Empowering Development Teams: Cultivating an Agile Mindset for Lasting Quality

oh my name’s Martin Intuit I’m a professional scum trainer with scrum the dark as well as a Microsoft MVP I’m here in Scotland and my good friend Jim is over in where are you Jim I’m in the United States in the Midwest Midwest Ohio Ohio okay so that’s if there’s a delay or there’s a problem that might be because of the internet isn’t this about that well this is kind of just after lunch in the US yeah it’s three o’clock my time here everybody’s know Netflix yet probably within the hour or so so I am interested in the question that you had for me the other day could you give me that you remember what it was yeah so I got a call from a colleague of mine who is on the agile journey let’s say and his current struggle is from a technical perspective so he has a number of development teams and his his developers just don’t they’re not thinking in an agile manner they are not validating and getting good feedback from customers and frankly to be honest the biggest thing is they just don’t seem to really care about bad quality going out the door or not meeting the customers needs and these are internal customers and a corporation but you know he was asking me how would you train development team members on agile and scrum and that was really where I reached out to you because my expertise is more around product ownership and scrum mastery than it is working you know in teaching development skills yeah I don’t think this is an evolved no problem but I’m curious to hear what you think yeah I was I was literally just thinking that I was thinking that it doesn’t sound like a development skill problem I find that in engineers tend to be reasonably smart people um and the reason you might have a problem is because they’re they’re disengaged from work so just like you would expect a product owner or scrum master to step up and um maybe being a little bit I don’t know what the word is blunt maybe step up and do their job I also suspect an engineering team to step up and do theirs but if they’re disengaged with the work that tends to be a cultural problem yeah and that’s really where my comments to him when is you know we can do technical practices we can teach TDD we can do pair programming and mob programming sessions and we can talk about you know iterative design and emergent design and all that but really it seems like how do you get people to care and how do you get them to care about quality and have some pride in workmanship pride and craftsmanship and the interesting thing about that is their business is very manufacturing focused so they are used to delivering end products like tangible goods to customers so I think there’s some interesting analogies there around caring about quality and customer feedback and you know kind of that that aspect of software craftsmanship is definitely a difficult one because if you do have people the are technically competent it’s it’s always possible that you don’t but if you do have people that are technically come and then it comes down to the the X the intrinsic motivations rather than extrinsic motivations and you’ll be familiar with Dan Pink’s book drive and talking about autonomy mastery and purpose and that’s usually where I would start for an engineering team is um look at what are they lacking in those three things right yeah that’s good I could I’ve spent quite a bit at a time with some of these teams so I think I could take a few guesses but I mean it would be presumptuous of me to know at the individual level but I think at the high level their autonomy is probably not great in their per their sense of purpose is probably a pretty low the thing I don’t know the dimension I don’t know is their mastery because I know you know here the the feeling of I need a two pair program with experience out and developers to teach them skills so I think there’s two aspects to it I think there’s a technical concern that they’re not great developers and then I think mindset can people to care how do you teach people do think soles and Keith doesn’t mind their work yeah exactly you were breaking up a little bit there it wasn’t too bad I think it was an internet issue that’s just the world we live in yeah and I’m sure I’m sure it’ll be in fine as we go ya know I’ve noticed a few things have happened recently and that’s that I decided I wanted another webcam because I have I have another monitor over here and when I’m looking at this monitor it looks like I’m not looking at you yeah and I went to by having to buy a webcam yeah and there aren’t any left no no hair clippers either oh yeah this is terrible this is the worst mine has been in years yeah my wife’s been complaining quite a lot but we just don’t have Clippers she’s got a pair of scissors but I don’t know if I want to let her have a goal with a pair of scissors yeah interesting stop yeah you know who’s still got Clippers in stock I bet two pet stores nice stores stores yeah that’s a good point I was at a pet store over the weekend and then they had a whole shelf load of Clippers so yeah it is interesting I read an interesting article which I guess is part meant for the type of work that we do in floor as to why there’s so many shortages and the article was talking about the the the flow of goods has more than one channel so for example for toilet paper which is currently substantially missing from shelves and lots of there are companies that make commercial grade toilet paper and those don’t make it onto the supermarket shelves and we’re no longer using commercial grade those distribution channels are empty you know they’ve got all the toilet paper but nobody to use them and the the EM was it the opposite of commercial the public consumer consumer is looking for thank you the consumer chains are getting overloaded because of just that switch so there everybody’s making the same amount of toilet paper we’re just using it differently yeah I think this is akin to like the nineteen forties where new markets are gonna pop up so things that were used to dispose of we’re now gonna be like what can we use this for and then so there’s gonna be this use of byproducts and it’ll be really interesting to see if we kind of kick off this second self-sustaining generation this of you know being self-sufficient and eating what you grow and and using the most of everything and this could be an amazing shift away from rampant consumerism but it’s funny I did a consumer products company last year and I feel that right now there is the data science experiment going on in every retail store in the world which is two things it’s buying patterns it’s so what are people buying first in times of hysteria I am more intrigued by the products that are left on the shelves so what is the last bag of pretzels bought what is the last jar of peanut butter what is the last type of toilet paper to be grabbed and what would influence those decisions and do companies and retailers care or what a date of scientists and I’m not a data scientist say you know you can’t make any decisions during a time like this because it’s unprecedented and it’s not significant from a data perspective because of the hysteria an impulse nature of things I don’t know but to me it’s always shocking to be like look at all the ketchups why is that one ketchup left and all the other ones are gone like what does that tell that producers in a few images from people taking pictures in supermarkets of the vegan aisle in the supermarket and everything’s still there I did think that was I noticed it in my local supermarket as well and that all of the the meat replacement goods were where all the shelves were fully stocked and it’s funny I did have some recently and it’s pretty tasty it’s just not the go-to that people think of when we when we go shopping yeah yeah yeah I think again and I don’t want to get to like Phyllis it if you think about which of your principles will be the last to go and which ones are the first to go so I I have a friend who’s a vegan or was a vegan and it’s like I don’t care I’m eating meat right now because I need protein and there there are amassing meat so they quickly let that principle go out of for many reasons fear Asteria impulse etcetera but it just is it’s very telling in my opinion I agree and it depends how how long this goes on for both of those things you know what’s the last what’s your last principle to go as well as and whether the data science is going to have an impact whether changes significant changes need to be made to the the distribution pipeline and I think there are some people I’ve been reading some articles people talking about everything changing and that it will just be different from from now on but then it hasn’t been that different in Asia where they’ve been through something like this before they still have rampant consumerism they still have and they probably just wears masks you see that uh a lot and even just people wear them anyway when they’re out and I think it is it’s going to be interesting how how long this goes on for what’s going to change because um we’ve got an expectation in the UK from our our what was he called the the health person in chief the chief scientist behind some of the decisions they’re making and he says is six to twelve months yeah we’re going to be in some kind of restricted set up they’ve already said that the schools here I don’t know what it’s been like for you guys but the schools here aren’t going back till after the summer holidays so that’s August before the schools go back at the earliest and I guess they’ll reassess then and see what’s going on but homeschooling is something that seems to be happening a lot in some places have have their act together for schools doing some kind of distance learning and other places they’re just emailing some homework and hoping people do it yeah you know I I had a conversation the other day with a family member and she was like you know man wouldn’t this be I’ve been great when we were kids and I said no because we’d be bored like when I hear kids today just want to smack a website there you have no board in 2020 but would be different back than like how would even if I was in maybe working through the drive-through homework assignments and bring them home redeliver them but available now that and exist five one year so yeah it’s it’s unprecedented so to bring it back to what you and I do for a safety yeah say if we talk about principles what principles do you think are even more important now and that team should focus on and and really spend a lot of time working to strengthen given this new I’m calling it our new Wow our way of working so give it our new Wow what’s more important than ever before I would I would think I’m coming back to to some of the the scrum values probably makes sense for for me and I think it’s gonna be really hard to get and teams to have the same level of commitment to each other that they can have in person when you can poke the other person you know that other person is there when you can’t see somebody you’ve you’ve said you’ll do something for is the same level of commitment going to going to be going to be a parent and how do we create that same level of commitment I’m just hoping teams are not thinking that they only need to talk during the daily scrum yeah somebody a scrum master or asked me the other day hey does it feel that you like we have more meetings now and I got thinking it does and it is as I look at my calendar and I have a number of quick 1520’s let’s say discuss this technical problem or discuss this plan or do this where those conversations would have happened organically in the off and a drive-by you know like walking up to goal having a what if we had to go third-person we just now you see I’m gonna schedule time to make sure you’re in the WebEx camera and able to you know miss so it does feel like there’s more of a schedule nature to work it’s interesting though you talk about like I think what I heard you talking about was follow-up like committing like delivery commitments to each other a lot of times lately where I have forgotten owed somebody something pretty small because I just get destroyed I don’t I’m not as focused as I was before in the office and I didn’t have all my tools and trappings available to keep me focused on the work at hand so I find it easier for little things to slip through but and the flip side of that is more attitude now and I’m like yeah I think I can you know give me two minutes I’m gonna run to the to the kitchen fine I’ll be right back and I can do that you know at work me being distracted Thanks yeah I I agree and I think especially with everybody off everybody are the schools being off and people’s kids being at home there can’t be the same expectation of commitment from folks anyway yeah I think it’s going to be very difficult to find to find that level of commitment yeah do the metrics change at all or do you think that the metrics that leadership and the organization cares about is gonna change if this persists for months and months it depends if if leadership are focused on yeah I’m gonna use a bad phrase I don’t like using it the metrics they should be rather the metrics they shouldn’t then I don’t think the the shoot change we should be looking at fart for engineering teams or any teams building some kind of product or some kind of output then we should be looking at value delivery are we getting the most valuable thing it doesn’t really matter whether people spend 12 hours a day or 2 hours a day if we’re getting enough value that we as an organization and our customers are happy with the output that we’re getting then then or sorry the output I used the wrong word again the outcomes that we’re getting then it’s irrelevant how much people actually work right but I think and again I’m making some leaps here is an organization that has a really good track record of measuring outcomes and value could easily say hey we’re getting the same or greater value delivered than we used to but think about a company or organization who had what their value was and they were only measuring output in activities like hours billed or lines of code written my fear is they are going to over index even more so and over focus on getting every drop of orange juice out of that out of that fruit and say I have to squeeze harder and how to and say well hey you’re getting what you’ve always gotten you know so you should be happy with you know we have lower costs probably and we’re getting the same but just to say that we have to know what the same was yeah so a company that didn’t do the hard work early to figure out how to measure and track value delivery doesn’t have a baseline yeah I totally get that and I think that it’s gonna be very difficult for those those companies to figure out what what they’re going to do and I have I have a slight inkling that those companies will just die I I’ve got a feeling that and as they realize that from their perspective they’re not getting their return on investment because they investment is based on quantity of work not quality of work so they feel that they are not getting the return on investment they divest themselves of employees in order to how many how many employees in the last how many people signed on in the that’s British expression what’s it called when you register for as unemployed in the US there’s a name for it I can remember the USA’s we called signing on here fire file if I oh yeah I’ll file for yeah yeah um Ted over 10 million people have filed in the last two weeks in the US and it’s it’s not in as high a percentage of that as that here in the UK mainly because the government is paying eighty percent of people’s salaries you know for companies to stay in business and not not go out of business but I think companies that are focused solely on the bottom line solely on profit so Leon’s that squeezed squeezing more juice out I think I think they’re gonna go they’re gonna go bust they’re gonna they’re gonna break yeah and III I think there are exceptions but I think that’s what will happen there’s two really interesting things I that I see one is people are being extra sensitive to expecting less like I see people expecting less so it’ll be interesting to see if this how far this goes if that correlates to people’s take on the workplace and measuring and caring about the right things but the other thing and completely different is if I think about some of the really good people that I work with over the years and I’m like why are you still here you know you seem to hate your job you don’t seem to like this company no yeah but I’m comfortable you know I’ve been coming to this building every day for twelve years and I’ve been working with the same people but imagine if you take all of that comfort away and everybody starts working remotely even most to the time well then changing your employer is just as simple as changing which VPN you log into and what your email address is in your workplace the people you interact with the building your commute none of that matters so what you might see is a higher propensity for people to switch employers to ones that value the right things or seem to value them more because it’s the barrier to switches is greatly diminish that time limit it’s as people either switched to employers who actually care rather than pretend to care um or start their own businesses to fill a gap in the market and care and hire people who care maybe maybe this could be a big push for the purely capitalistic focused organizations who are going to struggle if they’re though there was a big push and towards a lean but in the wrong way you know III ever I have a horrible story about how lean was implemented Lean Six Sigma if you’re familiar with the term Lean Six Sigma was implemented in an organization that I worked with and where the IT support department did you know Six Sigma training they got a six sigma consultant turn they spent three months doing this figuring out what they were going to do and then they implemented it and what the implemented was shadow masks on their workstations where their coffee cup goes at the end of the day where their keyboard goes at the end of the day where their mouse goes at the end of the day and my first question was yeah that see that face you’ve got that’s the exact face I had when they were presenting presenting their awesomeness that they’d managed to do in this Six Sigma world and and for me they just completely missed the point they missed the point so they were they were focusing on you know that that part of lean where you would maybe optimize your workspace and because maybe the consultant came out of a manufacturing world and they’re talking around it in a manufacturing world it was in fact a manufacturing company so it there’s a little bit of synergy there that would be that that level of expertise and but somebody on in IT the physical world is not their world and my first question was can I find files on the file server quicker no that can I create a support ticket quicker can I find out what’s going on quicker and I think that missing missing the point is happening quite a lot in our industry it’s why people talk about all agile is dead or scrum is dead it’s not that it’s dead people have just used the terms and features incorrectly I know that’s I’m trying not to be religious about it it’s it’s it might work just fine but they’re they’ve messed with the name or implemented it in a way that doesn’t necessarily provide them with the value that they were looking for and then they complain that the thing doesn’t work when in fact it’s the implementation that doesn’t work and then backing off and not inspecting and adapting is the complete untag Anette antagonistic opposite of agility yeah yeah that’s a lot to impact but something tells me that that company read or attended some work by Poul acres with two second lean which is a great room box is a great YouTube channel and a great company and a lot of those little kind of workspace hacks come from his world what end to second lien is what can you do in your day to save two seconds like how can you optimize you them so if you create two little Mark’s in your lunchroom and this is where the salt shaker goes and this is where the pepper shaker goes that might save two seconds but then when we encourage people to say how can you say two seconds they end up saying well I found this thing that can save 30 minutes or I found this thing that can save five hours so it’s really about getting people thinking about waste and seeing the value in the 5s is one of which is you know sorting and standardize this works there’s value in that as far as building habits I think some of the philosophy is if we help people get good at organizing and see organizing as a way to reduce waste they will figure out how to store files on a file server more efficiently yep but I think so many times people stop at the easy stuff and they don’t do the hard work to say okay great you figured out where my keyboard could set on my desk but what are we doing about that big giant problem in you know the IT world or that big database problem that we have over there and it’s making that leap from the mindset of agility to the hard work and practice of agility I agree and that’s the the thing that I see time and again in organizations and it doesn’t matter whether you call it lean whether you call it a jewel or scrum or Kanban or DevOps it doesn’t matter what you call it the same fundamental goal is there and is often often missed no I know you don’t come from our DevOps background you’re correct yeah well yes and now my background before I got into the world of advil was all infrastructure so client-server cloud network all that so I touch with DevOps a little bit so I have a systems background not a development background but I’d say more kind of my background was always in building high-performing teams and knowing that my special power - skill wasn’t in always doing the work but it was motivating inspiring and helping others do their best work and that’s kind of the world I live in the most cool so what what what does it be you’re working on just I’m so right now I’m an agile coach and scrum master and trainer for insight so I do a lot of different things but I am primarily a working scrum master an agile coach on a product line at a large company here in the United States so I’m working with development teams and other scrum masters who get really really important work done tech very technical work and it’s really stretched my skills it’s taught me a lot that this engagement has taught me a lot about myself about what I’m good at what I’m not good at it and how it’s really helped me figure out how to help build high-performing teams have you run any of the scrum to dark classes remotely yet so I am leading our very first one in the company in April we’re gonna do a PSM live virtual it is April vapor later this month the the tic-tock tic-tock trust me I feel a little bit of stress and anxiety there but I’m very excited to though and then I’m going to be copilot on more than likely on the PSF live virtual and a poly I might be leading a poly live virtual so I I have a pally in two weeks so I’m doing a poly in the Edinburgh timezone yeah public poly I have to to normal people and one PST coming so normally I don’t know how difficult that will be for my first live virtual classroom escapade so it’s going to be interesting I attended a workshop last week and was Todd’s workshop and and he did it was me as a PST and a bunch of normal people we were from his some of his classes who were just exploring things and they went through a workshop so some good learnings there in figuring out not only how to run the workshop but how to maintain the engagement levels that was that was really good I really enjoyed that but I’ve got the I’m jumping in I’ve literally got I’ve got next week free and then I jump into Polly Monday Tuesday then the next Monday Tuesday PSF next Monday Tuesday PSF next Monday choose the PSM so it’s gonna be a little bit full-on at least I don’t have them all in the same week luckily the to private PSFS that I’m doing and luckily the customer said um you know we we want to do we want to do it private which is good and we want to do it Monday Tuesday’s because they have deployments on a Saturday there there that’s quite every Saturday so they want they wanted to front-load the week rather than back load the week so that that helped me out a little bit as well it meant they didn’t want to in the same week which was a good idea yeah give me some time to prep in between and optimize things a little bit but yeah I’m looking forward to that as well you’ll have to fill me in after after the first one because we’re experimenting with for half-day sessions go guys I just feel like it’s gonna be exhausting for both the instructors and the students to do phase and and I have never been successful in keeping someone’s attention electronically for more than three to four hours yep but I also know that there’s pros and cons to that approach the other thing I’m curious are you gonna have a facilitator or somebody who’s supporting you from a logistic standpoint so you can focus on teaching so right now no I don’t have anybody who’s gonna be helping me out so I’m gonna be doing it all which is where I’m thinking about the tools that I’m going to use obviously well obviously for us maybe but that mural has been seems to be a useful useful - yeah I had in the workshop last week it worked really well I’ve seen bits and pieces over before and I think everybody all the other trainers have been using it to facilitate their workshops so much so that I thinks Kramden are going to be bringing out some templates I think there’s already templates available for the PSM PSM and PSN - I believe have templates so I think that that will that will help a lot even if it’s just giving everybody a jump start and then some stuffs pre-prepared and we can just implement those templates but also the the the video conferencing tool and they were going to be using I think is important as well I had planned to use zoom and the reason I plan to use zoom is it’s good breakout rooms but the museum has some significant issues right now not everybody’s happy using zoom based on the security concerns that have come out in the last little while well it’s all we the case once when you’re when you’re a little player nobody cares and you become a big player and everybody everybody cares and I think the yeah I’m not particularly bothered about leakage personally if that makes sense like if if some part of my video goes out and people get a hold of it CAA okay whatever that’s that’s okay but I think it’s more the concern of students in the class so I’m definitely running the PSFS in Microsoft teams which is secure or at least doesn’t have any known biggest holes in it but it does then require everybody to authenticate um but also that’s the thing that makes it more difficult to set up and manage initially but it is the thing that negates the problem that people have with the that you can just jump in yeah you know we’re doing a lot of tool reviews as well and it’s funny because right is this thing hit I had done a presentation around the relationship of tools with agility and it was very you know there is a certain amount of premonition there because I said tools do not make you agile but they can absolutely enhance your daily and getting good at tools and the application of tools will should be something you focus on in value but then even even more interesting I think and I’m curious if you agree with this as as we go as we develop more and more mature skills our tooling has to change so I thought back to there’s two analogies I use one is when I just started a golf when I was a kid my I just used a pair of hand-me-down golf clubs and they were okay and but then when my skills got to a certain point the tools became a limiting factor so then I went and I bought a nice set of off-the-shelf golf yelps and my game progressed and then some point I needed custom lights because I was growing I was a teenager and so our tools had to evolve with our skill set and then also I’m kind of an amateur woodworker and if you walk into a master woodworkers shop who’s been doing it for 10,000 hours or more they might have a single hand plane that’s a $300 hand plane that serves one very special purpose that they pull out twice a year but it is the perfect tool to deliver a very high quality product and there’s no there’s no better replacement tool but then there’s a certain amount of vanity in that tool and you could say well could you get the same outcome with a cheap tool from one of the big-box retailers and you might be able to but I just find it so funny with lately the focus on tools in the last few weeks not funny is in you know negative but just interesting in how tooling is becoming an amplifier for agility I agree and I’m gonna have to turn this light on because this light just automatically went off because nobody walked around for 20 minutes so give me one sec sure there we go that feels a little better I can actually everybody can see me now as well and I can see yeah yeah and see what I have i I’ve set up a studio in here so I have a camcorder linked in to do the whiteboard so if I need to draw something on the whiteboard when I’m doing calls and stuff I have to light boxes up here cuz lights important especially on video I think it’s difficult to see what’s going on yeah no I agree I my my wife thought I was crazy about a year ago when I made sure that all the light bulbs that I bought in my home office for the same temperature which is not where I am right now but because I didn’t want to have color correction issues you can have all that stuff so I had a pretty obsessive around the lighting and make sure I got all the same brand all the same temperature so that I I had a better quality lighting setup yeah and I’ve been I’ve been playing around with it like last week I had Daniel Vacanti on to have a discussion and we had air core problems from Daniel because I wasn’t now I’ve got headphones inspect and adapt you just got to figure it out this is new to me as well I’ve been learning how to use new tools like will be s studio for streaming and setting up the different thing that I can even do like if we have a problem we can go on please stand by while I go fix something or whatever yeah it’s been it’s been fun and how to how to get scape which you’re on into here that was craziness there’s lots of bender lbs so Skype is the only video conferencing tool that I found that has a special feature called NDI a so Skype is actually if I go to my desktop picture I’m in the middle and you can see you’re on skype there that’s my two skype windows so that lack of focus one and the this one and but that’s not what’s happening and in here okay so Skype is dreaming all of the different feed video feeds that it’s got locally so that means that I’m hooking in to this n di stream and putting your display here but I can if two or three people were calling in and I can bring them all in and move them around and it was very complicated to set up I’m quite happy that I managed to get it I think it was complicated for me maybe I don’t know it was it’s it’s been a lot of work trying to figure out these things get it get it good and I think it’s a is it’s part of the fun it’s something else to focus on and that’s the thing that I found in our what do you call it whoa you new world while I’m working you we have work here and isn’t it n well new way of working okay yeah there we go you know in our new way of working all of all of all of the work and conferences that I had just disappeared not quite overnight over there over the period of a week or so so then we had to reevaluate and figure out what to do and the I think the stream for where we that are would you call it funnel for where we get work in the new model is substantially different it’s it’s maybe different people who would see and come to online training then would come to in-person training although there’s probably a lot of overlap as well but there are some people who just I don’t care if it’s not in person um and I think doing doing these recording videos getting content out there and there is in this format that people would use if they were coming to engage with you and I think is is part of that that new model we are we’re inspecting and adapting already yeah well one thing I’ve been thinking about is how does this change the training landscape because think about if you’re a remote learner and you’re in Omaha Nebraska here in the United States in the Midwest and you don’t have any local you know quote-unquote experts or very few so you’re looking at well where am I going to travel to and it’s like now you don’t have trouble anywhere you can go get trained and come on by Daniel come to you you could go get trained in Azure DevOps from our natural would I mean so you you now have are a worldwide consumer and I feel that the trainer expertise and the quality of the training becomes paramount now because we’ve minimized and eliminated the barriers to immediacy and location you know so to me that’s provided to me it’s great because I think I put on a very good high quality learning session but I think that you know for many and I’m not saying I’m like somehow I’m elite trainer because trust me I’m not but I like to think that there or like I want that class because that’s a gym class instead of well that’s just that I’m just going to gym class because he happens to be in the same city or state that I’m in which that’ll always be a part of it but I want to build a reputation for my classes being of such a high quality that they’re sobbed out and I think I think that that’s actually one of the problems that I’ve been having and doing classes in Scotland and and that’s that I am much more known outside of Scotland than inside of Scotland having you know I I worked for three years from 2010 to 2013 in Seattle doing DevOps and agile consulting across I don’t know I think I did sixty different states which is quite a lot and many of my customers were in San Diego in the surrounding area and as eight hour time difference from here and I do a lot of training in in Oslo so in in the UK I up until recently have never really gotten much work mainly cuz folks that just didn’t know I was here didn’t didn’t see my content didn’t didn’t loop in that circle I guess but and it’s interesting because one of the other PS T’s in the UK had been training over in Edinburgh as well and um it’s it’s when people come to my class many of the people that come to my class were flying in come to my class I got very few people who were were Eddie robeast well maybe very few probably one of one of those Scottish phrases for you know about half and about half of the people that were coming to my class were flying in and I think that’s that’s just due to me going to other places around the world and doing conferences they are like I didn’t do a lot of conferences in the UK I did conferences in the you in Europe my customers were US and Europe check n yeah but now with Bertrand you should care so the the poly that I’m doing in a couple of weeks I just had to two folks from Germany sign up and I did a poly in Germany in fact I did a poly in Germany the weekend before they closed that hole of lights so luckily it wasn’t later than that and I think that um you know there were people who maybe wanted to come that couldn’t so then they booked into the Edinburgh one yeah that’s good hey you just said something that I have to ask about you said folks folks I struggle yes as a trainer I get my hand slapped occasionally and I do it to myself for six you guys I use you guys it’s just a collective it’s the group is folks your preferred nomenclature for so last that long no to be honest guys is my preferred Norma culture that’s what I default to that’s what I I me nights three years of training consulting around the us guys is they go to and just like it interesting act I prefer to focus on intent then on the actual works so when I say guys I’m being all inclusive but I am being very conscious of that and I’ve switched to folks but it is very I’m getting better at folks and telling guys but I’m doing folks or everyone or something else just to be to be more conscious of it because I think while it doesn’t matter to some people it does matter to others so I think it’s an important thing to take note off and but it’s just like I are we the one that always got me were and people saying oh shoot or dagnabbit or I don’t know some curse words although we would say swear word in the UK but some curse word and that they’ve made up in order to not say a real curse word yeah and from my perspective the intent is still there if I stub my toe and say die ignite I’m still swearing because that was my intent even though I used words that aren’t normal swear words and so I read for me it’s the same with guys and folks if I say folks but I mean guys then I’m being disingenuous and that’s the bit you should get slapped down for but if I say guys and mean mean folks then III wouldn’t like to get slapped down for that but yeah you know words words matter and if you’ve read the scrum guide yeah well no words matter or it matter a lot I think it’s definitely something I’ve tried to focus on yeah I have to my grandmother famously has a replacement word for every swear word and I’m like why do you do that we I know what you mean it’s just like what you said so I’m curious because there might be somebody out there who says wait what the heck word Jim and Martin’s supposed to be talking about today did did you what were we supposed to be talking about he said it is riffing on the list and I had fashioned ilysm and I had conflicting priorities that were the two things that are analysts and we we should spend about 20 minutes talking about professionalism and then we tangent T how many minutes I’m unprofessional and my two priorities are chocolate and puzzles and board games lit so that’s three well Jess can I did a puzzle a thousand-piece puzzle that was kind of fun and we collaborated on that and we’ve been playing some board I have a I have a group um the the meets on Sunday and we’ve been meeting on discord and I played games for nine hours on Sunday that’s awesome yeah I’ve been aware of discord for years but I would tell you that for years I was probably one of a hundred people in my circle that knew about it and now I have people like have you checked out on a discord channel have you checked your channel and it’s like it overnight it went mainstream it seems like I’ve got like twenty discord channels that I’m a member of knows yeah getting ridiculous it’s almost getting overwhelming so I do have a couple thoughts about professionalism and competing priorities the interesting thing about priorities and I’m curious what you think is there is no such thing as the plural of priorities he you only can have one priority and I this is now went into my teaching especially around product ownership is you know what is your priority oh I have five priorities no you have one and you know anyone who has ever why I have two priorities you know I want to go to the gym and and workout tonight and I also want to go binge that new show on Netflix well whichever one you do first that’s what you prioritize you might do both things but whichever one you did first is actually what you prioritize okay so this is an interesting one because I bring it up in my classes quite a lot okay and I have the same feeling as you however the majority of the time when I’m teaching scrum classes I’m teaching non-native English speakers and in most that I’ve found so far other languages it is plural it just means a dirt bike priorities just means ordered for for them so you know I sometimes I have a it’s interesting for me the things that are different across those cultures and languages yeah yeah I I think firm it and that’s how I use it in my in my teaching is the difference between priority and order and I say we might do things in a specific order that is out a priority so in that example I might go to the gym first and then go home and watch Netflix because that’s the most logical order maybe the gym is on my way home from the office and it would be dumb of me to go home watch a television show and then drive back to the gym that that might be dumb it’s a good thought exercise to understand the difference between priority and order and how those things relate especially when we’re like delivering value and building features I mean and again I hate to come back to zoom but if did you know and I guess this is not fact but this is opinion but the opinion I’ve heard is that zooms number one delight er from a feature perspective was their virtual backgrounds that the the number one thing that customers really touted as why they choose yeah your average person the number one reason that the the feature they loved in the zoom platform was the fun virtual backgrounds so guess what you see every other company prioritizing now they’re they’re pushing out virtual backgrounds and virtual green screens it wasn’t the stability or security the platform yeah obviously it wasn’t the breakout rooms you know your average just you know a user didn’t care about recovery rooms now we as trainers did yeah we care about the rooms yeah but but think about it if you look at a prioritization model of like des lighters and parity and which which features a user cares about sometimes it’s surprising I totally agree in its it’s the struggle of a product owner to make a decision between Ling and long-term sustainable value and sometimes you might have to prioritize the bling because you know we need to compete with em other platforms and if that’s what users value then we have to deliver what users value and but we also have to look at not spending all of our time just delivering things that users value otherwise I so I’ve got I got a just a little story around that the and you’ve probably heard me - you’ve probably heard me tell before and but it’s the the azure DevOps team at Microsoft ten years ago were significantly behind the curve and behind the curve is an expression that I think M actually makes a lot makes a lot of sense it’s one of those odd ones that actually makes a lot of sense because they they were building features at for users which means users were asking them for stuff and then they were building it in next release it just so happened that they had the two-year lag time so that really ends up being a four year lag time and in the enterprise world that was fine cuz Enterprise didn’t really give a crap yeah for year like okay whatever that same is all of our software we can adopt things that quickly I get a customer that took nearly four years to move from server based source control to distribute or controller but and that that am unable to deliver quickly and building stuff for users that were that they were asking for it meant that you’re a follower you were following what people want to do and one of the things that the the phoned was that they had the ended up building up too much technical debt because they were purely following leading because technical debt doesn’t matter if you’re a follower it really doesn’t matter yeah and if you’re making a lot of money off following you can just build up technical debt and we’ll just whatever but the they spend concerted effort they their goal of their their product unit manager which was Brian Harry at the time was to get ahead of the curve how we need to build stuff for the early adopters so that by the time the majority of people come along we already have that feature in the product we are the ones leading the industry not following and they invested a lifetime in working and I yeah okay can I react to that a little bit because you just you’re touching on is that that are just hitting home for me I left the company that I had that I was out for a number of years because they refused to try and get ahead of the curve that I used to joke that their product backlog was to send me links to our competitors websites and say we want what they have i it just rocked me to my core just bothered me that that is what they considered innovation was well this is what our competitors are succeeding with yep so that’s what we need to build and I’m like yeah they have that idea a year and a half ago it’s gonna take us a year to do it and then in a year-and-a-half they’ll be that far to be onto something else yeah and I hate it when my the owners my company would go to conferences because I knew I hated it I look at their counter I’m like oh my god they’re going to Vegas I can’t wait to see what’s gonna happen in my backlog of work when they get back sure enough come back from Vegas I get a calendar invite that says highly important and they’d be like okay this is what we just heard about this is what everybody’s doing this what we have to do I’m like I’ve known about that I’ve been other people in telling you and for a year ago and you know so that’s one reaction as I lived that nightmare for six years and then Nigel Thoreau I think just wrote an article one of our fellow PS T’s in a very amazing thought leader about you know disruptive innovators and innovators and these different companies you know that sometimes can find themselves with different products or services and different quadrants so some of their some of their work is is even truly innovative other work is achieving parity with competition and then and again I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here but you know in my training I talk a lot about features and features that became that went from the lighters to now just maintaining the status quo like would anybody butter an automobile without a backup camera no the interesting thing about features is as soon as you build one in and it becomes ubiquitous meaning it’s it’s everywhere and just becomes you know a part of the standard package you can never take it away it’s very very hard to take it away but it’s you have to be very careful with what you build because every feature you build is a feature you have to maintain and extend and worry about from a stability and security standpoint and you know there’s a quote out there and I forget who to attribute it to but he said that a product is not done when you can’t Jam one more feature into it a product is done when you can’t take anything away from it and still have it be desired and wanted by customers yeah and I love that idea and because that’s agile principle number 10 simplicity you know so I I talked about and especially my in my training on both sides both the product owner site and on the the product side lean inventory control you want to have as few things in your backlog as possible but it still be a backlog I know you want as few things in your product as possible and it still be a product yeah so they and I’m in your school of thought on this but there is how we’re kind of on topic cuz we’re talking about competing priorities there’s another coach in the same organization I’m in that feels that the product owners backlog should be as big as possible yeah like her dream back or a thousand items oh that’s a small backlog and I’m like no no absolutely not how did you have folks how can you rationalize and prioritize an order 4,000 items and even 400 like I don’t know if it’s if there’s not a perfect number but something tells me it’s not you know what I thought of right there when you said how do I manage 4,000 items same way you manage 4,000 people hierarchy need more higher alright you need more layers you need more more distance between the ideas and the realities for everybody else I’m being so cut out right now there is an idea of a funnel like let’s dump as many things into that funnel as possible so let’s consider many things but to me the most important thing a product owner can do is take something new look at it rationalize it and then say no we’re not going to do that but if you just say well I’m gonna we might do that someday and I’m gonna put it in the corner over there you you just enhanced your anxiety around stuff yep you have a packrat mentality a hoarder mentality so I preach a more minimal and I hate the word preach there sorry I’m trying to break myself of that habit but I suggest a more minimal approach kind of like a Marie Kondo approach to tidying up our things so that we can focus on less know but know them deeper and hopefully that leads to more value being delivered I just don’t think you can find that Neal and the haystack of 4,000 items but if you have put the time in to get good at rationalizing things and only have a you know a much smaller number to review you might be able to have a grasp on your product and your market and your customers better yeah and I totally agree with that I I got a I got a workshop from um David Starr who’s a very good friend I didn’t Seattle I don’t know you know David David’s awesome and he he wrote a workshop that he provide uh he had a family emergency and I had to take over a gig of heads I think I was pretty much just the first PST he met and after he found out the bad news that he had to deal with and so I took took on this this gig so he provided some workshops and things around it but the workshop was a requirements gathering workshop and effectively it’s got some stuff around it but effectively what you do is you take a bunch of people who are going to be working on backlog and you take some screen from the application that they’ve already worked on before and you get them to create user stories based on you know their their hindsight of knowledge that they’ve got knowing everything that’s going on yeah and so the III talk about user stories and I talk about scenarios so given the way in thence walk through all of that with them show them what good ones look like and then get them to work on breaking this down it usually takes like an hour and a half for them to do that but then at the end of that they have a very intricate set of backlog and behaviors that represent the work that the new had to go in to building that thing that make sense yeah so then we put that put that to the site take something out of your back look some item in your backlog something usually with a UI because it’s just easier for people to understand and interact with and put that put that user story on the board now do the same thing and they’ve they’ve now realized the amount of detail that they had to go into to describe the thing they’ve done in the past and I had I did it with a group where we had engineers architects bees we had business folks we had the the the entire PMO office there and we did that exercise and halfway through the second exercise the the head of product management stopped the whole workshop and and he said that this does we fundamentally are not ready to go into this level to even understand what these things are and that to me was a was a shocking realization for a company to realize that they didn’t have the fundamental understanding nor ability to create an order backlog and that was with with 20 people in the room focused on doing just that task yeah I don’t know if I where I stole this idea from or heard about it or or if I just came up with it but I have had teams in the past kind of do what I call retroactive refinement so go back and refine an estimate something you’ve already done like what you just described and with now with the benefit of hindsight what would we know and they’re like oh well we would do this and we would ask us to made it like this and we would use that exercise to create anchor stories so that we would post on the wall in our team space and say you know what remember when we were refine this retro actively we all said this is what a five looks like and this is the level of to the tasks that it spawned and it’s fun and then we have a new item off our backlog that everybody says we don’t understand this very well we’re like oh okay but which of those things does it look like like oh well it’s a lot like that thing okay that’s probably a good starting point to think about what what did we need to think about to do that thing we probably need to think about the same things to do this new thing so I love that workshop the other thing that when you were talking it kind of made me think about was this idea of like a backlog snake which was an exercise that I’ve done at a number of clients where I took their backlog and I printed it out you know sometimes hundreds of items and I arranged a conference room in such a way that all these tables form like kind of like this snake shape and I put my designated I had this kind of fun stuffed animal at one end of the of the table and it was the snake’s head and then I had the tail of the snake at the other end and I said okay now take everything and it the most important thing goes at the head and the least important thing goes at the tail and they were able to order and prioritize hundreds and hundreds of items by just laying them all out on on these tables so the things at the end became the most important the things at the end at the other hand became the least important and then what the product owner was able to do is like they were able to go about midway through and be like from this point on all these things just throw away we don’t even need them we’ll never get to him let’s just focus on these hundred things and we we drastically trimmed the product backlog in mass as a team as it actually is a whole group of teams and was it it wasn’t perfect and there was price and things we tossed away that we had two that came back but that’s another one of the things that I I teach is if something is really important it’ll come back yeah you’re not gonna forget about that amazing that you want to build but if it never comes back have you heard of a tool called email amnesty no so they have it was a plugin for for Outlook or people that have ridiculous numbers of unread items in their inbox I know people that have 25,000 plus unread items and their their their inbox and what you know amnesty did was it scammed through your entire inbox and for each unread email that you had or each person that you had an unread email from it created an email to them attached all of the unread emails and said in the body I’m declaring an email amnesty I have too much crap in my inbox and please send back to me things that you think are still important and then it sends it out and it China I don’t know how much of a tool it did for for for collecting responses but it meant that you know probably more than 50 percent of your emails are gonna bounce yeah and then you have a bunch of emails that somebody gets 10 things and they go well these two things are still important the rest I don’t care about anymore so suddenly I paired down that list and I’ve encouraged organizations to do that with their backlog items you know declare our backlog amnesty you’ve get 25,000 things in your backlog you can’t get to 25,000 things said send them back and see what comes your way yeah yeah that’s I launched a in activity at a client that was kind of a mixture of that it wasn’t really amnesty but it was this massive Kaizen event around getting our backlog under control and I started to dub it a mixture of the Marie Kondo method and the debt snowball method from Dave Ramsey I don’t know are you familiar with either of those two names Marie Kondo with Marie Kondo she says you should only have five board games is that what she says it’s probably zero you joy and I’m like well all these bring them joy no in a nutshell really what it is is is we took this giant backlog and we dispatched of a whole bunch of it right away just because it was old and the product owner could easily go through and know what was valuable and what could just be deleted so we did that then with what was left we met when and met with all the stakeholders and we said you know what is the value of this we’re going through it and this was kind of the organization step of the backlog but the Marie Kondo method you know of tidying up our backlog and we explained I got on my soapbox like 25 times gave the same little mini speech to this different stakeholders 25 times and said here’s why it’s important for you to let go of some things because if you want this you’ve got to let go of this because this is the crushing weight of the backlog warrants why we’re not getting anything done so we were able to get the a lot of stakeholders say you know what you’re right we don’t need that anymore the windows past for that etc focus on these two or three things we did that 15 20 25 times then we apply Dave Ramsey’s model of the debt snowball which is sometimes kind of productive and you got to be careful with it but it’s doing small things first so we were able to get a whole bunch of small things done which then allowed us to do less contact switching more focus on the bigger things so we might have done some less valuable work early but it was it paid us back in less context switching in time and focus and that’s kind of this this snowball thing of paying off your small bills so that you can then put big lumps of sum and big payments down on your really big bills and the organization loved it but but it took a while to get it done but man it just led to all types of phenomenal conversations about that you and priorities and competing priorities and all these things that we talk about every day it’s super difficult III find that product owners really struggle to have any kind of reasonable priority or good understanding of the product backlog or even to be able to be empowered to do that and I think that’s that’s that’s an organizational issue it comes from the the hierarchical tailor istic practices that we’re used to and backing off from those ideas is is really difficult have you have you seen the the I I do M I did our session a little while ago I guess what did I call it the tyranny of Taylorism and how to spot agile bs yes that one I did and I’m seeing your content yeah yeah so the the that that piece at the start where I talk about where Taylorism came from is something that I I do in almost all of my classes maybe not a PSF but a poly and a PSM I always cover that because I I think that too many too many folks dismiss this waterfall thing that they’ve heard of yeah they talk about it as waterfall which is where those big backlogs that are difficult to prioritize come from because we have to have a list of everything before we start and we have to spend six months in analysis before we do anything that that that’s maybe an exaggeration but depends on the organization that you’re working with and and bringing that down to you know I just need to two weeks work for the team I need a big team busy for a couple of weeks and then that will give me a couple of weeks to come up with more stuff to keep that team busy and getting that yeah that that balance is really important I’m glad you enjoyed that that I’m session that I did I did I really liked it I love this thought of or not the thought but the understanding the history of Taylorism and how it influences modern-day thinking and the relationship with Gant and other contemporaries about you know how work used to get done in this idea of there being one best way to do something well that does something better that this is something we fight against every day yeah no such thing as best practice on y’all have to quit practices for the situation at hand that’s right only a generally useful practice that works in some context exactly exactly so we know we have been we have been rambling for an hour and 20 minutes so I think it’s probably good idea to to wrap it up sure so if you could just do you have anything you’re working on next you have any public classes anything you want so yeah I do have some public classes couple will be out on the scrum ador’d site their home cities are Columbus and st. Louis right now please go take a look at those I am about to launch a website called no boring no boring retros dot-com and even though no boring retros is the the title because that’s something I’m very very passionate about it’s just gonna kind of serve as a portal for all of my content so my podcast appearances things like this just my random thoughts but there will be kind of a big section of the site dedicated of retrospectives and all that because I am a big believer in the power of retrospectives so yeah look for that and then I also love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn I mean that’s kind of how I stay in touch with my colleagues and my students right or wrong I’m not a great social media maven so LinkedIn is kind of the the preferred way to get in touch with me well I managed to get LinkedIn streaming-enabled on my account so this was going out live on LinkedIn so you’ll be able to go tag that that I don’t know how you do that and even write bit I don’t think you can figure it out yeah that the LinkedIn streaming is super new so it’s a little bit difficult to find stuff after the fact the other platforms are a little bit easier because they’re more mature but that’s awesome we’ll definitely look forward to to that and I think in in in that vein and if anybody has any feedback review of how we organize this how we set it up maybe just the audio or it could be how much of a plan we had for the this sprint which was not very much we had a very loose plan how much we got off topic maybe you like that maybe you didn’t um it would be really useful to get to get feedback on that and hopefully Jim and I will have maybe a retro and maybe we we do this again at some point laughs - cool well love our chats thanks for coming coming on Jim yeah thanks for having me cool well hopefully see you next time