August 27, 2025 • 57 mins
The agile brand may have become toxic, but your skills haven't lost value.
If you're struggling - listen or watch as we discuss the valuable skills you have and how you might apply them in future roles.
Founder & CEO Alex Polyakov returns to the podcast, joining Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel for a discussion about the market shift that has taken place and how people avoid being held back by outdated terminology!
One immediately actionable piece of advice?
Reframe your experience in business terms, such as:
What impact did your presence bring?
How did you save money or drive revenue?
How did you improve speed to market or decision-making?
What deep organizational problems did you solve?
These are executive-level skills that could translate to Director and VP roles. This work hasn't disappeared - it's evolved and so should your career positioning.
#BusinessConsulting #Leadership #AgileIsDead
LINKS
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com
INTRO MUSIC
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Alex, it's been a while.
Answer.
Intro.
Great intro.
in the planning for thisepisode, we were talking about
all this agile is dead stuff.
And again, all three of ushave unique and different
perspectives on agile isdead whatever happened,
(00:21):
happened with Agile.
I would like to talk to y'allabout if Agile really is
dead, like what happens next?
What do we all do?
And second of all I'm seeingthis thing on social media
where people in agile coachpositions Scrum masters , I'm
not talking about the peoplethat are cheating their job
role to product management.
So I'm talking abouteverybody else.
Like they're outta work for awhile and it bothers me 'cause
(00:42):
they feel like being outta workfor a while feels like it's like
a reflection of your self worth.
And I really want to talk aboutthat in the whole podcast.
Well, my, my, my takeon it is we gotta stop
talking about Agile.
The ship has sailed, thework's still there, but as
far as people are concernedthere's one common language.
And all of the folks thatwere in the Agile have been
(01:04):
working in the business.
So I think the biggest mistakesright now for anybody in this
career is to see yourself asthe part of the agile ecosystem.
It is no longer theagile ecosystem.
It is a business.
And so what you have to realizeis in the end of the day, you
are a business consultant.
Now you could specializein different areas.
(01:25):
There's executions, there'steamwork, there is a team
topologies psychology, there'smental aspects, there's product.
So there's a lot of facets.
How teams operate, howcompanies function.
But, everybody that was in theagile space had been somehow
involved with the business.
(01:47):
Business consultants are alwaysin need in different capacities.
So I think the biggest problemin finding a job is that.
There are certain terminologythat is no longer being
picked up right by whateverthe recruiting engines apply.
And so folks find itvery hard to find their
(02:09):
position of yesterday.
You gotta figure out whatis it that you are doing?
What is it that you want to do?
And look for opportunitiesto do that with a
different terminology.
Lemme ask you a question.
You think agile beingdead, if it is dead it's
just a passing fad, oryou think it's, it's gone.
(02:29):
Gone and whatever comeswill be the new thing,
the new shiny thing.
If it's not here already,what that might look like?
Do you want to getin on that first?
'cause I have ideas too.
Oh, I think theterminology's gone.
I think we gottadrop the terminology.
It's giving everybodyindigestion.
It's over usage.
It's commercialization.
It's young people, it'sthe generational shift.
(02:49):
Young folks don't wantto hear about Agile.
Right.
And so we end up focusingabout structure more, but
it's no longer the problem.
Agile was a structuredsolution to problems 20 years
ago, but the problems haveshifted with the structure.
(03:09):
New things emerged andwe're doing things faster.
And so we need thesolutions for today.
How do we getdevelopers to work fast?
You know, how do we get towork on the right things?
If we are bringing additionaltools and AI is a tool.
What does that look like?
You know who does the planning?
(03:32):
How do we do the planning?
How do we get the approvals?
How do we get all of that?
All of these same problems willremain, but we're no longer
confound to a, a agile structureas a solution, as sort of your
blueprint of how to get there.
I wanna deep dive a littlemore on something very
adjacent to that which iswhat are the skill sets then
that are needed to take usto the next level, right?
(03:55):
But before that you said you hadsome thoughts to share on that.
That's all right.
I forgot what allthe thoughts were.
I was a thought leader.
Sorry.
A thought leader.
If I was gonna seek totie up what we're talking
about now, I would say allof these folks working.
In the quote agile positions.
I'm really mainly talkingabout people working in Scrum.
That's really what I'mtalking about right now.
(04:16):
Product has kind of aneasy out 'cause you can
jump to product management,Marty Cagan writing books.
That stuff's the new hotness at,at least it is for right now.
Like a, actually I would arguethat's on the decline as well.
So like the, the like thewhatever just happened.
Tolis, I would argue that theproduct people as well, like
their, their field has becomeso broad that like the, where
(04:37):
that meme with like the greenReaper going door to door, like
product people are immediatelyafter the Agile people.
And in fact, you seethe AI people segmenting
this market as well.
It's all marketing.
That's my, that'sbasically my diatribe.
That's where it's going.
This is all marketing.
The, the product people,the grim Reapers coming
from them next becauseproduct people like.
(04:58):
We don't really know whattheir role is in the business,
in the worst businesses,they're just feature managers
and we don't need, there'sno value in that at all.
And the people that are nottruly empowered with driving
business outcomes empoweredwith driving business,
they have budgets and thedecision making power and the
actually, and autonomy actuallyautonomously empowered Yeah.
(05:21):
To do what they'resupposed to do.
I would argue that , they'renext and because of, so
many people like that all ofproduct management is gonna
get labeled with that label.
And is gonna be the next onethat is viewed like Agiles
are viewed right now, iswell, I don't understand
what they do all day.
What does a scrum master do allday outside of 15 minutes after
they run like the stand up?
(05:42):
Yeah.
I think it's alittle bit different.
If a scrum master is takingcare of the team right.
And helps them executeand coordinates that or
running interference andall of those things that
are on the scrum guide, allof that work is invisible
at the executive level.
The product manager's jobis visible at the executive
level, especially if it'san important product.
(06:03):
Because you take a slice abovethe execution and it's revenue,
users, customer service,churn, all of those things
that are bubbled up to the.
Senior level.
So you do see that result.
Now you may not care whatthat product manager's
doing day to day.
As long as thosenumbers are positive.
(06:24):
But I guarantee you thatyou will care what happens
day to day if thosenumbers are negative.
So that positionwill get exposure.
Now, there is a problem wherewith the ai, the expectation is
that the product manager's notjust gonna run quote unquote
business, but will also bethe coder and the designer.
Right.
And a million other thingscalled, that's called
(06:45):
product engineering.
Now that's what therole is morphing into.
Yeah, that's right.
The work will never disappear.
It shifts.
Somebody's gonna have to do it.
Now who's gonna do it?
Is it more responsibilityon the engineer?
Are we getting rid ofour product designers?
Mm-hmm.
Because now productmanager can do Figma.
You know, so I, I think thosethings are questionable.
(07:06):
Maybe you'll be lucky enoughto find somebody that's a jack
of all trades, but usually it'sfollowed with a master of none.
Do you need that person ordo you need somebody that's
super duper specialized?
I kinda see some parallelismhere between what happened
with Scrum Masters and.
Traditional agileists, right?
Like agile coaches and whatnot.
I can see easily thathappening with product
(07:28):
owners and product managers.
And that's for the samefundamental reason, which
is if you have a pulse,you can just take a two day
class and declare yourselfa certified X, Y, Z, right?
Sure.
That of course, it happeneda lot with Scrum masters, but
I'd say it's even happeningwith product owners too.
You're interestedin product, right?
(07:49):
So the first thing you do isyou take a class and then you
come out and say, I'm now acertified scrum product owner,
or whatever the other one is.
Sure.
So experience is what'smissing here, being able
to really do the rightthings when, when called on.
You know, same thing,same thing's gonna happen,
I think with product.
So Alex, what you pointedthis out very early in this,
(08:10):
discussion point is youdo have a lot of people.
Introduce into the field new.
Basically, they, they've never,never done the job before with
a potentially a two day class.
Like I'm not, I don't reallywanna harp on the certification
industry that, that I, I dowanna harp on them, but this
is not the podcast for it.
Okay.
We had several podcasts.
(08:30):
We had one with Brent-is this industry fixable?
And I think that wasbefore episode a hundred.
I don't remember how long ago?
That's, that tells you how longwe've been tracking this thing
out of the corner of our eye.
But yes, the industrial complexproduced a lot of these quote
coaches who, if Alex, you'resaying what really are they,
(08:51):
they're business consultants.
You have this millthat's stamping new
business consultants.
But they they don't have aproven track record in business.
When you or I think about,well, 'cause we've talked about
this on the podcast before.
The way I think about ascrum master, like they
need to be able to, to, tomake contact with people all
over the business quickly.
They need to be able toingratiate themselves at
(09:13):
the highest levels, C-suite,director level, whatever,
depends on how big theorganization is because we
rely on those people to bringvisibility to the big issues,
to the people that can helpmake the change and then
bring those people on board tomake the change that we need.
Because like the developerson the team are look, I just
wanna code and do cool stuff.
(09:33):
because the organization isset up as clunky as it is and
because like we got all theseintegration points and whatever
we, our day-to-day doesn'tinterface with the right people.
A million reasons why we're notsuccessful, but you got this
one person saying Hey guys, Isee you're having a problem.
I'm gonna go getthis other person.
I happen to know them.
I'm gonna call the bat phone.
I'm gonna getBatman on the line.
(09:53):
He's gonna drop into ourdaily scrum or whatever, and
we're gonna solve it todaybecause I got the right
contact at the right time.
This is like the job of sales iswhat I'm describing right now.
It's like you have an internalperson who just knows the right
person to call at the right timeto help get through the problem.
I'm not saying they have tosolve the problem, but, the
reason I want to have thispodcast was again, you have
(10:14):
people that came out throughthe certification mill and
businesses can't tell thedifference between that person
with the two day certificationand the person with like five
years of experience who actuallyknows about lean management
and organizational design and,how software gets developed
day to day understands thepoint of bringing the customer
in for reviews and stuff likethat, even though it's painful.
(10:35):
And I don't know.
Like I, there there's a,there's an agile bubble
that's responsible for causingthis negativity on the term,
but I'm having a hard timepulling the two of them apart.
Well, the, there's a littlebit of a difference between
new people joining in.
Mm-hmm.
You know, like youngprofessionals coming
through whatever programand the experienced folks
(10:59):
not able to find jobs.
The biggest problem that wehave right now is the folks
that have contributed for yearsand years are having trouble.
Finding opportunities.
Right.
You know, and we don'thave to talk about
certification with 'em.
You have real tangibleproof and experience.
The problem is that the way theyframe their accomplishments and
their achievements, they frameit in the agile terminology.
(11:22):
Mm-hmm.
And you need to decoupleyourselves from something
that's no longer popular.
Have they worked in a business?
Absolutely.
How have they consultedthe business to improve?
And if you can formulatethat way, then there is
real value that you couldbring to the organization.
Now there are people, again,some people are better at
(11:43):
product side, some peopleat the execution side.
There's the businessagility side, right.
Which is more of astrategic side than there
is the quality side.
So you have to find the basis.
However, I think there is a bigdiscrepancy on which company
they want to go and work in.
Previously you would find smalland mid-sized businesses with
(12:07):
roles available to do that.
Mm-hmm.
Not anymore.
Everybody's trying tobe lean, so it's really
only the enterprises.
Yeah.
And enterprises have beenshedding, the management
levels have been shedding, theproject management have been
shedding the agility Yeah.
Aspects.
And I would argue thatmoney is there to hire.
They just principally do notwant to invest in that area.
(12:29):
Om, I wanna pull you intothis one because I, I,
I, I thought about you.
I immediately, when Alex startedgiving the bullet points here,
I thought about, is this a.
Academic theory versus likebusiness practice type of
like business experience.
Or what is the ROIof having a coach?
You know like hiring apart-time coach on a consultant.
(12:49):
I'm thinking about this froma co consultant standpoint,
are all these agile folks,do they all become business
consultants and then if themarket gets flooded with all
these business consultants whohave these specific skills that
we're talking about, like let'spretend like everybody listens
to this podcast right here.
That's what I'm saying.
Can subscribe.
That's what I'm saying.
If everyone listens to thispodcast and I am valuable.
How can people pivot theirresumes and talk about their
(13:12):
stories and engage with peopleto say Hey, this is the ROI.
This is what I can do for yourbusiness in ROI, in terms of
the organizational design andwhat I can do for your goal
setting and all your apparatusof planning and all this stuff
that's like that you're probablydoing terribly right now.
Have to admit.
That's a fantastic question,first of all, and there isn't
a simple answer to that.
So let's unpack alittle bit, right?
(13:33):
People need help though.
Yeah, they do need help.
So here's the problemfor just piggybacking
of what Alex was saying.
If you've just had a careerin Agile, so to speak, right?
It doesn't really matterwhat your role is product
owner, scrum master orwhatever it might be.
And if you are continuingalong those lines, looking for
some work that basically justsays, this is what I'm gonna
(13:54):
do going forward, then yes,your resume is going to say.
I've been an agile list.
Right.
Right.
And no one wantsto see that today.
So they, that, that'sa big gulf right there.
Those people that aresuccessful, what they
manage to do is reframe itin a way that people can
understand, not just aboutdressing it up in agile ease.
(14:15):
It's putting it out there insimple, but business language.
You either saved theorganization money or
you made them money.
It's that simpleor protect risk.
Now how did you do that?
How did you do that risk?
Is that what you said?
So the thing aboutAgileists that are trying
to reform themselves.
Ask those questions, startfrom there and say, how have I
done this in the past for thecompanies that I've worked for?
(14:38):
Mm-hmm.
Forget about I took fiveteams and brought them to a
different level of agility.
Nobody cares about that anymore.
Right?
So if you reframethat, that's your past,
bear down your resume.
You don't need no sevenpage resumes anymore, right?
One page, pair it down, getthat business mindset, and
then project forward andsay, how can my skillset
(14:59):
allow me to help a business?
So think about it like this.
Pick three differentorganizations at different sizes
in different areas, if you likebus business domains and work
out your plan of how you canposition your skills to help
that business either save money.
Or make money and theresume wise as well.
(15:20):
You know, take a look,history in your history,
comments on the resume.
And rephrase from whatyou did to what you've
accomplished in business terms.
Yeah.
So it's not Hey, I've helpedthe team manage the backlog.
Nobody cares.
Everybody knows how tomanage the backlog, but
what did you achieve?
How many deliveries wereyou able to push through?
What did those deliveries do?
(15:40):
What did those releasesactually produce?
Was that critical?
Was that not critical?
Did that actually make animpact to the organization?
Yeah.
A long time ago we did a series.
We did a three podcast seriesand it was basically number
one was the scrum master'sresponsibility to the team.
Number two was the scrummaster's responsibility
to the product.
And then number three wasuh, to the organization.
(16:02):
to the organization.
And , it was very funny becausethe viewership of the series
of the podcast was numberone, the team, it was like
high number two, the productwas a little bit lower.
And then the organizationwas like a third of the
views of the first one.
It was like pretty stark,pretty stark contrast
that people aren't reallyengaged with like an org
level type of discussions.
(16:22):
Yeah.
It's interesting orglevel type of discussions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was interesting to meat the time, and it kind of
also signaled, it signaled.
What I see in that roleis like pe when, when you
start interfacing to belike, Hey, we can have a
bit more efficient org thatworks together and helps.
And like people are like,yeah, I don't, I don't care.
There's no value in that.
Well let, let, let, let's takea step back a little bit, right?
(16:44):
So, okay.
The reason why Agile is pickingup all this flack is because
the value is subjective, right?
I think if we take a look atScrum for example, having a
scrum master or not havinga scrum master, having
scrum master role sharedletting the tech lead just
(17:05):
do the command and controlmodel and implementation
having a micromanager.
And you compareall these models.
I think the results are goingto be almost identical, I
don't think that either ofthose provide a superior
result based or successfactor than any other.
So because there is such amultitude way of doing things
(17:27):
and because the results aremarginally identical, that's
why people are looking at itand it's Hey, why do we have
to commit to this structure?
Like people can deliversoftware successfully without
Agile or Scrum or you know,or create their own or do
their own thing if it works.
That that was thewhole premise of Agile.
If small incrementsand if whatever you do
(17:51):
works, don't change it.
Keep going with it, right?
We don't have to call it Agile.
Sure.
And if you can still achievethat level of success, why do
you actually need a structureddisciplinary approach and
higher specific roles?
I reacted strongly towhat you just said, Alex.
So I want to talkabout it for a second.
That's a nice way ofbeing I got hives.
What you just outlined isa very compelling case.
(18:11):
Hey, if we have a successin whatever we're using,
what does it matter?
I mean even in MartyKagan's latest book in
the Transform book, he'soh, these agile people
can't they can't help you.
Right?
Yeah.
Read my book, which is allan agile transformation
book by the way.
Sure.
It's exactly what it is.
The agileists, they understandteam topologies, meaning like
the, the book team topologies,like how actual, like good
(18:33):
development teams work.
When you segment by whatthe teams are doing, like
the value stream teams andthe component teams, they
understand Conway's law.
They understand why you get overa certain number of people and
your organization just fails.
Because Conway's law iskind of like grinding
against everything.
They understand.
They understand whenthey're seeing symptoms of
these things at work thataction needs to be taken.
(18:57):
And then we are saying, well,these agileists, they're
actually like organizationalarchitects and like that,
that's not a term that's beencoined anywhere before as like
you have system architects orsolution architects or whatever,
.
Organizational architectsorganization is broken up
to position themselves to dothe best work they can do.
(19:19):
That's just not a thing.
That's like sociologyand whatever.
And like corporateAmerica doesn't, I
mean, doesn't value that, but Brian, which agileists,
I've met a ton of agileistsand there are agileists that
just show up and say, sowhat's your status?
I, right.
(19:40):
And unfortunately, mostof the market is full of
folks like that, where ScrumMasters an easy position
to hide inside of a hugeenterprise where you don't
actually deliver the value.
And I've seen Scrum Mastersthat just simply pass questions
from one source to another.
That don't solveanybody's problems.
They don't run any interferencethat throw the team under the
(20:02):
bus every chance they get.
And it's that type ofculture that is, okay.
So unfortunately, for theones that actually know
about team topologies andactually care about changing
organizations, that is abusiness consultant, right?
Because that person has a muchmore depth than their own team.
They know howorganizations work.
(20:24):
They've seen a lot of it.
Explaining product managementto them is not required.
They've builtproduct themselves.
They know engineering.
They know lies whenthey hear them.
You know, it's a differenttype of professional.
So let me ask you a question.
Imagine you ran an enterpriseand there was a person
(20:45):
with this type of skillset.
What title would you give them?
Forget you, you have no agiletitles available to that person.
What title would you give them?
What do you think?
I give 'em the title that theyhave now, which is vp that's
usually the, OR director.
It depends on the sizeof the enterprise, but
normally these people Bingo.
(21:05):
Yeah, bingo.
So, so normally, normallythese people would get a
title that is commensurate.
Ooh, we haven't saidthat in a podcast.
Oh, that's a nice word.
Yeah.
They normally, they'd get atitle that's commensurate with
the concept that they can runan entire business operation.
Therefore they get a titlethat basically is like a
catchall title that saysyou are a business leader.
(21:27):
And that this is the main, oneof the, like the reason that
this podcast agenda stuck,there's several reasons.
This podcast as an agenda,as a statement, emotionally,
physically, oh, help me out.
Like what?
Psychologically, pathologically,I'm sociologically, like many
reasons that this stuck outto me as like as a podcast
(21:48):
that I really want to do islike people have convinced.
The agile folks, and yeah, I'myou made a point that I don't I
don't want it to go unanswered.
Which is yeah, a lot.
Like there's a lot ofpeople that got the two day
start and they really havenot done this before and
they're outta their depth.
So yeah.
Okay.
I'm I agree with you there.
Let's put them aside in a bucketin this for a second because
(22:10):
at the end of the episode,I really do want to ask, and
om you stayed in consultingmuch longer than I have.
It's like the people thatare outta their depth.
Is that like 70% of people?
50% of people, likeit's a large percentage.
If it's a large percentageof the, maybe it's a problem
and we need to talk about itseparately, , if it's like
30% of people and they justget they get their first job
and then they get washed outand they can't get back in
(22:30):
their career field, maybeit's less of a problem.
But if it's like 80% ofthe people out there and
like businesses just can'ttell the difference, then
maybe it is a big problem.
But the people that havethe experience that can
do the job, they areconsultant business leaders.
They know how development works.
They know how to runexperiments against the market.
(22:54):
To figure out if customersreally want features or not.
And again well, whatjob title would you
title those people with?
I would, I would title 'emwith well you can run a whole
enterprise, so you must be a vp.
And I just slap a VP ordirector title on 'em and
be go figure out my, likewhat gets success kid?
Go get it out there.
So there are differenttypes of VPs?
(23:15):
Yeah.
There are VPs that haveentire departments built
underneath of them.
Yep.
And there are VPs with just afew people and they have a very
narrow focus in specific areas.
Yeah.
So this sounds like one ofthose VPs that has the ability
to influence all others.
Sure.
Yes.
Or directors.
Yes.
And you expect other directorsto work with this director?
(23:36):
Hopefully not in commandand control model but in a
collaborative fashion to helpimprove other departments
in the way they operate.
Does that sound familiar?
Like 20 years ago beforethis whole agile thing?
I completely agree.
Sounds like it.
I completely agree.
If it's a business and we'rehiring people and maybe I'm
hiring someone with likea small sliver of staff.
Maybe they only got two,three people under them,
(23:57):
developer, designer, whatever.
And my my thing isI'm gonna give this VP
go test this market.
Go expand me in thismarket, whatever.
I'm gonna give them abroad business goal.
They have a budget,they have a team.
They tick themselves.
They go figure out howto do it, and they've
got everything they need.
When you convert all the jobtitles of quote, agile job
titles, like everyone losestheir mind is the main thing
(24:19):
I'm trying to get across in thispodcast is the people that have
been trying to make it work as aagile coach with like two, three
teams under them or whatever.
You've been learningcritical business skills
that you could basicallytake and become a business
leader in any other org.
So don't just because you aresubmitting your resume to all
(24:40):
these agile coach positions orwhatever, and getting bounced
by the random a TS position orHR people that don't even really
know what an agile coach is, orthey can't tell the difference.
Between agile coach with X yearsexperience and like a person
that just got their C yesterday.
Just because you're running intothese barriers doesn't mean you
do not have valuable skills.
(25:01):
I would argue you're notleveraging those skills to the
right audience in the right way.
You've gotta open your mind,first of all, and say, just
because I've been an agilecoach or whatever, scrum
master, fill in the gap.
Because the situation isno longer the same as it
was when you did that.
Yeah.
And it might be justtwo years ago, or it
might be 15 years ago.
It doesn't matter.
Right.
(25:22):
So it's having thatbusiness orientation and,
and not a lot of peoplecan just switch like that.
If you're a scrum master withthree years experience, all you
know is how to work with teams.
You can't seeyourself above that.
Right.
And that's a problem.
And it's really kind of adisservice that the titles
that somebody had historically,even though there's a big
(25:45):
amount of experience havebeen only the agile titles,
like how do you transpose it?
Right?
So for example, if I was intech, I could be a senior dev, a
tech lead, an architect, right?
And at the end of the day,I'm still a dev, right?
So I could still pursue that.
But I think the biggestdisservice that people
make is devalue themselves.
(26:06):
If they can't find a jobnow, they're oh, my skills
aren't really needed.
So they try to go a littlelower, but without recognizing
that the skills they possess areactually much more significant.
Right.
And instead of going lowerand limiting yourself
to the agile area, onlyreapply that as a business.
(26:28):
Consultancy type of skillset.
And you can go much higherin the organization.
You have more depththan you can offer.
And you just gotta get ridof the jargon and kind of
edit the experience a littlebit so that it's clear not
from the agility perspective,but from the business value.
I think it's hard though, fora lot of people to just get
(26:49):
rid of those mental shackles.
Of course.
'cause that's what they've done.
This is what when, when you,when you run into those kinds
of people, you immediatelyknow who they are because
you ask 'em what do you do?
And they'll go ba butI'm looking for work as
what a ba. So it's hardto come out of that mold.
Now, having said that, peoplethat have been around the
block a bit, they can do that.
(27:11):
Those people will saylisten, what I've been
doing can easily be appliedto project management, for
example, or vice versa, whichactually happened, right?
A whole bunch of projectmanagers got redubbed
as scrum masters.
Yeah.
But so people can apply theirbackground in different areas.
Operations isanother one, right?
If you're a project manager,you have the, the skills to
(27:31):
meticulously track things.
Well, you can besuccessful in operations.
There's no reason whyyou can't make it.
You just have to get awayfrom project management's
all I've done and that'swhat I want to do.
One of the hangups of Agilesis they're, they're stuck
in this team level dynamic.
Hmm.
And it doesn't necessarilyprepare them for the enterprise.
Assuming that everyone wants towork in an enterprise level type
(27:52):
of oh, I worked at 30,000 plusthree, or if you're not working
for like a global companywith hundreds of thousands
of people you know, you mightfeel overwhelmed or whatever.
But yeah, you have like theorganizational architect in
disguise type of thing is still,it is stuck in the back of my
mind from this conversationyou coming from it from a
(28:13):
systems thinking approach youknow how to restructure the
system to be more successful.
So if you were to lookat your resume again and
revise it to show theimpact on the organization.
In order to look for adifferent role, like a director
role or something like that.
You know, like apeople leader role.
'cause that's what, I'mthinking about people that
(28:33):
are stuck as a scrum master.
They're outta work orstuck as an agile coach
and they're outta work.
And well what did you really do?
The Agile coach and the agilecoach slash Scrum master for
Scrum masters, who managesmultiple teams and the program
manager, like those rolesare very close together.
They're very close together.
I would say communicationsis probably the big leap you
(28:55):
need to make organizationally.
Yeah.
Imagine you're in the interviewand you've come out
of a Scrum ecosystem.
You elevate yourself to abusiness role and it's well,
we'd like to improve theperformance of the team.
How would you do this?
And that's thequestion you're faced.
Well, you have to stepaway from the Agile thing
and say, well let's see,what do you guys use now?
(29:17):
Well, you're doingscrum wrong, right?
Gotta step away from that.
You have to understand a littlebit more on business basis.
Well, what wouldyou like to improve?
Is it the speed of deliveries?
Why is that costing you what'sthings are taking too long.
Yeah.
Well, why do you think that is?
Do you have any hues?
Learn to ask more businessspecific questions without
(29:39):
going too much intothe weeds of execution.
Folks that worked heavilyin Scrum, they tend to
jump a lot into, Hey, thisis the way to do this.
A model or process, this is rulebook, this is what the guide
says, and we have to implementthe guide a hundred percent.
And then you're sort ofgoing right back into
the weeds of where thissystem already rejected
so you have to elevate yourselfand just go, you know what,
(30:02):
I'm gonna go a little higher.
Yeah.
What's our goals?
How do we reach them?
What stands in the way?
What have we tried?
But don't sink intothe, kind of the agile
jargon into that level.
Now you can understandhow teams operate and
try to help 'em improve.
But I would try to stay awayfrom attempting to say, Hey,
let's transform into Scrum.
(30:22):
Let's do this implementation.
You're doing this wrong.
Yeah.
You, we have to estimateby points or whatever else.
Don't even go there.
Try, try to bring in.
Novel solutions into thebusiness problem space
instead of doing sort of thestamping of the scrum model.
You're so right.
I I could, I, I was justthinking about some of the,
(30:44):
the questions you just outlinedthat could be asked in response
to an interview questionlike that, and first reaction
is, if you've been a Scrummaster, the question you'd
ask is, well, what kind ofvelocity do your teams have?
Now I can improve that.
It's no, don't thinkabout that so much.
Right.
Go beyond that and say, well,what are some of the, the top
(31:07):
two or three issues that wecan talk about where I can
really make a difference?
Why are those top two or three?
Right.
What's the impact ofnot improving those?
Right.
Those, those are the typesof questions you could
ask, and none of thoseare at the agile level.
They're all at thebusiness level.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Just trying to understand thoseand see how you can how you
can make a difference there.
(31:27):
a lot of what you guys aretalking about right now weaves
itself in with lean managementprinciples, which we haven't,
I haven't brought up on thispodcast, but I had it in the
original show notes that Iwanted to bring up is hey,
you got all these people thathave been trained on and read
books on and understand theconcepts of potentially, right?
Like lean manufacturingand like they study lean.
(31:48):
If you go all the wayback to the Lean Startup,
you know what I mean?
They study and believein the concepts of we'll
just build the MVP to testan idea is good or not.
And then we're not gonna engagethe development team potentially
the most expensive resourcesin the building unless we're
sure that an idea is sound.
(32:08):
So.
We go from this mode ofbuild it and they will come
with the most highest paidpersons in the room, opinion
to this mode of everybodycan put ideas into the pool.
We grab the ideas and we testthe ideas against the market.
And then we only put the mostexpensive quote resources,
sorry, I have to keep going.
Resources for thepeople listening.
I'm being super sassy with myear bunny fingers over here
(32:30):
and so that like the best ideasrise to the top basically.
And they're the onesthat get implemented.
But that, that, that in orderto move to a environment like
that, even saying it, I'm wow,that, that's a, it's rarefied
air up here that I'm breathing.
Because like most organizationsif you can get past the egos
and all the stuff to evenget to an environment where
(32:52):
you're saying everybodyputs their ideas into a pot
and then we test the ideas.
Then only the best ideas makeit into the actual product
that developers produce.
Right.
As soon as I hear that,immediately, the first
thought in my mind isportfolio management
and program management.
(33:12):
Right back where we startedwith the old legacy enterprise
attempting to do thingsat scale from multifaceted
departments and organizations.
Bringing that into the onepriority queue and creating this
community-based voting systemof internal blah, blah, blah.
(33:32):
Mm-hmm.
And this is the stuff that wewanted to walk away from, right.
And created sort of likethe models of startups
within the enterprise.
And now we're right back tothe, to the enterprise world
of, hey, let's throw it all intoone bucket and start voting.
The funny thing about me, liketrying to lobby for like lean
(33:53):
manufacturing in this categoryis also I hear the other
side of it in my head whenI'm lobbying for it is like.
Well, nobody getting like atwo day certification is gonna
understand anything about likelean manufacturing and what
it really takes to considerthe entire system rather
than like just your team.
'cause you can't just look atyour team and how they plug in.
You gotta look at thewhole system 'cause you're,
(34:13):
you're not optimizing forone team or another team.
You're optimizingfor the system.
I used to have a CEOback way back in the day.
When you optimize for one team,you de optimize for another.
He would say it all the time.
But now, muchlater in my career.
You need to get your teamstogether or maybe reps from
each team and kind of talkabout what you're doing
(34:33):
with the system overall.
And that's the point ofscaling your big sessions
where you have reps from eachteam so you're not, you're
not optimizing process forone team and de-optimizing
for other people and kindof just moving the problem
around inside of your insideof your manufacturing quote,
manufacturing development.
Look, some of the stuff youjust talked about, which kinda.
Knowing how to experiment,getting validation, getting
(34:56):
the right signals from yourcustomers before you build
a solution for them, kindof flies in the face of,
the new thing now, right?
Which is build first.
It's cheap, right?
We build using ai, so build50 things, maybe somebody
will buy one of them.
I just don't feelright to me, you know?
Well, if you build that manythings, you gotta find that many
(35:18):
users and customers to test it. but these guys aren't testing.
They're simply throwingthings at a wall and hoping
and see what sticks, whatbecomes more popular.
Right.
Essentially, it's almost likeselling certain things to a few
customers and seeing if theypay for it, but not actually
waiting till it scales, right?
And placing those bets solightweight where I, I get it.
(35:40):
You can test it out.
But I think they're gonnaget a lot of false signals
because this is, wait,this is like two thousands
development right here.
This is the way it was backin like way back in the day.
Oh, you mean the.com?
Let's just build everything.
Or the next one.
Everything's an app.
This is the way it was at thestart of my career just build
it because like anybody couldjust throw up a website and
make a bajillion dollars orwhatever, like a simple web app.
(36:02):
That that didn't panout for a lot of people.
It did not.
I think it's an enablerthat made it happen.
The catalyst here is ai, peoplecan just come up with stuff that
they can vibe code really fast.
Mm-hmm.
But that's notdollars and cents.
No one's gonna pay for that.
So their answer isjust build more of it.
Pay for something.
I have another, I have awhole nother podcast, Alex,
just to let you know, Ihave a whole other podcast,
(36:23):
which is something alongthe lines of, speed through
the development team; thatwas never the problem.
I agree.
If you really needed toprototype something, you
got a couple, couple ofreally good guys or gals.
And you just go to town andthey, in a few weeks, they can
give you whatever you need.
You good enough to test and,and you know, if, if you had
(36:44):
to have a roadmap for yourprototype, something's wrong.
Sure.
Right.
So usually it took justa few weeks and a couple,
couple of really goodpeople to put it together.
I, I mean, I would argue ifyou don't need to support it
or maintain it or whatever,like didn't a, a couple hours
and you probably could havesomething up and running if
you don't have to support it.
Most development teamsare not engaged that way.
(37:04):
Om knows on the podcast, I'm abig, you build it, you own it.
My team can maintain itand still have a nice
work-life balance I don'tcreate software that's gonna
fall over all the time.
You know what I mean?
That's just a core belief.
That's just a core principlethat I have as a person
that I got from working ondevelopment teams for many
years and being up in themiddle of the night and stuff
(37:25):
like that, but if, if it's agreenfield and we don't have
to maintain anything, we justturn it off at the end of the
workday, turn the instance off.
You know what I mean?
That's a differenttype of development.
It is.
And it doesn't even haveto be an actual app, right?
It could just be a Figma markup.
If you have the customer.
So, yes.
Let's take a momentto step back.
Lots of startups.
Yeah.
Ton of startups.
(37:47):
Ai, ubiquitous.
How come there'snot more success?
You know what's missing, inthis equation, the customer.
Absolutely.
So now the enterprise doeswhat the startups are making.
Same mistake, we build more,but who do you give it to?
In reality, the enterprise modelfor building new things was
(38:10):
always we understand that pain.
We spoke to a lot of customers,we really know measuring
against the competitor thereis this market opportunity.
What we will do is we willallocate the budget to
build a quality productto go after that market.
And we already have a coupleearly customers that are
willing not only to tryit, but to pay for it.
(38:31):
Mm-hmm.
And that used to be thebasis for investment
within the enterprise.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
What, what's happening now?
Oh, we got devs, let's justlet, let them build stuff.
But who's going to go ahead andimplement who's going to apply?
And remember.
Customers, they're justlike regular people.
They get tired of being pitchedtoo many things too often.
(38:54):
Eventually they will gettired or they will start
prioritizing what goes first.
What goes second.
Yeah.
Their attention deficit isgoing to start increasing.
And what will happen is overtime nobody's gonna care
that you can produce 3000little minor niche apps.
In the end of the day, theywill want to comprehensive
something that reallyaddresses the bigger problem.
(39:16):
And that will taketime, time to build.
No AI will be able to solvethat right out of the box.
Mm. Because we're only buildingniche solutions for small,
specific little things.
Complex softwarewill not go away.
Business problemsare complicated.
Right.
Even AI won't be able to findthe right solution because
sometimes don't even, we can't.
(39:37):
So and AI's it doesn'tcreate anything new.
It only copies onbasis of what it knows.
And those bets after they don'tplay out, what are you gonna do?
You gonna place more bets?
I mean,I've written more software
that's sits on the shelfunused in my entire life.
Software I was proudof, but never got used
(39:58):
a hundred percent.
And I'm sure thistrend will continue.
Because not everything thatyou build will be a product
that will turn into something.
Right.
How does that make you feelwhen you create something
that like you, it's greatsoftware and then like.
It just doesn't get adoption.
'cause a a million aredifferent reasons, , it just
doesn't get frustration,disappointment, super annoyed.
It just shoots themojo out of you.
(40:19):
It sure does.
If you are a passionate engineerand you love this stuff,
like truly love this stuff.
Mm-hmm.
The number one gratificationthat somebody's using it.
Yeah.
Right.
Is that there are peoplethat value it and recognize
you for doing a good job.
Right.
Even by name, Hey, I wasinvolved in that project, I
was involved in this projectthat's still used to this day.
(40:39):
I mean, talk about the folksthat built software for
printers and you meet themnowadays they're retired and
stuff and you talk to 'em.
Oh yeah.
I was on the Lexmark teamand we built the firmware
to print those very firstblah, blah, blah, and
they're fascinating people.
And you respect them for that.
I mean, like my motheris a COBAL programmer.
She talks about thingsbuilding on mainframes.
(41:02):
Folks, folks don't really doa lot of development on that.
I think that taking pridein something you had
a hand in, absolutely.
It, it goes evenbeyond software.
One example is certainvehicle manufacturers, right?
They will have the personwho built the engine stamp
their name on the engine.
It's there in perpetuity.
It's like the VIN number.
(41:22):
You know, when they see acustomer paying for that
vehicle and say, I hada hand, I actually had
a hand in that vehicle.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, that just swells, right?
I mean, this is real.
This is the intrinsic motivationthat individuals have.
I remember my first job as anintern I was part of a single
point security it was sitting onVB script and I built reports,
(41:44):
reports of organizationalstructure like departments
and people and all that.
I remember coding VB scriptalong with JavaScript
to produce like a prettypicture of a report.
I was proud of that deeply.
Like I would print itand, show it at home.
Look, this is what I builtthe same feeling stays.
And there's nothing morediscouraging than software
(42:08):
that you just crankout and does nothing.
Yeah.
But we live in adifferent world.
If AI's building thatstuff, do you have any kind
of care for what it did?
Not really.
Yeah.
Until maybe you made acouple million immediately
by, by selling it.
And then you are offto your next ideas.
There are entrepreneursout there that launched
a hundred companies.
(42:28):
None of them succeeded andthey're still cranking out more.
And they're big idea, man.
But you know, in the end ofthe day, they're not swayed
by any way that things failed.
The lean principles can work.
Like they, they're goodand they really do work
when allowed to work.
Right.
When not interferedwith, that's the Deming.
(42:50):
Deming calls it Meddling.
Meddling, yeah.
Or in the perfectenvironment, would you say?
It doesn't even have to beperfect as it's an environment
free of meddling constraints.
Basically.
Meddling means I mean, asan executive you really
have a lot of control.
In the prep for this podcast,I talked a lot about management
coming in and saying oh, Brianwe really love your team and
everything you're doing is greatfor the organization, but we're
(43:12):
gonna reduce your budget by Xamount of dollars per month.
And I'm that seems like areally specific number down
to the number of cents.
Why?
Why is that?
Why are you tellingme that number?
Oh, because we're removingthis person from your team.
It sounds like you don't carewhether we're productive or not.
You wanted to remove thisperson from our team?
'cause it's, it is not likeyou're following up your
decision with any kind ofmetrics to say we removed
(43:35):
this person from Brian's teamand therefore the team we put
them on was productive or not.
Because I would argue ifBrian's team and the team you're
removing the developer for fromare equal importance and you
remove somebody from Brian'steam, move into this other team,
and because you introduced anew person to the other team
and because you took a personoff of Brian's team, both teams
(43:56):
now suffer for X number ofmonths until they rebuild their
ways of working, basically.
You as an organizational plannerfirst of all, they're not
organizationally planning inthis example, they're financial
planning, there should be ametric that the person who
made that financial decision.
Should be held to, to say Hey,you made a financial decision to
move money from this, this lineitem to this line item, and it
(44:19):
affected these teams this way.
Therefore get outta my office.
There is no extrapolation.
I know of theperformance to your team.
I know topology or set up,I know or number of people.
We don't baseline those things.
if we had the data, there wouldbe a completely new revelation
that meddling does impact thingsAnd in preparation for this
(44:40):
podcast, we also talkedabout the impact of layoffs
and how they're continuing.
And I, I, I would arguethat totally unnecessary.
These companies are makingmoney, they're cutting staff,
but they have plenty of money.
And as funny as it maysound, they're not even
impacting the market share orshareholder value that much
(45:00):
by trimming those resources.
Mm-hmm.
I question whatmotivations being driven?
I doubt it's cuttinglow performers.
I don't know.
It's not really clear.
Maybe one reason islike you said, they're
making money, right?
So.
By cutting staff, you'redirectly impacting your
bottom line, right?
You're saving money by savingall those salaries, if you're
(45:23):
not paying people's benefitand salaries, those are savings
right away, but not immediately.
So like a lot of companies, theywould realize only those savings
like a year or two after.
Yeah.
Because they can projectthat for our next quarterly
report, financial report.
We are doing fantastic becausenow, you know in their statement
(45:45):
that they release, they can sayour operating costs are lower.
But that's short term financial.
That's financial manipulationrather than actual value, which
is what everybody's doing.
Right.
As soon as you threw thisout as a conversation point,
Alex, the first thing thatcame to my mind, and it really
hasn't changed with yourback and forth, is that's
what everyone else is doing.
(46:05):
It, it's a fomo.
It's like everyoneelse is doing layoffs.
Like if I'm Google and I'mlooking around the market
and it's like Meta is doinglayoffs and whoever else
is doing Amazon, whatevermarket Microsoft did, yeah.
I don't want to beleft out of this.
I should also do layoffs.
And also you havea little air cover.
There's some gamesbeing played as well.
The unfortunate sideof it is at the end of
the day, it isn't just.
Numbers on spreadsheets.
(46:27):
They're real humanbeings with families.
Impacted by this.
That would be the real issue.
Yeah.
The sacrificial pawns are real.
You gotta get you gotta getover having a conscious home.
That's what I'm asking.
That's, I'm trying totell you right now.
I was born with one.
It can open, it's a big problem.
I wanna move us into the endof the podcast to ask the
toxicity with the term agile.
If agile really is dead, like ifthat's really where we're going
here can the brand be saved?
(46:48):
Okay.
And if the answer is no,then where does everyone go?
The brand has to beeither saved or morphed
into something, right?
Yeah.
Just replace it with something.
Pick a word.
People are being live and notagile, nimble, whatever you
wanna put it doesn't matter.
The core principles of whatwe used to call agility.
(47:11):
They don't change,they still work.
Small teams, rapid feedback,all of those things work, right?
Avoid the tyrannyof annual financing.
Finance products instead ofbudgets only, or projects.
Those things work, right?
So in practice you apply them.
You don't use agile jargon.
And as we were saying at thebeginning of the podcast,
(47:32):
orient yourself to usingbusiness terminology with which
business people understand.
Hopefully, There was a agilemanifesto, right in 2001.
I'd like to see an agilepostmortem, unadulterated way
of getting whoever's availablefrom the Agile Manifesto to
(47:54):
actually honestly say whatworked, what didn't stop hiding
behind the veil of marketing.
Step away from the fake stufffrom your case studies and
BS that have been propagatedall over and have a true
reflection of the world todayafter the impact of Agile.
(48:14):
There are things that improved.
There is entire disciplines likeproduct management that emerged.
Sure.
There are things that gotworse when the impact to
the folks that actuallyembraced the discipline.
I think I would love to seethat because there are way
too many arguments, even thesame heroes, same 17 heroes.
(48:39):
A lot of 'em conflictwith each other.
About who said whatabout the principles
about things like that.
I think it would be great tobring 'em all together and do
the agile postmortem we need.
If we are to preserve thatbrand and agility and actually
recognize it, I think wegotta start consuming what
(49:00):
we're producing and actuallygive back by explaining
what worked well didn't.
And if we had a way of changingit, how would we do it?
That's interesting becausewell, first of all, I
personally don't believethat's ever gonna happen.
I know.
I agree with you becausethese people have
already moved away from.
The original manifesto.
(49:21):
So again, without namingnames, I can tell you people
have come up with their ownlittle models here and there.
These are the same people andthey, it's not the same model.
It's not like they're allgravitating towards the same
thing or of the 17, not all ofthem are alive also right now.
But , that's not it.
They're not gonna dothis because this has
been a cash cow for them.
Exactly.
It continues to be a cash cow.
(49:41):
So if it's not gonnahappen, then what?
Maybe something else needsto rise as a movement.
Yeah.
Whatever that might be.
And I don't see the traditionalagileists coming up with that.
'cause people will havea trust issue there.
Yeah.
I think the trust issue,I think the scattered
attention, people believetoo many different things.
(50:04):
It's a lot harder in theenterprise and startup
space to be unique.
Without receivinga lot of criticism.
Some people will obviouslyadopt certain things like
Marty Cagan's being recognizedI think it's repackaging of
the ideas for the most part.
I don't think there's anythingsuper new that can be created,
(50:25):
but we've learned, right.
What did we learn?
Move small, get feedback.
Right, right.
But we don't do, we needa scrum master for that.
Right, right.
And, that's where kindof the reality and back
to the beginning of thepodcast where we are now.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I like you, younailed the outro right
there in the summary.
I agree with everythingyou just said, Alex.
(50:46):
The main reason that I wantedto push this up as a podcast was
I just have this feeling thatif the agile careers, quote,
air quotes, agile careers areover, and like you just can't
use the word Agile anymore.
That forces you to re-look atthe work that you were doing
outside the scope of this.
If I'm gonna call the Agilemanifesto marketing thing in
(51:09):
the first place, to convincecompanies you need to stop doing
this big project managementmulti-month nonsensical process.
And I'm gonna marketmy way around saying
that's not cool anymore.
The Agile Manifesto was amarketing scheme to convince
companies that the way theywere developing products
was quote, not cool.
If that was successful,what I'm saying is, okay,
(51:32):
that ran its course.
Now you need to take thevalue that you've been
delivering to companies.
And without hiding behindmarketing buzzwords, you now
need to refactor your resume.
Uh.
Show real business impactand remarket yourself as a
different, whatever it is.
I don't know what it is.
I wish I could, I wish atthe end of the podcast I
(51:52):
could tell people you'rea business consultant now.
Just put consultant on thetop of your resume and go
out there kid and, get it.
I'm not sure if that's theright term, but I am sure
that those skills, thosebusiness leadership skills
that you've been practicingas alist, whatever your role
has been they're valuable.
They are valuable.
I'm convinced they're valuable.
(52:13):
Yeah.
I agree with that.
I think as Agilist doesn'tmatter again with, you know
without kind of regard toroles, scrum master, product
owner, et cetera, you find asituation that you encounter
and you do things and youhope to leave that situation.
In an improved state.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So what is that,that's changing?
(52:34):
I mean, you're really a changecatalyst, although that's not
really a title that anybodylikes, but focus around what
has it meant to the businessesthat you've worked with as
opposed to at the team level?
Forget about fake metrics orvanity metrics as we call 'em.
Forget about all of those.
I mean, they were donea long time before, but
now they're truly buried.
Right?
Sure.
(52:54):
Nobody cares about your, CFDs.
I mean, they're good as far astools to improve, but they're
not something you lead withwhen you go in and interview.
Right.
Velocity and all the likes.
Well, the agile community'smissing is redefining
the agile track.
You know, back when we werestarting the careers and I went
into computer science, my sisterwent into information systems.
(53:16):
We all had a differentcareer track.
Her career track wasqa, project management.
That was the career trackand information systems.
Yeah.
My career trek as a computerscientist was engineering
development architectureengineering manager.
Somewhere along the lines,the track allows you to
jump different areas.
Project manager allows youto jump to program management
(53:38):
or engineering management.
The software developerhas a lot more variety.
They can continue along theengineering route, principal,
architects, et cetera, so forth.
They can stay on thedevelopment side, they can
jump into executive side.
There's a lot more versatility,security, et cetera.
I think the agility isthe one that doesn't
really have a track.
It was always a one path boom.
(54:00):
Agile.
Agile, right?
Yeah.
And that needs to be redefined.
What is that track nowthat we've reached that
last step on the rung,that's no longer available?
Where's the next one going?
Yeah.
And I think as we, as we talkedabout it, is back into the
business consultant, it isback into the directorships.
Continue improvement.
But don't go, don't look down.
(54:21):
Look up.
You can do a lot more if youstep away and just think about
the impact you've driven.
Right?
You can lead organizations,you can help run products,
you can help with quality,you can help a lot of things.
You just have to stopsprinkling the agile jargon
all over the place becausenobody cares anymore.
So I don't know if we havedeclared Agile completely dead
as a brand in this podcast,but I think what I said in
(54:45):
the podcast holds true, whichis the skills and experience,
especially the experience thatyou, that anyone listening
to this has the taking teamsfrom like teams off camera
to teams on camera, type oflike developing the team.
Like those are realskills that you have done.
That because you can't get ajob now for six months, eight
(55:05):
months, whatever, because likethese agile jobs you're looking
out for have disappeared.
That's not a reflectionthat you are not valuable.
Right.
Like I want to tell peopleand let people know Hey man,
it's like stop despairing.
You have solid businessleadership skills
that you have learned.
You've learned through doingit, and you've learned through
experience most importantly.
(55:25):
And yes, maybe the peoplethat you're interfacing
with don't value them.
Go find other businesses.
Maybe they only value themlike 10 hours a week, 20
hours a week consultancyor something like that.
There are businesses outthere that need your help.
Get out there and find thepeople that need your skill.
Is, is, is my main thingthat I'm trying to get
across in this podcast.
Again, that's the main seedthat, that, that I wanted to
(55:47):
have this podcast thanks to Alexfor coming out and weighing in.
'cause I I, I, I didn'tjust wanna be ranting at the
camera for an hour on thispodcast of Hey man, you, you
is kind and you is special.
I wanted to be listen,like you, you have skills.
No, it's great.
It's great being there.
I being here with you guysthe, the topic is important.
I think Agile willhave a long tail.
(56:10):
It's, it's too finelyingrained everywhere.
It's very important.
It's not gonna disappear.
However, the roles, thetraditional roles that fill it
will be less and less available.
Sure.
So we'll start transitioningto something else.
Mm-hmm.
AI will not replacethat thought.
(56:31):
However, there's gonna be someconversion to different roles.
But I agree with you.
Every agile professional hasa lot more value than what
they're able to describe,at least in the terms
that everyone has been.
Right.
It's not about backlogs,it's not about Jira, it's
not about tickets, it'snot about all these things.
Sorry, did you sayit's not about Jira?
(56:53):
Oh, yes I did.
Oh, I'm sorry.
There's a, there's aspecial sound effect that
is a special sound effect.
All right.
So those of you that are stillwith us, both of you don't
forget to like and subscribeand let us know down in the
comments below what othertopics you'd like us to tackle.
And thank you for coming.
Alex, it's been a while.
Answer.
Intro.
Great intro.
in the planning for thisepisode, we were talking about
all this agile is dead stuff.
And again, all three of ushave unique and different
perspectives on agile isdead whatever happened,
(00:21):
happened with Agile.
I would like to talk to y'allabout if Agile really is
dead, like what happens next?
What do we all do?
And second of all I'm seeingthis thing on social media
where people in agile coachpositions Scrum masters , I'm
not talking about the peoplethat are cheating their job
role to product management.
So I'm talking abouteverybody else.
Like they're outta work for awhile and it bothers me 'cause
(00:42):
they feel like being outta workfor a while feels like it's like
a reflection of your self worth.
And I really want to talk aboutthat in the whole podcast.
Well, my, my, my takeon it is we gotta stop
talking about Agile.
The ship has sailed, thework's still there, but as
far as people are concernedthere's one common language.
And all of the folks thatwere in the Agile have been
(01:04):
working in the business.
So I think the biggest mistakesright now for anybody in this
career is to see yourself asthe part of the agile ecosystem.
It is no longer theagile ecosystem.
It is a business.
And so what you have to realizeis in the end of the day, you
are a business consultant.
Now you could specializein different areas.
(01:25):
There's executions, there'steamwork, there is a team
topologies psychology, there'smental aspects, there's product.
So there's a lot of facets.
How teams operate, howcompanies function.
But, everybody that was in theagile space had been somehow
involved with the business.
(01:47):
Business consultants are alwaysin need in different capacities.
So I think the biggest problemin finding a job is that.
There are certain terminologythat is no longer being
picked up right by whateverthe recruiting engines apply.
And so folks find itvery hard to find their
(02:09):
position of yesterday.
You gotta figure out whatis it that you are doing?
What is it that you want to do?
And look for opportunitiesto do that with a
different terminology.
Lemme ask you a question.
You think agile beingdead, if it is dead it's
just a passing fad, oryou think it's, it's gone.
(02:29):
Gone and whatever comeswill be the new thing,
the new shiny thing.
If it's not here already,what that might look like?
Do you want to getin on that first?
'cause I have ideas too.
Oh, I think theterminology's gone.
I think we gottadrop the terminology.
It's giving everybodyindigestion.
It's over usage.
It's commercialization.
It's young people, it'sthe generational shift.
(02:49):
Young folks don't wantto hear about Agile.
Right.
And so we end up focusingabout structure more, but
it's no longer the problem.
Agile was a structuredsolution to problems 20 years
ago, but the problems haveshifted with the structure.
(03:09):
New things emerged andwe're doing things faster.
And so we need thesolutions for today.
How do we getdevelopers to work fast?
You know, how do we get towork on the right things?
If we are bringing additionaltools and AI is a tool.
What does that look like?
You know who does the planning?
(03:32):
How do we do the planning?
How do we get the approvals?
How do we get all of that?
All of these same problems willremain, but we're no longer
confound to a, a agile structureas a solution, as sort of your
blueprint of how to get there.
I wanna deep dive a littlemore on something very
adjacent to that which iswhat are the skill sets then
that are needed to take usto the next level, right?
(03:55):
But before that you said you hadsome thoughts to share on that.
That's all right.
I forgot what allthe thoughts were.
I was a thought leader.
Sorry.
A thought leader.
If I was gonna seek totie up what we're talking
about now, I would say allof these folks working.
In the quote agile positions.
I'm really mainly talkingabout people working in Scrum.
That's really what I'mtalking about right now.
(04:16):
Product has kind of aneasy out 'cause you can
jump to product management,Marty Cagan writing books.
That stuff's the new hotness at,at least it is for right now.
Like a, actually I would arguethat's on the decline as well.
So like the, the like thewhatever just happened.
Tolis, I would argue that theproduct people as well, like
their, their field has becomeso broad that like the, where
(04:37):
that meme with like the greenReaper going door to door, like
product people are immediatelyafter the Agile people.
And in fact, you seethe AI people segmenting
this market as well.
It's all marketing.
That's my, that'sbasically my diatribe.
That's where it's going.
This is all marketing.
The, the product people,the grim Reapers coming
from them next becauseproduct people like.
(04:58):
We don't really know whattheir role is in the business,
in the worst businesses,they're just feature managers
and we don't need, there'sno value in that at all.
And the people that are nottruly empowered with driving
business outcomes empoweredwith driving business,
they have budgets and thedecision making power and the
actually, and autonomy actuallyautonomously empowered Yeah.
(05:21):
To do what they'resupposed to do.
I would argue that , they'renext and because of, so
many people like that all ofproduct management is gonna
get labeled with that label.
And is gonna be the next onethat is viewed like Agiles
are viewed right now, iswell, I don't understand
what they do all day.
What does a scrum master do allday outside of 15 minutes after
they run like the stand up?
(05:42):
Yeah.
I think it's alittle bit different.
If a scrum master is takingcare of the team right.
And helps them executeand coordinates that or
running interference andall of those things that
are on the scrum guide, allof that work is invisible
at the executive level.
The product manager's jobis visible at the executive
level, especially if it'san important product.
(06:03):
Because you take a slice abovethe execution and it's revenue,
users, customer service,churn, all of those things
that are bubbled up to the.
Senior level.
So you do see that result.
Now you may not care whatthat product manager's
doing day to day.
As long as thosenumbers are positive.
(06:24):
But I guarantee you thatyou will care what happens
day to day if thosenumbers are negative.
So that positionwill get exposure.
Now, there is a problem wherewith the ai, the expectation is
that the product manager's notjust gonna run quote unquote
business, but will also bethe coder and the designer.
Right.
And a million other thingscalled, that's called
(06:45):
product engineering.
Now that's what therole is morphing into.
Yeah, that's right.
The work will never disappear.
It shifts.
Somebody's gonna have to do it.
Now who's gonna do it?
Is it more responsibilityon the engineer?
Are we getting rid ofour product designers?
Mm-hmm.
Because now productmanager can do Figma.
You know, so I, I think thosethings are questionable.
(07:06):
Maybe you'll be lucky enoughto find somebody that's a jack
of all trades, but usually it'sfollowed with a master of none.
Do you need that person ordo you need somebody that's
super duper specialized?
I kinda see some parallelismhere between what happened
with Scrum Masters and.
Traditional agileists, right?
Like agile coaches and whatnot.
I can see easily thathappening with product
(07:28):
owners and product managers.
And that's for the samefundamental reason, which
is if you have a pulse,you can just take a two day
class and declare yourselfa certified X, Y, Z, right?
Sure.
That of course, it happeneda lot with Scrum masters, but
I'd say it's even happeningwith product owners too.
You're interestedin product, right?
(07:49):
So the first thing you do isyou take a class and then you
come out and say, I'm now acertified scrum product owner,
or whatever the other one is.
Sure.
So experience is what'smissing here, being able
to really do the rightthings when, when called on.
You know, same thing,same thing's gonna happen,
I think with product.
So Alex, what you pointedthis out very early in this,
(08:10):
discussion point is youdo have a lot of people.
Introduce into the field new.
Basically, they, they've never,never done the job before with
a potentially a two day class.
Like I'm not, I don't reallywanna harp on the certification
industry that, that I, I dowanna harp on them, but this
is not the podcast for it.
Okay.
We had several podcasts.
(08:30):
We had one with Brent-is this industry fixable?
And I think that wasbefore episode a hundred.
I don't remember how long ago?
That's, that tells you how longwe've been tracking this thing
out of the corner of our eye.
But yes, the industrial complexproduced a lot of these quote
coaches who, if Alex, you'resaying what really are they,
(08:51):
they're business consultants.
You have this millthat's stamping new
business consultants.
But they they don't have aproven track record in business.
When you or I think about,well, 'cause we've talked about
this on the podcast before.
The way I think about ascrum master, like they
need to be able to, to, tomake contact with people all
over the business quickly.
They need to be able toingratiate themselves at
(09:13):
the highest levels, C-suite,director level, whatever,
depends on how big theorganization is because we
rely on those people to bringvisibility to the big issues,
to the people that can helpmake the change and then
bring those people on board tomake the change that we need.
Because like the developerson the team are look, I just
wanna code and do cool stuff.
(09:33):
because the organization isset up as clunky as it is and
because like we got all theseintegration points and whatever
we, our day-to-day doesn'tinterface with the right people.
A million reasons why we're notsuccessful, but you got this
one person saying Hey guys, Isee you're having a problem.
I'm gonna go getthis other person.
I happen to know them.
I'm gonna call the bat phone.
I'm gonna getBatman on the line.
(09:53):
He's gonna drop into ourdaily scrum or whatever, and
we're gonna solve it todaybecause I got the right
contact at the right time.
This is like the job of sales iswhat I'm describing right now.
It's like you have an internalperson who just knows the right
person to call at the right timeto help get through the problem.
I'm not saying they have tosolve the problem, but, the
reason I want to have thispodcast was again, you have
(10:14):
people that came out throughthe certification mill and
businesses can't tell thedifference between that person
with the two day certificationand the person with like five
years of experience who actuallyknows about lean management
and organizational design and,how software gets developed
day to day understands thepoint of bringing the customer
in for reviews and stuff likethat, even though it's painful.
(10:35):
And I don't know.
Like I, there there's a,there's an agile bubble
that's responsible for causingthis negativity on the term,
but I'm having a hard timepulling the two of them apart.
Well, the, there's a littlebit of a difference between
new people joining in.
Mm-hmm.
You know, like youngprofessionals coming
through whatever programand the experienced folks
(10:59):
not able to find jobs.
The biggest problem that wehave right now is the folks
that have contributed for yearsand years are having trouble.
Finding opportunities.
Right.
You know, and we don'thave to talk about
certification with 'em.
You have real tangibleproof and experience.
The problem is that the way theyframe their accomplishments and
their achievements, they frameit in the agile terminology.
(11:22):
Mm-hmm.
And you need to decoupleyourselves from something
that's no longer popular.
Have they worked in a business?
Absolutely.
How have they consultedthe business to improve?
And if you can formulatethat way, then there is
real value that you couldbring to the organization.
Now there are people, again,some people are better at
(11:43):
product side, some peopleat the execution side.
There's the businessagility side, right.
Which is more of astrategic side than there
is the quality side.
So you have to find the basis.
However, I think there is a bigdiscrepancy on which company
they want to go and work in.
Previously you would find smalland mid-sized businesses with
(12:07):
roles available to do that.
Mm-hmm.
Not anymore.
Everybody's trying tobe lean, so it's really
only the enterprises.
Yeah.
And enterprises have beenshedding, the management
levels have been shedding, theproject management have been
shedding the agility Yeah.
Aspects.
And I would argue thatmoney is there to hire.
They just principally do notwant to invest in that area.
(12:29):
Om, I wanna pull you intothis one because I, I,
I, I thought about you.
I immediately, when Alex startedgiving the bullet points here,
I thought about, is this a.
Academic theory versus likebusiness practice type of
like business experience.
Or what is the ROIof having a coach?
You know like hiring apart-time coach on a consultant.
(12:49):
I'm thinking about this froma co consultant standpoint,
are all these agile folks,do they all become business
consultants and then if themarket gets flooded with all
these business consultants whohave these specific skills that
we're talking about, like let'spretend like everybody listens
to this podcast right here.
That's what I'm saying.
Can subscribe.
That's what I'm saying.
If everyone listens to thispodcast and I am valuable.
How can people pivot theirresumes and talk about their
(13:12):
stories and engage with peopleto say Hey, this is the ROI.
This is what I can do for yourbusiness in ROI, in terms of
the organizational design andwhat I can do for your goal
setting and all your apparatusof planning and all this stuff
that's like that you're probablydoing terribly right now.
Have to admit.
That's a fantastic question,first of all, and there isn't
a simple answer to that.
So let's unpack alittle bit, right?
(13:33):
People need help though.
Yeah, they do need help.
So here's the problemfor just piggybacking
of what Alex was saying.
If you've just had a careerin Agile, so to speak, right?
It doesn't really matterwhat your role is product
owner, scrum master orwhatever it might be.
And if you are continuingalong those lines, looking for
some work that basically justsays, this is what I'm gonna
(13:54):
do going forward, then yes,your resume is going to say.
I've been an agile list.
Right.
Right.
And no one wantsto see that today.
So they, that, that'sa big gulf right there.
Those people that aresuccessful, what they
manage to do is reframe itin a way that people can
understand, not just aboutdressing it up in agile ease.
(14:15):
It's putting it out there insimple, but business language.
You either saved theorganization money or
you made them money.
It's that simpleor protect risk.
Now how did you do that?
How did you do that risk?
Is that what you said?
So the thing aboutAgileists that are trying
to reform themselves.
Ask those questions, startfrom there and say, how have I
done this in the past for thecompanies that I've worked for?
(14:38):
Mm-hmm.
Forget about I took fiveteams and brought them to a
different level of agility.
Nobody cares about that anymore.
Right?
So if you reframethat, that's your past,
bear down your resume.
You don't need no sevenpage resumes anymore, right?
One page, pair it down, getthat business mindset, and
then project forward andsay, how can my skillset
(14:59):
allow me to help a business?
So think about it like this.
Pick three differentorganizations at different sizes
in different areas, if you likebus business domains and work
out your plan of how you canposition your skills to help
that business either save money.
Or make money and theresume wise as well.
(15:20):
You know, take a look,history in your history,
comments on the resume.
And rephrase from whatyou did to what you've
accomplished in business terms.
Yeah.
So it's not Hey, I've helpedthe team manage the backlog.
Nobody cares.
Everybody knows how tomanage the backlog, but
what did you achieve?
How many deliveries wereyou able to push through?
What did those deliveries do?
(15:40):
What did those releasesactually produce?
Was that critical?
Was that not critical?
Did that actually make animpact to the organization?
Yeah.
A long time ago we did a series.
We did a three podcast seriesand it was basically number
one was the scrum master'sresponsibility to the team.
Number two was the scrummaster's responsibility
to the product.
And then number three wasuh, to the organization.
(16:02):
to the organization.
And , it was very funny becausethe viewership of the series
of the podcast was numberone, the team, it was like
high number two, the productwas a little bit lower.
And then the organizationwas like a third of the
views of the first one.
It was like pretty stark,pretty stark contrast
that people aren't reallyengaged with like an org
level type of discussions.
(16:22):
Yeah.
It's interesting orglevel type of discussions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was interesting to meat the time, and it kind of
also signaled, it signaled.
What I see in that roleis like pe when, when you
start interfacing to belike, Hey, we can have a
bit more efficient org thatworks together and helps.
And like people are like,yeah, I don't, I don't care.
There's no value in that.
Well let, let, let, let's takea step back a little bit, right?
(16:44):
So, okay.
The reason why Agile is pickingup all this flack is because
the value is subjective, right?
I think if we take a look atScrum for example, having a
scrum master or not havinga scrum master, having
scrum master role sharedletting the tech lead just
(17:05):
do the command and controlmodel and implementation
having a micromanager.
And you compareall these models.
I think the results are goingto be almost identical, I
don't think that either ofthose provide a superior
result based or successfactor than any other.
So because there is such amultitude way of doing things
(17:27):
and because the results aremarginally identical, that's
why people are looking at itand it's Hey, why do we have
to commit to this structure?
Like people can deliversoftware successfully without
Agile or Scrum or you know,or create their own or do
their own thing if it works.
That that was thewhole premise of Agile.
If small incrementsand if whatever you do
(17:51):
works, don't change it.
Keep going with it, right?
We don't have to call it Agile.
Sure.
And if you can still achievethat level of success, why do
you actually need a structureddisciplinary approach and
higher specific roles?
I reacted strongly towhat you just said, Alex.
So I want to talkabout it for a second.
That's a nice way ofbeing I got hives.
What you just outlined isa very compelling case.
(18:11):
Hey, if we have a successin whatever we're using,
what does it matter?
I mean even in MartyKagan's latest book in
the Transform book, he'soh, these agile people
can't they can't help you.
Right?
Yeah.
Read my book, which is allan agile transformation
book by the way.
Sure.
It's exactly what it is.
The agileists, they understandteam topologies, meaning like
the, the book team topologies,like how actual, like good
(18:33):
development teams work.
When you segment by whatthe teams are doing, like
the value stream teams andthe component teams, they
understand Conway's law.
They understand why you get overa certain number of people and
your organization just fails.
Because Conway's law iskind of like grinding
against everything.
They understand.
They understand whenthey're seeing symptoms of
these things at work thataction needs to be taken.
(18:57):
And then we are saying, well,these agileists, they're
actually like organizationalarchitects and like that,
that's not a term that's beencoined anywhere before as like
you have system architects orsolution architects or whatever,
.
Organizational architectsorganization is broken up
to position themselves to dothe best work they can do.
(19:19):
That's just not a thing.
That's like sociologyand whatever.
And like corporateAmerica doesn't, I
mean, doesn't value that, but Brian, which agileists,
I've met a ton of agileistsand there are agileists that
just show up and say, sowhat's your status?
I, right.
(19:40):
And unfortunately, mostof the market is full of
folks like that, where ScrumMasters an easy position
to hide inside of a hugeenterprise where you don't
actually deliver the value.
And I've seen Scrum Mastersthat just simply pass questions
from one source to another.
That don't solveanybody's problems.
They don't run any interferencethat throw the team under the
(20:02):
bus every chance they get.
And it's that type ofculture that is, okay.
So unfortunately, for theones that actually know
about team topologies andactually care about changing
organizations, that is abusiness consultant, right?
Because that person has a muchmore depth than their own team.
They know howorganizations work.
(20:24):
They've seen a lot of it.
Explaining product managementto them is not required.
They've builtproduct themselves.
They know engineering.
They know lies whenthey hear them.
You know, it's a differenttype of professional.
So let me ask you a question.
Imagine you ran an enterpriseand there was a person
(20:45):
with this type of skillset.
What title would you give them?
Forget you, you have no agiletitles available to that person.
What title would you give them?
What do you think?
I give 'em the title that theyhave now, which is vp that's
usually the, OR director.
It depends on the sizeof the enterprise, but
normally these people Bingo.
(21:05):
Yeah, bingo.
So, so normally, normallythese people would get a
title that is commensurate.
Ooh, we haven't saidthat in a podcast.
Oh, that's a nice word.
Yeah.
They normally, they'd get atitle that's commensurate with
the concept that they can runan entire business operation.
Therefore they get a titlethat basically is like a
catchall title that saysyou are a business leader.
(21:27):
And that this is the main, oneof the, like the reason that
this podcast agenda stuck,there's several reasons.
This podcast as an agenda,as a statement, emotionally,
physically, oh, help me out.
Like what?
Psychologically, pathologically,I'm sociologically, like many
reasons that this stuck outto me as like as a podcast
(21:48):
that I really want to do islike people have convinced.
The agile folks, and yeah, I'myou made a point that I don't I
don't want it to go unanswered.
Which is yeah, a lot.
Like there's a lot ofpeople that got the two day
start and they really havenot done this before and
they're outta their depth.
So yeah.
Okay.
I'm I agree with you there.
Let's put them aside in a bucketin this for a second because
(22:10):
at the end of the episode,I really do want to ask, and
om you stayed in consultingmuch longer than I have.
It's like the people thatare outta their depth.
Is that like 70% of people?
50% of people, likeit's a large percentage.
If it's a large percentageof the, maybe it's a problem
and we need to talk about itseparately, , if it's like
30% of people and they justget they get their first job
and then they get washed outand they can't get back in
(22:30):
their career field, maybeit's less of a problem.
But if it's like 80% ofthe people out there and
like businesses just can'ttell the difference, then
maybe it is a big problem.
But the people that havethe experience that can
do the job, they areconsultant business leaders.
They know how development works.
They know how to runexperiments against the market.
(22:54):
To figure out if customersreally want features or not.
And again well, whatjob title would you
title those people with?
I would, I would title 'emwith well you can run a whole
enterprise, so you must be a vp.
And I just slap a VP ordirector title on 'em and
be go figure out my, likewhat gets success kid?
Go get it out there.
So there are differenttypes of VPs?
(23:15):
Yeah.
There are VPs that haveentire departments built
underneath of them.
Yep.
And there are VPs with just afew people and they have a very
narrow focus in specific areas.
Yeah.
So this sounds like one ofthose VPs that has the ability
to influence all others.
Sure.
Yes.
Or directors.
Yes.
And you expect other directorsto work with this director?
(23:36):
Hopefully not in commandand control model but in a
collaborative fashion to helpimprove other departments
in the way they operate.
Does that sound familiar?
Like 20 years ago beforethis whole agile thing?
I completely agree.
Sounds like it.
I completely agree.
If it's a business and we'rehiring people and maybe I'm
hiring someone with likea small sliver of staff.
Maybe they only got two,three people under them,
(23:57):
developer, designer, whatever.
And my my thing isI'm gonna give this VP
go test this market.
Go expand me in thismarket, whatever.
I'm gonna give them abroad business goal.
They have a budget,they have a team.
They tick themselves.
They go figure out howto do it, and they've
got everything they need.
When you convert all the jobtitles of quote, agile job
titles, like everyone losestheir mind is the main thing
(24:19):
I'm trying to get across in thispodcast is the people that have
been trying to make it work as aagile coach with like two, three
teams under them or whatever.
You've been learningcritical business skills
that you could basicallytake and become a business
leader in any other org.
So don't just because you aresubmitting your resume to all
(24:40):
these agile coach positions orwhatever, and getting bounced
by the random a TS position orHR people that don't even really
know what an agile coach is, orthey can't tell the difference.
Between agile coach with X yearsexperience and like a person
that just got their C yesterday.
Just because you're running intothese barriers doesn't mean you
do not have valuable skills.
(25:01):
I would argue you're notleveraging those skills to the
right audience in the right way.
You've gotta open your mind,first of all, and say, just
because I've been an agilecoach or whatever, scrum
master, fill in the gap.
Because the situation isno longer the same as it
was when you did that.
Yeah.
And it might be justtwo years ago, or it
might be 15 years ago.
It doesn't matter.
Right.
(25:22):
So it's having thatbusiness orientation and,
and not a lot of peoplecan just switch like that.
If you're a scrum master withthree years experience, all you
know is how to work with teams.
You can't seeyourself above that.
Right.
And that's a problem.
And it's really kind of adisservice that the titles
that somebody had historically,even though there's a big
(25:45):
amount of experience havebeen only the agile titles,
like how do you transpose it?
Right?
So for example, if I was intech, I could be a senior dev, a
tech lead, an architect, right?
And at the end of the day,I'm still a dev, right?
So I could still pursue that.
But I think the biggestdisservice that people
make is devalue themselves.
(26:06):
If they can't find a jobnow, they're oh, my skills
aren't really needed.
So they try to go a littlelower, but without recognizing
that the skills they possess areactually much more significant.
Right.
And instead of going lowerand limiting yourself
to the agile area, onlyreapply that as a business.
(26:28):
Consultancy type of skillset.
And you can go much higherin the organization.
You have more depththan you can offer.
And you just gotta get ridof the jargon and kind of
edit the experience a littlebit so that it's clear not
from the agility perspective,but from the business value.
I think it's hard though, fora lot of people to just get
(26:49):
rid of those mental shackles.
Of course.
'cause that's what they've done.
This is what when, when you,when you run into those kinds
of people, you immediatelyknow who they are because
you ask 'em what do you do?
And they'll go ba butI'm looking for work as
what a ba. So it's hardto come out of that mold.
Now, having said that, peoplethat have been around the
block a bit, they can do that.
(27:11):
Those people will saylisten, what I've been
doing can easily be appliedto project management, for
example, or vice versa, whichactually happened, right?
A whole bunch of projectmanagers got redubbed
as scrum masters.
Yeah.
But so people can apply theirbackground in different areas.
Operations isanother one, right?
If you're a project manager,you have the, the skills to
(27:31):
meticulously track things.
Well, you can besuccessful in operations.
There's no reason whyyou can't make it.
You just have to get awayfrom project management's
all I've done and that'swhat I want to do.
One of the hangups of Agilesis they're, they're stuck
in this team level dynamic.
Hmm.
And it doesn't necessarilyprepare them for the enterprise.
Assuming that everyone wants towork in an enterprise level type
(27:52):
of oh, I worked at 30,000 plusthree, or if you're not working
for like a global companywith hundreds of thousands
of people you know, you mightfeel overwhelmed or whatever.
But yeah, you have like theorganizational architect in
disguise type of thing is still,it is stuck in the back of my
mind from this conversationyou coming from it from a
(28:13):
systems thinking approach youknow how to restructure the
system to be more successful.
So if you were to lookat your resume again and
revise it to show theimpact on the organization.
In order to look for adifferent role, like a director
role or something like that.
You know, like apeople leader role.
'cause that's what, I'mthinking about people that
(28:33):
are stuck as a scrum master.
They're outta work orstuck as an agile coach
and they're outta work.
And well what did you really do?
The Agile coach and the agilecoach slash Scrum master for
Scrum masters, who managesmultiple teams and the program
manager, like those rolesare very close together.
They're very close together.
I would say communicationsis probably the big leap you
(28:55):
need to make organizationally.
Yeah.
Imagine you're in the interviewand you've come out
of a Scrum ecosystem.
You elevate yourself to abusiness role and it's well,
we'd like to improve theperformance of the team.
How would you do this?
And that's thequestion you're faced.
Well, you have to stepaway from the Agile thing
and say, well let's see,what do you guys use now?
(29:17):
Well, you're doingscrum wrong, right?
Gotta step away from that.
You have to understand a littlebit more on business basis.
Well, what wouldyou like to improve?
Is it the speed of deliveries?
Why is that costing you what'sthings are taking too long.
Yeah.
Well, why do you think that is?
Do you have any hues?
Learn to ask more businessspecific questions without
(29:39):
going too much intothe weeds of execution.
Folks that worked heavilyin Scrum, they tend to
jump a lot into, Hey, thisis the way to do this.
A model or process, this is rulebook, this is what the guide
says, and we have to implementthe guide a hundred percent.
And then you're sort ofgoing right back into
the weeds of where thissystem already rejected
so you have to elevate yourselfand just go, you know what,
(30:02):
I'm gonna go a little higher.
Yeah.
What's our goals?
How do we reach them?
What stands in the way?
What have we tried?
But don't sink intothe, kind of the agile
jargon into that level.
Now you can understandhow teams operate and
try to help 'em improve.
But I would try to stay awayfrom attempting to say, Hey,
let's transform into Scrum.
(30:22):
Let's do this implementation.
You're doing this wrong.
Yeah.
You, we have to estimateby points or whatever else.
Don't even go there.
Try, try to bring in.
Novel solutions into thebusiness problem space
instead of doing sort of thestamping of the scrum model.
You're so right.
I I could, I, I was justthinking about some of the,
(30:44):
the questions you just outlinedthat could be asked in response
to an interview questionlike that, and first reaction
is, if you've been a Scrummaster, the question you'd
ask is, well, what kind ofvelocity do your teams have?
Now I can improve that.
It's no, don't thinkabout that so much.
Right.
Go beyond that and say, well,what are some of the, the top
(31:07):
two or three issues that wecan talk about where I can
really make a difference?
Why are those top two or three?
Right.
What's the impact ofnot improving those?
Right.
Those, those are the typesof questions you could
ask, and none of thoseare at the agile level.
They're all at thebusiness level.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Just trying to understand thoseand see how you can how you
can make a difference there.
(31:27):
a lot of what you guys aretalking about right now weaves
itself in with lean managementprinciples, which we haven't,
I haven't brought up on thispodcast, but I had it in the
original show notes that Iwanted to bring up is hey,
you got all these people thathave been trained on and read
books on and understand theconcepts of potentially, right?
Like lean manufacturingand like they study lean.
(31:48):
If you go all the wayback to the Lean Startup,
you know what I mean?
They study and believein the concepts of we'll
just build the MVP to testan idea is good or not.
And then we're not gonna engagethe development team potentially
the most expensive resourcesin the building unless we're
sure that an idea is sound.
(32:08):
So.
We go from this mode ofbuild it and they will come
with the most highest paidpersons in the room, opinion
to this mode of everybodycan put ideas into the pool.
We grab the ideas and we testthe ideas against the market.
And then we only put the mostexpensive quote resources,
sorry, I have to keep going.
Resources for thepeople listening.
I'm being super sassy with myear bunny fingers over here
(32:30):
and so that like the best ideasrise to the top basically.
And they're the onesthat get implemented.
But that, that, that in orderto move to a environment like
that, even saying it, I'm wow,that, that's a, it's rarefied
air up here that I'm breathing.
Because like most organizationsif you can get past the egos
and all the stuff to evenget to an environment where
(32:52):
you're saying everybodyputs their ideas into a pot
and then we test the ideas.
Then only the best ideas makeit into the actual product
that developers produce.
Right.
As soon as I hear that,immediately, the first
thought in my mind isportfolio management
and program management.
(33:12):
Right back where we startedwith the old legacy enterprise
attempting to do thingsat scale from multifaceted
departments and organizations.
Bringing that into the onepriority queue and creating this
community-based voting systemof internal blah, blah, blah.
(33:32):
Mm-hmm.
And this is the stuff that wewanted to walk away from, right.
And created sort of likethe models of startups
within the enterprise.
And now we're right back tothe, to the enterprise world
of, hey, let's throw it all intoone bucket and start voting.
The funny thing about me, liketrying to lobby for like lean
(33:53):
manufacturing in this categoryis also I hear the other
side of it in my head whenI'm lobbying for it is like.
Well, nobody getting like atwo day certification is gonna
understand anything about likelean manufacturing and what
it really takes to considerthe entire system rather
than like just your team.
'cause you can't just look atyour team and how they plug in.
You gotta look at thewhole system 'cause you're,
(34:13):
you're not optimizing forone team or another team.
You're optimizingfor the system.
I used to have a CEOback way back in the day.
When you optimize for one team,you de optimize for another.
He would say it all the time.
But now, muchlater in my career.
You need to get your teamstogether or maybe reps from
each team and kind of talkabout what you're doing
(34:33):
with the system overall.
And that's the point ofscaling your big sessions
where you have reps from eachteam so you're not, you're
not optimizing process forone team and de-optimizing
for other people and kindof just moving the problem
around inside of your insideof your manufacturing quote,
manufacturing development.
Look, some of the stuff youjust talked about, which kinda.
Knowing how to experiment,getting validation, getting
(34:56):
the right signals from yourcustomers before you build
a solution for them, kindof flies in the face of,
the new thing now, right?
Which is build first.
It's cheap, right?
We build using ai, so build50 things, maybe somebody
will buy one of them.
I just don't feelright to me, you know?
Well, if you build that manythings, you gotta find that many
(35:18):
users and customers to test it. but these guys aren't testing.
They're simply throwingthings at a wall and hoping
and see what sticks, whatbecomes more popular.
Right.
Essentially, it's almost likeselling certain things to a few
customers and seeing if theypay for it, but not actually
waiting till it scales, right?
And placing those bets solightweight where I, I get it.
(35:40):
You can test it out.
But I think they're gonnaget a lot of false signals
because this is, wait,this is like two thousands
development right here.
This is the way it was backin like way back in the day.
Oh, you mean the.com?
Let's just build everything.
Or the next one.
Everything's an app.
This is the way it was at thestart of my career just build
it because like anybody couldjust throw up a website and
make a bajillion dollars orwhatever, like a simple web app.
(36:02):
That that didn't panout for a lot of people.
It did not.
I think it's an enablerthat made it happen.
The catalyst here is ai, peoplecan just come up with stuff that
they can vibe code really fast.
Mm-hmm.
But that's notdollars and cents.
No one's gonna pay for that.
So their answer isjust build more of it.
Pay for something.
I have another, I have awhole nother podcast, Alex,
just to let you know, Ihave a whole other podcast,
(36:23):
which is something alongthe lines of, speed through
the development team; thatwas never the problem.
I agree.
If you really needed toprototype something, you
got a couple, couple ofreally good guys or gals.
And you just go to town andthey, in a few weeks, they can
give you whatever you need.
You good enough to test and,and you know, if, if you had
(36:44):
to have a roadmap for yourprototype, something's wrong.
Sure.
Right.
So usually it took justa few weeks and a couple,
couple of really goodpeople to put it together.
I, I mean, I would argue ifyou don't need to support it
or maintain it or whatever,like didn't a, a couple hours
and you probably could havesomething up and running if
you don't have to support it.
Most development teamsare not engaged that way.
(37:04):
Om knows on the podcast, I'm abig, you build it, you own it.
My team can maintain itand still have a nice
work-life balance I don'tcreate software that's gonna
fall over all the time.
You know what I mean?
That's just a core belief.
That's just a core principlethat I have as a person
that I got from working ondevelopment teams for many
years and being up in themiddle of the night and stuff
(37:25):
like that, but if, if it's agreenfield and we don't have
to maintain anything, we justturn it off at the end of the
workday, turn the instance off.
You know what I mean?
That's a differenttype of development.
It is.
And it doesn't even haveto be an actual app, right?
It could just be a Figma markup.
If you have the customer.
So, yes.
Let's take a momentto step back.
Lots of startups.
Yeah.
Ton of startups.
(37:47):
Ai, ubiquitous.
How come there'snot more success?
You know what's missing, inthis equation, the customer.
Absolutely.
So now the enterprise doeswhat the startups are making.
Same mistake, we build more,but who do you give it to?
In reality, the enterprise modelfor building new things was
(38:10):
always we understand that pain.
We spoke to a lot of customers,we really know measuring
against the competitor thereis this market opportunity.
What we will do is we willallocate the budget to
build a quality productto go after that market.
And we already have a coupleearly customers that are
willing not only to tryit, but to pay for it.
(38:31):
Mm-hmm.
And that used to be thebasis for investment
within the enterprise.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
What, what's happening now?
Oh, we got devs, let's justlet, let them build stuff.
But who's going to go ahead andimplement who's going to apply?
And remember.
Customers, they're justlike regular people.
They get tired of being pitchedtoo many things too often.
(38:54):
Eventually they will gettired or they will start
prioritizing what goes first.
What goes second.
Yeah.
Their attention deficit isgoing to start increasing.
And what will happen is overtime nobody's gonna care
that you can produce 3000little minor niche apps.
In the end of the day, theywill want to comprehensive
something that reallyaddresses the bigger problem.
(39:16):
And that will taketime, time to build.
No AI will be able to solvethat right out of the box.
Mm. Because we're only buildingniche solutions for small,
specific little things.
Complex softwarewill not go away.
Business problemsare complicated.
Right.
Even AI won't be able to findthe right solution because
sometimes don't even, we can't.
(39:37):
So and AI's it doesn'tcreate anything new.
It only copies onbasis of what it knows.
And those bets after they don'tplay out, what are you gonna do?
You gonna place more bets?
I mean,I've written more software
that's sits on the shelfunused in my entire life.
Software I was proudof, but never got used
(39:58):
a hundred percent.
And I'm sure thistrend will continue.
Because not everything thatyou build will be a product
that will turn into something.
Right.
How does that make you feelwhen you create something
that like you, it's greatsoftware and then like.
It just doesn't get adoption.
'cause a a million aredifferent reasons, , it just
doesn't get frustration,disappointment, super annoyed.
It just shoots themojo out of you.
(40:19):
It sure does.
If you are a passionate engineerand you love this stuff,
like truly love this stuff.
Mm-hmm.
The number one gratificationthat somebody's using it.
Yeah.
Right.
Is that there are peoplethat value it and recognize
you for doing a good job.
Right.
Even by name, Hey, I wasinvolved in that project, I
was involved in this projectthat's still used to this day.
(40:39):
I mean, talk about the folksthat built software for
printers and you meet themnowadays they're retired and
stuff and you talk to 'em.
Oh yeah.
I was on the Lexmark teamand we built the firmware
to print those very firstblah, blah, blah, and
they're fascinating people.
And you respect them for that.
I mean, like my motheris a COBAL programmer.
She talks about thingsbuilding on mainframes.
(41:02):
Folks, folks don't really doa lot of development on that.
I think that taking pridein something you had
a hand in, absolutely.
It, it goes evenbeyond software.
One example is certainvehicle manufacturers, right?
They will have the personwho built the engine stamp
their name on the engine.
It's there in perpetuity.
It's like the VIN number.
(41:22):
You know, when they see acustomer paying for that
vehicle and say, I hada hand, I actually had
a hand in that vehicle.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, that just swells, right?
I mean, this is real.
This is the intrinsic motivationthat individuals have.
I remember my first job as anintern I was part of a single
point security it was sitting onVB script and I built reports,
(41:44):
reports of organizationalstructure like departments
and people and all that.
I remember coding VB scriptalong with JavaScript
to produce like a prettypicture of a report.
I was proud of that deeply.
Like I would print itand, show it at home.
Look, this is what I builtthe same feeling stays.
And there's nothing morediscouraging than software
(42:08):
that you just crankout and does nothing.
Yeah.
But we live in adifferent world.
If AI's building thatstuff, do you have any kind
of care for what it did?
Not really.
Yeah.
Until maybe you made acouple million immediately
by, by selling it.
And then you are offto your next ideas.
There are entrepreneursout there that launched
a hundred companies.
(42:28):
None of them succeeded andthey're still cranking out more.
And they're big idea, man.
But you know, in the end ofthe day, they're not swayed
by any way that things failed.
The lean principles can work.
Like they, they're goodand they really do work
when allowed to work.
Right.
When not interferedwith, that's the Deming.
(42:50):
Deming calls it Meddling.
Meddling, yeah.
Or in the perfectenvironment, would you say?
It doesn't even have to beperfect as it's an environment
free of meddling constraints.
Basically.
Meddling means I mean, asan executive you really
have a lot of control.
In the prep for this podcast,I talked a lot about management
coming in and saying oh, Brianwe really love your team and
everything you're doing is greatfor the organization, but we're
(43:12):
gonna reduce your budget by Xamount of dollars per month.
And I'm that seems like areally specific number down
to the number of cents.
Why?
Why is that?
Why are you tellingme that number?
Oh, because we're removingthis person from your team.
It sounds like you don't carewhether we're productive or not.
You wanted to remove thisperson from our team?
'cause it's, it is not likeyou're following up your
decision with any kind ofmetrics to say we removed
(43:35):
this person from Brian's teamand therefore the team we put
them on was productive or not.
Because I would argue ifBrian's team and the team you're
removing the developer for fromare equal importance and you
remove somebody from Brian'steam, move into this other team,
and because you introduced anew person to the other team
and because you took a personoff of Brian's team, both teams
(43:56):
now suffer for X number ofmonths until they rebuild their
ways of working, basically.
You as an organizational plannerfirst of all, they're not
organizationally planning inthis example, they're financial
planning, there should be ametric that the person who
made that financial decision.
Should be held to, to say Hey,you made a financial decision to
move money from this, this lineitem to this line item, and it
(44:19):
affected these teams this way.
Therefore get outta my office.
There is no extrapolation.
I know of theperformance to your team.
I know topology or set up,I know or number of people.
We don't baseline those things.
if we had the data, there wouldbe a completely new revelation
that meddling does impact thingsAnd in preparation for this
(44:40):
podcast, we also talkedabout the impact of layoffs
and how they're continuing.
And I, I, I would arguethat totally unnecessary.
These companies are makingmoney, they're cutting staff,
but they have plenty of money.
And as funny as it maysound, they're not even
impacting the market share orshareholder value that much
(45:00):
by trimming those resources.
Mm-hmm.
I question whatmotivations being driven?
I doubt it's cuttinglow performers.
I don't know.
It's not really clear.
Maybe one reason islike you said, they're
making money, right?
So.
By cutting staff, you'redirectly impacting your
bottom line, right?
You're saving money by savingall those salaries, if you're
(45:23):
not paying people's benefitand salaries, those are savings
right away, but not immediately.
So like a lot of companies, theywould realize only those savings
like a year or two after.
Yeah.
Because they can projectthat for our next quarterly
report, financial report.
We are doing fantastic becausenow, you know in their statement
(45:45):
that they release, they can sayour operating costs are lower.
But that's short term financial.
That's financial manipulationrather than actual value, which
is what everybody's doing.
Right.
As soon as you threw thisout as a conversation point,
Alex, the first thing thatcame to my mind, and it really
hasn't changed with yourback and forth, is that's
what everyone else is doing.
(46:05):
It, it's a fomo.
It's like everyoneelse is doing layoffs.
Like if I'm Google and I'mlooking around the market
and it's like Meta is doinglayoffs and whoever else
is doing Amazon, whatevermarket Microsoft did, yeah.
I don't want to beleft out of this.
I should also do layoffs.
And also you havea little air cover.
There's some gamesbeing played as well.
The unfortunate sideof it is at the end of
the day, it isn't just.
Numbers on spreadsheets.
(46:27):
They're real humanbeings with families.
Impacted by this.
That would be the real issue.
Yeah.
The sacrificial pawns are real.
You gotta get you gotta getover having a conscious home.
That's what I'm asking.
That's, I'm trying totell you right now.
I was born with one.
It can open, it's a big problem.
I wanna move us into the endof the podcast to ask the
toxicity with the term agile.
If agile really is dead, like ifthat's really where we're going
here can the brand be saved?
(46:48):
Okay.
And if the answer is no,then where does everyone go?
The brand has to beeither saved or morphed
into something, right?
Yeah.
Just replace it with something.
Pick a word.
People are being live and notagile, nimble, whatever you
wanna put it doesn't matter.
The core principles of whatwe used to call agility.
(47:11):
They don't change,they still work.
Small teams, rapid feedback,all of those things work, right?
Avoid the tyrannyof annual financing.
Finance products instead ofbudgets only, or projects.
Those things work, right?
So in practice you apply them.
You don't use agile jargon.
And as we were saying at thebeginning of the podcast,
(47:32):
orient yourself to usingbusiness terminology with which
business people understand.
Hopefully, There was a agilemanifesto, right in 2001.
I'd like to see an agilepostmortem, unadulterated way
of getting whoever's availablefrom the Agile Manifesto to
(47:54):
actually honestly say whatworked, what didn't stop hiding
behind the veil of marketing.
Step away from the fake stufffrom your case studies and
BS that have been propagatedall over and have a true
reflection of the world todayafter the impact of Agile.
(48:14):
There are things that improved.
There is entire disciplines likeproduct management that emerged.
Sure.
There are things that gotworse when the impact to
the folks that actuallyembraced the discipline.
I think I would love to seethat because there are way
too many arguments, even thesame heroes, same 17 heroes.
(48:39):
A lot of 'em conflictwith each other.
About who said whatabout the principles
about things like that.
I think it would be great tobring 'em all together and do
the agile postmortem we need.
If we are to preserve thatbrand and agility and actually
recognize it, I think wegotta start consuming what
(49:00):
we're producing and actuallygive back by explaining
what worked well didn't.
And if we had a way of changingit, how would we do it?
That's interesting becausewell, first of all, I
personally don't believethat's ever gonna happen.
I know.
I agree with you becausethese people have
already moved away from.
The original manifesto.
(49:21):
So again, without namingnames, I can tell you people
have come up with their ownlittle models here and there.
These are the same people andthey, it's not the same model.
It's not like they're allgravitating towards the same
thing or of the 17, not all ofthem are alive also right now.
But , that's not it.
They're not gonna dothis because this has
been a cash cow for them.
Exactly.
It continues to be a cash cow.
(49:41):
So if it's not gonnahappen, then what?
Maybe something else needsto rise as a movement.
Yeah.
Whatever that might be.
And I don't see the traditionalagileists coming up with that.
'cause people will havea trust issue there.
Yeah.
I think the trust issue,I think the scattered
attention, people believetoo many different things.
(50:04):
It's a lot harder in theenterprise and startup
space to be unique.
Without receivinga lot of criticism.
Some people will obviouslyadopt certain things like
Marty Cagan's being recognizedI think it's repackaging of
the ideas for the most part.
I don't think there's anythingsuper new that can be created,
(50:25):
but we've learned, right.
What did we learn?
Move small, get feedback.
Right, right.
But we don't do, we needa scrum master for that.
Right, right.
And, that's where kindof the reality and back
to the beginning of thepodcast where we are now.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I like you, younailed the outro right
there in the summary.
I agree with everythingyou just said, Alex.
(50:46):
The main reason that I wantedto push this up as a podcast was
I just have this feeling thatif the agile careers, quote,
air quotes, agile careers areover, and like you just can't
use the word Agile anymore.
That forces you to re-look atthe work that you were doing
outside the scope of this.
If I'm gonna call the Agilemanifesto marketing thing in
(51:09):
the first place, to convincecompanies you need to stop doing
this big project managementmulti-month nonsensical process.
And I'm gonna marketmy way around saying
that's not cool anymore.
The Agile Manifesto was amarketing scheme to convince
companies that the way theywere developing products
was quote, not cool.
If that was successful,what I'm saying is, okay,
(51:32):
that ran its course.
Now you need to take thevalue that you've been
delivering to companies.
And without hiding behindmarketing buzzwords, you now
need to refactor your resume.
Uh.
Show real business impactand remarket yourself as a
different, whatever it is.
I don't know what it is.
I wish I could, I wish atthe end of the podcast I
(51:52):
could tell people you'rea business consultant now.
Just put consultant on thetop of your resume and go
out there kid and, get it.
I'm not sure if that's theright term, but I am sure
that those skills, thosebusiness leadership skills
that you've been practicingas alist, whatever your role
has been they're valuable.
They are valuable.
I'm convinced they're valuable.
(52:13):
Yeah.
I agree with that.
I think as Agilist doesn'tmatter again with, you know
without kind of regard toroles, scrum master, product
owner, et cetera, you find asituation that you encounter
and you do things and youhope to leave that situation.
In an improved state.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So what is that,that's changing?
(52:34):
I mean, you're really a changecatalyst, although that's not
really a title that anybodylikes, but focus around what
has it meant to the businessesthat you've worked with as
opposed to at the team level?
Forget about fake metrics orvanity metrics as we call 'em.
Forget about all of those.
I mean, they were donea long time before, but
now they're truly buried.
Right?
Sure.
(52:54):
Nobody cares about your, CFDs.
I mean, they're good as far astools to improve, but they're
not something you lead withwhen you go in and interview.
Right.
Velocity and all the likes.
Well, the agile community'smissing is redefining
the agile track.
You know, back when we werestarting the careers and I went
into computer science, my sisterwent into information systems.
(53:16):
We all had a differentcareer track.
Her career track wasqa, project management.
That was the career trackand information systems.
Yeah.
My career trek as a computerscientist was engineering
development architectureengineering manager.
Somewhere along the lines,the track allows you to
jump different areas.
Project manager allows youto jump to program management
(53:38):
or engineering management.
The software developerhas a lot more variety.
They can continue along theengineering route, principal,
architects, et cetera, so forth.
They can stay on thedevelopment side, they can
jump into executive side.
There's a lot more versatility,security, et cetera.
I think the agility isthe one that doesn't
really have a track.
It was always a one path boom.
(54:00):
Agile.
Agile, right?
Yeah.
And that needs to be redefined.
What is that track nowthat we've reached that
last step on the rung,that's no longer available?
Where's the next one going?
Yeah.
And I think as we, as we talkedabout it, is back into the
business consultant, it isback into the directorships.
Continue improvement.
But don't go, don't look down.
(54:21):
Look up.
You can do a lot more if youstep away and just think about
the impact you've driven.
Right?
You can lead organizations,you can help run products,
you can help with quality,you can help a lot of things.
You just have to stopsprinkling the agile jargon
all over the place becausenobody cares anymore.
So I don't know if we havedeclared Agile completely dead
as a brand in this podcast,but I think what I said in
(54:45):
the podcast holds true, whichis the skills and experience,
especially the experience thatyou, that anyone listening
to this has the taking teamsfrom like teams off camera
to teams on camera, type oflike developing the team.
Like those are realskills that you have done.
That because you can't get ajob now for six months, eight
(55:05):
months, whatever, because likethese agile jobs you're looking
out for have disappeared.
That's not a reflectionthat you are not valuable.
Right.
Like I want to tell peopleand let people know Hey man,
it's like stop despairing.
You have solid businessleadership skills
that you have learned.
You've learned through doingit, and you've learned through
experience most importantly.
(55:25):
And yes, maybe the peoplethat you're interfacing
with don't value them.
Go find other businesses.
Maybe they only value themlike 10 hours a week, 20
hours a week consultancyor something like that.
There are businesses outthere that need your help.
Get out there and find thepeople that need your skill.
Is, is, is my main thingthat I'm trying to get
across in this podcast.
Again, that's the main seedthat, that, that I wanted to
(55:47):
have this podcast thanks to Alexfor coming out and weighing in.
'cause I I, I, I didn'tjust wanna be ranting at the
camera for an hour on thispodcast of Hey man, you, you
is kind and you is special.
I wanted to be listen,like you, you have skills.
No, it's great.
It's great being there.
I being here with you guysthe, the topic is important.
I think Agile willhave a long tail.
(56:10):
It's, it's too finelyingrained everywhere.
It's very important.
It's not gonna disappear.
However, the roles, thetraditional roles that fill it
will be less and less available.
Sure.
So we'll start transitioningto something else.
Mm-hmm.
AI will not replacethat thought.
(56:31):
However, there's gonna be someconversion to different roles.
But I agree with you.
Every agile professional hasa lot more value than what
they're able to describe,at least in the terms
that everyone has been.
Right.
It's not about backlogs,it's not about Jira, it's
not about tickets, it'snot about all these things.
Sorry, did you sayit's not about Jira?
(56:53):
Oh, yes I did.
Oh, I'm sorry.
There's a, there's aspecial sound effect that
is a special sound effect.
All right.
So those of you that are stillwith us, both of you don't
forget to like and subscribeand let us know down in the
comments below what othertopics you'd like us to tackle.
And thank you for coming.
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