, everybody just kind of seems to think that, especially in technology, if my hands aren't on a keyboard and I'm not writing code and testing code, I'm like, what if the hour long session we had with eight people in a room told us we didn't have to write any code at all? That reduces complexity of the product and. Brian Milner (15:40) you Lance Dacy (15:59) less things we have to test. I just feel like we're narrow minded when it comes to that. And I try to tell teams all the time, the litmus test of success to me on sprint planning is that everybody on the team can articulate why the chosen backlog items move the product closer to the overarching goal. But how often do we just glaze over the sprint goal and the product goals? It's like, you you hear people all the time. The goal of this sprint is to get these eight backlog items done. That's terrible. Brian Milner (16:25) Yeah, yeah. Well, we could park on this the whole episode, but we do want to try to make it through the others as well. So let's go to the one that the only repeating event that takes place in Scrum, the Daily Scrum. What have you seen as being some of the biggest problems with this meeting? Lance Dacy (16:30) Right. Well, I mean, I think we could probably placate this one and say, most of the time people turn it into a status meeting. Okay. Okay. I agree with that one that Scrum says that the daily Scrum is more about the team collectively assessing the progress or lack thereof the sprint. Well, that entails some level of, you know, status of how things are going. But I think what they lose sight of is that the daily Scrum is really, you know, more about I would say synchronization, right? We're supposed to be synchronizing on the system of work to uncover, you know, the bottlenecks, you know, plan the work for the next 24 hours to help us hit the sprint goal. So I find that at the daily scrum, if the team leaves, you know, maybe with at least one concrete adjustment, like, hey, I'm going to pair up with you on this item that's taken too long or re-sequencing work because of the dependency or escalating something that's you know, stagnant is an impediment. Well, that's a really good way to do that. But I'd also say, Brian, so let's just put the status meeting problem on the side. The other one I hear quite a bit, and you'll hear this from teams a lot, I'm sure you have, but people are saying, hey, we already talk all day. I just don't think we need a daily scrum. You ever heard that one before? Brian Milner (17:58) Yeah, I have. Lance Dacy (17:59) What do you think of that one? Is that one a big deal? I mean, I find that I face that one all the time. So I don't want to just put that on the plate, but yeah, the status meeting problem. But how often have you heard teams saying we're, we excel at collaborating all day. Why do we have to have another meeting? Right. Brian Milner (18:15) I don't hear that often, but I do hear it occasionally. And my question would be, is that the reality? Are they really communicating that much? Because if they are, we talk about sometimes this development practice called mob programming. Mob programming, everyone's in the same room at the same time all day long. And they don't have daily scrums usually when they do mob programming because There's nothing to share they don't already know, because they've all been working together the entire time. using that as an extreme example, right? In those cases, I think that they're accomplishing the purpose in a different way. And I don't really have a problem with those teams doing it. if a team says, we communicate all the time, do they really? Because if they do, yeah. Lance Dacy (18:58) Right. And how much of it on Slack? mean, how much of it's an email? So we, we, hear this all the time. And you know, I just, I just seem to, maybe I come across the teams that say it all the time and it's, took me a long time to finally, you know, try to get to the point and articulate that, you know, talking all day does not equal a 15 minute whole team inspection. and adapt the loop that focuses everyone on the sprint goal. I mean, yeah, you collaborated today and say, how are you looking on this? But have we all collectively got together, look at the scrum board or the Kanban board or whatever it is that you're looking at and actually look at each other in the eye and say, how are we doing with this? So, you know, I typically think about synchronizing on the sprint goal. Conversations are fragmented, right? So some voices never hear the full picture. Some hidden work piles up. We don't know it. Brian Milner (19:18) Yeah. Lance Dacy (19:46) We already know that if you just read asynchronous comments, you may not interpret them correctly. That's another problem. And so I just find that if you are just talking to a couple of people, then those blockers may stay local and developer loses half a day before maybe anybody notices, even though they were collaborating and talking with people. So I think the Slack stuff is good. There's good ways to have asynchronous daily scrums if you absolutely have to do it. But I find that those like a Slack you know, ping scatter attention, and create a lot of context switching as well. And I just don't feel like the information is radiated very evenly or cohesively across the team. And so, I think it affects their predictability to do that, even though they're talking every day. That's great. I love y'all collaborating, but who's coming together and saying, do we all feel good, you know, about where things sit? I just don't think that that's happening in my opinion. Brian Milner (20:35) Yeah. Well, and I think your initial point about purpose, I think, is really important with this one, to understand the purpose of why we're there. And maybe even underneath that, or parallel on the same level as a little bit, is who is this for? Who is the owner of this? And the sooner I can get the developers to understand this isn't my meeting, this is your meeting. This is your event. This is your working session, as you said. If they own it and take Lance Dacy (20:57) developers understand this. Brian Milner (21:08) ownership of it, then it becomes a productive time because they realize, oh, we can talk about or do whatever we need to do here. Yeah, it would be great if we could coordinate and spend some time doing this kind of thing every day. So yeah, think kind of helping them understand that they own it as well, I think is an important aspect. Lance Dacy (21:28) Right. Like focusing on like, hey, you know, the outcome, not the necessarily, you know, the ceremony says, Hey, it's up to you. You choose what format you want to do this. But, I had a team one time that just kept reiterating Lance. do not need this. I'm like, you know what, if you're truly in sync, prove it. You know, it's like, let's experiment. So skip the event for one week intentionally and track two metrics, right? How many items are blocked 24 hours and how much unplanned work is discovered late. And most teams are going to see a spike in all of that. Right. So the thing is, um, you want to optimize it, you know, don't delete it. Mature teams may finish their daily scrum in half the time. That's okay. Right. So some run it asynchronously in a chat, plus then they get together in five minute live huddle to tackle. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, but I think so much, we focus on the daily scrum because it's the recurring meeting, right? It happens most often. And I find most leaders and managers in my early consulting days, they would call me up. Lance, we'd like you to come assess the team's daily scrum. don't think they're doing well. It's like really just the daily scrum. Why is that such a focal point? But yeah, that's a huge one, Brian Milner (22:35) Yeah, I always think of it kind of a little bit like checking the oil in your car. Like it can tell you so much about things, even though it's a quick little check, like it can just tell you how the car's been treated, you know, all that kind of stuff. ⁓ Right. Lance Dacy (22:47) Yeah. Or a pacemaker, right? I mean, it's like, I'll try to think of it since cadence is such a big thing. You know, think of the daily scrum, like a pacemaker of the sprint, that continuous chat is like blood flow. And that pacemaker ensures that that B to stay in regular, ⁓ just at minimum to surface problems, know, great point. Brian Milner (23:03) Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the sprint review. I know one of the things that's always been a pet peeve of mine is when people call it the demo, because that seems to probably placing the focus on just the demonstration and not really where I think the purpose is, which is getting feedback. So how have you seen teams handle successfully What kind of strategies have they used to get feedback and really inject feedback into their work? Lance Dacy (23:33) Well, I find if I had to like say one of the biggest issues here is I find that the right stakeholders typically aren't there, they're too busy. And I'm like, well, what's more important than spending, you know, $80,000 every two weeks for this team to build something for you? It's like, ⁓ so I'm just curious sometimes, you know, and I leave that up to the product owner. That's your responsibility is to make sure that the right stakeholders are there and that can highlight some problems as well. So let's just put that to the side. Brian Milner (23:40) Yes. Yeah. Yep. Lance Dacy (23:59) the fact that we need the right stakeholders there and they need to attend and find it valuable. Well, actually let's dive into that one. Stakeholders don't find it valuable. Why? Well, teams show up maybe with a PowerPoint slide and say, here's what we did. And it's a bunch of technical jargon and it's just boring to everybody. So the first thing I like to do is I'll create a nice little agenda for it where I'll have the product owner kind of stand up and recap. What was the purpose of the sprint? Why did we have the sprint? What were we trying to get accomplished? Brian Milner (24:12) you Lance Dacy (24:28) What did we get accomplished, what we didn't get accomplished and how that affects the overall budget release and timeline. Can you believe that most people don't think a sprint review is actually a review of the sprint? Standing in front of your stakeholders saying, here's how the sprint went. It's not a retrospective. It's just saying, here's how it went. Here's the problems we have. Here's some things we might need help with removing impediments, but that's the first part of a sprint review. And I want the product owner to own that. Brian Milner (24:38) Ha ha ha ha. Lance Dacy (24:53) and show the timelines and show the budget and do all of those things. I love that kind of stuff. And then I kind of let the Scrum Master go over metrics of the team that the stakeholders like to see. Remember, Scrum should be a self-reporting framework. They shouldn't have to request status updates. We should just be pushing the information. I think the sprint review is a good way to kind of test what information do you want, what's valuable, but to bake that into our process so nobody has to go run a report. So. Brian Milner (25:19) Yeah. Lance Dacy (25:19) I like the Scrum Master to kind of do that and engage what that's looking like. And then the third part, like you just said, is a demo. Well, really what's better is let them use the product. That's probably the best thing we can do, but don't show me a PowerPoint slide. Show me what's working and show me how this works and let me experience it so that I can actually say that that solves our problem. I know the product owner already said that, but they may have missed it as well. Brian Milner (25:29) Yeah. Lance Dacy (25:44) I find the, and what happens is you say, this is too technical. You know, I just updated a, you know, it was a, just say a re-indexed a database table. It's like, they don't understand what that means. That's not true. You show a query, run the query, say it was very slow. It's had a subtree cost of this and I changed these indexes. I run it again. It's the same data. So that's good, but it goes quicker. And here it is. I mean, it takes under a minute. You don't have to know SQL to understand what's going on, but that gives them confidence that Brian Milner (26:07) Yeah. Lance Dacy (26:13) Wow. Okay. That's really cool. So it took time, right? Some people just think, well, it's too technical. They want to understand it. It took you half the sprint. Be proud of that. So I think one of the big problems as well, not having stakeholders there at all, but not having a good, you know, I don't want to make it so formal that it's stuffy, but I like to put those three components in there. Why did we have the sprint? What's the overall budget release and timeline? What are the metrics we're capturing? Do these look good to y'all? Is there anything else you want? And then the demo. Brian Milner (26:21) Yeah, yeah. Lance Dacy (26:42) and let the developers be prepared. What am I going to show? Let me have my test data up and ready to go so those demos go really smooth. And I find that it builds trust and confidence. So that's what I think. Brian Milner (26:52) I completely agree. it's, if you're a developer, and I've encountered this before from developers where they feel a little nervous about letting the stakeholders actually do the thing in the sprint review. And my question to them is, well, then how can you call it done? Right? I mean, if you're afraid to even in the sprint review have someone actually use the product, it needs you, the developer to actually do it. in order for it to be successful, then how can that be done? Lance Dacy (27:19) Right. Or they're like, I don't want to spend the time to get it ready for demo. Well, no, that's the point. You've got to spend some time preparing for the sprint review. That's OK. and guess what, Brian? That might be another meeting. Brian Milner (27:25) Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. And, you know, I think this is, this is something we talk about pretty well in, in the WoS class as well, just kind of what a good sprint review looks like and what, how to plan it. you know, what everyone's responsibilities are there. think having being armed with that really does give you a leg up on, on making this a more successful meeting. Lance Dacy (27:54) Absolutely. So I think, you know, we want to involve the stakeholders, have a conversation, invite the right people and make sure, you know, the other part of this, make sure your process is providing the information to the stakeholders that they want. And that's the job of a scrum master. So the sprint reviews are great litmus test for that as well. Brian Milner (28:12) Yeah, well, we got the last one here to cover. That's the retrospective. And this is one of my favorite meetings. But what have you seen as some of the biggest issues with teams and retrospectives? Lance Dacy (28:24) Well, I mean, if usually when somebody asks me, you know, what's the most important pieces of scrum, there's a lot of important pieces. the two most important activities or events in scrum. The first one in my opinion is the retrospective. And the second one is product backlog refinement. Like if you get those two things right, you know, I hear business people, mentors in business all the time. If you take care, of the top line stuff, the bottom line will follow. Right. So if you do really good at retrospection and you do really good at backlog refinement, all these other things will typically fall into place fairly easily. But what happens in the retrospective, in my opinion, is teams try to solve too many problems at one time. They don't know that by the way. So how this really manifests is, we don't see any improvement. And so they just start losing sight of the retrospective providing any value. But really I find the root cause in my opinion is, Brian Milner (28:52) Yeah. Lance Dacy (29:19) They're trying to fix too many things and too many things are too big. You're not breaking it down, right? In Scrum, we talk about breaking product backlog items down into smaller ones that fit in the sprint to show usable increments. Well, you got to drink your own champagne and take your improvement backlog and break it down and limit. You remember that goal of lean concept, I believe I've read somewhere is limit your work in progress. The more things you work on at a time, the longer everything take and people are too busy. to improve, does that sound ridiculous or what? Too busy to improve. And the reason they're too busy to improve is it's too big, they don't see the value in it, so we're not doing a good job backlog refining the improvement backlog. So my opinion is, how we facilitate this event is probably the key because Scrum Masters really can earn their money here. But I've seen teams just get in a conference room, open up a Word doc and go, okay, what went well in the sprint? Brian Milner (29:49) Yeah. Lance Dacy (30:11) and they write it down and then, okay, what didn't go so well this sprint? And then they write it down and then, okay, anything we want to change, yeah, let's change these three things. Okay, Jane, you got this, Bill, you got that one. And then nothing ever happens. So I think that there's an execution part of the retrospective that is lacking. And one thing that I used to do with my teams that I thought worked really well is every retrospective we would have our action items and put them wherever we're doing the daily scrum. so that we're mindful of not only how the scrum is going or the, know, the sprints going with the daily scrum review, but it's also, are we keeping these other things in top of mind? And if that list is too long, you won't. And so I follow what Jeff Sutherland, you know, taught me one time when I was talking to him, he was saying that fine tuning your processes is a lot like fine tuning your computer. If you have a slow down or a bottleneck in your computer, you don't just change all these components and say there it was, you try to change one thing at a time so you can actually troubleshoot if that causes another problem, but it often exposes a bottleneck you never knew was there. So he actually talks about only select one, two, or maybe three things at a time to improve. And if they're too big that you can't really make improvement, break them down. So that to me, is the root cause that causes a ton of other superficial problems, if that makes sense. Brian Milner (31:31) Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot of subtlety with this meeting as well, right? mean, there's structure kind of issues that sometimes teams have, but there's some subtle issues that go to things like psychological safety and trust that I think can really make a difference here as well. whenever I bring that up, I always kind of worry people think, this is kind of a kumbaya thing. this guy wants us all to sit in a circle and hold hands and whatever. And that's not what I'm saying, but I do think that there is a level of safety that's needed. if I say my opinion and someone speaks up and says, well, that's stupid, or that's ridiculous, why would we ever do things that way? Right, mean, how likely am I to give you my opinion the next time? Lance Dacy (32:14) I know, what an idiot. ⁓ my gosh, I know, that's so bad. Brian Milner (32:22) Yeah. So I think that's something that you got to kind of be on guard with as a whole team. And you got to make it a whole team mission just to say, look, we're going to prioritize this. We're going to prioritize that we want to feel safe to speak our minds here in a safe way that's not going to be impairing, that's not going to have repercussions. when we do that, we'll find the most important stuff. ⁓ Yeah. Lance Dacy (32:46) Well, I mean, that's kind of why I go back to how it's facilitated, right? Because the way you facilitate, you can make it very institutionalized, right? So the people are just talking about the same problems over and over again. You know, I used to put a little, when I was talking about putting that little piece of paper up on where the daily scrum was, at the end of the sprint, in the retrospective, we would put a plus sign next to the ones we really thought we got better at. We'd put a minus if we got worse and just a slash if we didn't really pay attention at all. And we'd have to look at each other and go, why didn't we make any progress on this? we commit to do much? So the work of improvement is just as important as the product development work because that's what makes you hopefully deliver sooner at some point. I like to not think of agile as a faster way to work. It's actually slower, but you may deliver sooner because of the efficiencies you gain about getting better and more effective. And if you think about agile, Brian Milner (33:08) Yeah. Lance Dacy (33:35) as the philosophy of the way that we're delivering our product, Agile Principle Number 12 actually commands of the team to continuously tune and adjust their people and processes to get better. Well, the way we do that in Scrum is the retrospective. And so to me, it's inspecting the team's own people, process environment, and trying to select the most, know, biggest bang for the buck, the highest value for least cost. Does that sound familiar? You know, what's the improvement we can make and commit to it as a team just as important as we commit to the work of a sprint. And then that top impediment item, you know, becomes visible and, we get it removed and we start building out that cadence. And there's a lot of different, you know, I don't know. We have a lot of different online tools and things like that to facilitate. I'm curious, you do a lot of facilitation with this as well. What are some tools that you think work best to pull that best out of the team to do that? Brian Milner (34:26) Well, I mean, as far as actual tools, I think there's a lot of online tools like Miro and Mural that are really good kind of whiteboarding tools that allow people to interact and sometimes even in some anonymous ways. Sometimes you can have some anonymous type portions of it where that adds a little bit of safety to the room. ⁓ I'm not, no one's gonna know that it was my comment. Lance Dacy (34:26) Thank Yeah. Brian Milner (34:49) I used to use that kind of thing a lot when I was a scrum master. We would use a tool that allowed people to type in things anonymously. And that made a huge difference because here's the thing. One of the hard lines to walk as a scrum master facilitating this is that you're also participating. And facilitating should be kind of a neutral thing. But we're kind of Lance Dacy (35:05) Right. Yeah. Brian Milner (35:14) blurring the lines here as a Scrum Master, because you need to do both. You need to facilitate, but you also need to participate. And that's why I loved having kind of the anonymous nature of people adding things is because I could add things. I could put things on the board that then no one knew came for me, because I'm a team member like everyone else. And if everyone else agreed with me, then we'd talk about it. But if no one else did, hey, we'd talk about whatever everyone else thought was most important. Lance Dacy (35:33) because I'm a human, I can't be one of this. But you could also, know, bias the, or anchor the argument as well, just like when we do with estimating when you got the senior leader. So Scrum Masters, I totally agree. We walk a fine line, you know, active listening and doing some of those professional facilitation techniques to make sure we're guiding the team to a solution. you know, one of the biggest things that I like to do that I thought helped teams, regardless of how, you know, there's multiple ways to... format of retrospective, know, liberating structures has a lot of good activities that you could prey upon. But really what I want to do is bring the data. I bring data that hurts and helps, you know, what are our flow metrics look like, what are the escape defects? Let's not hide away from that. Concrete evidence is what's going to help focus the discussion on the work, not the people. And that's where your psychological safety, I think, comes into play. We want to challenge ideas, not the people. you know, and so we start thinking about ways to come together as a team and really address these things. So I like to prime psychological safety in that way. and focus on the problems with the data, not the people causing them, even though there's probably people causing them. you know, maybe you start with a two minute icebreaker or check in or something like that, that, there's a lot of ways that we could facilitate that. Brian Milner (36:46) Right. Lance Dacy (36:55) you just kind of get what they call an emotional exhale. You know, we just went through this sprint, we might've got our butts chewed in the sprint review by the CEO or whatever. We're in this together as a team, how can we bring that together? And then try to come out with a framed shared goal that's gonna help us all get better, you know, in that as well. So there's a lot of ways to do that. You know, in the WoZ class, we actually show a couple of those, right, that you can walk out. Brian Milner (37:21) Yeah. Lance Dacy (37:22) But that's what I love. The retrospective has to be one of the most important activities, I think, in Scrum. Brian Milner (37:27) I agree. I agree. Well, I mean, we made it through the events and you know, when we kind of look back at this, I would say, I hope what people hear is that it's not really the meetings that are the problem. It's really what goes on in that meeting. What's happening or what's not happening in that meeting that I think is kind of the important part. Recently, recent episode here on the podcast with Kurt Peterson. Lance Dacy (37:47) and I'll see you guys in a second. Brian Milner (37:54) we kind of brought this idea of talent versus skill and talent being kind of more the inborn ability to do something and skill being something you learn and earn on your own. And that's, think the good news about this is that a lot of this is skill-based. It's stuff that you can learn and get better at and improve upon. It's not something you have to just be naturally good at. Lance Dacy (38:16) Right. Well, and we didn't get into backlog refinement too much. That may be its own other thing, but I think those are handled poorly as well. But I agree with you, know, meetings aren't the villain necessarily, know, poorly designed meetings are the enemy. And I find that when every Scrum event is time boxed and anchored to real data and laser focused on inspecting and adapting and learning, that takes some time to learn how to do that. Right. Most individuals that join a team, Brian Milner (38:23) Right. Lance Dacy (38:43) aren't used to working that way, just like a lot of stakeholders aren't used to progressive planning. So I think the foundational element of a scrum master is to bring empathy and, you know, love on people where they are. That's what a coach does is embrace us where we are and say, here's what I'd like to get us and facilitate a plan to get us there. So that's some of the best things that a scrum master role can do. But also it's the team learning. those things as well to help adapt to that. So that's what the WOS class is such a great thing because now they're gonna be on the same language that a scrum master may be doing and that undercurrent can start moving at the same pace. So. Brian Milner (39:19) Absolutely agree, absolutely agree. Well, Lance, I can't thank you enough for making time for us to come back and talk. Thanks for chatting with us. Lance Dacy (39:27) Absolutely. Thanks for having me and wish you all the best of luck out there in your scrum endeavors. Hope to see you in a woes class very soon. Brian Milner (39:34) Yes.

Is your team dreading retrospectives, or skipping them altogether? Mike Cohn joins Brian Milner to unpack what’s really going wrong (and how to fix it) so retros don’t just take up time… they actually make your team better. Overview In this candid conversation, Brian Milner welcomes back Mountain Goat Software co-founder Mike Cohn to talk about one of the most misunderstood parts of Scrum: the sprint retrospective. Too many teams treat retros as boring, repetitive, or even pointless—and end up skipping them entirely. But retros are where the magic of continuous improvement actually happens… when they’re done right. Brian and Mike dig into the common reasons teams dread retros, how to spot the signs a retro isn’t working, and the practical ways to bring them back to life. They also share their own lessons learned (including how Mike once argued retros shouldn’t be part of Scrum!) and walk through the real reason retros matter: giving teams space to inspect, adapt, and improve together. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mike Cohn Your Fast Tract to a Fresher Retrospective Webinar #141: Cooking Up a Killer Retrospective with Brian Milner Overcoming Four Common Problems with Retrospectives by Mike Cohn Retrospectives Broken? Fix Them for Good by Mike Cohn Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. 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 Milner (00:00) Hey everyone, welcome back to the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here with you always, Brian Milner. But before we dive in today, I wanted to let you know that we're gonna have a free webinar that I'm gonna be running here for you. It's gonna be on September 24th at 9 a.m. Pacific. So do your adjustments wherever you are. It's called Your Fast Track to a Fresher Retrospective. It's just gonna be a little short 20 to 25 minute presentation. And then there's gonna be some open question and answer that we're gonna have after that. it's perfect if your team's retros are feeling a little stale, or if you're looking for practical ways to shake things up. We're gonna put a link to it our show notes, but wanted to make sure right up top that you guys knew about that. It's completely free, September 24th, 9 a.m. Pacific. We're gonna have that webinar on retrospectives. And joining me here today, also is the one and only Mike Cohn. Welcome in, Mike. Mike (00:55) Hey, Brian's good to be back. Brian Milner (00:57) Glad you're here. We wanted to have a conversation because I think we can probably all agree that not all retrospectives, we might even say are worth having. When you look back on them and you look back on the content of it, maybe we'd say it wasn't worth having. If your team isn't getting value from the meeting and skipping it might feel rational. But skipping the point of retrospective, continuous improvement, isn't something high performing teams really can afford. It's a main part of what we do. So we're going to talk a little bit more. We're going explore that about why some teams end up dropping retros. Because I hear that all the time. People ask that in classes. Is it OK to? Should we? Should we do it less often? So we're going to talk about why some teams might drop retros. What that really says about the team health itself. and how you can bring retros back in a way that reconnects to their purpose so that it's not just a ritual. And with that then, I'm going to pull Mike back in. So again, Mike, thanks for being here. I really appreciate you giving us your time for the episode today. Mike (02:05) Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. Before you jump in, I do want to point out that we've been on for about 15 minutes before we got ready to record. Just kind of haven't talked to each other for a bit. And I just want to point out for everybody listening that Brian did a mini retro on his podcast before we got started, talked about how we can change some editing on that, maybe get episodes out more quickly and also to get them out in video. So I guess I'm saying that to. make us commit to the video part of it, but to also point out that Brian did a retro on his podcast, right before we got started. So Brian is walking the walk. Brian Milner (02:40) Yeah, mean, it's always good to inspect and adapt, right? I mean, if you don't do that, then you're not questioning why things are happening the way they are and things get stale and eventually fall off. So yeah, I'm a big proponent in that, stopping down to inspect and adapt for sure. Mike (02:56) Brian, one of the things that does come up with retros is teams feel like skipping them when they're not getting anything out of it. Do you think it's okay to skip a retrospective? Brian Milner (03:08) Well, I'm probably not going to shock anyone here in my answer, but I'm not going to be someone who would support that. I'm not a proponent of that. I think that's a mistake. I try to be very careful about saying, hey, this is always this way. I do think that that's the Agile Manifesto talks about periodically, routinely. kind of having this kind of inspecting and adapting moments where we retrospect on how things went. And Scrum has this meeting built into it to happen every single sprint. The thing that kind of jumps out at me when I first thought about this is we kind of take this attitude sometimes that, this thing isn't working great. And so maybe we should skip it. Or least that's, I guess, the mentality behind skipping the retrospective. Mike (03:55) When you say skip it, I think about the guy skipping leg day, right? Brian Milner (03:59) Right, right. Well, that's exactly where I was going to go. It's like, where else in life do we say, that's not working, so I just won't do it. You know, like, I'm having a hard time getting my passport renewed, so I guess I just won't get my passport. You know, like we don't do that with other things. There are things that are hard. There are things that take more effort. And it doesn't mean that if it's harder or it's not working right now that we just don't do it. We got to figure out why and... you know, fix it and, you know, get better at it. Mike (04:27) Yeah, there's a I'm a big fan of the Lego Batman movie. And in there, there's a song where this says Batman never skips leg day. Right. And, you know, skip something if it's truly useless, but don't skip something because it's hard. Right. I would agree that. Brian, I'm curious what you think about this situation. What suppose you have a team doing one week, one week sprints and one week is. Brian Milner (04:31) Ha ha. Right. Mike (04:51) Awesome. It's the right length for the team. It's a right length for the business. Everybody agrees. It rocks. One week sprints rock. But the team hates retrospectives. Like literally, they'd rather go to the dentist and have a root canal instead of having a retro. And at some point, somebody on the team goes, huh, if we switched to four week sprints, we wouldn't have to do these darn retros as often. That's a tough one. What do you think about that? Brian Milner (05:18) Well, there's some truth in that. You know, they're not wrong, as they say. You know, if you do longer sprints, then you have meetings less often and included in that is a retrospective. So yeah, that's not wrong. You would do it less often. But on the other hand, your retro is gonna be a lot longer. If you're retrospecting over the past month versus over the past week, Mike (05:28) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (05:42) A weekly retrospective is going to be very short. A monthly retrospective is going to be very long and no one likes longer meetings. So that's the trade-off is, yeah, we can do it less often, but do you really want to have those meetings double and triple and link? Mike (05:46) Okay. in double and triple perhaps, but I I gave it the example where it'd be one fourth as often. So it'd have to be four times as long. And I doubt that it would truly be four times as long. See, this is a case where we probably disagree on this a little bit, because I have had teams that have made that argument. Hey, if we went to longer sprints, we wouldn't have to do this as often. And I don't want them to go to longer sprints. I doubt you do either. But what I've told them is like, look, the rule is do a retrospective often at least once a month. Brian Milner (06:20) Yeah. Mike (06:27) If you're going to do it every four weeks and you want to do two weeks sprints, for example, do your two weeks sprints. But I'd rather have you do the retro every other sprint, but take it seriously. Because what they do is they just go through the motions. They're going to go through the motions for 10 minutes. They're going to go through the motions in 10 minutes in a four week sprint too. Just show up. Can we get better or anything? No, we're good. Done. Brian Milner (06:37) Right. Mike (06:49) I'll let them trade off if they want. If they will make the commitment to me, they'll take it seriously and really come with ideas and try to improve. Brian Milner (06:56) Yeah, well, I think this is a prime example as well why inspecting and adapting is so important because, all right, what's our issue? No one likes going to the retrospectives. We're jumping from that to, then let's just not do them as often. When what you need to do is stop and inspect and say, why don't any of us like coming to the retrospectives? What's the problem about our retrospectives? And that's really the core issue there is to say, Hey, are we doing the same thing every single retrospective? Are we saying, Hey, what went well? What didn't go well? Right. I mean, are we being asked the same questions every time? we never varying it up? Are we always doing kind of navel gazing kind of thing? Or sometimes are we doing team building stuff? Sometimes are we even just celebrating some things that happen from time to time? The root cause is the important part because otherwise, you know, it's like cutting off your leg because you you got to a little infection or something in your big toe. That's not the cure for it. The cure is find out what the disease is and treat the disease. Mike (07:57) 'm back to it's leg day at the gym and I'm going to cut my legs off because I hate leg day that much. Right. It's like, no, no more leg day. Right. So you'd have to really hate leg day for that, for that to be the solution. What, what are some of the signs that you've seen that indicate a retro is not working and that the team needs to kind of rethink things? What are some of those signs? Brian Milner (08:00) All right. No more leg day. Thanks. Yeah, no, that's really good. Common things, people checking out, people just giving surface level answers. Here's a big one. There's obvious things that didn't go well in your sprint, and no one brings them up. You just kind of get there and it's like, for example, hey, we didn't finish everything in this sprint. Mike (08:39) Yeah. Brian Milner (08:44) But then we get into our retrospective and no one puts on the board. What's something that didn't go well this front? We didn't complete all our work, right? Sometimes people get to that point where they just feel like, it's so obvious. Why would I need to bring it up? Well, if it's so obvious, then we need to address it, right? We need to do something about it. So yeah, I think that's part of it is that sometimes people will just check out and you might be able to tell it that way. You might be a tell it because they're not really contributing things. People try to rush through it. You know, it's like you only get a team where only a couple of things are in each one. And it's almost like it feels like the team's colluding to sort of, well, you put these two things up there and that'll be enough. And then they'll leave us alone. We can go on. You know, so, you know, they're, they may not literally be doing that, but it's almost, you get that feel that it's almost like there's an implied, I guess we have to have this number of things up there. Yeah. I mean, it's just, Mike (09:13) Good. Brian Milner (09:37) In general, there's no investment. When people show up, they're not really engaging. They're marking the time. And when that's going on, yeah, that's usually a precursor to someone eventually saying, hey, let's just not do this then. Mike (09:54) One of the problems that I'd add or one of the symptoms that I'd add would be when the team is talking about things again and again, the same item again and again, right? And it's not gonna get fixed. You we might be in there talking about, you know, I hate the new building, right? The new building's farther from my home. This is a real team I worked with where they all moved. They were downtown and the company moved everybody out. near the airport in their city. And it wasn't better for anybody. I mean, it was probably better for the CFO writing the check for the landlord or to the landlord. But it was a bigger commute for everybody. The facility wasn't as nice. It wasn't your restaurants. I mean, it just kind of sucked. And they would grumble about it every week. It's like, we can't fix this, right? We can't fix this. Right. You know, and so sometimes talking about things that are out of a team's hands are are they're just frustrating. Right. Brian Milner (10:34) Ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Mike (10:42) It's like mention it one time. I hate the new building. It sucks. There's no good restaurants here. And you know, you're probably not going to fix that problem. Maybe you can agree that you're going to, know, on, you know, the last Friday of a sprint, everybody on the team is driving back downtown and we're all going to lunch together, right? Fix it that way a little bit. But, you know, don't grumble about things that are out of your hand, right? You know, I'm worried about climate change. It's like, yeah, but I don't hear about that. It seems retrospective, right? Brian Milner (11:02) Yeah. Yeah, that's completely outside our circle to do anything about, right? So yeah, I agree that there is that scope sometimes that happens. But on the other side of it too, I would say one of the other killers that can contribute to people kind of checking out is not feeling like it's making any difference. know, if we bring something up, let's say it's not completely out of our hands, but it is something that's a real issue. And we bring it up. Mike (11:09) You Yeah, we need to test earlier. We need to test earlier in the sprints, right? Brian Milner (11:33) Right. We need to test earlier. We think we'd be better if we had some test automation here and we want to put test automation software in place. Yeah, well, I asked the manager and he said no. So I guess we're done. Right. I mean, it's frustrating. We say these things. I think it's important that the team see progress. It doesn't mean that you have to solve it 100%. In that case, hey, the manager said no. OK. Mike (11:46) No. Frustrating. Brian Milner (12:01) Well then how can we raise the transparency of the issue it's causing for us not to have it? We can make it apparent that this is what's going on. I remember there was a team I had one time that they started to bring up the issue that they didn't have a coffee machine near them. Now this was an absurd case because I don't know any other place that would do this. for whatever reason, this place I was at, they had two floors. the programmers were on a floor without the coffee machine. The coffee machine was down the stairs on the lower floor. And so they were complaining because they were saying, hey, we have to walk up and down the stairs all these times a day. mean, there's a reason that we name our languages Java. They're coffee drinkers. So they brought it up, and we talked about it. And we said, oh, guess they kind of set up the office the way they set up the office. immediately put me into action to think, you know what, this may not be about coding or may not be about something that's kind of a day by day thing that's doing our work, but it is an important thing that they have access to this. And I was able to then kind of start to compile some data and show, look, they're spending this much time walking up and down the stairs and that's happening to each developer and you're losing this much time of their day walking up and down stairs. You think it's too much expense to put in this coffee machine, but you're paying this every week by not having a coffee machine up here. And we were able to get them to actually make that change. That was huge for those developers. They thought that was the best thing in the world that now the coffee machine was relatively easy to get to, and they could get refills anytime they wanted. So I think it's important that they see that progress happens. Right. Mike (13:46) Yeah, it showed that they were cared for, right? That somebody heard, right? Why do you think this is so prevalent? Because, mean, you we hear this all the time, right? You know, oh, our retro soccer. Oh, man, I'm going go to retro today. Why is this such a common thing? Why do so many teams feel like they don't need to do retrospectives? Brian Milner (13:50) Exactly. I'm not really sure why they jumped to that as the solution, because as I said, we don't really do that anywhere else in life. Other than to just think, you know, no one likes meetings. And when we come up against a meeting that we don't feel is going well, then that's sort of, that is sort of our instinct is, well, then let's just not have this meeting. But if they, maybe that gets back to purpose even a little bit then. If I don't understand the purpose of it, then now it's not just that it's not going well, it feels pointless. And why do I want to go through something that's painful to go through and I don't understand why you want me to go through it? You know, that's a double whammy that now the easy solution is, well, let's just not do it then. Mike (14:34) Right. think a lot of teams feel like, you they adopted just the bare beginnings of Agile or Scrum and they start to, they notice they're better, right? We've improved. And they, maybe they are 10, 20, 50 % better than they were before and got there pretty easily. And it's like, well, we don't need to keep improving. We just improved, right? ⁓ And you know, it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? This is like so much more you could get better at, but you you see that you got better. Why keep going, right? Brian Milner (15:03) Yeah. Yeah. Mike (15:14) So I think that's a factor. I'm curious what you would say to me 20 something years ago, because Esther Derby is the reason why retros got added as a standard thing in Scrum. They were not part of Scrum at the beginning. And she started lobbying that they should be a standard part of Scrum. And I disagreed. I said retros should not be part of Scrum. And I'm very big on admitting my mistakes. So I argued no. So I'm curious what you would say to me, because here's my argument. I don't want to wait until the end of a sprint to tell my team an opportunity to get better. If I notice an opportunity to get better, I need to bring that up in the next morning's Daily Scrumber. If it's a huge opportunity to go grab everybody that afternoon and mention it. How would you argue with me about that? Because in some ways, that is a better way to get better, right? Just bring it up in the moment. Why wait till the end of a sprint? Brian Milner (16:03) Well, I think what I'd say is, then if you recognize something in the moment, then absolutely bring it up in the moment. There's no need for you to wait till the end of the sprint. I don't think that you store it up or that you have to wait. I would say something similar about a sprint review. Why do I have to wait till the end of the sprint before I get feedback from a customer about something I just did? You don't, right? ⁓ There's no reason why you can't on day two or three Mike (16:25) Okay. Brian Milner (16:28) show it to somebody who's going to be using it and say, what do you think about this? In fact, it's better if you do that. What it becomes though is that, speaking now about the review, the review is the time everyone can count on every sprint to show up and examine the increment and give feedback. The retrospective is very similar. We can give feedback throughout the sprint. We can improve throughout the sprint. Mike (16:52) Right. Brian Milner (16:52) but it's the designated cadence. It's the time that we can count on every sprint that we're gonna set aside, right? We're gonna set that aside to do this because we think it's that important. Mike (17:04) I think it's that dedication, that dedicated time that is part of what persuaded me because suppose I come, I do come up with a brilliant insight. It's my idea. Of course it's a brilliant idea. I come up with this brilliant idea about how our team can get better, Brian. And I want to talk to about it right now. And I, I, I Slack you and I said, let's talk about this. No, your head's down in the middle of something else. You don't want to talk about it right now. It's not the right time, right? And if we set aside that time at the end of the sprint as a dedicated time, it's more likely to happen and it's everybody knows to have their brain ready for that conversation, right? It worked better, right? Brian Milner (17:42) Right, and the fact is, lots of people are heads down throughout the sprint, right? There's lots of time in the sprint where you're just so involved and busy and your brain's working on what we're building that unless you get told, unless you get that thing on the schedule that says, wait, I gotta stop, okay, time to retrospect, right? Unless you get that reminder that, hey, this is important too, right? We gotta do this thing. You could very easily just end up going for a long period of time with never doing it. And that's the danger. It falls off your radar and pretty soon you're never having any kind of time to retrospect. So it's not that there's something magic about, we've got this meeting that's called this. It's really what happens in it. And if that's happening on an ongoing basis, well, maybe you have another process that's not Scrum that would be as effective, but Scrum dedicates that time so that you make sure you don't miss it. Mike (18:35) Yeah, I just don't think it happens. If we told everybody, as soon as you come up with an opportunity to improve, interrupt your team and tell them about it right then. It's not going to happen because if I have a brilliant idea, OK, I might go talk to people. How many brilliant ways to improve a team do you come up with, right? Most of them are incremental, right? Hey, here's a way that we do a little bit better. And I'm going to go, well, this will all be a little bit better, but everybody looks busy. I'm not going to go bother them right now, right? And I noticed that I would do this. I would have an idea. I wouldn't bring it up. And then tomorrow I'd forget about it. What was that brilliant idea I had yesterday? And so I became a very strong advocate of the retro, despite at the beginning, and being very honest with that, not thinking that it should be part of Scrum. It should be something that we just do on a more ad hoc basis. Brian Milner (19:21) Yeah, that's very interesting. And I'm glad you shared that because it's interesting about the evolution of things and how things have changed over time as far as that's concerned. But you know, the other kind of aspect there it also is, you know, if my if I'm heads down and I'm going through, there are some things I'm going to notice just in the course of doing my work, because, hey, I would have been better if I could have done it this way versus that way. But I also feel like I'm going to miss so much if I don't actually pause and and redirect my brain from, I'm just plowing forward to let me actually turn my attention towards what's happened over this recent past and really think through it. Well, what did happen this last sprint? Let me think through everything that's happened. Yeah, that wasn't great. That was okay. That was actually pretty good. Mike (20:07) Do you have a structure you use for helping teams find ways to get better? Brian Milner (20:13) You mean as far as a retrospective is concerned? Mike (20:16) Yeah, I you mentioned earlier asking people like, you know, what went well, what didn't. Is there a structure, even a higher level framework you use? Brian Milner (20:24) Yeah, mean, the way I, Astrodurby and Dinah Larson's book has a really great five step kind of process for it. But I even tend to kind of distill it down even a little bit more than that, to just say that, you if you think about this thing that we talk about as the three pillars of Scrum, that, we talk about in Scrum classes, transparency, inspection, adaptation. I think that's actually a good pattern for retrospective transparency. What actually happened? I mean, let's try to be clear about what the reality was from this past sprint. Inspection, why did those things happen? What was the root cause of why those things happened? And then adaptation, what are you going to do about it? We don't want to just keep doing the same things and let's hope everything gets better. No, hope is not a strategy, right? We have to figure out the root cause and then have a plan. What are we going to do differently? Mike (21:12) Yeah. What advice do you have for somebody listening right now that wants to fix their retrospectives, wants to stop them feeling useless and be productive in their retros? Brian Milner (21:29) Yeah, it's, you know, I sound like a broken record. It's the, it's time to inspect and adapt, right? You need to find the truth of what's behind that resistance, right? What's causing the team to not want to do retrospectives. And, and if you're a scrum master, you know, that, that could be a hard look in the mirror for yourself to kind of look and say, well, maybe I'm not doing a great job facilitating this. Maybe that's the root cause of this. Or maybe there's mistrust on the team. Maybe there's some safety issues. Do we feel safe enough to say things that actually went not so well here? Sense of fear. Or maybe the root cause is it just doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like it matters to anyone on the team. It kind of feels futile and that we're just saying the same things every time, but nothing's actually changing. So I think there's different solutions depending on what that root cause is. And I think that's where I'd probably try to focus is if it feels broken, that's the symptom. What's the root cause of it? Why is it feeling broken to everyone? And then we can come up with a plan for what to do. Mike (22:31) OK, that's good. Inspect and adapt at a meta level, right? mean, why is our retro broken? Inspect and adapt over that, and then inspect and adapt within the retro. So for somebody who's listening today, I want to start to wrap this up. I know we're kind of at the target limit for our podcast episodes. For somebody who's listening right now and maybe is thinking about or has skipped retros, maybe wants to get back to it, are there any things you'd like them to know? Brian Milner (22:35) Yeah. Mike (22:57) What takeaways would you give people as we start to wrap up here? Brian Milner (23:01) Yeah, I think that some of the big takeaways are it's important to always inspect and adapt no matter what we're doing. And that's what the retrospective is, is a chance every sprint to actually inspect and adapt. It's just a tool, right? It's important to understand the retrospective. There's nothing magic there. It's a tool. And we always say, know, individuals and interactions over processes and tools. it's not that that's a magic thing. It's a tool. But if the tool isn't working for you, then inspect and adapt on it, change it to make it work. If you feel like you've lost sight of the job the tool is meant to do, that's a big problem. And that's something that maybe should be a focus not just for you personally, but for the team. Does everyone understand what we're here for, what the purpose is, what we're trying to do with this, and why this is an important use of our time? If not, then Again, maybe you're asking me to go through something that right now is painful and I don't understand why you're asking me to go through it. A lot of these things, when we put together our Better Retrospectives course, we try to address a lot of these common kind of concerns behind why people might skip a retrospective. And as I said, there's various cures to various diseases and you have to be able to really diagnose it. and get to the heart of it before you can apply the proper one to it. Mike (24:23) You mentioned you're doing a webinar. you tell us about that so I can put that on my calendar? I want to join that and listen. Brian Milner (24:29) Yeah, absolutely. And anyone listening can. doesn't cost you a thing. It's a free live session we're going to have September 24th at 9 a.m. Pacific. So 9 Pacific, 10 Mountain, 11 Central, 12 Eastern. So it'll hit right around lunchtime if you're on the East Coast or first thing in the morning if you're on the West Coast. But yeah, it's going to be September 24th. We call this webinar, your fast track to a fresher retrospective because that's the idea. want to try to freshen it up. We want to try to give you some practical concrete ideas in just a short little 20 to 25 minute session. We want to give you some practical steps and things that you can apply immediately and take advantage of. And we're also going to give time afterwards for open Q &A. So if you have a question that's You have a burning question about retros. You feel like you have a situation you need help with. Yeah, bring it to that session and you can ask us. we're not going to be able to get through every question, but we'll be able to get through a good handful of them and try to deal with the things that we think are going to be the most popular questions there in the group. Mike (25:41) Good. I just put it in my calendar and notice it's September 24th is National Punctuation Day. I think the National Punctuation Day celebrations are at the bar that night. that shouldn't conflict with participating in your webinar. Brian Milner (25:54) Is there a sub group that has a party for celebrating the Oxford Comma during this National Punctuation Day? Mike (25:58) You Probably I want to see who is out celebrating National Punctuation Day. So I'll have to have to start looking for that look for look for the parties but Brian Milner (26:08) You I don't know who it is, but I know they are celebrating it! Exclamation point, exclamation point. Mike (26:15) With a few exclamation points. So thanks for letting me on here to talk to about retros, Brian. I learned a lot. I'll turn it back over to you. Brian Milner (26:23) Yeah, no, this was a great conversation. I appreciate you coming on and kind of driving this a little bit for us, Mike. yeah, just a reminder, we'll say that again, September 24th, at 9 a.m. Pacific. You can go to the Mountain Goat website and we'll put a link in our show notes as well where you can kind of find out more information about it and put it in your calendar. Mike (26:45) Perfect.

Scrum isn’t new, but the questions teams are asking about it are evolving. In this episode, Brian and Cort Sharp compare notes on what they're hearing in class, in the community, and behind the scenes. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner welcomes Mountain Goat Software colleague and community manager Cort Sharp for a real-time pulse check on what’s top-of-mind for Scrum teams today. From overloaded calendars to misunderstood metrics, Cort and Brian dig into the patterns and questions they’ve seen across classes and conversations lately. They unpack common friction points like meeting overload, velocity confusion, misused roles, and daily scrums that eat the whole morning, and offer grounded suggestions for handling each one. Whether you're a Scrum Master trying to protect team time or a developer wondering how to work more collaboratively, this episode offers helpful context (and practical nudges) to help your team work better, together. References and resources mentioned in the show: Cort Sharp #143: What Still Makes Teams Work (and Win) with Jim York #152: The Five Pillars of Real Agile Improvement with Mike Cohn 7 Advantages of Scrum (Plus 1 Hidden Disadvantage) by Mike Cohn What Is a High-Performing Agile Team? by Mike Cohn Mountain Goat Software’s Working on a Scrum Team Course Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. 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 Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner. And today we have Mr. Court Sharp with us. Welcome in Court. Cort Sharp (00:10) Hey Brian, thanks for having me on again. Brian Milner (00:13) Yeah, Court has been a frequent guest of our show. If you've been around for a while, you probably remember some episodes we've done with him. Court works with us here at Mountain Goat Software. He is a producer and other things, community manager, other things. But he sits in on just about, well, not every class, but he sits in on a lot of classes and helps produce them and make sure that they work. We previously have had Court on with sort of this theme that, you know, Court has his finger on the pulse of things a little bit more because he sees the classes through multiple trainers. He hears the Q &As that take place in all the classes. You know, he even sees some of the emails and some of messages come through the Agile Mentors community from his work there. So Court just has some insight that maybe... a trainer like myself who only gets to see how people question in my classes that I might not have. So we like to have Kordon to get a broader voice of the people approach, if you will, into things. So we wanted to talk a little bit about what are people talking about now? What are the questions? What are the concerns? Cort Sharp (01:18) You Brian Milner (01:29) What are we hearing now in classes as opposed to maybe a year ago or six months ago? So I think probably a good place to start there, Court, is when people are talking to us about just the common, hey, here's things that's a problem, here's things that are a pain point, how do you deal with this? What are some of the more common things that you've been hearing across the classes and across the interactions with people who are in our our system. Cort Sharp (01:53) Right, right. Yeah, I guess I am kind of the collector of questions. ⁓ But even outside of our classes, I'm hearing a lot of questions about, I'm hearing a ton in our classes about this, but outside of our classes, whether it's on various social medias, various emails, of just questions in general to people who are newer to Scrum or I guess Agile as a whole, but specifically about Scrum. Brian Milner (01:58) Ha ha ha ha. Cort Sharp (02:18) organizations that are newer to Scrum is time management. So like how do we fit all of this new stuff? Like all this new stuff is great. All of what we talked about is great. All that we know about it is great. We were on the same page of like, hey, here's, it's a good time to check in daily with our daily Scrum, make sure we're all on the same page, right? We do need stakeholder feedback with the sprint review. It's good of us to kind of retrospect. and use our retrospective to check in on our team and our process and make sure we're doing the right stuff. But how do we fit all of that in with all of the other meetings and stuff that we already have? And you and I were talking a little bit about just kind of what we're going to talk about a bit more. But we were talking about this before we started recording. And I think I told you literally three or four days ago, I just had a conversation with one of my friends who they're working in a tech software, they're doing a software project in some organization and they're like, yeah, they're trying to get us to move to Scrum because they've heard about this thing. And I just, I don't know how you push this man. I don't know how you do this. I don't know how you live in this world because they got me in six hours of meetings a day and they expect me to get four hours of work done. And I'm not sitting at the office for 10 to 12 hours a day. That's ridiculous. So I think the biggest one is the the time management specifically with all of these meetings. And I know my personal take is I think all of these or a lot of these organizations, I can't say all a lot of these organizations are looking at Scrum as an additive to their current process, not a substitute or replacement. you do you see that, Brian? Do you agree with that? Brian Milner (03:53) Yeah. Yeah, I agree. mean, if they already have a huge slate of meetings that they're, I mean, there's going to be some things that Scrum isn't going to replace and shouldn't replace, for example, like, you know, one-on-ones with your manager, right? There's not a function inside Scrum for a one-on-one meeting with your manager, nor should there be, because that's not about how a team builds something. That's more general management and HR, you know? so those kinds of things, no, it's not going to replace and there are going to be other meetings outside of scrum. It's not intended for scrum to replace all of them, but it is intended to replace some of what you already did. and if you, so for me, it's all about purpose. You know, that's, that's where I think that you should start with everything is what's the purpose. And if you understand the purpose, Cort Sharp (04:46) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (04:54) then you can compare, ask yourself what the meetings that you have now, what's the purpose of this meeting? And if you can't answer that, then I would challenge it. I think that an agile organization should be open to challenges for any part of the process. And you should be able to say, hey, I'm not sure why we're doing this. And if we can't really articulate, here's the purpose behind it, it should be gone. Cort Sharp (05:10) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (05:19) We should get rid of it. So I think you're right. I think there is sort of this layering on top of, and if we don't allow the scrum meetings to replace some of the things that we've done previously, yeah, can be, it can seem like a lot more of a meeting heavy kind of system, but the meetings in the system, let's be clear, right? First of all, depends on how long your sprint is, but let's just go with the sprint that's the sprint length that's the average or most common, which is two weeks. If I have a two week sprint, first day of the sprint, I'm gonna have sprint planning. That is going to be a long meeting. There's no two ways around it. The official time box is up to eight hours if you have a month long sprint. Most people would half that if it's a two week sprint. Cort Sharp (05:45) Yes. Brian Milner (06:07) So maximum maybe of around four hours. So half a day, let's just say, right? Half a day of your first day is gonna be in planning your sprint. Then maybe you finish that meeting up with a small sort of mini daily scrum, but that's it for that day. So you have half the day on day one. Day two, day three, day four, almost all the days of the sprint that are remaining, you have 15 minute meeting. That's it. If you, if you layer on maybe a backlog refinement, maybe you have another hour long meeting in the middle somewhere, but there's no other scrum meetings every day. It's a 15 minute meeting until you get to the last day. So first day, last day, right? First day, four hour meeting last day, you're going to have the sprint review and the retrospective. So there's going to be some time probably in the first part of your day that you have a sprint review. It's going to be some time in the the back part of your day for a retrospective. But those two combined, they're not gonna, maximum I would say there, if you combine those two, would be the same as the sprint planning, maybe up to about four hours or so, maximum. So maybe half a day. So two days of your sprint, you've got half the day for meeting, two out of 10. And the other days, you've got 15 minutes every day. So yeah, there's a lot of those 15 minute meetings, but they're just one a day. And otherwise you have the entire rest of the day to do whatever you need to do to build. So percentage wise, it's actually a small percentage of the total time that you have to work in the course of two weeks. ⁓ If the meetings are not being kept in their time boxes, Cort Sharp (07:32) Mm-hmm. Right. Brian Milner (07:55) then that's the issue, right? If we have a daily scrum that goes for an hour, yeah, I would feel like that's a beat down as well. That's not what it's intended to be. Cort Sharp (08:06) Right, right. And I've also heard the other really common complaint is about the daily scrum of, I understand it's only 15 minutes. I understand that it's a check-in. There's been, I've heard complaints about other, or seen complaints about other meetings where the point of the meeting isn't really well understood across the team, which I think we'll get into a little bit later. But specifically about the daily scrum, the biggest complaint I've seen is, okay, it's 15 minutes, but is it actually really only 15 minutes of your day? And again, same buddy of mine, same friend of mine who threw this out to me, and he was like, so let me paint this picture for you. I get in the office, let's say at 9 a.m. I sit down, I eat. respond to a few emails. look at my emails, I check that out until about 9.30. Our daily standup is at 9.30. Our daily scrum is at 9.30. I have to do minimal work because I can't get into any deep work. I can't get into any major thought work in that first 30 minutes. So I can't really do a whole lot there. Maybe I'll grab a cup of coffee and hang out. That's what most of my days look like. 15 minutes. And then there's always 15 minutes after that 15 minutes to kind of coordinate with whoever needs to, whoever I need to work with to get stuff done, to help remove bottlenecks or anything, which is totally fine, right? We encourage kind of that 16th minute, so to speak, outside of it, but the meeting officially ends at 15 minutes and unless you need to coordinate with someone else, you're free to go, right? So he's like, okay, there's normally another about 15, maybe 30 minutes. So that takes me until about 10, 15. Well, lunch is at 11, so I got another 45 minutes of nothing. Can't really do a ton of work, and that's basically my whole morning just gone, right out of the gate, right? So it's a 15 minute meeting, but in my friend's world, it's a lot more than 15 minutes. ⁓ I know what I would say to that. I'm curious what you would say, and then I'll share what I would say to that. Brian Milner (10:02) Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to say something that may blow people's minds. What if you don't have the daily scrum first thing in your day? Right. Maybe what the issue is here is the time of your daily scrum. If it's at 9.30 and that's messing with your day because you can't really get anything done before that. And then afterwards you're spending more time. So it's taken time and then there's not enough focus time before lunch. so you feel like half your day is gone, well, what would happen if it was the last thing in your day? What about if you ended the day with a daily scrum? What about if you did it first thing after lunch? There's nothing that says it has to be first thing in the day. The team can decide any point of the day to have the daily scrum, and I encourage the team to experiment with it. I've had some teams before who Cort Sharp (10:48) Right. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (10:58) really love end of the day daily scrums because they felt like at the end of the day, we check in with each other. We get together and say, all right, what happened today? Right. And they can all, it's all fresh in their mind because they just finished the day. They can talk through it all. All right. So what does that mean for tomorrow? All right. When we come in tomorrow, we're going to do this. And one of the things that allows is if you have, most of the places I've worked, Cort Sharp (11:02) Hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (11:24) You have developers who have sort of different time schedules. Some people will sleep in and come in late and work late. And other people like to come in really early because they like to avoid the traffic. If you have that kind of situation, if you put it towards the back part of your day, then when people come in in the morning, it doesn't matter what time they come in, they have a big chunk of focus time, but then they can dive in and do things. to me, your friend's problem is more about Cort Sharp (11:32) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (11:50) that interrupting the block of concentration time and it just needs to be moved to a place where it doesn't, you know, kind of split that block of focus time. Cort Sharp (11:54) Mm-hmm. That's a much better answer than I gave him. I just said, well, what else would you be doing in your morning? And he said, well, probably, you know, putzing around, checking email, doing nothing until lunch anyways. ⁓ Right, right. Brian Milner (12:06) Ha ha ha! Well, there is always that, right? mean, just because you've got the opportunity to have focus doesn't mean you're going to focus, but that's a whole other set of issues, right? Yeah. Cort Sharp (12:24) Right, yep. And really, I guess my additional answer to him was also, when you're working in an organization, you're making a reciprocal commitment to that organization to say, I will get this amount of work done, you will give me this type of compensation, and there will be communication between everyone. ⁓ And to me, the Daily Scrum is that communicative part, maybe not necessarily with the organization as a whole. Brian Milner (12:44) Right. Cort Sharp (12:51) but you're still communicating with your team and you're getting on the same page, you're getting aligned so that you all can meet your reciprocal commitment. So really, is the daily scrum for the team or for the organization? I think you can make an argument for either, but at the end of the day, it's for everyone to get on the same page so that we can move forward, which you were going to say something? Go ahead. Brian Milner (13:12) No, just going to say, part of that as well is just, this is some of the stuff that we talk about in our working on a Scrum team class that we're launching here at Mountain Goat Software is really these kind of more subtleties of how the team works together. When you take a Scrum Master class or something like that, you'll learn that, it's a 15 minute meeting and there's a time box. You may not hear that kind of thing of, well, what works best for this team? Maybe it's the end of the day. Maybe it's the middle of the day. Those are the kinds of things that we try to focus on in a WoWs class is what's the best way for your team to actually do this thing and actually make it successful. ⁓ One of those other areas that I think is kind of a classification of problems is that classification of things and just kind of general process confusion. Cort Sharp (13:49) Mm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (14:00) You know people who just don't understand You know chunks of the process or why things are done a certain way or how to do certain things What what kind of issues have you heard along those lines? Cort Sharp (14:01) Right. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard and seen and had conversations with people about velocity and how velocity, some piece of after it's explained to them, they totally get it. They're on the same page. That's all good. Then they run into the issue of explaining it to their leadership. But the understanding of velocity is that it's a changeable or it's a metric to compare teams. Brian Milner (14:21) Ha Cort Sharp (14:41) And I'm on team A and we have a velocity of 20. You're on team B. You have a velocity of 30. Someone looks at that, bigger number, better, right? Brian's team is better than Court's team. No, that's not what it is at all. That's not how it should be used. That's not how it should be handled. That is a misuse of the process. That is a confusion point on what velocity actually is. Velocity, I guess we'll explain it here. Brian Milner (14:52) Right. Cort Sharp (15:06) Velocity is just a measurement of how much one specific team gets done in a period of time. That's it. How many points? And points are all relative. So story points are relative. They are not the same from one team to the next. So therefore, your velocity cannot be the same from one team to the next or comparable from one team to the next. You might have the same velocities, but it's not like saying, OK, my US American dollar is the same as your US American dollar. Those are two very similar, those are the same exact thing. Those are very comparable. We're working with different types of measuring is really what it comes down to, right? Brian Milner (15:43) Right. Well, and I get the confusion because Mike's phrase is, estimate size, derive duration. So when you start to say, well, a story point is a measure of size, not time, you sometimes get pushback from people to say, yeah, but you're eventually going to translate it into time anyway. And you're right. We are. We're deriving duration from it. But the split we're trying to make there is when we estimate, right? When the developers are doing the estimation, we don't want them thinking in terms of time. We don't want them to make that process forward leap to say, well then the story point equals this number of hours. So let me do the calculation in my head and figure out how many story points this is gonna be. I say this in class. If your organization has a conversion chart like that, Cort Sharp (16:12) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:33) a story point equals this number of hours, you're gonna have to convince me and explain to me what benefit there is of doing that. Because I have yet to hear anyone say, oh, well, we do that because it gives us this benefit. Other than saying because that's the way our tool works, right? Our tool we use to manage our process or whatever takes it in this way. And so we have to make the conversion so that we can use this tool. Cort Sharp (16:42) Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (17:01) Now the problem is the tool is driving your process. But other than that, there's not really a benefit that anyone can show me for making that conversion, because what the developer ends up doing is estimating in time. And if they're going to estimate in time, wouldn't it be easier just to say, our estimate is in hours rather than story points? ⁓ It's six hours to do that. It's not one story point. ⁓ Cort Sharp (17:19) Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Brian Milner (17:26) That's what I encourage people to do. the confusion comes from the fact that we do make that duration, we do drive the duration eventually, but that's for the long range forecast. I mean, we say very clearly in our other classes, but we talk about this in the worst class and the working on a scrumpting class, that when you're estimating something, you're thinking in terms of size, you're thinking in terms of risk. comparative to other things. And there's really only two reasons that we would use Story Points. One is to make those longer term forecasts, but the other is to help the product owner to know the relative cost of things so they can prioritize. But the thing you're mentioning, Core, is to use it as a performance metric, and that's where people fall into, I think, a big trap. When you use it as a performance metric, it actually destroys the other two reasons. Mike says this, we have a good thing going with the other two reasons. Organizations want to be able to forecast forward. Organizations need the product owner to be able to know the relative cost of something so they can prioritize. Those are good things. So why go in and destroy it by also trying to use it as a performance metric? Because those two things are needed still. And we won't have a way of doing those. Cort Sharp (18:24) You Right. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, totally. I agree with that. I don't really have anything to add. I you just kind of knocked that one out of the park there, Brian. Good job. Brian Milner (18:48) Yeah. Yeah, no, mean, velocity, some of these, part of it's, you know, these are all new terms for a lot of people as well. And so you hear terms like velocity and think, oh, what does that mean? And, and I get it, you know, if you're a manager and you're not really familiar with this kind of stuff and you hear the term velocity and you think, oh, that's the speed of the team. Well, yeah, it is the speed of the team. Right. And if it's the speed of the team, why can't I use that to judge one team against the other? Because it's like using, um, you know, Fahrenheit and Celsius. I mean, it's Cort Sharp (18:56) Right. Brian Milner (19:18) metric and imperial. They're different measures. And so one number doesn't equal the same thing as the other. ⁓ Now, there are some scaled frameworks like safe that we'll try to level set across teams by having a little cheat sheet saying, hey, this is an example of a five-point story. This is an example of an eight-point story. So that the teams can maybe relatively compare against the same definitions of Cort Sharp (19:25) Right? Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (19:45) sizes. ⁓ But I gotta say, even there, the teams are going to be off. The teams are not going to be perfectly aligned. That's the only thing that you can really do to try to align those. But they still have their own conversations. They still reach their own conclusions. And so the scales aren't going to be perfectly aligned no matter what you do. Cort Sharp (19:46) Mm-hmm. think even more importantly beyond they have their own conversations or I guess more fundamentally, not more importantly, more fundamentally, is that they have different people on different teams. You have different skill sets, you have different abilities, you have different people working on different stuff. I think I've programmed a little more recently than you have maybe, or it might be vice versa. I know you've recently just built a website again. But I would probably wager my programming skill set in like, I don't know, Ruby on Rails is probably a little, I got a little edge up on you right there, right? So if we were on different teams, Court's on this team, Brian's on that team, how can we possibly compare this different skill sets to each other and expect the same result, the same speed, the same pace? Brian Milner (20:37) Yep. Yep, definitely so. Cort Sharp (20:55) You were talking about, oh, it's like comparing using Fahrenheit and Celsius. The first one that popped into my mind was miles per hour or miles and kilometers per hour, miles per hour, kilometers per hour. Right. Speed in different cars. And then even beyond that, I guess, building on the car analogy, that's like comparing a high end Ferrari to my little first car ever, which was a Saturn Ion little beater. Could barely get up to 60 miles an hour thing. Those are two different cars. They're two different skill sets and they require two different viewpoints to even be able to compare them. There are comparisons you can make, know, four wheels, steering wheel, whatever. But at the end of the day, one of those is going a whole lot faster and it was not my first car. I can tell you that. ⁓ Brian Milner (21:39) Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's a good way to compare it as well. What about things that have to do, and I'll kind of combine some thoughts here, but maybe what about things that are kind of more role-centric or even just how the team works together? What kind of issues have you heard people mention recently in those areas? Cort Sharp (21:49) Mm-hmm. So managers, for one, what is the role of managers within Scrum? What's the difference between a product owner and a product manager? Is there a product manager? Does that person even exist? Do we just need to fire all of our product managers or turn them all over into product owners? That one's very common. But I think another really common one is when does the Scrum master step in? And the first time I took my first scrum master class, I can't say first time I took one. I've only officially taken one. but I've been in, if you look at the title of a podcast episode, a couple, couple episodes ago, a rough estimate of a billion, scrum classes. Laura, Laura, Laura Kendrick and I have been in a billion scrum master classes. That was, that was the fun conversation we had, but. I made that that I needed that question to answer to help me kind of grasp what is this new role? This is not a very traditional typical thing that you see within organizations of the Scrum Master. Do I as the Scrum Master, do I help estimate? Do I help prioritize the backlog? What do I do? Am I am I a team lead? Is everyone trying to talk with me on the daily stand up and is it my role or my job to hold? take notes, hold people accountable to what they're saying? Or is that kind of just my job to say, okay, cool, we did it, we're good. I facilitated this meeting, I put it on all your calendars, you showed up and do your thing, I'm out, see ya, right? So I think the Scrum Master role as a whole, there's a bit of confusion on that and product or project managers, right? How do we manage those or handle those? Brian Milner (23:43) Yeah. Well, the other titles, no matter what other title that you have, first of all, let's separate out. This is part of what people need to understand. Do not confuse job title with scrum roll, right? Because you can have, let's say I'm a project, I'm hired as a project manager, but... Cort Sharp (24:00) Hmm. Brian Milner (24:07) now I'm gonna be on a Scrum team, I could be the Scrum master on that Scrum team. Does that change my job title? No, I'm still hired as a project manager. So that's kind of the thing that people need to understand. You don't have to have the job title Scrum master or now we're doing Scrum, so now we got to fire our project managers and hire Scrum masters, right? That's not necessarily the case. It's a role on the team. ⁓ So that being said, Scrum defines three. Cort Sharp (24:15) All right. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (24:33) It defines Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developer. It doesn't define any others. It doesn't mean you don't have them. Mike has this phrase that I love. says, the Scrum guy doesn't mention tacos, but it doesn't mean we don't have tacos. ⁓ The one I like to say in class is it also doesn't define a CEO. But I bet you have a CEO. I bet your company has a CEO. Cort Sharp (24:47) Right. Brian Milner (24:58) It's not saying that you don't need these other roles or that there's no place for them in an organization using Scrum. It's saying Scrum is going to define for you how a single team works. And if you have a product manager, maybe that's more of a scaled thing of how we manage that product across multiple teams. If you have project managers, maybe that's about coordinating information across teams. If you have business analysts, maybe that's helping product owners to write stories. Maybe they are a product owner. I don't know. If you have managers, managers are usually not on a Scrum team unless they're really expert at doing a certain skill. Sometimes I'll see managers who are developers on a team. But the power dynamic is a weird thing on a Scrum team and that's something to be careful of. If you do have someone who is a manager of any kind on a Scrum team, I would, if at all possible, try to make sure that they don't have any direct reports that are also on that same team. They can be on another team with other people that don't report to them, but if you have them on a team with people that directly report to them, now you got this weird power dynamic within this team that's supposed to be a team of equals, but it's not a team of equals because one person's going to fill out a... Cort Sharp (25:56) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (26:12) performance report on me. So how safe do I feel to say I made a mistake around a manager who's gonna put that on my performance report? That's the danger. ⁓ But yeah, I think you're gonna have any of these other roles. And as far as the Scrum Master is concerned, when does the Scrum Master step in? Well, let me ask everyone listening to think about this question. If you were a parent of a child, when do you step in if you have a child who's doing something that could be harmful? Cort Sharp (26:21) Right? Right. Brian Milner (26:39) Think about this, I didn't tell you what age the child was, right? If you have an infant, you're gonna step in a lot quicker. You're gonna protect them a lot more. If you have a teenager, you might give them a lot more leash and say, hey, that's your responsibility, right? You know kind of how to do this. And if they insist on doing something a way that you don't think is the right way, Cort Sharp (26:42) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (27:04) a certain point as a parent, you have to just say, you know what, this is their lesson to learn. And, you know, they need to have the, I believe very strongly as a parent that you have to really defend your kids' rights to make their own mistakes. And I'm not saying developers are kids, or I'm not saying that, you know, you're, as a Scrum Master, you're the parent of the team. Please don't interpret it that way. But I am saying there's a parallel to this to say, Cort Sharp (27:09) Mm-hmm. Right. You Brian Milner (27:29) As a scrum master, knowing when to step in is an issue by issue decision. At this instance, how harmful will it be if they do this thing? Is this a kid running out in front of a truck coming down the street? Well, I'm gonna stop that. ⁓ Is this, hey, don't touch that plate, it's hot. I have told you 50 times, don't touch that plate, it's a hot plate. Cort Sharp (27:35) Right. Right. Brian Milner (27:52) Okay, well hey, maybe it's time for you to touch that hot plate and understand that, hey, next time I'm not gonna touch that hot plate, you know? Cort Sharp (27:54) Right. I totally agree. I'm a little more, and I understand I'm a little biased in this, but I'm a little more of a fan of the Scrum Master. The best or a good analogy of a Scrum Master is like a coach on a team, like a sports team is what I'm saying. And the reason I'm biased, right. Brian Milner (28:12) Gee, I can't understand why that would resonate with you. Cort Sharp (28:16) Who would have thought? I am a, well, recently, I'm a little hiatus right now, but I am a swim coach, head coach, and I think the parallel there is just much easier for me to grasp because think of a coach. You are supporting your team. You're stepping in when needed. You're talking with, whether it's officials or referees or someone that's a little higher up, has a little more authority. than you or your team has in a moment. You're not being disrespectful to them, but you're just communicating, you're conversing, you want to get their understanding and you want to communicate that to your team and work within whatever kind of scope is set there. You're working within the scope of the rules. So I like to view that as kind of like, here's the general organization rules that we follow and standards and practices and all that stuff. But I'm not the one, me personally, I'm not the one. Brian Milner (28:48) Yeah. Cort Sharp (29:09) jumping in the water and doing the races, right? I'm not the one out there on the court, dribbling a ball up and down. I'm not the one out there on the field tackling people, right? I'm there to help the team formulate a plan, help the team execute that plan and help the team really just do what they can't or remove as much of their stress as possible so that they can only focus on doing their job, which in the coaching space is Brian Milner (29:15) Yeah. Cort Sharp (29:36) sport coaching space is let the team go out and swim, let the team go out and play football, let the team go out and play basketball or baseball or softball or whatever it is, right? Let them do their thing. You're there to help them and make their day on game day on meat day as easy as possible and as seamless as possible for them. So there was there was something that you said there to Brian that kind of got my gears gears turned a little bit. Brian Milner (29:55) Absolutely, Kreen. Cort Sharp (30:02) You were talking about how the kind of power dynamic, if like a manager is on a team and someone reports to them, there's that power dynamic there. But you said that everyone is on an equal playing field within Scrum. we're all on the same level within our team. We might have different roles, but we're all on the same level. And that kind of got me moving into like, what have you seen that one kind of helps establish that we're all on the same team, we're all on the same playing field, we're all working together, you I might be the product owner, so I might have a little, or I do have guidance over here's the direction we're gonna go more so than maybe the Scrum Master does with the product development itself. But how do you kind of build that trust within a team to be able to say, yeah, I see you, Cort, as an equal contributor here, even though you're the one saying, We're going to do, we need to do this, this, this, and the other thing in the next two weeks. cause I see a lot of, I see a lot of questions about that. see a lot of struggles with that. And I think that's a very common issue that a lot of people face within a scrum team. Because again, it is so different from, I report to my manager. You don't report to your scrum master. You don't report to your product owner. You sit down and have conversations with them. So how do you, how do you kind of foster that and facilitate that? that type of environment. Brian Milner (31:25) Yeah. Great question. And like the kids used to say a while back, there's the rub. You know, that's kind of the key point there. There's a thing we say about Scrum where we, a lot of trainers and coaches will say this, Scrum is simple to understand, difficult to master. And that is precisely what's meant by that. And that's kind of some of the stuff that we try to capture in this working on Scrum team. Class is is that difficult to master portion because? You know, how do you how do you gain trust from someone else? well That's not in the scrum guide, right? I we're not gonna be able to you know, look that section up and say here's the rules on how you You know start to trust someone else that you're working alongside That's a difficult thing How do you do it? Well, it takes time You know, it's like a any kind of any other kind of relationship you have with another human being, you can't walk in from day one and say, hey, we're going to now have this deep trust with each other. You have to extend it and you have to earn it. That's the way that it's built. And that has to happen over time. You have to display that I have trust in you and I'm worthy of your trust. So when you put your trust in me, you can count on me. I'm going to be here and I'm going to do what it is you expect me to do. That's really the only answer that works for that. it's difficult. is the human working dynamic, I think, is the undervalued kind of glue that holds a lot of this other stuff together. ⁓ Cort Sharp (32:52) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (32:55) And it's that kind of stuff that a good scrum master, I think, can really make an impact on because, hey, they're not just going to know a time box. That's kind of just Scrum 101. But they're going to also know, well, what happens when I have two team members who get into a big conflict, who disagree? My hand's off, and I just let that run. And all of a sudden, now we have a team that splits, that fractures along that line. Cort Sharp (33:05) Right. Right. Yeah. Brian Milner (33:23) Or do I get roll up my sleeves and get involved and have the skills to help them navigate that conflict and come back as a team without resentment, without losing trust in each other, but really working honestly with each other and being productive when we come back. That's the difficulty. And like I said, that's something we tried to capture when we kind of created that working on a Scrum Team classes. Cort Sharp (33:23) Right. Brian Milner (33:48) And what are some of those more subtleties of nuances that really are the heart of whether the team is going to work or not? Cort Sharp (33:57) Right. think even, even beyond just what do these look like? I think the way I view a working on a scrum team is it's for everyone on a scrum team, right? It's not just for scrum masters. It's not just for product owners. It's not just for developers. It gives you a big picture. Excuse me. Sorry. It gives you a big picture of how, how effective you can truly be when you are. Brian Milner (34:18) Yeah. Cort Sharp (34:25) working together on a Scrum team, right? You were talking a little bit about the human working dynamic or nature, one of those. And as soon as you said that, I was like, we should double click into that a little bit. But very briefly, maybe double click into it a little bit of when we work together and humans are working together and not working in siloed environments, not saying, hey, I'm the front end developer. I did my mock up. Brian Milner (34:31) Yeah, yeah. Cort Sharp (34:52) I'm out, I'm done. Figure it out everyone else. you're, struggling with your database stuff. Tough. I'm done with my thing. I'm going to sit back and sip a, sip a cool lot on, on Tahiti's beaches or whatever. Right. We're not doing that. We're, we're helping each other out. We're working together and we're saying, okay, cool. You're having database issues. I don't know anything about databases, but maybe I can help look up some stuff or I can find some. help you out in some way that isn't inhibiting you from doing your job. But it might not be like doing it. It's definitely not doing your job for you. And it's not like it's a, I know everything about databases or I know enough about databases to be able to get by. It could be even as basic as, you run into this error code. Cool. I'll look that up for you and send you the results and save you a little time, hopefully that way or something. But it's that team collaboration, it's working together as a team. I like the perfect example, which I'm pretty sure we talked about this in working on a Scrum Team course as well, of developers and testers working together in tandem and saying, instead of, we like to say, developers finish their code and then we throw it over the proverbial wall. And all right, testers, you got to catch it, figure it out. and then test it, developers maybe sit side by side with testers or hop on a call, not too dissimilar from what we're doing here, just hop on a call with each other and say, let's figure out the verification that the password meets the requirements. Okay, cool, tester, you want to write up the tests, I'll start developing or working on the code for it. Awesome, here's my code, here's my thought process. Do you have any thoughts, Tester? Do you see any edge cases right out of the gate that I should keep an eye out for or work on? I think that is the bigger picture that working on a Scrum team really highlights and really focuses on and allows a lot of people to kind of open their eyes a bit more and see the forest through the trees, so to speak, to be able to understand here's the value and here's what it actually means to be working on a Scrum team rather than just here's my role. I'm gonna go do my role, do my thing and see everyone else figure it out. Brian Milner (37:08) Yeah, not that it ignores the basic components and the ground rules that help us, but it goes beyond that to say, how do you actually make this thing work? So yeah, that's a great point. Well, this has been really useful. I really appreciate you taking time to do this, Court, and coming back. And I'm sure we'll do this on a periodic basis, just to check in and see, hey, what are you hearing now? What are the hot button issues now? So. Cort Sharp (37:18) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (37:32) Thanks for sharing that and keeping your ears open and continue to do that so we can do more of these. Cort Sharp (37:39) Hey, happy to Brian always always fun just seeing what's what's going on out there. What conversations are are being had. And I hope this actually like help someone. Right. I hope this this helps solve either clears up some confusion about, know, maybe what the daily standup is for, what the daily scrum is for, who it's for. Hopefully it doesn't add more confusion. But if it does, you know, you know where to go. Right. Brian Milner (37:59) Hahaha. Exactly, All right, thanks, Cort. Cort Sharp (38:05) Yeah, thanks for having me.

Shared services teams often wonder: Does product ownership still apply here—or are we the exception to the rule? In this episode, Brian and Kert Peterson explore how Scrum principles hold up when value isn’t always customer-facing and demand never stops. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian welcomes back longtime friend and mentor Kert Peterson for a deep dive into what product ownership looks like in a shared services environment. They explore the practical realities that differentiate shared services from traditional product teams, from endless stakeholder requests to the challenge of defining “value” when your users are internal. Together, they discuss the importance of proactive leadership, strategic alignment, and understanding who your real customers are. Kert also shares tools for improving intake, applying an experimentation mindset, and closing the feedback loop, even when your work is abstracted from the business’s end goals. Whether you’re a product owner in infrastructure, data, middleware, or internal tools, this episode will help you reconnect your team’s work to the outcomes that matter. References and resources mentioned in the show: Kert Peterson #9: Scrum Artifacts with Kert Peterson #12: Kanban with Kert Peterson What Happens When For Product Owners Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Kert Peterson is an experienced Agile coach and trainer who bridges the gap between business strategy and technical execution. With a background spanning engineering, marketing, and management, he’s helped teams at Amazon, NASA, and Capital One launch Agile practices that actually deliver. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you here as always, Brian Milner. And today I have one of my dear friends with me, Mr. Kert Peterson is back. Welcome back, Kert. Kert (00:13) Thank you, Brian. It's great to be back with you. Brian Milner (00:16) Love having Kert on. Kert is one of my mentors and actually first person I ever came in contact with when I was trying to become a CST. He kind of showed me the ropes and took a lot of time helping me to understand how to do this thing. So I have a huge debt of gratitude to Kert that I can never repay. But wanted to have... Kert (00:33) It's funny, Brian, let me just say I have the same debt of gratitude to Mike Cohn. So it's funny, it's coming full circle. Brian Milner (00:37) That's awesome. That's awesome. So, but we wanted to have Kert on because we want to talk about something that we I know I've heard a lot of questions about in class and it's a big topic of conversation. And that is, you know, when we talk about working in the area of shared services, you know, how does product ownership fit and work into that area? Does it fit and work into that area? Or do we find the exception? Is this the place where product ownership just all of a sudden is not able to provide any value? So Kert, that's a huge big ball of yarn to unravel there, but what comes to mind when you think about this? Kert (01:18) Well, I think back to the origins, what inspired the Scrum framework, which was Japanese product companies in the late 1970s doing things differently, using this sort of rugby approach and getting cross-discipline groups together and seeking to innovate and reduce time to market. So when I think about product ownership arising out of that context, it's very clear, right? There's a printer that I want to get better at. I want to take a Canon EOS Rebel and I want to make the next generation of it, or I want to take the Honda Civic. And I want to improve the way it shifts or whatever. And so there's a lot of clarity. And I think, I would say an easy vision to sort of begin to form and coalesce around the direction we're moving in. And the shared services groups I've worked with, whether it's middleware or data people or cybersecurity folks, they just experienced this constant deluge of requests from a variety of stakeholders, dozens, if not hundreds of stakeholders. And it feels like they're always operating tactically. helping those product owners that they're leading shared services teams to shift out of the tactical and begin to think more strategically and begin to get more, I guess, proactive about how they meet requests and what they're going to offer and how they're going to offer it is sort of a challenge that I think I see many of my customers and clients up against. Brian Milner (02:37) Yeah. I think one of the things I hear quite often about this is it's sort of, you know, cause and for example, a product owner class or something like that. We'll talk a lot about understanding your customers and, and mapping out kind of personas and other things and how that influences our idea of value. And then how you, kind of rank value according to your backlog. And that, that to me is kind of where one of the friction points here in shared services is you've got these demands coming at you. all day, every day from all these different corners and from everyone, it's urgent. From everyone, this is the most important thing. So how can you apply some of this product ownership mindset principle to scenarios where everything is urgent? Kert (03:21) Yeah, you those fundamentals, you know, when something's coming in, how do we weigh it against other opportunities? And usually we want to do so financially. How do we kind of begin to assess this particular request or opportunity against others? And when I teach product owner training in person, I hand out these little plastic covered pictures of currency. So I'll have like a yuan from China. I'll have a euro, I'll have all these varieties of currency and I won't, I make them kind of cryptic. Like I'll choose one from, you know, maybe one from Mongolia. And so I put this currency in front of them. say, okay, rank these in order of value, you know, translate it to U S dollars, which one's most to least important. And they struggle because I don't let them look at their phones and they have to, you know, sort of think or be creative. And at the end of the activity, they realized, wow, I don't have a system for translating this currency into the currency that's universal, which is US dollars. And it gets them, it sort of sets the stage for this idea of scoring, you whether you're using rice or some other scoring method, it sets the stage for that conversation, which is critical. How do you objectively assess what's coming in and make the choice on the next best thing to build? Yeah. Brian Milner (04:36) Yeah, that's a great exercise. I love that because it's a great picture there to understand as a product owner, you can't make those decisions in a vacuum. If you don't have the background, if you don't have the knowledge, if you don't have source information coming in, then no, I can't rank currencies. I've got to have expertise in those areas to help me understand those things. So yeah, I love that exercise. That's awesome. One of the other things I hear quite often in the shared services space is kind of the idea of, maybe this stuff is, maybe Scrum doesn't work as well in a shared services space because of the immediacy of all this stuff. And maybe we have to do Kanban versus Scrum. What's your opinion there? Kert (05:18) When I was at Capital One many years ago, shared services teams were adopting Scrum because that was the only game in town. This was 2005. really Agile was sort of very closely connected to Scrum because the Scrum and XP communities sort of were the members of the Agile Manifesto. And what Scrum teams end up doing is they say, you know, we're going to have a sprint planning session and we're going to plan 10 % of our capacity for something that is doable. And we're going to reserve 90 % for unplanned work. that's coming at us. And I see Scrum teams that retain Scrum and that want to leverage Scrum for shared services really just allow for a huge buffer of flexibility. But they also start to get curious about, you know, over the last two weeks, we left 90 % of our capacity open. We used all of it. And here's the top three, you could say offenders, right? Top three requesters, top three sources of demand. And they really begin to get good at tracking where their money's being spent as a team. So they can go back to those stakeholders and say, look, if you want us to continue to serve you, give us some more funding. So I think Scrum teams can excel in shared service. You're applying Scrum in shared services. I just think there's some nuance to it. That's been my experience. I'm curious what you see too. Brian Milner (06:34) Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I think that 90-10 kind of thing, the thing that concerns me or that I always try to raise with people is the whole concept of transparency and trying to understand the reality of what's behind this. So you make a good point. If we have top three offenders of people who are the people who constantly requesting things from us, it's important, I think, to stop and look at those things and say, how many of these things were things that could not have been foreseen or things that we could not have planned in advance. And how many of these things are things that really were just kind of urgent pop-up day by day, we've got to handle these things as they come in. And don't take for granted, I don't think would be my advice to people that all the things that people are requesting of you are kind of urgent day by day things. There's probably a lot of those things that could have been foreseen and could have been planned. But it takes kind of that after action of retrospecting and trying to figure that out to know the difference. Kert (07:34) Beautifully put, I totally agree. Brian Milner (07:37) Yeah. So Kert, what are some of the other big challenges that you've heard from people in the shared services space when it comes to just using Scrum? Kert (07:45) Well, one of the biggest challenges that I've seen and one of the things that I think is a great solution I heard from one of my mentors, Kevin Rosengren, who worked at Capital One for many years. I worked with him at Applied Frameworks and he's now an airline pilot. He loves to fly. And so he's back doing that commercially. But I worked at Mission Health in Western North Carolina for, I was a contractor there working with the application support team. And I kept using the word intake management. intake management and Kevin got really his kind of the back, back, hairs in his neck kind of bristled and his hackles went up and I'm like, come on, Kevin, what's, what's wrong with intake? And he said, intake implies passivity. You're just kind of standing there waiting for things to come at you. He says, I want my product owner to be proactive. I want them to have a vision, a mission. want them to be out in front of the problems. And so I think one of the biggest challenges for shared services is really, taking ownership of the team. And really be a financial custodian for the investment that the company's making in that team and being more proactive in Kanban. We have this term called shaping demand. And this idea of shape demand implies proactivity. So I'll give you an example. was it Collins aerospace working with a middleware team and they did some demand analysis. They kind of diagnosed their backlog, what's in it. And they, they started to realize they weren't tracking an important backlog item. speaking of kind of unplanned work, there are people with ask him for advice or consulting and they realized over a period of weeks or months that a lot of their capacity was kind of leaking or going out via these, just these consulting hits that they took. Give us advice on this, give us advice on this and it may be three hours here, four hours there, but it would add up and they realized, Hey, we can get more active. But we create a knowledge base. If we have some protocols about how we receive this request, if we make them fill out a form. So those are some. some aspects of really taking ownership of your service and requiring certain, you could say, information or maybe levels of respect coming from the requester that begins to help you feel like you have more power than you might have thought last week or last month. Yeah. Brian Milner (09:55) Yeah, that's a good distinction because I agree there is sort of this reactive nature sometimes to that work. if I'm a, I don't know, if I'm a backend shared services team and we're fulfilling requests on a daily basis of people to build servers and install things or whatever, it can feel an awful lot like we're just reacting to what people are giving us. So that, I agree, that's a huge challenge of, know, when you're that kind of product owner, how do you come up with a vision? How do you understand, you know, I get those questions all the time, especially if you're in things like sprint goals, you know, those kinds of things. You know, do we have a sprint goal when what we're doing is just kind of taking things in and responding to people? What do you think are the keys to people becoming more proactive than reactive as a shared services team? Kert (10:48) Yeah, that's that I think therein lies the challenge, Brian. I think that's a real challenge because I do think that things come at you and it just feels like you you're a ticket taker, right? You're you're you're just under this deluge of constant work and it's very tactical and it's very kind of, know, it doesn't it lacks sort of that that sense of purpose drive and the ability to say no. Now, some demand is going to be irrefutable, some demand you just have to say yes to. But I think more often or I say There is definitely a category of demand that you should be able to parse through and determine if it's for you and if it fits with the strategic goals that you've been situated, that you've been assigned or your mandate, so to speak. Gosh, it's shifting from, it's kind of like, how do you shift from that fire fighting mode to fire prevention? And I think there's a piece of that is kind of. Brian Milner (11:35) Right, right. Kert (11:37) I call it scrambling up to the crow's nest, you know, in the old pirate ships. And you've got to have at least someone on the team that's looking out and seeing the big picture and understanding the strategic goals of the business and how we as a shared services team can begin to serve them. But I don't have a, it's not easy because, you know, I think when I was a product owner at Amazon in the early days, and there was a very clear, you know, there was very clear missions like let's grow the number of wishlist creators or number of wishlists in the community. And so there was a kind of a clear, you could say marker and a clear direction for what you're up to. You're serving the community. You're doing things to populate the community, get people more connected. I think there's a lot less clarity and you have to kind of hunt for it, I would say. And I think it does take I think one of the challenges for shared services leadership is to be more connected to the business and to recognize themselves as a more integral part of the business and the ability to actually affect business outcomes. I think, so anyway, connecting to the business and getting those shared outcomes in view, think is a part of that puzzle. Brian Milner (12:44) Yeah. Yeah, I think you're making a strong point there because I agree. That's sometimes I think the challenge in that space is you do feel sometimes very disconnected from the business goal because it's not as clear as gain this new set of customers or service this new clientele or anything. It's more support based. It's more infrastructure based. If we don't do our job in that space, then we can't enable the other groups to do what they do well. But that's a layer of abstraction really, even from what the business has as its goal. So I think that's an important point is, if I'm that kind of product owner, I want to make sure that what we do is tied into the business objective and trying to understand fully what it is we're trying to do as a business and how we support that. We talked to, I mentioned a little bit earlier about customers and that being kind of a friction point of understanding customers. And how do you, how does that relate in your mind when you're in a shared services team? Do you, there less emphasis on trying to understand who your customer is if, know, from product ownership, uh, kind of discipline, uh, or, or is it just as important and we were not really understanding what we. should be classifying as our customers. Kert (14:07) I think it's the latter, Brian. I definitely think it's the latter. When I was working with this 50 person division at Mission Health, I Mission Health got acquired a couple of years ago, there were requests coming from every department in the hospital system. mean, there was clinics, there was oncology, there was radiology, there was all this, there was this huge landscape of stakeholders that, again, felt like my thing's the most important. And understanding each customer or segment of the, you could say the market, right? The 10,000 person healthcare system was really critical to sequencing work and shaping work and to timing, determining how to kind of decompose it. And so that was a really vital piece. what, you know, I think about a few weeks before I left Mission Health, there was a really strong move from the leader there, Joel, to create what we call strategic engagement partners, which really were these proactive individuals that would go out into the landscape of the hospital system and begin to profile the oncology clinicians or the oncology physicians. And so by doing that, it started to kind of get them to put a finger on the pulse of the bigger, really the customer, which was a variety of customers, but it also helped them recognize, okay, this quarter we're, As a healthcare system, we're falling way behind in MRIs or radiology services. And so we better give some extra attention to that. So let's ensure that that's part of our goal this quarter. And so it really, that strategic engagement with the customer is, think as critical as it is when you're selling a camera or a car. Yeah. Brian Milner (15:43) Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. That just brings to mind as well then the idea of making closing that loop with your customer to understand whether what you're doing is actually making impact or not. And I think you gave a good example there, but what about if your shared services team is kind of more internal? And like I said, if we're installing servers, If we're installing some big network system or something, and that's what our team does in various places, how do we close that loop in a more productive way and really make sure that the work we're doing, even though it's somewhat repetitive, even though it's abstracted from your end customer, how do you make sure it's actually doing what's needed? Kert (16:26) Yeah, that's, I love that question, Brian. It's a fantastic question. So I live in Canada. moved here, moved here five years ago. There's a data center of excellence, data center of excellence for the government of Alberta. And, the leader of that data center of excellence, a guy named Donnie, he, he came to one of my product owner trainings and he started to kind of put pieces together that I want my 30 person data team to be equipped to not only go out and service, you know, the community of the ministries. there's like 26 ministries. like health, education, kind of like departments here in the US to service them, but also to help recognize that what we're providing is impacting the bottom line of the ministries. And in some cases, it's harder than others. I mean, I'll just like the Ministry of Health Care, for example, if a data center of excellence can go in and be a strategic partner for that data for the health care ministry, they can begin to formulate. Brian Milner (17:14) Yeah. Kert (17:24) a strategic plan for how they use data. They can begin to equip them with dashboards and other information, other data products, and they can tell a story to the bigger organization that's allocating funding for the data center of excellence. So his drum that he beats is he wants his people to be able to go in and engage strategically and be able to tell a story about the impact they have. Now, some industries are so busy and so inundated with work, they just want a dashboard. Be a ticket taker, give me a dashboard, and don't bother me with strategic stuff. And those are much harder to kind of draw the connect the dots between business impact and our efforts. But there's going to be a subset, I think, of requesters or customers that you're going to be able to start to build a relationship and tell a story. And then those customers become indispensable to, they can become part of your testimonial. Brian Milner (17:55) Yeah. Kert (18:15) they become indispensable to you justifying your existence the next annual budgeting cycle, so to speak. Brian Milner (18:21) Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. One of the other areas I'm thinking about as we're talking about this, because there's a lot of content that comes across in the product in our class about the idea that we should be in an experimentation mindset and look at the things in our backlog more as experiments. We're running these things trying to see if they're going to solve the bigger problem. And then if they don't, we find another experiment. Sometimes I hear a lot from people in classes that are in more shared services places that they have a harder time finding how that would fit in with what they do. It doesn't feel like experimentation. feels like, like we've talked about kind of more order taking. So how does that apply, Kert? How do you, how do you, if you're a product owner in that space, how can you take more of an experimentation mindset if you're in shared services? Kert (19:10) Yeah. You know, I love this question. I've never heard this question, Brian. And it's, it's a great question. It's, it's, it's taken me deep down deep, deep thinking about product ownership. I'll throw out my, my, my, I'll kind of expose my thinking and it, cause I don't have, direct experience that I could point to in sort of this experimentation, the application of this mindset to shared services. I can imagine, can imagine if you have a customer that comes and says, you know, Brian Milner (19:14) Hahaha. You Kert (19:39) I want a purple minivan. And you're in that mindset as a shared service provider, you're going to want to discover the underlying need and sort of begin to kind of tease out, you know, what is it that you're trying, what problem are you trying to solve? What is it that you're after? And maybe, you know, we've all seen that famous, you know, iterative incremental picture of, you know, the skateboard, then the, you know, what is the... thing with the handles on it and then the motorcycle and a bicycle. So that evolution of solutions you could say. And I think if you're in that mindset, you're going to say, Hey, I know you want a pink minivan or a purple minivan. Let's start with, you know, this, which is, which is going to move you in that direction, because I know what you're doing is trying to solve this problem. And let's start with that. And let's see, let's see how it goes. You see, you're enlisting the support and partnership of your customer or requester. And so it takes that willingness to kind of be in a. Brian Milner (20:03) Yeah. Kert (20:30) experimental mindset with the shared services provider, I would think. So that's my thought. don't know how that question lands for you, but it's a great question. Brian Milner (20:38) Yeah. No, I mean, I think this is kind of central to what we're talking about here because, you know, I think there are going to be things that, you know, are just needed and there there's not really going to be an exploration of those things. If we have a government regulation that says we've got to do this and you've got to have this in place by this date or whatever, that's That's not up for question. I don't need to run a rice, you know, kind of a prioritization on that because it's needed, right? It's unquestionable. But I think that sometimes it's sort of that line in product ownership of, I think it's very easy if you're a product owner in the shared services space to maybe shift and consider everything as a needed thing, as being an order taker. And if that's the case, then yeah, you kind of, you kind of abdicate your, responsibility in that case of understanding and prioritization and everything else, because you're just kind of giving it to the people who are demanding things from you. And I think that that's there's, there's a balance there. There's a yin and yang. I think because you've got to understand some of those things are that way. And there are some things that are not. And the things that are not, I've got to understand, as you said, the core need behind it. Because it's very easy to have your stakeholders turn you into just an order taker. And if you allow that to happen, your stakeholders will run over you. But you've got to keep that wall, keep that boundary up, I think, if you're a product owner in that space, to be able to say, now, wait a minute. You're saying you need this. Let me understand why, help me understand what's behind this. What is it that you're trying to do and accomplish with this? It's the whole how versus what kind of discussion, right? We have to understand the how behind it, or we have to understand the what behind it so that we can then talk with the team and find the best how. But if we don't go through that extra work, then I think that we just. Kert (22:34) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (22:51) quite simply become order takers and get overwhelmed with the volume that's coming at us. Kert (22:56) Totally agree. And I think data teams are a prime example because of course everyone these days wants a dashboard. Give me a dashboard. I need a dashboard. And the probing and sort of the con I call it a consultative approach. The consultative hat you wear to go in and discover what's underlying that request. And like you're saying, what is it you're really wanting and why and what need are you trying to, you know, kind of achieve there is often I say undervalued. Brian Milner (23:01) Yeah. Kert (23:22) And often, you know, not seen because they're under such a deluge of just, you know, okay, just get them something and make them go away. And I think there's a desire to have, I mean, Donnie wanted sort of everyone in the team, his 30 person team to have that capability or that sort of consultative hat that they could wear. And I think that can come with time, but I do think that there's some people, you know, in that What we recognize was in that 30 person team, there were probably six to eight folks that were really sort of ready to step into the role of product owner. And so I think one of the things that's important in any team, specifically in shared services teams is to recognize there's going to be people or a person or people that are sort of inclined towards, you know, being a great listener, being consultative, thinking strategically and sort of bringing, you know, having kind of, I don't like the word gatekeeper, but sort of manning that front gate and ensuring that what's taken in is well understood and well shaped and all that sort of thing. Brian Milner (24:20) Yeah Yeah, I agree. don't like gatekeeper as well, but there's a judgment element, right? I mean, you've got to apply judgment. And that's quite frankly something that only humans can do is to apply judgment to decisions and understand the story behind the data. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this topic. As I said, this is something I hear questions about quite often in product owner classes, because there's a huge number of product owners out there that are in this space and sometimes feel like the redheaded stepchild. Maybe we just don't fit in. But I think you made a strong case here. I think there's a lot that can apply. Kert (25:07) So, so Brian, I'm really curious when you think about great product owners. I feel like my question to you is, are they made or are they born great product owners? Do you have any thoughts? Like what comes to mind when you think about that question? Brian Milner (25:16) Ha ⁓ yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's talent and skill, is what comes to mind. And I think that we all have some natural abilities in different areas, but I think we all have skills that we acquire and learn and there's discipline to it. There's rigor to that. There's a process to it. And I mean, I, you know, I think there are our product owners that have talent, ⁓ that are, that's kind of innate. but for me, it's mostly in areas that's, things like communication, right? If you're, if you're a poor communicator, ⁓ you can improve your communication skills, but, ⁓ you know, you see this in politicians and things in certain times. I talk about certain politicians as being just really good communicators naturally. Yeah. They, they've, they've studied communication and understand how to do it better. but they had an innate skill in that area already, or innate talent, I should say, since I'm differentiating between the two. ⁓ But yeah, I think I would lean more towards like maybe 90-10 skill over talent, and that it's, you know, it is a lot of practice and learning and discipline that we just, need to study and know our craft, you know, it's a craft. And I think we have to improve on that and get better at it. But yeah, I mean, in this kind of work, think I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the talent side of it. I think that there is some innateness that can be useful, but ⁓ I kind of lean much more to the skill area. Kert (27:06) Yeah, yeah. So Donnie's got this 30 person team and he suspected there were six to eight that were suitable candidates to kind of go into a multi-week cohort to kind of become sort of more seasoned or sort of competent product owners. If you had 30 people in front of you and you were asked to choose the six to eight that are most suitable for a product owner program, would you have any thoughts around? how you would do that. mean, I'm guessing you probably wouldn't draw straws, but Brian Milner (27:38) No, I mean, I think it comes back to some of the things that we talk about. ⁓ Whenever I go into an organization and try to figure out who's the right product owner for this product, it comes down to a few common things. First of all, do they have the domain knowledge for the product? Do they know enough about that product to be effective, know about the market, the customers, those kind of things? Do they have the availability to do the job? ⁓ Are they constantly going to be involved in other things? Are you splitting this person between 10 teams? ⁓ And then are you going to be able to give them the authority that they need to make the decisions that they need to make in that role? ⁓ if I was trying to decide which is the right person, that would be the rubric I would be using is trying to say which one of these people match best for this product. Kert (28:34) Right on. Cool. Thanks, man. Thanks for entertaining that last topic. Brian Milner (28:39) Yeah.