Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

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.

Tali Shlafer, a certified interview coach, shares her insights on mastering the interview process. She explains why top performers often falter in interviews despite their qualifications. Tali emphasizes the importance of preparation, authenticity, and storytelling, encouraging candidates to view interviews as skills to develop. She provides strategies for tackling tough questions and reframing weaknesses into growth opportunities. This engaging conversation offers practical advice for anyone looking to enhance their interview game and connect with potential employers.

Barnaby Golden, an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach, discusses a critical issue facing Agile teams: the underpowered product owner. He explains how lacking authority can derail decision-making and team momentum. Barnaby highlights the stark differences between empowered and underpowered product owners, emphasizing the need for trust and clear communication from leadership. The conversation also uncovers the complexities of managing multiple product owners and the importance of aligning product development with customer needs to deliver true value.

Join Brian and Scott Dunn as they unpack what “buy-in” actually means and what it takes to move from surface-level support to genuine commitment in this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian is joined once again by Scott Dunn to tackle a listener-chosen topic: how to get real buy-in for Agile initiatives, especially when shifting from a non-Scrum environment. They explore why buy-in isn’t about enthusiastic cheerleading or deep Agile knowledge, but about leaders and teams aligning on desired outcomes. From the cost of performative support to the emotional side of change, Brian and Scott share practical strategies for securing support at all levels of the organization. Along the way, they dive into influence tactics, the importance of shared purpose, and how co-creation—not compliance—drives lasting change. Whether you're guiding a large transformation or simply trying to influence up, this episode will help you rethink how to earn trust, build alignment, and inspire meaningful momentum. References and resources mentioned in the show: Scott Dunn Elements of Agile Assessment 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 SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:01) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And I also have with me today someone that you probably know pretty well because he took over this podcast for about a month there. Mr. Scott Dunn is with us. Welcome in, Scott. Scott Dunn (00:19) Hey, thanks Brian. Yes, that podcast takeover was a lot of fun. So thank you for that opportunity. That was a hoot. Had a great time. Brian Milner (00:25) Absolutely. Well, I don't think I publicly thanked you for that. just ⁓ a public thanks. Scott Dunn (00:28) No, you didn't. No, not even an email. Not even a Slack message. Brian Milner (00:33) Well, very public thanks to you for doing that. Those episodes were great. I enjoyed them and it was fun to be a listener. It was fun to listen to it and just kind of hear the conversations and be a fly on the wall for those. So thanks again for doing that. Scott Dunn (00:47) Yeah. Yeah. It's a real treat. Brian Milner (00:48) We're having Scott on we kind of ran an experiment on this one because we were Scott was teaching a class for mountain goat and We thought maybe we'll just see what the class thinks so we pulled the class to see what topic do you want us to talk about and We thought we'd just go with the winner the winner that came out of that class was how to get buy-in How do you get buy-in in a? move from a non-scrum place to a Scrum kind of way of working. How do you get buy-in in the organization and buy-in from others? So when I was thinking about this as a topic, I think the first thing that popped in my head Scott about this was What do we mean by buy-in? So what does that mean to you? Scott Dunn (01:33) Right. So sometimes what I'm hearing is people saying like, buy in, you know, they, I would hear a common complaint, like they don't get it. They don't understand. don't, for me, buy in isn't that they need to understand agile or scrum and these types of things and how it works. Buy in is they get, they give their support kind of regardless. So my favorite example of that is walking into, this is a multi vendor effort we're doing on a Salesforce implementation. And we'd asked for the VP of the whole thing to come down and say some words before we had our first retrospective. You can imagine it's going to be kind of heated with different vendors trying to make each other look bad or whatever. And he'd said, yes. So we're coming down into this, you know, big high stakes meeting. And I just remember him saying, you know, I'm so excited to be doing this for you all. It's great. And he kind of falls in and looks at me says, what am I doing again? Cause he didn't, he didn't know, he didn't know what a retrospective was. He just knew he was asked to come and do something around that. And to me, Brian, Brian Milner (02:21) Ha Scott Dunn (02:28) That's fine. He's showing up. He's letting everyone know this way of working is important. It's important to me. It's important to success. And he probably couldn't tell you any of the meetings or artifacts or anything in scrum, right? But that's still what we need. Brian Milner (02:39) So. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it because I think a lot of people sometimes think of buy-in, like everyone's clapping and waving scrum flags around and all that stuff. And I don't think that's really buy-in. I think it's just the willingness to honestly try it, to give it a shot and be open about what would work and what doesn't work. The opposite of that is the resistance, know, of just being resistant to it and saying, I'm gonna put up hurdles and walls in the way of this being successful. That's, think, what needs to be avoided. Scott Dunn (03:18) Right, right. think that some of what was helped is to give them the, for me, the mindset of their buy-in isn't about doing things right. They're not saying, we're really wanted. We really want a new process. We were getting asked to come in because they're not getting the results they want. So buy-in for me from their perspective is how to help get the results that they're looking for. And they'll support us to get those results. So I don't talk to them about some of the aspects of an empirical process or any of that. I sort of say, you in order to get things faster or in order to improve quality, right? And that's how they get behind that. I think sometimes people are preaching some of the process part, even if they could understand that's not really what they're about. But I think they even struggle to understand what we're talking about. So yeah, it's hard for them to get behind and support us when they're not tracking. They simply know there's a pain point we're having. Can we talk about that and how to get what we need and what do you need from me to get that? Great. But I think we We can do ourselves a favor by helping point to the same target, make sure we're aligned with the same target they want. And maybe they'll give us more support if they feel like, yeah, you're tracking with me. I want to come in talk about, you know, more collaboration. Like we already have enough meetings. That's what, that's what I heard. Right. But I'll come and talk about faster time to market. Well, yeah, now they're interested in talking about what they need to do, you know, that I'm asking them to get behind that. I think that's fair. Brian Milner (04:28) Right. Yeah, I think there's also an element there, because I know we're both kind of fans of and users of kind of the path to agility framework from our friend David Hawks. And I love the part of that that's trying to establish the motivation, the purpose from the outset to try to say, What's the thing we hope to get out of this? And I think that's really crucial in getting buy-in that you can't just tell people, hey, we're gonna be a Scrum organization now. Why? Because I tell you that's what we're gonna do, because we're gonna check off the box and say that we're now Scrum. That's not motivating to anyone. if I can say, no, we're gonna... go through this change because here's the end result. Here's what we're trying to get to. Here's what we think will be better. If I can lay that out, then I've got a purpose behind it. And now I have motivation to go forward with this difficult change and learning what's expected of me and all that stuff. But if that's not done, I feel like that's a crucial misstep in that. Scott Dunn (05:44) Yeah, I wanted to add to that, that that point about the clarity of the goals is really something that has sticking power. And we had a client, I came and was working with him this year that he had remembered from the last year as the CTO. He's remembering from last year that we had done that same exercise or what are the goals that leadership has. And he remembered it was quality and customer satisfaction. That had been over a year since we had done that, but that not only stuck with him, but we came back to the group and kind of had a fun poll. Like, everyone remember? They remembered. And so every time we're having a decision we're trying to make about should it be this way or that way on the process, the different, were doing the race, the matrix work, et cetera, people kept coming back to, well, is that going to help us in terms of quality? Is that going to help us in terms of customer staff? We're not going into the nuts and bolts of Scrum or these other approaches. It's simply what's the business goal. will that help us hit the goal? And when the leader hears you using their language that they get, like that's my goal, they're feeling like, okay, whatever you need to do, sounds like you understand what I'm after, right? It's really powerful. But I like that you mentioned that, because when we go through that exercise, always super clear, we don't get confused. Times when we lead with, especially on the executives trying to lead with explaining Scrum, you can tell sometimes they're not really tracking or they're following along, okay, so what's the point? Brian Milner (06:59) Yeah. Scott Dunn (06:59) Yeah, you start off with what's their goals. They're like, great, this is exactly what I want to talk about. And then, Hey, you're not doing the things you need to do to hit those goals. Oh, okay. What are they? I mean, I remember one time a couple of years back, literally when the coach was presenting the results of that assessment towards their goals, they cut them off in the middle of his presentation. Just says, well, why, why is it, you why is that red? Why are we not hitting the goal? What do need to do? And they just started solving the problem right then he couldn't even finish his presentation. Talk about getting support. And he had been there six years saying, Brian Milner (07:23) Wow. Scott Dunn (07:27) Scott, they're not gonna buy into doing this transformation team and the scrum work. He couldn't even finish, I think, a couple of slides and they gave him everything he wanted, right? Powerful, powerful. Brian Milner (07:36) Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good point. I also think one of the reasons that there's, you know, and that kind of parallels it. One of the reasons there's a lack of buy-in in general is that it's sort of targeted to just one area. You know, like this is a team thing. The teams are going to get trained, but the leaders have no idea really what's going on. They're kind of separated off from this. And I think that's a big part of the problem as well is you get buy-in when they see the leaders have bought in. So are the leaders bought in? Are the leaders on board with this? If they're not, then the rest of the group isn't going to be bought in either. Scott Dunn (08:18) People are smart. They're watching which way the wind's blowing. to be honest, Brian, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I tell people, I don't even care if they genuinely believe in that or not. If they're getting behind it because that's the way the politics are going, hey, they're getting out of the way. We're getting things done. Fine by me. Right. So partly when we're getting that by now, so make sure leaders, are you communicating this clearly? Because some of your people are either not on board or they're kind of waiting to see, this a fad or is this going to blow over? I need you to really communicate that clearly, et cetera, to see if people are get on board with that or not. Or, and on the other side, if I feel like some of these folks are not on board and I do feel like I have leadership support, I need to escalate that pretty quickly and make sure you understand, know, because they might get mad at you or me for talking about scrum and changing things. I'm like, I didn't knock down the door and come in myself. I was asked to come in here by someone who has authority. So maybe you need to clarify that with them, whether we're doing this or not. But don't get mad at me. Brian Milner (09:04) Right. Scott Dunn (09:11) So I will check them on that and clarify with the leadership to say, let's make sure your people are in alignment as well. If we do have that buy-in for sure. Brian Milner (09:20) Yeah. I saw another kind of quote about this that really got my brain working a little bit. Cause it was talking about the cost of fake buy-in and it was, it was kind of saying, you know, performative buy-in might actually, you know, it was asking the question, is performative buy-in worse than just outright resistance? And I don't know. Let me ask you that. What do you think? Do you think performative buy-in is worse than just someone who's resistant? Scott Dunn (09:28) Interesting. Yeah. As someone that just gave an example of performative buy-in. So if you would ask me a week ago, I might have gave a different answer, but someone was talking about this is a wildly different aspect of this, but you did ask me to join. So you get what you get. ⁓ They're talking about the difference of discrimination in the US versus South Africa. And they said, what's the difference? And they said in South Africa, it was blatant. no, you're a person of color. You cannot buy property here. That's how it is. Here, it's more like Brian Milner (09:59) You Scott Dunn (10:14) Yeah, we're looking at your loan application and I don't know if you can buy in this way. So it's subtle. And this person actually said, I'll take the outright blatant discrimination of South Africa, where at least you know what the issue is versus the subtle one. So maybe to that point with what you're saying, maybe it is better to have outright resistance and then say, well, at least I know who's on board or not. Rather than the person says they're on board, but every time they're in a meeting, they come out meeting and we don't get the decisions made we need. That's funny. Brian Milner (10:39) Yeah. Yeah. When I read this and started to think about it, I kind of had that same conclusion that like when someone's being outright resistant, yeah, it's an obstacle, but it's honest. And, you know, I'd rather have the honesty because they're trying to, they're still acting their way because they have a belief that their way is the right way to do it. And so they're throwing up a resistance because they're honestly resistant to it. Whereas someone who just sort of nods in meetings and claps along and, know, oh yeah, sure, great. But then they're kind of in the quiet, you know, behind the scenes and the hallway conversations. That's insidious. That's something that I can't really deal with. And it's like, you know, let's have the discussion. Let's talk about it. And, you know, if you win, then great. Why not have the courage to just have the conversation and see which idea wins? Scott Dunn (11:39) Right. on that note, think for everyone's sake, Brian, if we could be honest for a moment, not that we haven't been honest in these other podcasts, but in this, in this moment, we're really going to be honest. Would you, would, do you feel at times that our culture, our company cultures actually teach people to do just what you said to not be honest, but then like be like, you know, politically savvy, don't say what you really think, but then you're going to kind of be subversive and undermine that thing. And I've dealt with that so many times, I'll show up to a meeting like, I would have swore we were on board. had that one-on-one and now you're not saying in the meeting that you go on board with that. So people might've gotten coached. It's actually not safe to be honest and have good clear spirited debate because there's a price to pay if they do that. And they maybe 10 years in corporate can kind of teach you don't be honest or they're trying to read the tea leaves about what you think it's going to be. And so, yeah, I definitely would rather take it. Maybe it's part of the mindset of trying to really check, you know, where people are at. If I go back to my early days of coaching, those one-on-ones of having the level of honesty to really know where people are at. That was, think, some of the power. And I think some of that came from genuinely caring about the people, wanting them to succeed, wanting them win, even if it wasn't going to be at this company because of all the change or whatever. I did feel people felt like I really was open and honest with them and transparent and had their back. I would hear some real things about how they really felt because they didn't feel like there was a payback for that. And that allowed me to actually say, well, you know what, if you're really not on board, let's see what we can do as far as another opportunity. Maybe it's a positional switch we can do or whatever that was. Because I mean, this did affect people's jobs in some ways. And I think maybe if I don't have those one-on-ones, they're probably just going to give lip service because they don't know if anyone there really has their back in a turbulent time of change. AI is a great example of that, right? Hey, we want to move forward with AI. Well, what's the impact of my job if we do? But no one's really talking about that, right? It's all positive and all that. So I think people are trying to read that too. But you bring up a good point. I think I would take the direct as long as they feel like they can safely be open and honest. Brian Milner (13:31) Yeah. Yeah, well, even that question, right? What effect is AI gonna have on my job? And the honest answer I think that someone has to give right now is, don't know. I feel like I understand what it is today, but I don't know that that's gonna be the same way tomorrow because this technology changes so fast, so I can't promise anything. But here's what it is today and this is the paradigm we're trying to live in. So I think that there's an honesty component there that you've got a mirror to say, hey, I'm going to be honest with you. You be honest with me about this. And we'll be upfront with each other as we make our way through this. yeah, so yeah, think that kind of being honest and taking that approach, I think, is the right way to go. I also think that being kind of a reverting back before you get into things like, here's what a Scrum Master is, here's what a product owner is. You've got to start with the basics and mindset kind of culture things. You have to start with transparency, inspection, adaptation. That's really the way to go. And if we buy into those sorts of things initially, then we can start to say, well, here's a practice that supports that. Now you understand why we're doing this practice because it does this thing. Without it, it's just sort of one of those things of do as I tell you, you know, and that doesn't get buy-in. We've got to see the why behind it. Scott Dunn (14:48) Yes. Yeah, I think so. That's a great point. I was just making a note because sometimes we come in about agile. Some of the folks when I'm sharing this, it's maybe is new to them that I try to really present it. I want what you want. So even down to the words and then I kind of map back to that. So for example, if if we have quality problems now, I might believe in say an agile practice like mob programming, but I don't want to bring up like, hey, we should try mobbing. because it's cool or because you know, whatever, they don't care about that. But oh, they have a quality concern. Hey, boss, I've been thinking about, you know, these quality issues. I got an idea that I think it really could help with quality. But if I was to ask you, Brian, is is Bobby gonna, does Bobby help with quality? Does Bobby help me with, you know, cross training and tearing down knowledge silos and sharing learning? And I think, well, it does a lot of things, I pitch it towards what management wants. So agile as a means to an end. So I want what you want. And if I can't get that clarity that I want what you want, I need to be listening more because if I feel like I come to them talking, I've seen from my own experience, I come talking about better collaboration. That's not what's on their mind. I'm literally losing credit with them because they're like, why are you bringing this up? Like this isn't even our concern right now. Right. So I'm losing trust. I'm losing political capital. So I listen intently what their concerns are, the things I think that are important or that can get that. Then I'm going to pitch it. I'm going to pitch it in that language even like, you know, that what these are the things that would help on. I want what you want. Brian Milner (16:00) Yeah. Scott Dunn (16:18) the sport, I'll even research stuff to find out. So maybe I gave an example recently, when I was a manager for a web development, team that they wanted bigger monitors, of course, and I couldn't get approval for the bigger monitors. so I went and researched, I knew that always we had pressure to deliver more. I researched until I found somewhere someone had to study the show that larger monitors help productivity. And then I brought that to him and like, Hey, I'm looking for ways to improve the team productivity. I think I found something. What is it Scott? Brian Milner (16:30) Mm-hmm. Scott Dunn (16:46) Well, larger monitors, you can tell us, Smollick, really? You've been asking for this for months. I said, no, there's a study that proves it. Now he approved it right then. But partly I wonder, Brian, is I was also giving him air cover for when he gets flack from the other departments. Why does Scott's team get the special monitors? Well, it improves productivity. And right. He's got a reason now. Otherwise, it looks like maybe he's just playing favorites or something else. Right. We're all watching costs. So I will do the research to say, hey, I want what you want. I'll go and I'll go and dig it up. Brian Milner (17:04) Yeah. Scott Dunn (17:13) Someone somewhere must've said it's gonna help. So I'll bring that to them. It ⁓ worked. Brian Milner (17:17) Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. you're giving him the why behind it. You're telling him, hey, here's something that's in. It's the old outcome argument that the outcome from having larger monitors is this, that we have this productivity. I know you want greater productivity, so here's a means to do that. And I think that's kind of the way that this, you in a nutshell, what we're trying to say here is, you know, I can't go into a company, your boss comes into your company tomorrow and says, hey everyone, we're switching to pens that write in green ink, because we're a green ink company. We just, we want to be known as the green ink company from now on, because it's better. So everyone, make sure you switch to green ink. I mean, they do it. But there's a difference between compliance and real commitment. ⁓ And that's the difference, I think, is, all right, you wanted to switch to green ink, but why? What's the point behind it? I'll do it, but I'll be committed to it if you tell me, well, studies show that when people read in green ink. I mean, that kind of thing can make an impact. But otherwise, it's like you're Scott Dunn (18:08) Yes. ⁓ Absolutely. Brian Milner (18:31) It's almost like an insult to the intelligence of someone, you know, to say, we're going to do this crazy new thing called a standup, you know, or daily scrum or whatever. And well, why are we doing that? I don't know. Cause right. That they tell us that's what we're supposed to do. Well, we have to stand up for a meeting. Why are we standing up? Why aren't we just sitting down? It's more comfortable. I don't know, but that's what you do in a daily scrum is you stand up. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's that kind of a thing that I think. Scott Dunn (18:34) yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Brian Milner (18:58) if you don't lay the groundwork of here's why, then they're gonna just react with the way that you would switch to green ink. ⁓ Scott Dunn (19:05) I love that example. love that. And we've all been there, right? When someone says, why would we do this? I'm like, I actually don't know. It's a terrible feeling. I don't know. We go through all this effort to do just that. And you mentioned that compliance, compliance will never have their heart and soul and energy into this. So think that that's a big deal for them as well. When leaders are, we had something happen where it's a large financial institution and their data engineering group. Brian Milner (19:11) You're right. Yeah. Scott Dunn (19:33) You're like, yeah, AI is not really, you know, for us, not important to us. Which is interesting, right? Then the next week, like that, the head of that group, their boss's boss says, we need to be using, AI. Well, guess who makes it announced at the very next week. We need to get going with AI, So some of this is like, look, if they're pushing those things, we also want to make sure that they're in a position to look good for their bosses, those types of things. Right? So one, you know, giving them air cover, but two, listen to the winds of those things. If we make them successful, I mean, this is old school, right? Make your boss look good. My goodness. If they feel like that's happening, then you're going to get a lot more support. And this is a good example of a radical change for a whole data engineering team, just because the boss's boss says so. So now we're going to do it. I think looking for even those opportunities and following through on what that might be bringing them ideas that make them look good and generating that as well. I love the green ink one. just now it makes me want to be that we're the green ink company. You're we're going to be known for this. Brian Milner (20:23) Yeah. Scott Dunn (20:29) ⁓ But why? Brian Milner (20:30) Yeah. I think it's also kind of important that you acknowledge that there is an emotional impact here. And this gets into kind of the idea of the whole Satir model of change and that kind of thing. And so I think maybe part of the equation of getting buy-in is really comprehending and understanding that you're not going to get buy-in right away. ⁓ Scott Dunn (20:56) Hmm. Brian Milner (20:57) you know, there's going to be chaos and resistance. There's going to be a point where people are going to be resistant to it. And if you do the rest of it well, then that they'll turn that corner. But what makes them turn that corner is, is that they're connected to the purpose behind it. And so if you're, if you're going to try to implement this, if you're to try to do a change, and just expect it's gonna be, know, hunky dory from day one, you're fooling yourself. Humans don't take to change well. It's got an emotional aspect to it. I love the way David Hawks used to always say this. You know, I knew how to be a hero the old way, and I have no idea how to be a hero in this new thing. So I don't feel comfortable with this change because I don't know how to win. Scott Dunn (21:41) So true. Brian Milner (21:47) And I think that is a really accurate reflection of that emotional kind of impact of it. Everyone wants to do their job well and be seen as a smart person at work and everything else. And I knew how to do that before, but now I don't know how. And so I'm afraid I'm gonna look bad. Scott Dunn (22:02) Right? And I think that lack of awareness or knowledge is some of the things that we're asking them to do. Like you said, uncomfortable or new doesn't feel good. And we kind of think that, oh, if I don't feel good, this must be bad. It's just uncomfortable. But I think I love what you're saying. We can map it out and say, by the way, it's going to look like this as we go through that. And that hero part, a lot of our management, like 90 % of the management is going to be in that, you what we call expert or achiever. Like they're the smartest ones in the room, or they're ones that coordinate everything and they know who to talk to. you're trying to introduce something to someone who thinks they already know all the things. So how we're presenting that to them, including the fact that they're human too, right? They're gonna feel some things and maybe uncomfortable. It wouldn't hurt to explain a bit more, even if they're not gonna necessarily admit it, but like, hey, it's gonna feel different. The people might push back on this. So even when you're first beginning that, it reminded me of how I just knew I'd need to ask my boss like five times. Look, lots of people are asking him for stuff. They're partly just going by the simplest way of Who keeps coming to my office the most? And maybe on time five, like, wow, Scott, this sounds like a problem. Well, yeah, I've been here five times. Because they're kind of waiting, like, is it really a problem or do you just come in once or twice? So repeating that and then maybe framing it to say, and doing the change looks like this and that, giving them information so they don't have to admit that they don't know if they're priding themselves on knowing all the things. I really think that's a great addition to that. The Satir change model, knowing that it's going to get uncomfortable. I've seen execs jettison this just because people are bothered or upset or they're uncomfortable. So therefore this must be a bad idea. So I think we can do ourselves a favor by explaining a little bit like it's going to look like this moving forward as far as their support. Some people may not like it and here's why, but here's how I would answer those people. Like you're literally feeding them the responses. And I'll also do the get behind the expert and say, well, this is, this is what Harvard business review says, or this is what this expert says. You might be surprised because Again, back to them being experts, if you ask them what they think they know about Agile, I might have mentioned before, they score themselves on average about 8.5 out of 10. But their people would score them about 4.5 out of 10, right? It was what I've seen when I did the study, the surveys. So they think they know, so they're not gonna admit they don't know, but go ahead and give them the information they wish. If you know they don't know, I like what you're saying, kind of shrink the chain so they can understand, it's gonna look like this and feel like this. People might ask this way. But here's how I'd respond to them. know, remember this is where, you know, 90 % of the companies are doing X, Y, and Z. So they have backing. They can answer to the people. We kind of set them up for success. Otherwise that satiric change curve is going to hit them. They won't have answers. That feels really awkward. This must be a bad idea. And they're going to undo what you just asked for. Right. I've seen that happen. You just got approval and then a week or two later it got put on hold or undone. Brian Milner (24:44) Yeah, no, I agree. one of the areas, one of the other kind of things that I found in thinking about this in advance was a quote that was from the five dysfunctions of a team book that we all talk about quite a bit. But there's a quote from that that says, people don't weigh in, they won't buy in. And I love that. And I thought, you know, that really is a good point that there, it's not about Scott Dunn (25:00) Woo! Brian Milner (25:08) people need to feel like they're co-creating with you. And to do that, you need to be able to listen to them. If they don't feel like they have a voice, mean, put yourself in their shoes. If you felt like there was a big change happening and you had no say in it, that would feel pretty oppressive. But if they felt like they're building the change with you, then I think then that's what kind of can turn people around and say, no, I have a say in this, I'm a part of this. and I get to shape a little bit about what this is going to look like. They're going to shape it a lot. I mean, that's part of just the Azure way of working is that, hey, we're going to individualize this for this company, for this team. It has to fit here. And the more we can help people see, no, you're a co-creator in this. You're not just being told, but you're going to shape this with us. Scott Dunn (25:54) Right? Even with the leadership, I mean, it's easy. think everyone listening would agree. If you look at the common leaders, that's, even the, let's say director level and above personality types, right? For, for disc, it's going to be a high D for a strange pattern would be like command, um, computing values framework. They're going to be blue, get results, make it happen. But we need it to be, we need to be their decision for some of these folks. So when I would come to one of my bosses and say, I think we should do X every time he'd say like, yeah, let me think about. I'll get back to you. I kept thinking like, I don't understand because these are my people. I thought you trusted me. I realized, it has to be his decision. So part of what you're saying is invite him into the solution. So then I'd say, hey, we've got three options, good, better, best. What do you think we should do? Or I'd say, hey, I've done all the research, option A looks great, option B looks terrible. What do you think we should do? I mean, I try to simplify it. I tried to make it obvious, but I couldn't tell him I need to do X or we need this from you. It needed to be his input and to decide. Brian Milner (26:44) Right. Scott Dunn (26:51) once I framed it that way, he agreed every single time. I simply frame it, put it right in front of him so it's kind of an obvious decision, but I had to let him have that voice to decide. I'm really glad you brought that up. That one literally went from zero to 100 % if I changed my approach of how I had addressed it to let him be the one to decide and weigh in on that. Or even pitch it as a sales. Hey, I think it'd be great to move forward. What would that look like to you? Well, now he's talking about moving that change forward. without even realizing it, because you said to move forward, what would we need to do? And now he is co-creating, but it's already a yes, right? But by default, a little bit of sales, a little bit of sales effort there. Brian Milner (27:24) Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a, that's a good example. And that's a good example, I think for like the scrum masters listening and other people out here that are, feel like, you know, I'm not the leader in the organization. I'm not way up here and I can't, you know, have my decisions trickle down to other people, but, you know, kind of the, influencing up kind of mentality there. Yeah. It might sound like a little bit of a trick, but you know, if you can help. the boss co-create with you, right? Here's the problem. I've done some research. Here's some solutions. How would this look for you? Or what do you think of these options? Which one do you think sounds best? If I'm a boss and someone comes to me and says that I've researched this, here's the solutions that are possible. Which one do you think sounds best? That's really a service to me because you've just done a lot of work for me and I know that I'm doing my job by making the decision, but you've presented it and now I don't have to do anything but make the call. Yeah. Scott Dunn (28:24) Yeah, yeah. Simplify the decision-making or frame the decision-making is, think we might actually be kind of, I don't want to say teasing. I just hear some feedback from people at times like, leadership's was like, bright, shiny squirrel, right? And they get frustrated. But in some ways I'm thinking, well, at least someone in the org is decisive. I'll take that. But we can help them leverage that decisive trait they have. Brian Milner (28:43) Yeah. Scott Dunn (28:48) But for the good, instead of these random crazy things, you know, when the leader's like, I love Agile, I can change my mind all the time. We can, we can, we can guide them to better decision-making too. I love the influence both up and down what you're saying the Scrum Master can do. I think we miss, that we all have that ability to try to influence decision-making and shape some of this. Maybe there's more agency than we realized, I think for some of these folks, Scrum Masters, product owners, cetera, that you might be surprised. Like run an experiment, try some of these things out that we're talking about and see for yourself. I mean, all these personality types are different and your orgs are different. I totally understand that. Do something, inspect and adapt and see what you get. might, cause once you strike gold, you're like, you know, you're set on getting influence and buy-in from folks. It's really powerful network. Cause we don't need to give you a title or change the org chart in order to have results happen with you involved if you're that kind of a person. And I think you can really write your ticket in your career if you're able to do that soft skill of influence and buy-in up and down. It's great. Brian Milner (29:43) Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Well, I hope that for at least the people that were in your class, this is is hit it right on the nail on the head for what it is they were they were thinking this would be about. But I think this is good. I think this is a good conversation and it's important, I think at all levels, because there's you know, this this affects us whether we're doing a massive transformation in an organization or Scott Dunn (29:51) Yeah. Brian Milner (30:06) We're just trying to influence up a tiny bit, you know, the food chain. Scott Dunn (30:10) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I hope that for the folks who were in that class, you better let us know if that was it. If anyone else is interested in other things, absolutely. We love hearing what your what those topics would be and bring on the right people. I will say that Brian, you brought in so many different voices. It's really, really great. So again, influence us. You can practice what we're talking about by putting those ideas up there. Other folks that we'd love to hear, because I love the the slated speakers you brought in. Brian's been really awesome. Thanks for this opportunity. Brian Milner (30:34) Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming on again, Scott.

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