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Agile Mentors Podcast

Podcast Agile Mentors Podcast
Brian Milner and Guests
The Agile Mentors podcast is for agilists of all levels. Whether you’re new to agile and Scrum or have years of experience, listen in to find answers to your qu...

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  • #131: Lessons from Modern Agile with Joshua Kerievsky
    Is Agile still relevant in today’s fast-paced world? Brian and Joshua Kerievsky reveal the four game-changing principles of Modern Agile that prioritize safety, empowerment, and continuous value delivery. Overview In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with Joshua Kerievsky, a pioneer in the Agile community and the creator of Modern Agile. They discuss how Agile practices have evolved, the critical role of safety and empowerment, and how to deliver value continuously in today’s fast-paced world. Don’t miss these insights into creating better teams, products, and results through simplicity and experimentation. References and resources mentioned in the show: Joshua Kerievsky Industrial Logic Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky Modern Agile #33 Mob Programming with Woody Zuill #51: The Secrets of Team Safety with Julie Chickering Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Experimentation Matter: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation by Stefan H. Thomke Agile For Leaders Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course Accurate Agile Planning Course Join the Agile Mentors Community 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. Joshua Kerievsky is the founder and CEO of Industrial Logic and author of Joy of Agility. An early pioneer of Extreme Programming, Lean Software Development, and Lean Startup, Joshua is passionate about helping people achieve genuine agility through principle-based approaches like Modern Agile. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back. And this is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as I always am. I am Brian Milner and today I am joined by Joshua Kerievsky and really excited to have Joshua here with us. Welcome in Joshua. Joshua Kerievsky (00:16) Thank you so much, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian (00:19) Very excited for Joshua to be here. Joshua's been around for a while. He's been doing this for a long time. He said, you know, when we were talking before, and he's been involved with Agile before, it was called Agile. And, you know, that probably tells you all you need to know there. But a couple other things here about him, just so that you kind of can place him a little bit. His company is Industrial Logic, Inc. and he's the CEO and founder of that company. He has a book called Joy of Agility that's out there that I highly recommend. It's a really great book. And he's also closely associated with something that maybe you've been aware of, maybe you've heard of, maybe you haven't, but something called Modern Agile. And that's what I thought we'd focus on here for our discussion is really to try to understand a little bit about it. especially for those of you, maybe you haven't heard of it, haven't been around it before. So... Why don't we start there, Joshua? Tell us a little bit about what was the need that was trying to be filled with something like modern Agile. Joshua Kerievsky (01:19) Well, it goes back to a conference I attended in Prague back in around 2015. And I was giving a speech, a keynote speech there, and that ended. And then I went and said, well, I'm going to go join the OpenSpace. And I was just looking at what people were talking about at the OpenSpace. And at that point in time, I had already been experimenting with a ton of stuff that just kind of different from what we had been doing 10 years earlier or even later than that. I mean, just this was new things that we were doing, whether it was continuous deployment or ideas from lean startup or ideas from the pop and dykes and lean concepts applied to agility or just a lot of things that were just different. And none of the sessions I was seeing in the open space seemed to be talking about any of that stuff, like giving up story points or moving away from sprints until continuous flow. just nothing was being talked about. So I just said, well, I'm going to host a session, and I'll call it, I don't know, a modern Agile. And so that's as far as I got in terms of thinking about the name. I just wanted to run a session where we could talk about, there's a lot of new things we're doing that kind of display some of the older ideas. And they're very useful, I found. So the session ended up getting a lot of attention. 60, 70 people showed up there. So we had a big group. And it was well received. People were fascinated by the stuff that they weren't aware of. And so I then repeated this open space event in Berkeley. Like a month later, was Agile Open Door Cal in Berkeley was running and did it again. And again, there was tremendous interest. in this, so much so that I decided to write a blog and wrote the blog and started getting more conversations happening. And that sort of began the movement of describing this thing called Modern Agile. And it took a few twists and turns in the beginning, but it wasn't sort of, I guess, if anything, I felt like Agile needed to be a little more simple. in terms of what we were explaining, because it was starting to get very complex with frameworks, enterprise frameworks coming along like safe and just too many moving parts. And so what ended up happening is I wrote some things and people started to notice, there's kind of like four things there that are really valuable. One of them was The names changed a little bit over time. But anyway, what ended up was four principles emerged. And that really became modern Agile. Brian (03:58) That's awesome. just for listeners here, I've pitched attending conferences in the past. If you've listened to this podcast, you've heard me say that, and I'll create things come out of that. And here's an example, right? This is something that was open space discussion. Open space, if you're not familiar with that, at conferences, can, if there's an open space day or a couple of days, then anyone can present any topic they want. And whoever shows up is who shows up. And this one got a lot of attention. And a movement grew from this open space topic, which is awesome. So let's talk. You mentioned there's four principles here. And I like the distinction here we're making also between the frameworks and the practices versus the cultural aspects or the philosophy behind it. And returning to those roots a little bit more from what Agile originally was. So you mentioned there's kind of four areas of this. Let's walk our way through those. I know the first one, or one of the first ones here is make people awesome. So help us understand, what do you mean by make people awesome? Joshua Kerievsky (04:59) Probably the most controversial of principles, because you'll get people coming along saying, wait a minute, people are already awesome. What are you talking about? And it comes from my, I'm a big fan of Kathy Sierra. And her blog was incredible. And her book, she wrote a book called Badass, Making Users Awesome. And in her book, she was really wonderfully clear about Brian (05:07) You Joshua Kerievsky (05:24) that teams that build products ought to focus on the user of the products more than the product itself. In other words, she would say, don't try to create the world's best camera. Try to create the world's best photographers. Big subtle difference there. Like that is focusing so much on empowering the users, making them awesome at their work or whatever they're doing, whether it's art or accounting or whatever, whatever your product does, how can you give them something that elevates their skills, that gets them to a point of awesomeness faster? And that's what she was talking about. So I thought, what a wonderful message. And initially, I used language like make users awesome. you know, having been an entrepreneur myself and created products and sold them and You learn a heck of a lot when you make your own product. And we've made several products over the years at Industrial Logic, probably the most successful of which was our e-learning software. And that has taught me so many, so many lessons. One of them is you have to serve an ecosystem of people. You can't just make your main user awesome. What about the person who's buying the software? How do you make them awesome in terms of helping them buy something that's going to get used? If they buy your e-learning and they never use it, they've wasted a lot of money. So we've got to make sure that their reputation is intact because they made an excellent investment and it got used and it got into valuable, it created value in the company. So how do I make the buyer awesome? How do I make the person that like rolls out the licenses to people awesome? How do I make their experience awesome? How do I make my colleagues awesome so that we love what we're doing and really enjoy working together? So it kind of morphed from make users awesome to make people awesome. And it's so expanded. If anything, we set the bar higher. And all of the principles of modern agile are like unachievable. They're all kind of high bars, right? But they're the goal that we go towards. So that really is it. It's about creating Brian (07:23) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (07:35) you know, wonderful, you know, the in Great Britain, they use awesome kind of sarcastically sometimes, right? They'll say, well, that's awesome. You know, and so for them, it would be brilliant. You know, I thought of making an English version. We have many translations of modern agile, and I thought of making an English version, which would be a proper British English version, make people brilliant. But it's meant to be to empower folks to give them something. And it's so it is. Brian (07:43) Ha You Joshua Kerievsky (08:04) It does have a product focus in the sense of we're typically building a system or a product that someone's going to use and it's going to give them skills they didn't have before or abilities they didn't have before that are going to be very valuable. Brian (08:18) Yeah, I love that. And there's a sort of a servant nature to that servant leaders, not servant leadership as much, but servant nature of I'm serving these people and how do I, how do I serve them in a way that really empowers them? Kind of reminds me of like, you know, the, the great principle with, with dev ops of just, know, if I can, if I can empower the developers to be able to do these things on their own. And so they don't need someone else to come and check the box and do everything for them. You're making them awesome. You're empowering them to be more than they were otherwise. Joshua Kerievsky (08:54) Yes, yes, absolutely. I I think we've seen a history in the software field of a lot of tools coming along and helping. It's not just tools, it's also methods as well. I mean, I'm entirely grateful to the Agile software development movement because it helped nudge everything towards a far better way of working and to make us more awesome at our craft. yeah, you have to have a North Star though. If you're going to build something, You have to know, what are we going for here? What are we shooting for? And with Cathy's influence, again, it's not so much make the greatest product in the world. It's, that focus on the users, the people who are going to be using the work, using the product. Brian (09:34) That's really good. Let's talk about the second one then on my list here, the make safety a prerequisite. What was the point here behind this principle? Joshua Kerievsky (09:40) Yes. So starting probably around 2011 or so, I could not stand going to the Agile Conference anymore. It had just become too commercial and too filled with just people hocking stuff. And it just was bothering me too much. I couldn't go. So I ended up going to South by Southwest, which is an Brian (09:54) You Joshua Kerievsky (10:09) Enormous conference tens of thousands of people show up So it'd be 20,000 30,000 40,000 people showing up for these for this event, which is musical film technology just it's just wild and I came across this book by Charles Duhigg called the power of habit. He was there that year and In that book. Well, first of all that particular year was 2012 that I went my first year there it poured The rain, it was every day, it was unusual for that time, but it was just like pouring rain. So what could you do? I bought some books and I was sitting there in my room reading them. And I'm reading this book, The Power of Habit, and I come across this chapter called The Ballad of Paul O'Neill. Now who the heck's Paul O'Neill? Well, it turns out Paul O'Neill is this incredible guy, a complete business maverick. He ended up becoming the treasury secretary under Bush and not. in 2000 for a short period of time, but that's another story. And he ran Alcoa for about 13 or 14 years. And so the Ballot of Paul O'Neill is very much about what he did at Alcoa to turn the company around. And in essence, you could say he made safety a prerequisite. That safety was his guiding light in turning that company around, which meant left people empowered to do all kinds of things. So it went way beyond safety, but started there. And it's an incredible story. I've written about it in Joy of Agility. I got so into Paul O'Neill that I ended up interviewing his main lieutenant. And then I got a chance to interview him a couple of times. the man's a genius. He passed away a few years back. Absolute genius. this concept of safety started to really pull at me in the sense that I felt, first of all, extreme programming, and I'm a big practitioner of extreme programming, brings a tremendous amount of safety to software development. It may not be as explicit in saying safety, safety, safety. When you look at extreme programming, doesn't really talk about safety, but it's implicit. And these days, Kent Beck's much more vocal about, you One of his missions is to make software development safer for geeks. But safety to me is almost like I found my home. Like safety was something that, what I learned through Paul O'Neill was that it's a doorway to excellence. And he transformed a hundred year old company with safety. I would complain about companies we were working with that were 25 years old and had an embedded culture. Like, how are we gonna change this company? But safety started to be this thing that I hadn't really thought enough about, and making it explicit opened up a lot of doors, right? And I became very interested in the work of Amy Edmondson, who's extremely famous today, but back then she was not so famous. And huge fan of hers. I, you know, I can email her and she'll email me back and she wrote a nice thing about my book. So. She has done some incredible work there. And so when we talk about safety in modern agile, it's psychological safety. It's financial safety. It's any of the safeties. There are many safeties that we could talk about. And it looks at all of them, right? It's brand safety, software safety in terms of security. you know, of the software and on and on and on. So make safety prerequisite is vast and big in terms of what we're trying to do there. Making it a prerequisite means it's not an afterthought and it's not a priority that shifts with the winds. It is permanent. It is something that we know we have to have in place. And it's very, very hard to achieve. Just like make people awesome is hard to achieve. Boy, is make safety a prerequisite difficult. Brian (13:43) Hmm. Yeah, I love Amy Edmondson's work as well. I'm just kind of curious. does the safety kind of inclusive of things like quality as well? Do you intend that to be part of what you mean by safety? Joshua Kerievsky (14:11) Well, mean, to the extent that it makes it safer to do good software development. So if bugs are happening all the time, you can't make people awesome, typically if you don't have quality. If you have really poor quality, nobody's being made awesome. They're experiencing all kinds of problems with your product. So make people awesome and make safety a prerequisite are very much tied together. That is, there is no real excellence without safety. You could think you're having an excellent experience, so that all of a sudden there's a major problem, and boy, are you unhappy. So they really go hand in hand. You could have the most incredible restaurant, and then one day you've got food poisoning happening. Great, no one's come to your restaurant. So you will not make anyone awesome if you don't make safety a prerequisite, and quality is part of that. Brian (14:57) Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next one then, because the next category is one that just resonates with me a lot. Experiment and learn rapidly. What was kind of the thought behind this one? Joshua Kerievsky (15:06) Yeah, and this is one where it that's shorthand, if you will, because you can only fit so many words on a wheel there. But it's important to know that that really means experiment rapidly and learn rapidly. And that comes a lot out of it in the influences of something like Lean Startup. I'm a huge fan of that book and of Eric's work, Eric Reese's work. Brian (15:13) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (15:29) And the fact that we can experiment rapidly and learn rapidly rather than just building everything and then learning slowly. Right? How can we do cheap experiments quickly to decide what's important to work on and what isn't? Let's not build stuff nobody wants. Let's find more time with our customers and understand their needs better so we can build the right things that make them awesome. In other words, and a lot of these are interconnected. In many respects, modern Agile is a Venn diagram. ideally want all four principles to be overlapping. And right there in that middle is where you really want to be. Not easy. But experimenting, learning rapidly, yeah. So challenge yourself to find ways to do quick, cheap, useful experiments. You can do lot of unuseful experiments. Amazon experienced that. There's a story in my book about how Amazon had to start just shepherding the experiments a little more and having some better criteria. Because you could do an endless array of experiments and not get anywhere. There's a wonderful book called Experimentation Matters by a Harvard business professor. Wonderful book as well. But I love experimentation and learning. And I see it as critical to building great products. So that's that principle there. Brian (16:46) Yeah, there's a real difference, I think, in organizations that put value on that learning process. if you see it as a valuable thing, that we invest time to gain knowledge, then that really can truly make an impact when you go forward. I know I've talked about this in classes sometimes where people will say, isn't it a little bit selfish from the organization to try to always just figure out what's going to sell the best? or what's going to work the best in advance of putting something out. My response is always, well, yes, there is a benefit to the business, but there's a benefit to the customer as well because they would rather you work on things that they care more about. Joshua Kerievsky (17:24) That's right. Yeah. I mean, we once put out an experimental product to a large automotive company. And we were really excited about it. We had a whole list of features we wanted to add to it. But we were like, you know what? Let's just get this primitive version kind of in their hands just to see what happens. it turned out that we learned very rapidly that they couldn't run the software at all. There was some proxy. that was preventing communication with our servers from their environment. So it was like, excellent. We learned really quickly that instead of those fancy new features we want to add to this thing, we're going to fix the proxy problem. And to me, that's the nature of evolutionary design is that we create something, get it out there quickly, and learn from it rapidly and evolve it. So it goes hand in hand with that as well. Brian (18:11) That's awesome. Well, there's one category left then, and that is deliver value continuously. So what was the genesis of that? Thinking about delivering value continuously. Joshua Kerievsky (18:19) So that was heavily influenced by my own journey into continuous delivery and continuous deployment and that whole world. We got into that very early. I was lucky enough to catch a video by Timothy Fritz, who he worked with Eric at IMBU. And he coined the term continuous deployment. And that video is actually no longer on the Brian (18:43) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (18:44) But this was something that I became enamored of was doing continuous deployment. And we started doing it at Industrial Logic with our own e-learning software back in about 2010. And by the time you get to like 2015, it's like, hey folks, there's this thing where you can do a little bit of work and ship it immediately to production in a very safe way, a safe deployment pipeline. It's friggin' awesome. But the principle doesn't just apply to that because this modern agile is not just about software development. It's how can I work in a way that gets value in front of people as fast as possible? So for example, if I'm working on a proposal, great, I'm not going to work for two weeks and then show you something. I'm going to put something together, a skeleton, I'm going to show it to you and say, what do you think? Does this add value? Where would we improve this? Blah, blah, Again, going hand in hand with evolutionary design. continuous delivery of value is something that is a way of working. With artists that I work with, they'll do a quick sketch or two or three sketches of something first before we start settling in on which one do we like the best and how do we want to craft and refine that. So there's a way of working in which you're delivering value much more finely grained and approaching continuously instead of in bigger batches. Brian (20:05) Yeah. I love the connection there between artists as well, because I've got a background in music, and I'm thinking about how when you go to write a song or create a new work like that, you start off with the roughest of demo tapes, and you move from there to increasingly more sophisticated versions of it until you finally have the finished product. But no one thinks that's strange or thinks that's weird in any way. But you're right. Sometimes there's this attitude or kind of I think in some organizations of, we can't let anyone see that until it's absolutely finished, until it's done. Joshua Kerievsky (20:39) Yeah, yeah, and that maybe that's that there's some fear there, you know, because they don't want to be thought of as, you know, being lesser because they put something rough in front of someone. Whereas I view it as a, you know, to me, it's a sign of weakness when you when you only send something polished because you haven't had the courage or the sense of safety to put something rough where we can make better decisions together early on. So. There's a lot of learning, I think, around that. But it's a challenging principle of its own, deliver value continuously. And people would say, well, what does value mean? Value is one of those words where it's unclear, because you could improve the internal design of a software system. Is that value? It probably is. But you've got to be able to quantify it or prove that it's going to help make things more graceful in terms of flowing features out. yeah, quantifying, communicating what the value is. is important. I'm also a big fan of maximizing the amount of work not done, as it says in the manifesto. So how can we do less and deliver more sooner? Our motto in industrial logic now is better software sooner. And a lot of these principles go straight into that. that drives it. Brian (21:38) Yeah. That's really great. Yeah, I love these four principles and I think that they really represent a lot. There's a lot that's baked into each one of these things. And I'm sure as you kind of put this together with the community and started to talk more about it, I'm sure there were some challenges. I'm sure people came up to you and said, well, what about and how about this? Is there anything now looking back on this that you'd say, gosh, we really... really didn't quite cover this or, know, this is maybe I could fudge it and squeeze it in this area, but you know, there's this other thing that I really think would be important to kind of mention here as well. Joshua Kerievsky (22:28) Well, you know, it's funny, because I thought I was going to write a book. I started collecting stories. I love telling stories, and I find stories to be a great way to help educate people. Not the only way, right? But as part of some of the workshops I give, you tell a story. Hopefully it's a story that's sticky, that sticks in the person's brain. And over the years, I collected stories like that, stories of agility. I thought I'd be writing a book about modern agile when I started writing Joy of Agility. Gradually, as I wrote more and more stories, they didn't quite fit into all those four principles. And I think the lesson I learned there was that I was starting to talk about what pure Agile means, the word Agile. What does it really mean to be Agile? Whereas modern Agile is really almost in the context of product development, of building services or products for people. Whereas Agile itself is even more pure. And so the... the book itself got into the difference between quickness and hurrying, which you can relate to this. You could say experiment and learn rapidly. Well, OK, maybe we shouldn't rush it. Don't rush. Be quick, but don't hurry is one of the mantras in Joy of Agility. So adapting, right? Adapting, we talk about adapting all the time. So to be agile, you need to be able to adapt quickly. These four principles in modern agile don't say anything about adapting. Brian (23:46) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (23:48) So that's kind of implied, but it's not there. So it's a different lens on agility. If anything, I'd say the make people awesome principles are not meant to. It created some dislike, I'd say, from some people. It could have been called empower people, potentially, although a lot of people really love make people awesome. I don't know so much what I'd change there. I'd say we have a .org. So it's a modernagile.org is a website. There's a pretty large Slack community, which, know, four or 5,000 people on that. We don't certify anyone in modern agile, so there's no certifications, but it's something that is neutral in the sense that whether you practice Scrum or Kanban or Safe or whatever, these principles can influence you. And, you know, but again, this all came out of like, when I went to that open space conference in Prague, I had no idea I was going to talk about modern agile. You know, it was not like a predetermined thing. It was just like, my God, they're not talking about the modern ways we're doing stuff. So, and I always encourage people to, you know, keep pushing the limits and keep modernizing. I said to my own company the other day, our wonderful ways of working that we've been doing now for years that have evolved, they're probably antiquated as of today. You know, with generative AI, what would we do differently? Let's have a perspective on our own work as it needs to be modernized constantly. So the term modern in modern agile means always be modernizing, always be looking. Okay, I've had people say, well, Josh, some things don't need to be modernized. There's things that are just evergreen. They're classic. I'm like, absolutely. I'm not changing evolutionary design anytime soon. I find it to be quite useful in so many contexts. So yes, there's the evergreen stuff. And then there's the stuff where you can, indeed, discover a better way. The manifesto itself says, we are discovering better ways of working. Great. Keep that going. Keep modernizing and looking for easier, simpler, quick, easy grace. as the dictionary definition of Agile says, how can we work with quick, easy grace? That's always going to be improving, hopefully. Brian (26:12) Love that, yeah. And you're right, I mean, think there's some, to some people I think that there's, I guess at times an attitude of, you this is all new stuff or this is a brand new concept and something they don't really see the connection backwards in time to how these things are all built on other ideas that have been progressive over the years. So the idea of, yeah, this is, you know, we're, we're not saying that certain ideas are bad because now we're trying to modernize them. We're just saying we're trying to apply that same principle forward into kind of the context of today, which I don't see anyone should have a problem with that. Joshua Kerievsky (26:48) That's right. That's right. Well, and if you are experimenting and learning rapidly with your own process, which I highly encourage, chances are the way you work today will be different than it was yesterday. You will be exploring, like we use discovery trees today. We didn't use them before. Years ago, no one knew what a story map was. There wasn't such a thing as a story map. Now we have story maps. There's constant improvement happening. And you've got to be open-minded and willing to try new things and drop old stuff. We thought sprints and iterations and extreme programming was absolutely fundamentally part of the way to work. Then we started experimenting with dropping them and turned out, wow, this is pretty cool. We like this. It works pretty darn well for our purposes. That came through experimentation. some of our experiments were terrible, just terrible. It's not an experiment if you already know the outcome. keep pushing the limits of what can make you happier and more joyful at work in terms of producing great stuff. Brian (27:46) Awesome. That's great stuff. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on, Joshua. This is great stuff. just, you know, we'll put all the links to the books mentioned and everything else in our show notes for everybody. But as Joshua said, you can go to modernagile.org and find out more about this if you'd like to. You'll find information there about Joshua himself or his company again is Industrial Logic, Inc. And, you know, his book again, just to mention that, Joy of Agility. We were talking how some people get that title a little mixed up or whatever, but it's just the three words, joy of agility. So just look out for that book. I think you'll find it a rich resource for you. Joshua, thanks so much for coming on. Joshua Kerievsky (28:25) Thank you, Brian. Thanks to you. Thanks to Mountain Goat and the folks there. And I really appreciate chatting with you. It was really wonderful.
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  • #130: Be the Change: How to Drive Impact Without Authority with April K. Mills
    Ready to spark real change in your organization? In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with April K. Mills, founder of Engine for Change, to reveal how anyone can become a powerful change agent—without waiting for permission. Learn how to drive meaningful change, navigate resistance, and reignite Agile practices with strategies that actually work. Overview In this inspiring episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner talks with April K. Mills, CEO of Engine for Change and author of Everyone is a Change Agent, about what it truly means to lead change. April explains how effective change agents focus on clearing obstacles rather than forcing compliance, and why fostering curiosity, empowerment, and collaboration is key to sustainable change. From navigating corporate roadblocks to revitalizing Agile practices, April shares actionable insights and tactics to help you take control and make a lasting impact—whether you're in a small startup or a global enterprise. References and resources mentioned in the show: April K. Mills Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials by April K. Mills Change Tactics: 50 Ways Change Agents Boldly Escape the Status Quo by April K. Mills Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule 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. April K. Mills is an engineer-turned-change-evangelist and author of Everyone is a Change Agent and Change Tactics, empowers individuals and organizations to thrive through change using her proven Change Agent Essentials. With a passion for turning ideas into action, April helps people drive meaningful change with the time, title, and budget they already have. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have April K. Mills with us. Welcome in April. April K. Mills (00:11) Thanks for having me. Brian (00:13) Very happy to have April with us. April is the founder and CEO of an organization called Engine for Change. That's engine-for-change.com. That's her website. She's also an author. There's a book that she put out called, Everyone is a Change Agent, a Guide to the Change Agent Essentials. And that's what we wanted to have her on to talk about today with a little bit about being a change agent. Now I shouldn't say from the outset, April is a request. We had a listener request for April to come on. And I always love that. I always try to push those people to the top of our list and get them on as soon as possible. And it was such an interesting topic. I thought this would be just a really great way to have a great topic to have early in 2025. So April, let's start with just trying to understand when we say change agent, how do you define that? What do you mean by change agent? April K. Mills (01:09) Yeah, a change agent is someone who takes action to bring about the change they want to see in the world. So rather than waiting for a boss or a corporate program or somebody from HR to come in and say, hey, let's improve this process, the change agent sees the need for a change and takes action. And the big thing I talk about in my books and my work is the difference between what typically happens when somebody sees a need for a change in an organization where they decide, I'm gonna go get a boss to go make everybody do my idea. I call that driving people. And I draw the contrast with that and driving change where you choose the change for yourself and you clear the obstacles for others to choose it too. And I love talking about that with Agile audiences especially because Agile is a change agent movement. of folks who want to drive change. I see a better way to create this product and I want to be part of it. And that's always what's drawn me into the agile space. Brian (02:13) Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And it is a big change, right? To think about the dynamics of someone kind of sitting back and saying, yeah, I see something that needs to be done. I see something that should be a different way, but you know, who am I to say anything about this? Who am I to do anything about versus the person who actually takes action and does things. So that kind of leads to a question about change agents. What kind of skills or traits do you think are really helpful or beneficial to someone to be a better change agent. April K. Mills (02:46) Well, the key is that difference between driving people and driving change. It's not what degree do you have, it's not how long have you been in the industry, it's not are you a people person, are you more focused on the data or some of those factors that we usually like to talk about. It really is, are you willing to take the step yourself first and clear those obstacles and encourage and invite people to join you? Or do you want somebody to make them obey you? And that choice is really the key for anybody to be a change agent. Because so many times we've seen people who might be able to convince the boss, hey, our team should be agile. And what happens, right? It goes on for about three months. The team gets frustrated. The boss gets angry. And then everybody starts to have a reaction when you bring it up, right? I'm sure plenty of the listeners have gone into an organization. If you're passionate about agile and you go, hey, have you guys heard about agile? And they go, ooh. And they make like a face. That's because they've encountered somebody who is driving people. And so that's the big focus I always try and talk with people about is can you show up with that willingness to let people join you and understand what their obstacles are to doing it. Brian (03:57) What are some kind of warning signs or signals you'd look for to kind of recognize whether I'm actually approaching this from a driving people perspective versus driving the change? April K. Mills (04:08) So a lot of times the key is how are you thinking about or talking about in your own head about the people around you or even yourself? We have a tendency to drive ourselves as well. So you can hear it in the language, right? I'm frustrated because so-and-so won't listen. I wish I could get more attention. It's all this sort of vague or... putting the action onto someone else and then complain the action isn't happening fast enough. You can hear it in the language. And so when someone's driving change, you don't hear that. hear, you know, I'm working on, I'm doing, the next thing is my action is I'm going to go talk with this person. I want to understand. I'm going to be curious. And you get this agency, this power coming back into your body almost, and then taking taking the next step from there. And so it's almost easy. You can almost say, well, how far outside your body would you put the power to make this change happen is a useful question to ask people. And if they say, well, it's in the CEO of the company, it's in the industry, it's in my tech lead, but it's certainly not me, well, then you're not a change agent. Brian (05:20) So that brings up a good point because I think I can try to channel what the listeners might be thinking here. I know that in times I've been in organizations where, yeah, you have the ideal, you have the thing that you think is the best thing to do. But because the power dynamics in the organization, you don't really have the power to make that change and you depend a little bit on others that have the power to to help affect it. And so there is a sort of an aspect of, I don't really have the capability or the power to cause this change to happen. How can I still stay with that mindset of driving change versus driving people when I know I need someone else's help? April K. Mills (06:03) Right. So that's a great conversation. And I've started to call it phase one Agile versus phase two Agile. I'm old enough in this space where when I first joined, a lot of Agile was team-based. Somebody on the team or several people on the team said, yeah, I want better. And these are the things that we can do as a team to deliver better. And let's do them together. And then the problem was the teams could do it, but they couldn't scale it. And they were like, if only we could get the senior leaders to pay attention to us, that would solve all our problems. And then you get phase two agile, which was executives buying agile implementations and forcing it down on people. There is one right way and we will do exactly this and you must conform and no other versions are allowed. And then we got the fractures and all of the fights about all of the different aspects. And so we tried it both ways, right? We tried it with the team effort and then we tried it with this thou shalt effort. And I think the key to actually making Agile work across organizations and deeper into organizations is to keep that energy from the team-based Agile to say, we're choosing something better, but it's that piece of driving change. What are the obstacles for others to choose it to? We didn't do that step. We went from my team does it, now the boss should make everybody else do what my team does. And I think that's where we got off track. in really scaling Agile into something that was sustainable and brought that joy and commitment and everyday wanting to show up and be better across the organization. So that's what I would encourage folks to do is not try to cheat that step of getting your fellow teams and larger systems to join you by finding somebody with the power to make them be like you. Brian (07:50) That's fascinating. I know that in some of these changes I've been involved with as well, there can be things that happen that kind of find yourself stalled a little bit, right? The initiative or the changes you're trying to affect just doesn't feel like it's going where it needs to go. What advice do you have for people who feel like they're in that place where they feel like they're kind of stalled out? in the change. April K. Mills (08:16) Yeah, so a lot of the things I talk about in that book you mentioned everyone is a change agent are different tactics you can use to overcome that. One of the key things that I talk about is what I call a change buffer, which is how can you make the rules where you're at different than those rules across the organization? I mean, let's take a simple example. Let's say there's five software teams in a business. Very simple example, right? And one is doing some practices and they'd love for those practices to spread. but they're not spreading as fast as they would hope. One of the ways to protect your change is to say, on our team, we will behave this way, declare it, make it what I call a policy buffer. So when one of those other four teams says, well, why are you doing it that way? You can point to the piece of paper and say, we've agreed to behave this way. Now, if you'd love to join us, we'd love to share that with you, but this team behaves this way. So then it's not every developer having to defend in effect the practices, which can get exhausting. But then you can start to ask them, what's your policy on your team? How do you do this? And get curious. Not in a, I'm trying to lure them in and trap them into my way of behaving, but in a, really want to understand, do they have a different measure that they're being exposed to? How can we help maybe get that measure off of them? Do they have a boss who's got a different standard for what quality looks like? Well, should we have a corporate conversation around, quality across the five teams should be the same. We don't tend to have those because we want to skip the step of coming into that alignment together and just have a policy somehow drop from the stars that aligns with my values. yeah, policy buffers are really big to protect a change and help it spread and have those curious conversations at the edges. Think of it like system integration, right? You can't just dictate, you have to understand and merge. Brian (10:11) Let's say we put in place a policy buffer like that on our team and our whole team agrees to doing something and we think this is the right way of doing things. And someone higher in the organization, some manager or leader finds out about this and says, no, I don't want that to happen. We've been trying to affect the change, right? And not push the individual. But now we do have the individual who's saying, you shall not do this. How do you overcome that when you're the change engine? April K. Mills (10:38) Yeah, so a lot of times you have to understand what are the assumptions that that leader is making and again get curious, right? Because if we focus not on the method but on the outcome, we should be able to get alignment faster. So rather than going into a boss and saying, method A is my choice, method B is yours, you know, it's a cage match, two will enter, one will leave. You instead want to show up and say, Well, I think we both agree we want to deliver quality products on time that customers love at the lowest possible production costs. Are we aligned on that or not? And if they say yes, then you say, okay, now let's just understand what are you asking for? And from my perspective as a person who has to implement that, here's how I think that impacts our ability to deliver quality products that customers love at the lowest possible production costs. And these methods that I'm using are doing this and here's my data or evidence. And so you in effect want to shift it where it's not me looking at you, but as people are probably going to see on this podcast, it's us next to each other. So if we instead frame it as me and the leader looking at the issue together, because we want to win together, we're not in competition. So again, it's about seeking to understand, removing those obstacles so that we can be aligned together to go there together. Brian (11:57) I love the idea of backtracking a little bit and finding that common ground and going from that space. I think that's a great approach. I know I've had success with that in my career too, of being able to find, well, we agree on this, right? And if we agree on this, now we're just talking about the best way of getting from where we are to there. And then it's less personal, then it's less about the person, it's more about the best strategy. And we're a little bit less... personally invested that we think it's a you know a personal affront or challenge if it's if it's more about the idea So I agree. I think that's a that's a great kind of approach to doing that How about the differences in just the the context of this if I'm a change I know you know I've been in some small organizations. I've been in some medium large-sized organizations and You know I think anyone who's been in large organizations would say Well, yeah, that's nice and easy when it's in a startup, right? If I'm in a startup, then yeah, everyone's wearing a lot of different hats and it's really easy to make change, but you know, the institutional kind of inertia that can take place in larger organizations, how do you overcome that as a change agent? April K. Mills (13:00) Yeah, well, I can speak to that from deep experience because my background started as a civilian nuclear engineer for the US Navy in a hundred year old shipyard. And I started six weeks before September 11th. So I came into a nuclear shipyard, a hundred years old, very staid in the way they did things, optimized for the shipyard and the world changed. Brian (13:03) Ha ha ha ha. April K. Mills (13:25) And I watched as that organization struggled to deal with the rate of change that was being imposed upon them. And a lot of the things that I talk about in everyone is a change agent came out of that experience of understanding what tactics worked, what didn't, what philosophy worked, what didn't to be able to empower people to make changes happen. And we made amazing changes happen in the shipyard. And then I went on and did 10 years with Intel Corporation, right? The chip maker and taught these things globally and saw people do amazing things within the company. Now it's true, if you don't get the main rudder of the company, you're not gonna steer it. But there's a lot of change you can make in an organization from where you're at. And I think that's the powerful, powerful thing. And so these tactics work at scale. They work for an individual, right? If you stop talking to yourself like, you know what you need to do? You have to do this or so and so is gonna get mad at you and you instead say, What's our obstacle for getting up early and going to the gym? And how can I clear that? And how can I choose to do that every day all the way up to a team, all the way up to an organization? I've seen these things work all the way through that scale. So I've used it in community projects to deliver an accessible playground in three and a half years when everybody said it would take five or 10. And these tactics have also been proven, although they weren't listed this way, in historical successes. If you think about when Admiral Rickover founded the nuclear Navy back in 1950, they went from approval to use nuclear power to USS Nautilus underway in five years. We can't deliver anything in five years anymore because we constantly are looking for who's going to make people, how are we going to force them? Can we keep them forced to do it? And with employee turnover, with system turnover, with the rate of change, I would argue this era of driving people has to end because it wasn't ever really effective, but it's getting less and less effective. And that's the name of my second book, which is Change Tactics, which is both you should change tactics and here are some change tactics to help people accelerate their results. Brian (15:36) That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it gets really deep really quickly here too, because you start to think about even the way we manage our projects and the fact that a lot of more traditional project management is sort of, when we talk about this change agent approach, is sort of managing the people and trying to push and drive the people towards deadlines, some, not even an outcome, but a timeline. versus trying to affect the outcomes that we're trying to achieve as an end result instead. So it really is interconnected, isn't it, through even the way we set up our projects? April K. Mills (16:13) Yes, it totally is. And I have that in the book and in the classes I teach is where is the force? So I'm an engineer by training, right? So I'm constantly looking and thinking about where's the force in the system if it was a pump or a reactor plant or whatever. And you can see it to your point with the program management is your, are you spending most of your time trying to push people to do something? Or are you moving the form, fit and function of whatever the product is? If that's delivering code and integrating code, if that's a physical product, are you clearing the obstacle so that product moves forward faster? And you hear this and see this in stories of what's going on at SpaceX, right? When they're confronting something about, can't get a part for six months or I can't get a part for a year and it's gonna cost me $50,000, they're saying. Isn't it just sheet metal? How could we make that in two weeks with what we've got? Because they're not talking about you should be able to shrink that timeline. What are you doing? Why aren't you talking to the vendor enough? aren't you pushing on the vendor hard enough? They're saying, what is the physical thing we need and how fast can we get it? And it's allowing them to shrink product costs. It's allowing them to shrink durations. It's what Rickover did in the 50s. It's what Andy Grove did with Intel back when it was Intel delivers in the 80s and 90s. Focus on the product, focus on the physics, focus on the engineering, the mechanics to support the engineering, the operations to support the mechanics, and you'll deliver products faster. And at the heart of all of that is change agents because they're not trying to get somebody to obey. They want to get something amazing done. Brian (17:50) One of the things I found kind of in when I've worked with organizations and talked with organizations about kind of moving from point A to point B is the fact that you kind of need help. kind of need, know, a lot of times people will try to make these changes all on their own and they sort of take the weight of the world on their shoulders. I can't figure out why it's not working. How do you kind of co-opt others into your strategy? April K. Mills (18:14) Yeah, well, the best way is to share with them what you've learned about being a change agent. I've had countless folks who, know, one person will read my book or come to a class and they'll go back and try it and people will get curious because you show up differently. So a simple example that I give in the book is rather than sending a mandatory meeting, which we're all guilty of, right, we get an assignment. and we go into the global outlook calendar and we pick people and we make them mandatory and we order them to come to our meeting. We say, Brian gave me this assignment. You have to come. Brian said this is really important. Come to my meeting or else. And we do that. That's the default. And I encourage folks from a driving change perspective to instead, maybe Brian, you gave me that assignment, but my meeting notice would say, I've been asked by Brian to lead this. I'm excited to do that. Here's why I've chosen this as the thing I'm going to focus on. I've marked you all optional. I think you have the skills and capabilities that would be amazing on this team. And if you're as passionate as I am, I'd love you to partner with me. We're going to start meeting on Tuesday. If you're not the right one, feel free to tell me. But I'm moving forward on Tuesday with whoever's there. And I'm really grateful that I get to work in an organization with you. Now. Who's gonna come to, which meeting are you gonna come to? The April says Brian's gonna be mad at you if you don't, or the one where April's gonna go off and do something amazing, I don't wanna miss out. And anybody can do that because everybody send in meeting notices out to people. So the simplest actions have the most powerful results. Brian (19:31) Ha It really is a cultural change too, right? mean, that's a very different cultural kind of approach to it to say, hey, it's optional, but, you know, get on board with this idea. If this is something that you're excited about, I want you to be a part of this versus, hey, you've got to, that's your job. you know, I've been given the authority to, to demand that you be here and, and, and, you know, really want. So, so how do you. You know culture changes is obviously one of the hardest things to do in an organization. How do you start to if you're a change agent? How do you start to? Change the culture in the organization to be more in line with that April K. Mills (20:25) So my focus is always on the culture starts with one. So people will treat you the way you show up. And so show up as a change agent and the world will bend around you in reaction to it. Now I do have a chapter in the book where I talk about my son who's got special needs and he took a long time for him to walk. He had to walk with forearm crutches. And the first time we were really out in public, he was walking with his forearm crutches. And you could tell that people were really confused and concerned, right? It's different. He's a small child. He looks very fragile. And you had all these reactions from people about, well, you know, where's his mother? Cause I was watching him from a little ways away. I always joke, no one ever asked where's his father if a child is wandering off. But you know, they're watching him and you could tell there were people that wanted to either pick him up and do it for him. Take him someplace because he looks so fragile, let me help you. Or they were mad that he was off on his own and I wasn't hovering. And I use that story for the same thing here. Because when you go off and you say, let's make this optional, I'm passionate about it, I'm committed, and even if I'm alone in this room, I'm going to move this forward, people are going to look at you funny. Like my son with his forearm crutches because they're used to somebody walking off strong, demanding, creating space. But it doesn't mean that that's necessarily the best way to do it. And so you have to be comfortable being different. And I use the concept of change buffers to help people with that. A personal buffer might be like Richard Feynman, the noted physicist. I don't care what other people think. I'm going to be me, their concerns to the wind. A friendship buffer. I'm going to go off and do this. when somebody goes, April's crazy. I call my friend Brian and you go, you're not crazy. You're doing the right thing. Keep it up. Let's go for coffee, let's go for the beer, whatever. A leadership buffer, maybe you're my boss and you believe in this, you've seen it. I go off and do it, people give me a hard time. I go, hey, take it up with Brian, my boss. We do things this way in his group. Or back to that policy buffer. In my group, we drive change, not people. So when somebody shows up differently, folks go, you know, why are you doing that? it's just the way we work. And that's what I've built in organizations over the years. The people that were in The groups with me that were doing this, depending on how comfortable and how strong they felt, could either say, I'm different, live with it. Or they could say, we're different. Or the policy is different. Whatever they needed to feel strong enough to show up differently. Because when you show up differently, you get amazing results. Brian (22:58) Yeah. That's so, that's so awesome. I completely agree. What if people are listening to this and hearing all this and getting excited about it and thinking, yeah, this is, this sounds like something I want to participate in. is, it sounds like something I want to start to do. if someone feels inspired by this conversation and wants to be, become more of a change agent, uh, but they really just don't know where to start. What are some practical things that you would give them to say, here's, here's a good way to start to, to move down this path. April K. Mills (23:27) Yeah, well, the simplest one is that's why you write books, right? So my book is available. I self-published it on purpose to make it very affordable. So it's, think, $9.99. Everyone is a change agent. It's $14.99 for change tactics because I accidentally wrote a longer book than I intended. sorry. When I got the first copy, I'm like, oh, that's more than I thought it was. OK. But so both of those. So for, you know, the price of a meal. Brian (23:44) You April K. Mills (23:54) for one person these days with inflation, right? You can get two books that help you not only have the basis, but have some just simple tactics, almost like a recipe book you can use. And then later this spring, I'm rolling out with my Engine for Change Company, this Change Agent Essentials class, which is based on that content. I've been teaching it now for 10 years in corporations. As we were talking before we started, right, I'm a recovering hider in corporations, I guess. Now I'm coming out into the world. And so it's going to be available for folks if they want to take the class to get that more immersive experience. So I'm really excited to bring it to the world because it works. And I'm especially passionate about agile people using it because there's too much conversation around agile dying and we need better products delivered faster that customers love at the lowest possible costs. And I don't know a better way to get there. So we got to reclaim agile from the driving people. Brian (24:47) Yeah, I completely agree. you know, anyone who's been involved in Agile in any significant, you know, way I'm sure would probably agree that it's not that the core concepts in any way are, are less, valid or, or, or no longer practical or anything like that. It's just people have seen so much bad versions of things that now that that definition has been marred a little bit, I would say. And so now we, we, we have to kind of take Like you said, take back control of that a little bit and say, now here's what it really is, and here's why we do things this way. And I like your approach there. Find the common ground and say, here's, you know, we both believe in this. Well, what's the best way of doing that? You know, here's what we think. April K. Mills (25:28) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's going to be a really exciting time as we go into 2025. There's so much change happening, but so much of it is at that default of driving people. So there's a huge opportunity to show up differently, to create a ripple. That one person can create that ripple. You three people can support each other while they try these new things. By the time you get to five, you almost have critical mass, right? At least two of you will always be online at any one time to support each other. And you can grow it from there. And I've seen great, great things happen. And it really is an unleashing of energy. If people can remember the first feeling they had when they found Agile and it was like, yeah, that feels more like what a professional does. And that excitement and that energy, you can get back to that and you can get back to that by driving change. Brian (26:24) Love it, love it, this is awesome. Well, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. We're gonna put links to everything in our show notes for everyone so you can get to April's company and find out more about her classes and also find out more about her books there as well. So April, thank you so much for coming on. April K. Mills (26:40) Thanks for having me. It was an honor to be recommended. Brian (26:43) Well, and our honor to have you on as well. So thank you for our listeners and recommending people and thank you April for making the time for us.
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  • #129: 2025: The Year Agile Meets AI and Hyper-Personalization with Lance Dacy
    Curious about the future of Agile in 2025? Join Brian and Lance Dacy as they dive into the rise of AI, hyper-personalization, and how teams can balance innovation with customer focus. Plus, discover actionable insights to navigate a rapidly evolving landscape—don’t miss this forward-looking discussion! Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian and Lance set their sights on 2025, exploring how AI is transforming Agile practices and reshaping customer engagement. They discuss the shift from output to outcome metrics, the expansion of Agile beyond IT, and the critical role of leadership agility. With practical takeaways on fostering continuous learning and delivering real value, this episode equips teams and leaders to stay ahead in a fast-changing world. References and resources mentioned in the show: Lance Dacy Accurate Agile Planning Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. 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 (00:00) Happy New Year's Agile Mentors. We are back and a very happy New Year's to everyone who's listening. Welcome back for another episode and another new year of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner, and we have our friend of the show for our annual kind of tradition now. We have Mr. Lance Dacey back with us. Welcome in, Lance. Lance Dacy (00:23) Thank you, Brian. Happy New Year to all of y'all. Happy to be setting this tradition. think it's two times now, so we'll just call it a tradition, but I love it. Thank you for having me. Brian (00:32) Very glad to have you here. The tradition we're referring to is that we like to take the first episode of the new year and just take a pause and kind of look ahead a little bit. What do we see coming up? What do we think this new year is going to be like? Obviously, it's a year of change. Here in the US, we'll have a new president that comes in. I'm not going to get into whether you like that or not, but it's new. It's going to be a change. There's going to be differences that take place. And I know there's a lot of differences and changes going on just in the way businesses operate and how things are run and lots of new technologies, lots of new trends. So we just thought we'd take a pause and kind of scan the horizon and maybe give you our take at least on what we're hearing and what we're seeing. And you can see if you agree with these or not. We'd love to hear from you in our discussion forum on the Agile Mentors Community afterwards if you have other thoughts or opinions on this. let's get into it. Let's start to talk about this. So Lance, I guess I'll start. I'll just turn it over to you and ask you that generalized question. Give me one point or one thing that you've been reading or seeing recently that you think is going to be a really important thing for us to kind of be prepared for or look out for here in 2025. Lance Dacy (01:44) Great question, Brian. There's so many things out there, and I thought we could start by looking back a little bit. if we're okay with that, just let's summarize, you what did we see happen in 2024? You mentioned, you know, 2025 is a year of change, absolutely, but 2024 was definitely a different kind of year as far as my experience is concerned and seeing a lot of industry trends that are just popping up out of nowhere. Now we are fans of agility, which means we embrace quick, efficient changes, but there's things going on in 2024 I never predicted Brian (01:52) Yeah, yeah. Lance Dacy (02:19) fast. And so I think we've got to reshape the way that we're thinking about these things. I think the topic of mind, one of the biggest shifts that I saw in 2024 that I think will continue in 2025 is AI. So that artificial intelligence is a big word that we keep lumping into a lot of things. And I just wanted to take a pause a little bit and say, I know everybody's got a little bit different experience about AI, but in particular, as it relates to product development and agile delivery, which is what this show is basically focused on, I thought we could look at some insights of what happened in 2024 with that. And so I think I call us babies at it right now. And I know that may be a bad term, but I have a lot of experience with AI and machine learning and things like that. But as far as the use of it, I feel like we're all a little bit more of babies on how to use it in the day-to-day work that we're trying to accomplish. And I think that comes with learning something. I embrace that. I don't mean that as a downplay, by the way, but that we're all babies. I'm just saying we're less mature about it. We're experimenting with a lot of things. And I don't think that some of the AI is all good. I I embrace it as a thing that's going to help us later on, but... I thought we could just share our experiences of how we've seen this thing manifest itself. I think tools like AI driven, I'm going to use the bad word JIRA, but in place of that, just use any product backlog management tool that you see. And I've seen a lot of organizations not just talk the game of, we use AI for our backlog management, but I'm talking about backlog prioritization, sprint planning capacity. And I believe what's happening is it frees teams up to do more of the... value driven work that we're going to see a lot more of in 2025. So what I mean by that is when we got automated testing and development, if you remember those days, it freed the developers up or the testers, should say, from doing less of the does this thing work to more of how does it feel using it as a human being, you know, automating that. So I've seen things like JIRA, with AI with JIRA and GitHub co-pilots, you know, reshaping the value creation in the teams and eliminating the need of having to do very low level tasks. So what is your thoughts on that and do you have any experiences of that as well? Brian (04:36) Yeah, for sure. There's a couple of things I've found that just kind of some stats I found from some different places. you know, listeners know I'm kind of like a data geek here. want to know where the data comes from and want to make sure it's a, yeah. Yeah. You want to make sure it's a solid source and it's not some questionable, you know, sketchy kind of, well, I asked 10 of my friends and here's the answer, you Right, right. Exactly. Lance Dacy (04:48) Good hand. I love that. or a FBI. Brian (05:02) But so there's a couple of things that came back. One was, I think Forrester is probably a pretty good source of information. They have some pretty good rigor to their process. And they have a thing that they put out every year. This one's just called the Developer Survey. And this is the one that they put out for 2024 that I'm quoting here. But a couple of stats from that that I found interesting. One was, 49 % of developers are expecting to use or are already using general AI assistance in their coding phase of software development, which, you know, maybe higher than most people might think. But it doesn't surprise me too much. I think that's probably kind of what I'm used to it. Understand saying, you know, an assistant co-pilot, that kind of thing. They're not saying 49 % have been replaced. They're saying 49 % are being assisted. by that and that seems about right. Maybe again, maybe a little higher than some might expect, but that seems like not too big of a shocker. Lance Dacy (06:04) Well, the animation too. So when you talk about assistance versus letting it run it, I saw a gentleman on LinkedIn, which is also a good. I wish we could interact more with our users on this call, because I'd love to hear their perspective. But I heard somebody say, let AI write my code. No, thank you. Code is like poetry. It has to be refined over time. It has humanistic qualities. And I was like, man, that's a really good point. But when I try to show my kids how to create a Ruby on Rails app to do an e-commerce site and I type it into chat GPT or whatever tool you use, I was amazed at how quickly it was able to put together. mean, you got to still know the file structures and things like that. But I don't know that developers are just going to say, I was going to write the whole thing. think they're, I think it's saving us keystrokes. I think we talked about that last time as well, but that's an interesting, interesting take. Brian (06:50) Yeah. Yeah. So I thought, I thought that was interesting. There was another, you know, I'm kind of, I'll move around between these two sources basically, but there's another source that I saw where there was a Harvard Business Review article. posted this on LinkedIn a while back, but it was a kind of the source of it was about a survey that they did to try to determine the impact on the job market. And one of the things they did was now their data was from July, 2021 to July, 2023. So this is a little bit older data, right? The survey was trying to say in analyzing the job postings on freelancer job sites specifically, and they tried to identify ones that might be affected by the advent of chat GPT, because that's the period where chat GPT really started to come onto the scene and started to become prevalent. And what they found was about a 21 % decrease in the weekly number of posts and what they call automation prone. Lance Dacy (07:35) Yeah. Brian (07:47) jobs compared to manually intensive jobs. They said riding jobs were affected the most 30.37 % decrease, followed up by software app and web development 20.62 % decrease and engineering 10.42 % decrease. But the interesting kind of thing is they found it kind of towards the end of that there was some increases and their kind of conclusion was that there was actually an increase in demand of the kinds of work that required human judgment and decision-making. And so that kind of ties back into what you were saying about let AI write my code whole, completely no, there's still a requirement for that human judgment and decision-making. I think this is why I'm not afraid of it, right? This is kind of, I don't want to make this an AI show, it's about the future in 2025, but when we had a... Lance Dacy (08:17) All right. Right. Brian (08:40) When we've had AI shows, that's one of the things I've said to the audience here is that I'm not so afraid of AI being sort of the doom and gloom of it's going to destroy profession or destroy. It's going to change it. But I don't think that's any different than any other. A great kind of analogy I make is when we started to have testing automation. It didn't do away with testers. This is just another tool that's going to be in our tool belt. Lance Dacy (08:51) Guy net. Brian (09:05) And I think our challenge is not to, you know, we're agilist, not to resist change, but to try to adapt, try to find ways that we can align and incorporate and get the most out of it. So, yeah. Lance Dacy (09:17) I think the most part of that though is, Brian, too, what most people fear. And I agree with you, we won't make it an AI show. just, we got a couple of points to make on this. But for the first time ever in human history, we now have something that might be more intelligent than us. And that is scary because there's some AI neural network engines that people can't explain how it's working anymore. They put it in place. And then it's like, we're not quite sure how it's doing all of this. And that's a scary thing, obviously, that can get out of control. We've never really had to face that. So we do have to be aware of that, but you know, let's go back and peel it back. Hey, we're, trying to plan a backlog with AI and we're trying to write a few Ruby on Rails code. I'm not letting it run my life yet. And one day it may already be doing that. I just don't even know it. I don't know. We won't get into that debate, but I think the thing is that we need to take pause of in the agile industry. is we embrace new technology as long as it's helping us deliver faster to our customers and save us time and efficiency. You know, I tell teams all the time, Agile is about delivering the highest business value items as early as possible with the least amount of cost friction, know, whatever word you want to use for that. Well, AI might help us do that, but I want to caution that. I think you and I were just talking about this. I wanted you to bring up that news story element that we were talking about. where people are just pushing content out there and kind of desensitizing us to is that important information or not? And I think AI needs to tag onto that. So I didn't know if you could share that real quick and then I want to share some metrics that I've seen some teams capture. There's a lot of teams now adopting these things called Dora metrics, which was created by a DevOps engineering group. And it's amazing to me now that we have real data to see, well, we have embraced AI. Brian (10:45) Sure. Lance Dacy (10:59) does do some things or not, I'd like to balance the good with the bad on that. But can you go over that new stuff that you were sharing with me? Brian (11:05) Yeah, no, it's just a conversation I've been having recently with people, they're friends of mine and kind of, you're probably feeling the same way about this in certain places, but the breaking news alerts that you get on your phone, you get those things all the time and I've had friends and I have discussions about maybe it's time to just turn them off. There's just so many breaking news alerts and that's kind of the issue, right? Is that there are so many that are now classified as Lance Dacy (11:23) Yeah. Brian (11:31) breaking news that you kind of look at that and say, this isn't really breaking news. You know, like if something really major happens, yeah, I want to know about that. I'd like to get an alert about something that's truly breaking news. the, you know, have major news sources, apps on my phone and get those breaking news alerts all the time. And some of them are just things that are minor, minor news that I would be much better served seeing in a summary and like a daily summary or even a weekly summary on some of the things. Right. Lance Dacy (11:50) Yeah. Or if at all, like you don't care about the sub undersecretary of Parks and Lighting in Minnetoca. You know, I don't know. It's just like, thank you for that information. But I totally agree that I feel like we're getting desensitized to a lot of these words, buzzwords, if you will. And we as humans are going to have to learn in this environment. And I'm trying to teach this with my kids as well, because they're the ones suffering the most from it. Brian (12:04) Right. Yeah. Lance Dacy (12:22) It's just inane information out there and you're filling your brains with the main things. So AI is great because it's allowing people to deliver more content, but is that content of substance or they just trying to market to you and get you, I forget the word you use for it, but, you know, keep you on a leash. Is that what you said? A small. Brian (12:42) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's kind of what we were saying about this is that I think that the kind of conclusion that led me to is that I and I've seen this trend, I think in other areas as well, as I sort of feel like maybe with bigger companies, more than others in today's world, there seems to be a shift a little bit that, you know, for example, that that breaking news thing, it's not it's not something that benefits the customer, right? As the customer, I don't think there's a customer out there that says, I really love all these minor news stories appearing in my breaking newsfeed. But what it benefits is the company. It benefits the source because it keeps you engaged. It keeps you coming back and it keeps that ping to keep you engaged. And that's what they're trying to promote. That's good for the... Yeah, that's good for the company, but it's not good for the customer. I think that there may be, we may see some real kind of shifts I think happen in... Lance Dacy (13:21) Or me, it keeps me frustrated and I leave them. Brian (13:34) Some of those big companies maybe have moved too far in that way to favor their company's interest over the customer. And that leaves a door of opportunity, I think, for smaller companies to say, well, we're going to be all in on just what's best for the customer. And I think customers will appreciate that and will reward that because it's annoying otherwise. Lance Dacy (13:54) That's what I want to focus on because the last part of this AI conversation I want to have is I like a lot of what Gary Hamill, he's a management professor at a lot of different schools recently. He visits a lot of companies as well, but I really like the way he delivers his content and how he's more innovative and thought. I mean, I tell people all the time that management and leadership has not seen any innovation in 150 years. It's about time. that we start learning how to create cultures for human beings that are bringing gifts and talents every day to make things better for our customers. And Gary Hamill is a really good source if you're interested in those kinds of things. And so he emphasizes how AI has reshaped value creation by eliminating those low-level tasks that I think we all can embrace and are allowing agile teams to achieve unprecedented efficiency. Now... We are babies immature with this technology. So maybe these news organizations and the ones that we're going to kind of say, you're not doing a good job at it. It's not because they're bad. It's just we're learning how to use a new tool and hopefully customer feedback will change that. But I wanted to hit on these Dora metrics. Dora metrics are, I think they were created by DevOps research and assessment. That's what they kind of stand for. And there's four major categories. that Dora metrics measure as it relates to more of an engineering benchmark. Like how well are we, if you're an agile software development product company, Dora metrics are really good for you to look at. know, metrics can be misused, so be careful, but they're measuring outcomes. You know, what is our deployment frequency, which could be an output metric, because who knows if you're releasing the right things, but let's not get into that conversation. deployment frequency, lead time for changes, the change failure rate of your changes, and the meantime to recovery of those changes. I think those are really four good performance benchmarks. And they're starting to surface a lot in organizations that I work with. So you kind of use tools like Jellyfish or something to overlay over Jira. And all these tools are great, but these teams are using AI. And I found that we finally get some real data that says, how well is AI affecting those core metrics if you were measuring performance benchmarks of the software that you're delivering. And so this report that was created by the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps report, they categorize organizations and performance clusters like elite, high, medium, and low. And based on their performance across these metrics that I just mentioned earlier, they're evaluating and guiding their software delivery practices. And so the impact of AI adoption was really cool to see on the DevOps Launchpad was a site that I saw this on, that the integration of AI into the development processes, as we were just talking about, has mixed effects on those door metrics. Can you believe that? So a 25 % increase in AI adoption correlated with a one and a half percent decrease in team throughput and a 72 % decrease in the stability of the product. Now these suggest that while AI, you know, offers productivity benefits maybe for the individuals or the teams, it has a, you know, it's introducing complexities that are affecting the software delivery performance. So I want our audience to pay attention to that. Brian (16:59) Wow. Wow. Lance Dacy (17:21) and start using some of these maybe to push back on managers and leaders that are just embracing this new tool and say, let's just push this on the teams. So that's the impact of AI adoption. And then if you look at platform engineering, so if you look at the implementation of an internal developer platforms, you know, that are helping developers deploy code faster, the adoption of AI led to an 8 % increase in individual productivity. and a 10 % increase at the team level. Now that's fantastic. But these gains were accompanied by an 8 % decrease in change throughput. So while the teams may be able to make changes, what I interpret that to mean is the customer is not seeing the changes. There's an 8 % decrease in the throughput all the way as a cycle time, if you will, all the way to the customer and a 14 % decrease in the stability of the product. So that indicates trade-offs. that we all need to be aware of that AI might be helping us performance wise, but it's not helping the customer a whole lot if we're destabilizing the platform. So I haven't dug into those metrics a lot, but I wanted to share that with the audience because if you do find yourself in a position where people are pushing this, you can try to go reference those and maybe give them some, I always call it pros and cons, right? There's no really right or wrong when you're an agile team trying to make a decision. You got to look at the pros and the cons and Brian (18:23) Yeah. Lance Dacy (18:40) We might accept a pro, multiple pros that come with some cons, but we all look at each other and say, that's the better decision for our customer. And we live with those cons, whatever they may be. So I wanted to talk about that because it centers on what you were just thinking with the news organization. just push, we got more productive at pushing content, but was it the right content or is it destabilizing what people are using? And you just have to be careful of that. Brian (18:57) Yeah. Yeah, no, I think those are excellent points. I think that's one of the things I see kind of for 2025 as well is that we're still so much in the empathy of how AI really plays into how a team operates and how development works that I don't think we can really say ultimately what's the right way or wrong way to do anything yet. I think it's good for teams to experiment. I don't think you should be afraid of experimenting and trying things. But it all comes back to the basic principle we say over and over as Agilist, inspect and adapt on it. Try something and identify what works about it and what doesn't work. And if that means that, we're using it too much and it's causing too much errors, we'll back off, find the right point, and move forward with that. Lance Dacy (19:41) Yeah. Or where companies are using it bad. Like I have a story that we won't get into here where a CEO or an executive of the company was mandating that they use AI to do something not so good for the customers. And you want to be able to push on that as well. So I'm sorry to interrupt you on that, but I was just like, man, that's something. Brian (20:07) Right. No. Lance Dacy (20:11) Sometimes, like we want to self-organize around the experimentation. We don't want it pushed in like management saying, need to use this because I want you more productive and managers be careful of doing that. Make sure you understand the pros and cons as much as you can before you dictate. Brian (20:26) Yeah. Something else you kind of said triggered something to me. I know the, I think that, well, not in a bad way, but it just, you know, the metrics I think that you mentioned were really good metrics. I liked the idea of kind of measuring, you know, things like, you know, the failure, the bug rate, you know, like how many defects and those kinds of things I think are good metrics. But they kind of, Lance Dacy (20:31) What? Okay. Brian (20:49) point out a certain difference that I think that's out there that I think the business community is wrestling with. And I hear these questions all the times in class, so I know it's prevalent out there. But we talk about building high performing teams. And just the difference between that word performing and productivity. There's sometimes I think confusion or false equivalency. between those two, that performance equals productivity. And I think a lot of the metrics sometimes we see that get measured or that we try to measure even, kind of expose that, as that's what's really the issue here, is that we're really trying to make that false equivalency between the two. It's not saying that performance has nothing to do with it, but Lance Dacy (21:15) Right. Brian (21:32) You know, this is the simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential. You know, I'd rather have low productivity, but what we produce is high performing, is highly valuable, is something that matters, right? And I think that's kind of those kinds of statistics like you were bringing up, you know, what is our failure rate of things we put out there? Lance Dacy (21:44) Yeah. Brian (21:54) That is, I think, a performance metric to say, the old phrase, slow down to go faster. Right, right. Maybe the reason that our failure rate goes up and we're having problems with this is that we're trying to go too fast. And if we could back off, it ultimately makes you go faster if you have less bugs that you then have to go back and fix. Lance Dacy (22:00) Yeah, make hate, totally. Yeah. Brian (22:19) So it may be counterintuitive to certain organizations. Let's push them. Let's try to get everyone to go faster. But I think these new kind of metrics that you mentioned that we're trying to measure more and more, I think are starting to open people's eyes a little bit to the difference between those two words. Lance Dacy (22:22) I mean Well, in like the CrowdStrike situation, you know, that took down a lot of the airline systems, you know, I'm not saying they make, they didn't do a good job deploying and everything. All of us are victim of that kind of thing. But, know, to get us back on track a little bit, because you asked me the question, then I felt like I got us off on a tangent. know, 2024, obviously the rise of AI integration into Brian (22:48) Sure. Lance Dacy (22:54) the workflows that we experienced with Agile. And I just wanted to highlight, yeah, those are some great things, experiment with it. We're in our infancy. So there are a lot of things to discover that may not be so good. So start trying to put metrics in place. And I thought the Dora metrics, you know, as I've started discovering those, I'm a data guy and I'm like, yeah, as long as those are being tracked correctly, I think that's a good benchmark to kind of look at, hey, we're making a lot of changes in our software, but it's crashing the system. So change is good, crashing is bad. there's pros and cons, so we have to delegate that or figure that out. Now, the other one that you just mentioned, I thought I saw a great shift in 2024 from output related metrics to outcome oriented metrics. So the Scrum Alliance has a report, which we're all probably familiar with, especially you and I being certified Scrum trainers with, and we get a lot of data from them. But teams moved away from feature counts to measuring outcomes like Brian (23:35) Yeah. Yeah. Lance Dacy (23:49) customer satisfaction, user retention. You we teach this in our advanced certified Scrum Master workshops, the difference between output versus outcome metrics. And we've been doing that for five years. And I think it's really starting to take hold that management and leadership and maybe even teams are measuring the wrong thing. And I really saw the needle move in 2024 that people's eyes are opening that let's measure the outcomes of what we're doing. Sometimes that sacrifices individual productivity and performance for a greater outcome achieved at the organization or customer level. And we've been trying to articulate that for many years. And so I've seen a shift in that. And then also the rise of Agile beyond what I would generalize as IT. So Agile Alliance produced some information that I thought was interesting that Agile has expanded into health care or sectors like health care. education, human resources, HR, and those are typically what we would see the laggards, you know, back in the day, banking and healthcare and all those were the last people to adopt this progressive planning approach because of the way that they budget and finance and rightfully so. But those agile principles have been proven out far beyond software unpredictable type work and is going more into, you know, the different types of work environments and I think onto that is how it's getting involved more in leadership. So I don't know about you, but I've also seen people focusing more on building a culture of, I would like to call it leadership agility. So John Maxwell, you know, is a vocal person in the industry about leadership. And he underscored this idea that agile leadership. in driving transformation across non-technical domains. So not just a digital transformation, but non-technical domains is really taking hold in this idea of empowering cross-functional teams. You we've been saying this in technology for years, that the siloed development method is not good. Well, organizations are starting to see that not only in the tech sector, but why don't we put a marketing cross-functional team together with this other team? And that's what they talked about in 86. you know, in the new, new product development game. And I think I started to see the needle move a little bit more with leaders being more fascinated about leadership agility and driving culture change to meet the demands of cross-functional teams. And it could just be a by-product that technology has gotten easier to make these and focus on these things now, but psychological safety, know, sustainability and agile with, people having real goals and integrating. Brian (25:59) You Lance Dacy (26:23) What you see now is a lot of these eco-conscious practices coming in to product development, like the environmental, social, government's commitments as well, are making their way in there. So I want to just reflect on 2024. I don't know what you think. I'd love to interact with the audience too, but those are kind of the main things that I saw. And that will lead us into a good discussion of how we see that helping us in 2025. So what do you think about those? Brian (26:49) I One of the things I think that kind of stood out to me from what you talked about was the concept of how that plays in leadership. And I think you're absolutely right. think that is, I am hearing more of that in classes, people talking about that when they ask questions. You know, we've talked about for years that the fact that there can be sort of I don't know a better word to say but a glass ceiling sometimes in the organization for agile and how it spreads across and that leaders are often You know overlooked as far as getting trained in this kind of stuff and understanding it and I do see a rise in leaders trying to understand a little bit more about how can we You know incorporate this or even better, you know, how do we support? and nurture and foster this culture in our organization. So I think you're absolutely right. I think that is sort of a hidden or kind of a cheat code, if you will, for organizations to try to be more successful with the stuff we talk about is if you can have, it's not a top-down approach, but if you don't have the top on board, then they can really start to become a hindrance or a roadblock to the teams actually being successful with it. And so I agree. think that, you know, I'm hopeful that that shift is occurring. I'm seeing signs of that, you know, it's kind of always a little bit of a back and forth, you know, is it moving in that direction? Then I start to hear people say, no, we're having trouble. And the anecdotal little stories you hear makes you kind of not sure what the prevalence is, you know? Lance Dacy (27:54) Yeah Lose hope. You lose hope. I think, you know, the big takeaway for me for this as we talk about 2025 is it's going to be increasingly difficult and it has been increasingly difficult for any one individual company, product, service, whatever you want to call it, to differentiate yourself from other people. I've been telling my kids this forever. Brian (28:18) Right, right, exactly. Lance Dacy (28:38) that I feel I've seen a big shift from when I was back in early 90s, know, writing spreadsheets for people, they thought it was just unbelievable the work that I was doing because not everybody could do that. Well, everybody can do that now. So what I mean about differentiating yourself is, you know, AI is one of those things that you have to start prioritizing AI literacy because we've just talked about how immature we might be in some cases with this. But if we can ensure that our team members understand how to work effectively with those AI powered tools and letting AI be an active team participant, then I think we're going to start seeing even a greater problem with being able to differentiate yourself. So the main point I want to make for 2025 that I believe is going to be a real big focus is a is a hyper personalization of customer products. So there's a lot of companies out there that are really good. You just mentioned it with the news, right? Hey, I'm building your content, I'm keeping you engaged, but am I really serving you? Am I giving you your needs? And maybe it's okay if news organizations do that if you have a way to filter it and customize it. But really what I'm talking about is, and I'll go back to what Gary Hamill says about this. He says, the markets are crowded. And when you have the rise of AI and tools like Trello, Monday, and things like that, those are project management tools, right? Used to, you could be a better product company just if you would manage your work better. You know, you were using Scrum or Agile, you had an edge on everybody else. You could deploy faster and that was your secret sauce, right? But now that most people can do that now, what's your next up level in game? And he thinks it's going to be this hyper personalized customer solution and engagement. Brian (30:06) Right. Lance Dacy (30:23) where we need to invest in more customer discovery processes. You know how hard that is in teaching tech teams to do that? All we focus on is building the features, but how about we get better at customer discovery and really understand the tools that provide deep insights into their behavior so we can recognize that? know, several companies that I think are on the forefront of that, for those of you who are like, yeah, I'm concerned about that too. Where can we get better at that? I mean, go look at Amazon. Brian (30:30) Yeah. Lance Dacy (30:51) You know, Amazon uses highly sophisticated algorithms to analyze customer behavior, which enables them to produce product recommendations and help you buy things you didn't even know. You remember when we would teach like Kano analysis in a product owner class and they had six categories of features and one of those feature categories was an exciter or delighter feature. You know, the key to being a good differentiator is providing product and features that people didn't even know they needed. That's why customers are not always right, you know, on what they need. They're thinking about their reactive sense. And so how can we get better at predicting their behavior even more than they can and use AI and machine learning that allow for real-time adjustments? Because that used to take forever. You you think about Benjamin Graham's book on investing in the 1940s and 50s, trying to predict what the stock market is going to do is nearly impossible now. But can you imagine how he differentiated himself by doing all these algorithms by hand? Brian (31:20) Yeah. Lance Dacy (31:48) And so what I mean by that is we need to use AI and these tools to help do more predictive customer experiences. So Amazon does a good job. Netflix employs a lot of data analytics to help understand viewing habits. Starbucks does this. Spotify does it. So I really feel like in 2025, if you want something to focus on and you're a software product development company practicing agile, build literacy of AI tools with your team. Make sure we're using them the right way. Track the right. data, but more importantly, let's discover what our customers are doing and behaving and use the AI to help us decipher that information a lot easier so that we as humans can make a decision on where we spend the great scarce capacity of our teams building great products for them. And so there's a lot of things that go into that, but I feel like that's going to be the focus in 2025. That's what's going to separate the people that succeed even individually. How are you going to differentiate yourself from a market pool of people out there? You need to start learning how to use these tools and differentiate yourself. That's the for 2025. Brian (32:52) Yeah. No, that's a great point. I'll tag on and say that I know there's this, people probably have heard of this, there's a social media kind of trend of if you use chat GPT or something like that a lot to go to it and say, tell me some insights about myself that I may not know, just based on all my interactions with you. And that was a trend for a while for people to ask that and then. they were shocked in some of the things that would come out from chat GPT. Well, what I found in taking a couple of courses and things about AI is, it's really good at taking a large amount of data and then pulling out things that you may not be aware of. I think that's going to be something, the more data driven we are, obviously the better because we have facts behind it. And as you said, it has to be the right, we have to collect the right kind of data. you can take a big... Lance Dacy (33:19) Yep. Yes. Brian (33:43) source of data and feed it into an AI like ChatGPT and say, give me five hidden insights from this data. Yeah. Lance Dacy (33:50) Yeah, stuff you thought about, right? I think insights, that's the way to put it. And I used to have a saying being a data analytics guy for 20 years. Most people and organizations are data rich, but information poor. And I would like to change that word nowadays to insights poor because Brian (34:09) Yeah. Lance Dacy (34:09) We may have all the data and tracking data, there's no harm in that, know, storage is cheap these days. So go ahead and track it all. You can report on it infinite number of ways. And that's the secret sauce. And I think you just hit it on the head that, just go ahead and start tracking stuff. Let AI, you can't ever read that amount of data as a human being and decipher it. Let the machine do that. But then you can test it. You can say, do I really believe that or not? Because you have a humanistic experience that AI doesn't have. So we should embrace that. Brian (34:40) Yeah, I agree. Well, I mean, I hope people are hopeful. I'm hopeful. I know when I start a new year, I generally am hopeful because that's just the way I try to start new years. But I'm hopeful for some of these changes. think the tools that we have are just making things, some things that might have been more mundane, a little easier for us to do. And maybe that allows us to focus. Well, like the data I brought about at the very beginning, you the fact that there's a rise in, you know, postings and companies needing jobs that require human judgment and decision-making. I think that's where we're headed is, you know, that rise in human judgment and decision-making skill. And that's something that's at least at the moment, you know, our computers can't do for us. And it really does require, just like you talked about, understanding our customers. I can't put an AI out there to try to interview all my customers and get deep. Well, but not and get the kind of deep insights I want, right? Not to find out what the real problems are. It wouldn't know how to question it enough and dig deeper into different ways to truly figure those out. So it requires huge human judgment and decision-making. And I think that's where we... Lance Dacy (35:35) you could. Right. Brian (35:51) now bring the value is in that area. Lance Dacy (35:53) Well, and people hate change, right? So let's just end with this. know, most people, customers, you change things on the product. You put a new car design. We usually don't like it. So you want to hang in there and not get too distracted by noise with that. mean, remember when the first iPhone came out, you know, older generations like this is too complicated. I don't want to use it. And there is something to say for that. But eventually that's what we use and we learn how to adapt to it. So stay hyper competitive in 2025. Foster continuous learning for your team. So stay updated on industry trends. It'll lead time to experiment and invest in your team's learning. Prioritize collaboration and innovation. None of us are smarter than all of us together. Break down the silos. Encourage the cross-functional collaboration. And experimentation is going to be key. Leaders and managers in particular. must foster an environment where it's safe to not do so well. I tried something, it didn't work, and I'm sorry about that, but I learned from it and I'm going to try it this way next time. That's not a huge thing right now. We need to foster that. The last one, focus on delivering value. Keep the customer at the center of everything. Use metrics to measure your real world impact, not just the outputs. And I think that's how we can summarize everything that we talked about. Those are the three things if we had to take away. continuous learning, collaboration and innovation, and focus on delivering value. Good luck in 2025, right, Brian? Brian (37:19) Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's awesome. Well, I hope this has been beneficial to folks. And Lance, I appreciate you keeping our tradition and helping us look forward into the new year. obviously, a very happy new year to you and your family. And thank you for coming back and joining us. Lance Dacy (37:35) Yeah, likewise to you, Brian. Glad to do it. Hope to see you all soon. Thank you all.
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  • #128: Top Lessons from 2024’s Most Inspiring Episodes with Brian Miner
    Missed some episodes this year? Don’t worry—Brian’s got you covered with a highlight reel of 2024’s most memorable moments, featuring game-changing insights from Agile thought leaders and innovators. Tune in to catch up, reflect, and set your sights on a stellar 2025! Overview In this special year-end episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian takes us on a trip down memory lane, sharing highlights from some of the most impactful conversations of the year. Featuring insights from Agile legends like Mike Cohn, Clinton Keith, Heather McGowan, and more, this curated selection is packed with golden nuggets that you can revisit or discover for the first time. Whether you missed an episode or want to relive the best moments, this recap is a perfect way to close out 2024 and prepare for what’s ahead. References and resources mentioned in the show: #79 Navigating Agile Trends and Challenges in 2024 with Lance Dacy #86 Revisiting User Stories with Mike Cohn #90 Mastering Agile Coaching with Cherie Silas #93 The Rise of Human Skills and Agile Acumen with Evan Leybourn #100 Navigating the Future of Agile and Scrum with Lance Dacy & Scott Dunn #111 Adapting to the Future of Work with Heather McGowan #120 Agile in Gaming with Clinton Keith #123 Unlocking Team Intelligence with Linda Rising 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. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00.622) I'm Brian Milner and this is the Agile Mentors Podcast, a show about both the personal and organizational journey towards agility. My friends and I will be sharing with you what we've collectively learned from seeing thousands of companies Agile implementations, apparels and pitfalls, as well as the secrets to success. We'll share our personal in the trenches experiences so that you can apply what we've learned in a practical way in your careers. We also hope to hear and learn from you as well. If you're like us and are always in search of better ways of working together, you're in the right place. Join us, mentor, and be mentored. Let's get started. Brian Milner (00:53.288) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for the final episode of 2024. Believe it or not, we have reached all the way to the end. You might be thinking, wait, there's a few more weeks left. Yeah, there's a few more weeks left, but the next release date would have been on Christmas Day itself and the one following would have been on New Year's Day. So we're gonna take two weeks off to be with our families after this episode. And we encourage you to enjoy that time, take the time with your family as well and friends, and truly wish you the best over that time period. But before we get there, we do have one more episode for you. We thought what we'd do for today's episode might be tiny bit different than normal. In fact, I don't think we've done anything like this before. What I wanted to do is, since it is the last episode of the year, is to look back over the past year and play you some portions of some of the really fantastic discussions that we had over this past year. Just pull out a handful of these to talk to you about. If they sound interesting to you, maybe you can go back and take a listen to those episodes. So let's get right into it, because I don't want to waste time setting it up any more than that. For starters, I want to go back to something that's now kind of a tradition for us, and the next one you'll hear from us after this episode will be the continuation of that. The beginning of this year in 2024, we started things off and we kicked it off with friend of the show, Lance Dacey. And that episode was really about looking forward into 2024. And for us to talk about what we maybe thought was coming and what we saw in the future, and then trying to somehow make some predictions or give some advice about how we might be better prepared for it. And one of the areas that came out in that discussion was really talking about how leadership affected an Agile transformation and Agile with the culture of an organization. So I'll play you a little clip here from Lance's discussion. One of the thoughts that he had in that episode, really talking more about how we need to go to the next level with our organizations and with the leadership in our organization. Take a listen. We've been trying to scale Scrum and Agile for a long time and we've written the practices on how to do it. Brian Milner (03:13.23) but we're not allowing the people to practice that. You know, just got through coaching. My youngest son is in fifth grade and we coach his football team. It's like, we're going to sit down and tell you during this play, here's the stance that you take to block. You're basically a robot. Do everything that we say, even if you don't understand it, because the whole scheme for that play is built on everybody doing their job exactly as prescribed. But as you evolve into professional football or high school football, they've learned so much about those mechanics. that's really fun now because they've got the IQ to respond to what's in front of them. That's agile. And that to me is what we have to start learning in organizations, is we know how to run the play at the team level, but how do we build up the people to run the play correctly in challenges when there's adaptations that need to be made? And a lot of times management and leadership is the suffocating part of that where they don't allow for that. It's always interesting to go back and look at those conversations that we have at beginning of the year. and see kind of how it played out. Were we right? Were we wrong? So if you're interested in that, check out that. That was just episode 79 was the first one that we did in 2024. Next up, I'm gonna jump to episode 86. This was one with our very own Mike Cohn. Mike had come back on because quite frankly, we've had for many years a set of user stories that were sample user stories that you could come to our website and download just as a resource for people if they wanted to see what... samples of user stories look like, try to imagine what that would look like in their particular context. So that's why we had this collection of user stories. Well, Mike went back to re-edit those recently, and then he took kind of another look at it and had forced him to kind of reconsider some things, wanted to share some thoughts about those new ideas and thoughts he had about user stories, just in re-examining ones that he had put together previously. So in this next clip, what you'll hear Mike talk about is really kind of a controversy maybe just his own controversy internally, but kind of a shift that he had over the years and really the template itself for a user story. So take a listen to this. I had a bunch of slides. I looked at them a few years ago to confirm this. I looked at them and they all said, I want to blank, right? And it was what the user wants. And sometimes it's not what the user wants. So if you look at slide decks that I create today, they all say, I. Brian Milner (05:36.866) They don't say I can, they don't say I want to, they just say I, and then you fill in the verb. For example, as user, I am required to enter a strong password. I don't want to enter a strong password. I want to type in my dog's name and let the system know it's me, right? So I am required to enter a strong password that doesn't fit with I want to or I can. I can enter a strong password? Well, that doesn't really help. I don't want to. I can enter a strong password. I can enter a weak password. Is that possible? So I do think there's problems with I can, but I leave all of that out of the template and I let the situation determine what that verb should be. Always an interesting conversation there with Mike Cohn. Very, very lucky and fortunate to have him come on usually multiple times per year. And that was just one of the times that Mike came on our show this last year, but really, really interesting stuff there about user stories. If that's something you're interested in, I encourage you to check out that. That was episode 86 with Mike Cohn on user stories. Now we're gonna jump ahead to episode 90. Episode 90, we had a friend of mine, Sheree Silas, come on. Sheree is a very authoritative, knowledgeable person on Agile coaching. In fact, she is the person that I most likely am going to point you to if you come to me and want to find out more about Agile coaching. She has some really great classes and other things that she teaches. And we had her on to talk about Agile coaching, obviously. And one of the things that came up is something that I hear sometimes in classes that Some of this coaching stuff you talk about sounds a little bit like counseling a little bit. Is there a crossover there with counseling? Is this a counseling job? So take a listen to what Shree had to say in response to that question. As an adult coach, you are not an organizational psychologist. You are not a counselor. You are not an organizational therapist or any of those things. That is not the job. The job is consulting, mentoring, training. and some coaching, helping people how to learn how to negotiate, learn how to collaborate, learn how to have good, healthy conflict. And there's helping them to get the business results they want. And it's very frustrating when you kind of hear this taking all the way to the other end of, we're just there to do woo-woo touchy feely stuff. I'm the psychologist. No, that's not your job. And you're not trained to do that. And that's part of the coaching work. Brian Milner (08:03.136) is to help them understand what they need and what they don't. And even as a professional coach, it is my job to make sure my client understands what coaching is and what it's not. And as an Agile coach, that's part of the work is to make sure the client understands what this work is and what it's not. Yeah, really good stuff there about Agile coaching. If you're interested in finding out more about that, listen to that episode. You'll hear more from Sheree on episode 90 about Agile coaching. Next up, I have a relatively new friend of mine, but one that, you know, feel like brother from another mother. Mr. Evan Layborn was on and he came on to talk about some research that his organization had done in partnership with the Scrum Alliance. And in particular, there was one component of that that I wanted to question him about because when I initially read it, it gave me a little bit of some misgivings about it. One of the things I mentioned was that traditionally we have always talked about being a T-shaped individual on a Scrum team that had a depth of experience in one area. but a breadth of experience in other areas that you just weren't an expert in. You were only really looking to be an expert in one area. But this report kind of brought to bear this idea of what they're calling a pie-shaped individual. So think about the mathematical symbol pie and how it has two lines going down. It's kind of like a T with two lines going down from it, right? And when I saw that, initially my first thought was, well, is this just organizations trying to get by with less head count? Take a listen to what Evan had to say about that. I want to be clear that when we're talking about pie-shaped individuals and companies looking for pi-shaped individuals, we're not talking about companies who are looking for one person to do two jobs. They're not looking for someone who's got two skills because they're trying to fill two roles. They're trying to fill two jobs. We're talking about one person, one job, and using multiple skill sets to do that job better. more effectively. In the technology world, we've had a word for this in the tech world for 10 years, full stack developer. A full stack developer is a pie-shaping, it's a developer with test competence and operations competence. They can deploy a DevOps environment. That full stack developer is a prime example of a pie-shaped person. It's not one person doing two jobs. It's one person doing one job with a variety of skill sets. Brian Milner (10:30.752) and doing that job better, exponentially better because of it. There's some really interesting other insights that Evan had in that episode. highly recommend that to you. That was episode 93 with Mr. Evan Layborne. Next up, well, we celebrated a milestone. We had our hundredth episode, if you can believe it or not. And we thought it would be appropriate to celebrate by having two people that we have on quite frequently on the podcast, Mr. Lance Dacey. and Mr. Scott Dunn. So we had something that we don't often have here on the show where we had multiple guests, but we had Lance and Scott on to really look back over the past 100 episodes and look ahead a little bit into what we thought might be coming. And one of the interesting kind of conversations we had there was thinking about some of the changes taking place in the workplace today. You'll hear Scott kind of start in on this with. thinking about the kind of dilemma organizations are facing with the work from home versus work from office kind of situation. And then Lance will come in and kind of relate it more to some larger agility issues as well. Take a listen. Thinking back to the time when people didn't really want to go agile because they thought it was a fad. And it didn't take but a few years, like, I could be wrong. Maybe that is a thing we need to do, right? And then everyone gets on board. But there was a lot of kicking and screaming and doubting the early years. I think we're going to see that with remote work is made like the proving ground of do you really work this way or not as a manager? you get this or not? You cannot lead and manage people currently how you are going to in the future because they were talking about how the new generation. is coming on board and they just won't tolerate certain things. And I think you hit it on the head with that Scott, that if these managers don't learn how to lead and manage with this newer generation, two or three removed from what I'm talking about, you're not going to have any employees because they will not tolerate it. They do not work that way. It was always such fun to have both those people on our podcast and it was even more fun to have them both on at the same time. So I really appreciate both Lance and Scott really helping us celebrate there. The fact that we crossed that threshold into a Brian Milner (12:38.326) our 100th episode. Next up is someone that I found really fascinating. is Miss Heather McGowan. And she was the keynote speaker at the Scrum Gathering this year in New Orleans. And she was so gracious to come on the podcast and talk with us a little bit. She had some really great insights. Just listen to what she had to say here in thinking about sort of the place of work in general as a part of our lives today. But what I think what's really happening is we've outsized what work is in our lives. So community used to consist of social interactions, religious affiliations, clubs and groups we belong to, all of those kind of, if you think of them as circles, because everything's visual to me, all those circles shrank and work became bigger. So now part of this generational change, but more and more people are looking for work to provide their purpose. work to provide most of their relationships, work to fill these. It's a little bit in terms of how we're interacting with each other that's causing illness, but it's also an outsize expectation we have around work. So now it becomes table stakes for a lot of organizations for work to be my self-expression, work to be my sense of purpose, work to be where I think about my values. And it wasn't like that a few decades ago. I heard from a couple of people after this episode, just friends of mine talking about it. I want to make sure I'm clear about something here that Heather was saying, she's not saying that we should find our values from those places. She's just saying that's kind of how society has shifted a little bit. So you can debate whether it's good or bad, whether the other circles that she mentioned had shrunk or grown or anything like that. But really that's kind of the reality we're left with is that there's a lot of people who find their belongingness from work today, as I said, whether that's a good or bad thing, you can debate. but that's certainly a reality I think we have to live with. And this was a really interesting discussion. So I highly encourage you to check that out if you want to. That was episode number 111 with Heather McGowan. Next up was someone I found really interesting as well. This was Mr. Clinton Keith. Clinton is a veteran of the gaming industry. And I know there's always some interest in that in our listeners and in the Agile community about how you really can apply some of these Agile principles and things. Brian Milner (14:55.704) to an industry that's so fast moving like the gaming industry. Well, as I said, Clint has worked in that industry for a very long time and he's seen pretty much everything there. He's worked in all different kinds of gaming companies. He's helped them to learn and apply these agile principles along the way. So I'll just share a snippet of the conversation that we had. In this clip, he's talking really about how some of these principles we talk about like, individuals and interactions over processes and tools and are we letting something like a new technology drive how we do things or is it really more about what's the value we're trying to deliver, right? And in the gaming industry, it's fun. It's delivering something that's fun. So take a listen to what he had to say about kind of one of these experiences he had about really finding the fun. The big light bulb moment was having a short deadline on showing something of value. led to people making better choices from the player's perspective, not this challenge of, what can I do with artificial intelligence over the next two years? That's part of the big challenge with these big, huge games of saying, it's like, hey, if there's not a payoff, if you can't see value, and this was an early lesson I learned working with Nintendo of Japan, the guy that made Mario and Donkey Kong, we worked with him directly, Miyamoto. You always had this thing, it's like, the fun fast, show the value of it. And it always stuck with me. When you have these short deadlines, you want to encourage the teams and the product owners is judge the game. Not what you see in the potential in two years. Judge your vision of the two years against what you're seeing every other week and adjust your expectations. Don't fall in love with your vision. Judge the game. Don't fall in love with your vision. Such great advice there, and I think it's so applicable to really industry. Don't get caught up in that word game, right? Judge the product. Think about it that way. I think sometimes, especially for us as product owners, sometimes we can look at that and say, we've got these grand visions and grand designs for our product, in two years we're gonna have this incredible product that's gonna do all these things. Well, you may not make it to two years. You may not make it to two years if you don't. Brian Milner (17:16.897) deliver a value earlier, right? If you don't capture the imagination and attention of your customers, if you don't solve a problem for them upfront, we know the big idea is gonna take longer to get to, but I think what Clinton is saying here, and it's really an important point, I think, is that that's part of what we kind of focus on as Agilist is trying to find the value and deliver it early. So just a really fascinating episode there as well with Clinton. Encourage you to check that out, especially if you have interest in the gaming industry, lots of good content there from him in episode 120. Lastly today, I'm gonna leave you with one last one that wasn't too long ago here, but we had someone that is kind of a beloved figure in the Agile community. She's often referred to as an Agile visionary. That's Ms. Linda Rising. And she came on to talk about multiple things with us, but one of the things that she talked about in our conversation, was about a research project that Google did several years back called Project Aristotle. They were trying to figure out kind of the components, what went into making a high-performing team. So just listen to what Linda has to say about what their scientific research kind of uncovered about really what goes into making a team high-performing. All these different researchers made the same mistake in the beginning. and it's the same mistake organizations make. They thought in the beginning that what makes a smart team is smart people. Wrong. Not that you don't want smart people. You can have a team of very smart people that doesn't have any of these other characteristics that is not intelligent as a group. We really have to wake up and realize, first of all, that we're doing that, that we're valuing IQ or individual intelligence, smartness, you went to this school or you got that particular SAT score. It has nothing to do with that. It's not that there's no correlation, but it's weak. It's much better to have people who have these other characteristics. I just have to say Brian Milner (19:38.444) We are so spoiled Agile mentors with some of the great people like Linda Rising that we get to hear on this podcast and learn from really as sort of a masterclass from some of the best thinkers in this industry. And I know I'm very thankful for them taking their time and thankful for people like Linda Rising coming on the show. If that dialogue that you just heard there sounds interesting, check out that episode. It was episode 123. Linda talks about a lot of lot more great stuff there in that episode. But yeah, we get so many great guests on our show and that was just a handful. It's hard to even pick out just, I think we just had eight of them there. It's hard to pick out just eight over the past year, because there were just so many. And any of the other guests on here, I hope you don't feel like you were not in the top eight or anything. This was just a sampling. I just wanted to pull some different kinds of episodes and I think there was quite a variety of guests and topics and things that we had on the show this year. It just makes me excited about thinking about what's possible in the next year. I know we're gonna be trying some new things. I've been interacting with some of you at the Agile Mentors Community and you've been talking to me about some suggestions about things that maybe we can do. And we're gonna try that. We're gonna try some new things going into the new year. So you may see some shifts from time to time of just a few experiments that we might be trying. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on any of those things, but we're always in search of making this the most valuable use of your time. We think that the quality of the people, like you just heard, is pretty good. We're pretty happy with the people that really decide to come on the show, and we're very humbled by the fact that they choose to come on our show. I just wanna always make it the most valuable use of your time. We want this to be the most valuable Agile podcast that's out there. As always, if there's anything we can do to change that, I'll go ahead and just say that now. email us podcast at mountegoatsoftware.com. Put that at the end of every episode. Truly mean it. If there's things that you want us to experiment with or try, if there's guests you want to hear, in addition to some of these great guests you heard today, there's other people that maybe that you think would be good on the podcast, send us an email, podcast at mountegoatsoftware.com. Or if there's a topic that you want us to cover, let us know that as well. We'd be more than happy to try and put that in. In our planning, Brian Milner (22:01.666) we try to always put the listener's suggestion kind of towards the top of our backlog. It may not be the very next thing we do, but we try to make that as soon as possible. Oftentimes we have to find the right guest, but as soon as we find the right guest, we want to get that listener suggestion on as soon as possible. So thank you for those that have made suggestions in the past and keep them coming. I'll just go into a few other things then and wrap up and get you on your way. It's been fun looking back over the last year. And as I said, I'm excited about seeing where we go next year. Speaking of that, just make sure that you like and subscribe to the podcast. That way you don't miss any of these things, like any of these great episodes that you heard little snippets of here in this podcast episode. And with that, I guess that'll be a wrap for another year. So Agile Mentors, my heartfelt happy holidays to you. Whatever you celebrate this season, I truly, truly hope that you get to spend some time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. truly hope that you get some time to reflect on what you're grateful and thankful for. I hope you come back next year refreshed, ready to go. I hope that's part of your sustainable pace, that time of renewing with the people in your life that are closest to you. We look forward to seeing what happens with you in the new year. So join us back next year. We'll kick things off. We'll be back here in just a few weeks. And on the 8th of January will be our next episode that we release. And we'll have our... of annual sit down with Lance Dacey to look ahead to 2025 and see what's coming up then. So join us and hope you have a very, very happy holidays. See you next time on another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.
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  • #127: Agile Strategies for Job Market Uncertainty with Mark Kilby
    How do you navigate a bumpy job market with an agile mindset? Join Brian and leadership coach Mark Kilby as they explore practical strategies for staying prepared, leveraging your network, and taking ownership of your career during uncertain times. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, Brian Milner and Mark Kilby explore how to approach the challenges of today’s unpredictable job market with an agile mindset. Drawing on insights from Mark’s extensive career as a leadership and career coach, they discuss how preparation, adaptability, and proactive networking are essential to staying ahead. Mark emphasizes the importance of treating your career like a product, continuously iterating and inspecting trends to navigate change effectively. The conversation also delves into the power of maintaining strong professional relationships, keeping your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date, and using experimentation to explore new career paths. Whether you're facing a career transition, considering your next step, or simply looking to stay prepared, this episode offers actionable advice to help you take ownership of your professional journey. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mark Kilby From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver by Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community 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. Mark Kilby is a leadership and career coach specializing in helping leaders and teams thrive in complexity. Passionate about building more inclusive and effective organizations, he draws on years of experience guiding professionals through organizational change, remote work transitions, and sustainable growth, all with a focus on fostering trust, collaboration, and long-term success. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back and this is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and today I've got a friend that I have seen talk several times at conferences, we were talking, I don't think I've actually crossed paths with him personally yet, but Mr. Mark Kilby is here. Welcome in Mark. Mark Kilby (00:21) Thank you, Brian, and glad that we finally had a chance to meet virtually face to face at least. Brian (00:26) Right? Right? Yeah. And today's world, you know, that's actually saying a lot. You know, that's kind of the default. Mark is a leadership and career coach and has been, you know, a speaker at multiple Agile conferences over the years. He has a book that he co-authored called From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And he has spoken on lots of different topics. Mark Kilby (00:31) Yes it is. Brian (00:51) But when we talked about having him on, we talked about a topic that I know is very topical here. For some of you, maybe, know, kind of right in the meat of where you are at the moment, but really starting to think about this bumpy job market a little bit and how to navigate that with an agile mindset. You know, this agile stuff is not just stuff we talk about in working with a team, but it actually is a way of thinking about you know, doing anything. give me kind of your description there, Mark. When you think about, you know, navigating a bumpy job market with an agile mindset, how does that look different from others? Mark Kilby (01:27) So, well, it. The best way to think about this is whether you get this out of college at career placement or you're working with a career coach later on, it's always plan out your route and just follow the steps. Well, it's kind of hard over the last couple of years to say what the right steps are because so much has happened. And you and I were talking just before we hit the record button about one of the things that gets a little bumpy here in Florida, and we call those hurricanes. And I've learned over the many years living in Florida that you can prepare for hurricanes, but you can't prepare for exactly what happens. And so it's kind of the same way these days with our careers. You can maybe get certain certifications, you may get the right resume, the right LinkedIn profile, but if... If you're not paying attention to how the market shifts, and I think many people have been caught off guard with the latest market shifts, you can be in a world of hurt. how do do the prep to weather that storm? So that's kind what I'm focusing on these days. Brian (02:42) That's awesome. That's awesome way to look at it. Cause I think you're right. know, like I know I personally have gone through a couple of, you know, layoff periods in my career and, you know, it's never something when it hits, well, at least I shouldn't say this in my experience, I absolutely were completely prepared for, they were a little bit of a shock when they happened and Mark Kilby (02:51) yeah. Brian (03:05) first one much more so than the second one. I think you learn something from each time something like that happens. But you mentioned kind of the way the market is shifting and the way things are changing a little bit and trying to be prepared. So I wanna follow that for a little. So when you talk about navigating kind of a bumpy job market and the shifts and being prepared, how do you prepare for the unknown? For things that you don't really know what's coming or you don't really know how things are shifting. How do we do that? Mark Kilby (03:38) Yeah. Well, it's paying attention to some of the longer term trends. mean, 100 years ago, know, kind of fall into the hurricane example. We had no way to predict these. And now we've got a little better way. have models to kind of guess and it's still guessing. So, but at least we have a sense of, OK, how big is it going to be? You know, how big is the change that's going to happen? How do we prepare for it? Do we stay in place? Where we're at? Is it time to move and do something else? So it's kind of the same way with our careers these days. I'm gonna guess, not everyone's gonna have the visual, but with the amount of gray on the podcast right now, you could probably relate to this. Our parents probably stuck in the same job. most of their life. I learned early on, especially in tech, the changes that happen rapidly. Matter of fact, the place where I went as a summer intern shut down the next year. The whole plant went poof. But my parents were like, how can you? It's such a great place. This company's been around for decades. But I could tell that the winds were changing. Something was shifting there. So I learned to look at, right, how is the business doing? How is the market doing for the business? And what does that mean for me? So it really helps that we kind of build up our own little model to predict, you know, how is my job going to be here in the next year or so? Even five years ago, I saw early indicators that Azure coaches, scrum masters, we're going to be at risk. But the job market was going to turn. think several people could tell that. But I mean, we had so many that were going into that, that the set of roles and we were also, you we we were seeing some failures as well as successes with transformation. And I remember, so I actually had Ken Schwaber in my, as my my Scrum instructor, I remember him saying, know, Scrum will not solve your problems. It'll make them highly visible. But guess who gets blamed? The person who made it visible. you know, as, as agile coaches and Scrum masters, you know, were the, those folks in particular are always navigating a tightrope. You know, what, what do you, you know, what do you make visible, both the good and the bad? And if, if you're dealing, Brian (05:55) Yeah. Right. Mark Kilby (06:17) with cultures that are more focused on short-term kind of improvements and not looking at the longer term. How are people staying engaged? How are the steam aligned so they can do to deliver business value? You know, if that's not a focus of the organization, then it's that job, that role is going to be probably misunderstood and was. And so when things start going bad, fingers start getting pointed. It's like, okay, maybe we don't need these folks. And we've seen that for the last couple of years in particular, but we were getting early indicators well before that, well before the pandemic hit. So that shift was gonna happen. So we can model some of this is my point. Brian (07:01) Yeah. I like that. Go ahead. Well, I was going to go straight to that. I I like the comparison there with the hurricane. And I was thinking as you were talking about that, why are we better at it now? I would kind of presuppose it's because of the amount of data. But the more data we have, over the years, the better we are. And that if we've suddenly, magically, for whatever reason, lost all our historical data of hurricanes and what they do, then I would imagine we'd be back to square one of not really being able to predict very well about where they go. So translating that over into our careers, I love that comparison. And I love what you're pointing to to say, you can see indicators, can look at the trends, you can see how's the business doing. So that's kind of one of the things I want to ask you about a little bit is, especially here in this agile world, I know there's, I've heard lots of talk about, is this overall an agile thing that is on a decline or is this really more driven as an economy at large that's going through problems. And so we're kind of trickling down from that and feeling that. if I'm an employee for a company, what I'm trying to navigate then and figure out is I want to see trends for our business on the whole, but I also am trying to... Mark Kilby (08:38) Mm-hmm. Brian (08:40) fit that in with what the overall economy is and the market out there to see, is this just an overall thing for all of businesses right now and for the full economy or is this specifically something to do with our business that is kind of a, I would think a bigger warning sign than to start to get more prepared. Mark Kilby (08:59) Well, going back to the hurricane metaphor again, there's multiple things that impact that. It's the same thing for our jobs. So it's what data do you need to gather? And you pointed out to some of that. So what's happening with the company? What are you seeing in press releases? What are you seeing in commentary on your organization? I'll give an example of a company that no longer exists. So can safely speak about this company. So a company I was at early in my career and was well known in the Java programming space. They actually hosted a lot of Java sites at the time. They were also at the top of the, not the AI boom, but what was called the internet boom, know, dot com boom way back. And they went through the same Friends that a lot of companies did spending a lot of money Not pulling not pulling in revenue and it was very public how much they were spending When it became obvious that they bought like very expensive real estate office real estate in in Boston Harbor area and they bought very expensive real estate elsewhere You don't have to be a financial wizard to figure out like all right if they're spending all this money and and we're seeing pundits in other news sources say, yeah, we're not sure about this company. And you're seeing a lot of that. You might start to wonder as an employee, like, I wonder if I am really safe here. Is it time to hunker down or is it time to move? So you've got to gather your own data about your company, your industry, and even the broader economy. If you ignore that, you kind of ignore it at your own peril. We have to be the product owners of our own career. Brian (10:47) Mm, I love that. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Well, so shifting gears a little bit, because I think we obviously are not going to, we're soothsayers or anything. We can't foretell the future exactly. And there's always going to be things that kind of catch us off guard. There's the unknowns and that's Mark Kilby (10:48) Yeah. Yeah. Brian (11:10) Partly what we talk about a lot in Agile is just the idea that you can't know everything upfront. So you got to be prepared. You got to have a system that works for you that kind of allows for those unknowns to come along and then allows you to adjust as you're going through. So that's kind of where I want to go next then is if we accept the fact that, we have indicators and they can give us an indication about the job market or about our company. And we have to kind of assess those independently to see if it's time to move or we should be ready for something to happen or not. Once that threshold is crossed, once we make that decision, or it's made for us, then we're into a whole other world. And we talk about this being a bumpy job market. Well, it's bumpy on both sides of that threshold. So how would that apply to you? After you've crossed that threshold, how do we use Agile and an Agile mindset to navigate the task and the hardships of trying to find the next thing? Mark Kilby (12:16) Well, there's even a little bit before that. So that's OK, but a great question. And I'll come back around to it. So just as you're starting any agile project or program, there's some setup. There's some prep that you have to put in place. And I'm going to tie back to the hurricane metaphor here also. There are seasons for that prep sometimes. So think about the season you're in. Brian (12:18) Okay, sorry. Mark Kilby (12:41) month to month, quarter to quarter, and maybe you're wrapping up a big program, that would be a great time to update your resume and your LinkedIn. Not waiting until you're out of a job, but go ahead and just like, you know, I think I'm going to update. And people will say, but I don't want other people to know that I've updated my LinkedIn profile. There's an option for that. You can shut that off so that doesn't happen. But you want to get in that, that there's prep seasons like, okay, if something were to happen, what do I need to do? What do I, what, what I need to have ready? So keeping that resume up to date, keeping that LinkedIn profile up to date, then looking at, okay, I I've kind of doing these, these cycles of, of prep and also reflection on past work. Maybe I want to think about what was the work I enjoyed that I want to amplify through. LinkedIn, resume, and maybe even talk about a LinkedIn and kind of be broadcasting a little bit. I really enjoyed this project we just finished up. That gets you a little bit out there. And I can already hear the introverts cringing. But if you talk about the ideas, what you learned as an introvert, that works for me. Brian (13:47) Hahaha. Mark Kilby (13:56) I mean, that's how I got into remote work because I found interesting ideas and concepts to talk about. And that's how I got known by that. I looking to make a job switch? No. But I was broadcasting, hey, this is the kind of stuff I really enjoy doing, hoping to attract others who are also interested in that. And yes, it did lead to new job opportunities. So I got hired in 2014 because of the stuff I posted in LinkedIn around those times. So it's kind of doing that inspect and adapt, inspecting, where am I currently as I wrap up a big significant chunk of work? How do I capture some of that? What do I want to reflect? And what do I want to kind of make transparent about what I liked about that? Then let's say the winds turn and things get a little bumpy. Well, if you've... If you've been kind of connecting people, connecting with people online, if you've been kind of talking about, this is kind of things I do, it's much easier to go out there and say, hey, I'm looking for a new opportunity. You've seen what I've talked about online. What ideas, what do you have network? What do you have community? So it makes it much easier if you do some of that prep work and kind of reflect and inspect into that. Brian (15:20) Yeah, I'm getting a connection there too. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but I'm getting kind of a connection because I know in the agile world, we're all about how teams work together and just kind of that whole mindset of the best architectures, designs, right? The best stuff comes from a group of people working alongside each other. And I'm connecting that a little bit to what you just said, because you're talking a lot about how you're reaching out to the community through your LinkedIn profile and through post and other things. And that feels a little like you're kind of teaming, like you're teaming up with the network that you've made to try to solve this big problem that you have. Mark Kilby (16:05) And from a career standpoint, we team in different ways. mean, how many of us have been to courses, conferences, we've met people that we've kind of connected with, or we've talked about some great ideas, like, yeah, let's stay connected, let's talk more about that. How often do you follow up with those people? Do you like forget until the next conference? Do you maybe check in every six months? Maybe a little sooner? Maybe say, hey, what kind of projects are you working on based on that idea we talked about? Reach out to those connections that you made. of just not to keep them warm, but just to say, hey, what are you working on? How does it compare to what I'm working on? Let's just talk about that. Let's do some more reflection on that. Brian (16:49) I think that's great advice because I hear what you were saying earlier and agree. It's kind of a struggle when you're working at a company and you're not really sure yet whether you're moving on or you're not and no one has told you anything. But you're starting to feel the signs and you're starting to look around and say, maybe it's time, but it's not right for me to just blast it. It's not right for me to go to LinkedIn and... Mark Kilby (17:02) Mm hmm. Yeah. Brian (17:15) Because you don't want the boss or coworker to see that and say, what's going on? You don't want that to happen. But I think you're right. There's more subtle ways you can do that by just starting to connect to key people in your network. And I like that phrase. I like being able to say, hey, what's going on in this area? Or what have you done in this area that we talked about when we last connected? I think that's a great approach to that. Mark Kilby (17:40) because it's so much easier to ask for help when you need it then, rather than if you haven't talked to that person in five years since you saw them in a conference. But if you stayed in touch and just talked about, hey, here's some things I'm dealing with at work, how about you? What are you coming across? What are you learning? What are you trying? Or what are you struggling with? And if they know you're struggling, then they might say, hey, you know, I heard of this opportunity. And that's where the network helps you. That's where the team helps you out. Brian (18:12) Yeah. They always say that, you know, like that's the, that's your strongest avenue to, to another job is, is, you know, a personal connection and inroad, to the company. Cause you bypass all the, you know, all the silly AI stuff of scanning through resumes and do you have the right keywords and all that stuff? which, know, that's a whole other thing. but, you know, if you do, I think you're right. If you can make that personal connection. Mark Kilby (18:34) Mm-hmm. Brian (18:39) your resume can go to the top of the pile. You skip the initial vetting, you go to the interview, and once you get the interview, then you're golden from that point forward. Yeah, I love that. That's a great approach and I like the idea of continuing to maintain that network. But I will tell you, from my first layoff to my second layoff and how I kind of approach things was very, very different. And I'm kind of curious how this fits in with what you advise people as well, because I know my first layoff, I got a little snowed by certain people where I started to make strong connections. I started to go through energy process with people and they're in the full recruitment mode at that point, because they don't know if it's going to be you or somebody else. if you get to be... you know, one of the finalists, they're interviewing you, but they're also recruiting you. And I know I made that mistake early in my career of just thinking, well, I'm close. I'm close with these things. So I don't need to worry about continuing to do the day-to-day hard work of reaching out and making new connections and starting the process new. Because I don't want to lead them on. I don't want anybody to think that I'm, you know, interested when I'm so close with this other one over here. Mark Kilby (19:45) yeah. Brian (19:54) And yeah, I learned pretty quickly that's a mistake. know, those things, there's no promises. And you know, you gotta keep turning that crank every day of sending things out. So how does that fit in a little bit with the strategy? Mark Kilby (19:58) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well. Well. mean, to map it back to Azure concepts, you never prepped just one thing on the backlog. You're looking at what are some things that might pop up in this next sprint or this next phase of work? What is it that we might consider, but we're gonna make the final decision when it's time to make that decision? So you can't be in that stage as you talk about those final conversations and you're still doing the dance with them. It's like. You're confirming is this the right place and they're confirming are you the right one to bring in? That's not the decision point. The decision point is when the offer is made. So you've got to get some other things. You got to keep some other things going in the backlog. Keep it going, keep it going. And I would say even once you've accepted that offer, you might wait a week. because I've had some colleagues where they've gone in, they've gone through those interviews and maybe everything wasn't as advertised in the position. I think some of us have been in that where you go and it's like, this is not the job I signed up for. So keep those other connections warm for a week or two, just in case, just in case. Brian (21:24) Yeah, that's great advice. I tell a story sometimes to people in the classes about how there was a job I went to that's interviewed and they were asking me all sorts of agile questions. They wanted me to come in because of my agile expertise. I get in and unfortunately for me, it took a few months before it became clear that they were actually hearing the word agile from their division leader. And the division leader was not using capital A Agile. They were using small a Agile and saying, we just need to be faster. But he would throw out the word Agile. And so they heard Agile and thought, well, we need to know about this Agile thing. And yeah, that was not a good fit. That was not as advertised. I wish I had found that out earlier. But you make the decisions when you cross that threshold. Well, this is good advice. And I'm kind of curious then as well, you know, maybe taking it back a higher step because, you know, maybe I'm not in the place where I'm trying to decide, is it time to leave? But, you know, part of navigating a job market is also navigating a career and trying to understand what's the right next path for me or what's the right next step to get to the next level of where I think I should be in my career. How would you kind of apply an agile mindset to that kind of a process? Mark Kilby (22:44) So I will say, since I started with extreme programming, I'll bring in another concept, the spike. How do you set up an experiment where you can explore, is this possible or not? So let's say you're an individual contributor and you're wondering, should I take on a management? Brian (22:51) Okay. Mark Kilby (23:04) How can you experiment with that? So are you a member of any volunteer organizations? Can you lead an effort and see what that looks like to coordinate people? To actually maybe plan a budget to get some event going? What would that look like for you? What does it look like when not everybody's cooperating? Because when you deal with volunteer teams, it gets way more interesting than it works sometimes. Because you're really trying to appeal to their motivation. You can't fire them if they're a volunteer usually. So if you look for how can I experiment with what's next? And is there some way I can lean into some of the same activities? And then when I go and apply for that management position, say, yeah, I've run some of these things at my church or at this community center, and I've organized this, I've set the budgets for that. So you're already demonstrating some of the possibilities. You're trying to decide, this something that I enjoy, that I will benefit from, that I can lean into that next phase of my career? Brian (24:12) Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's really great. Well, this topic is, I think, so topical for a lot of people and, well, just about everyone. Because we're all at some stage of our career, and we're all at some stage of our relationship with the place we're at at the moment. I think we all have to be aware. I think we have to keep our eyes open and ears open. And like you said, try to find those sources of data that can clue me in as to what my situation is and maybe what I need to be prepared for. Is the hurricane coming my way or has it turned? Mark Kilby (24:44) Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Brian (24:48) Before I let you go though, I do want to take just a second here before we wrap things up. Because I mentioned your book earlier, the book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And I know you've done lots of talks and research on distributed agile teams far before COVID happened. So I guess I'll ask you what What do you think has changed today in the years since COVID, when things now things have started to settle a little bit more? How has the nature of distributed teams shifted in just the past few years? Mark Kilby (25:25) Well, I think we're seeing some of those shifts even in the last couple months with the call away from hybrid to fully back in the office. We've seen it with Amazon, we saw it with Dell, we're seeing it with others. So I think we're seeing the companies and the management that was looking at what's next, what's possible, and those that are like, no, we like things the way they work. I assume that we're going to see many existing hybrid setups go away. I see, I think there's very few that are going to survive. There have been some other companies that have gone fully remote, but I think we're going to see a lot more of return fully to the office because it's really hard to live in both spaces at once to be in the office and be remote. It's, it's just too difficult. We probably didn't amplify that enough in the book. That's the one thing that Johanna and I, we've talked many times about updating the book and it's like, no, not yet. It's not quite time. Let's let this phase pass. But I think we're going to see things go back to almost 2018 where there's some companies that are doing well remote. And it's not just startups because there's companies, thousand, 2000 employees that are functioning well, fully remote, but it takes a different mindset. Brian (26:29) Yeah. Mark Kilby (26:49) around how do you connect, do you keep people engaged, how do you keep them motivated. So all those things that we were all forced to answer during the pandemic, some of these companies have been answering that a little bit more, I would say thoughtfully rather than being forced to answer them. Brian (27:09) That's a nice way to look at it. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, mean, so much road has passed our tires from when you guys started that. I mean, you wrote that prior to COVID, right? Yeah. Yeah, talk about a great timing. mean, you guys were really visionary looking ahead there. I'm sure there's no way you could have known there was going to be a massive pandemic, but yeah. Mark Kilby (27:20) Yeah, yeah, it came out late 2018. No, no. Brian (27:32) It was very timely when that happened to have that knowledge available for folks. Mark Kilby (27:36) Yeah, were, well, I want to add, we were never in the mindset that every organization should go remote. That was never ever our intention. But for those who wanted to go remote, that's what that book was for. Brian (27:44) Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And you know, I know that's not our, not really what we, we focused on the, the podcast here, but I did want to just kind of dip into that a little bit for folks, just in case that is a topic that's of interest to anyone here listening as well. If you're really looking for information in that area, strongly encourage that book for, for you again, from chaos to successful distributed agile teams. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can find it so they can, you know, find your work and. to follow up and any last thoughts here before we close it out? Mark Kilby (28:26) Yeah, so I would say whatever you're struggling with, step back from that. I don't care if it's remote work. I don't care if it's a career challenge, but step back and look at what are the patterns that you're seeing and how can you inspect and adapt for those patterns. That's an agile mindset. Brian (28:47) I love that. Yeah, it tends to follow that if we put to practice these things we're teaching, you know, and talking about and trying to do in our organizations now and kind of apply that to other areas of our life that, you know, we're going to see similar results. So, I really appreciate you coming on. this has been a great conversation. And, and, as I said, I know, Mark, there's going to be lots of people listening who are just going to eat this up because, you know, if you're in that position, You know, you're looking for any kind of help that you can get. So I hope this is really helpful to folks and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge in this area. Mark Kilby (29:22) Thanks, Brian, for having me on. Brian (29:25) Absolutely.
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