Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is one of the co-hosts of the Agile in Construction track at the Global Agile Summit 2026. In this preview episode, he and Vasco talk about why Agile belongs on the construction site, what the track's speakers discovered when they stopped following the plan, and why software people should pay close attention to an industry that builds hospitals, not apps.
"People don't realize that those ideas absolutely work in other industries. Agile's been successfully applied everywhere, and I think where it gets the least amount of publicity is in the construction sector."
When most people hear "Agile," they think standups in a tech office, not concrete and rebar. Felipe wants to change that. Construction, he says, is always about 20 years behind whatever process or technology the rest of the world adopts — a "very safe stock of keeping tradition." That gap is exactly what makes this track valuable. Agile is alive and growing in construction, and the translation turns out to be simpler than you'd expect. Most of what needs to change isn't the framework — it's the vocabulary. The sessions in this track show how practitioners made that jump with surprisingly small tweaks.
"Half the speakers that I asked were like, 'what, me? Do I have a story to share?' I was like, yeah, you have this really amazing... people just don't realize how awesome they are."
One of the things that struck Felipe while assembling the track was how humble the speakers are. People who have transformed how their companies deliver work — including the keynote speaker, Brian, whose organization celebrated 10 years and saw dramatic before-and-after results — genuinely didn't think their stories were remarkable. They grew up in an industry with 100 years of project management tradition, where PMI-style thinking is the water they swim in. They don't see how different things look from the outside. Some of these practitioners couldn't even work across projects before adopting Agile — and now they're doing it routinely. That capacity shift alone is a data point worth paying attention to.
"It's just ground into you, that thou shalt follow a plan. But in reality... they have to do heroic things to make those plans happen. Because the plans are just wrong."
Felipe zeroed in on the Agile value of responding to change over following a plan as the single biggest shift his speakers experienced. In construction, plan adherence is gospel — you follow the schedule, period. But in practice, teams were performing heroics just to make flawed plans appear to work. As speakers adopted Agile, they stopped forcing broken plans and started adapting. Felipe gives a nod to #NoEstimates — calling Vasco "the granddaddy of #NoEstimates" — as part of the same insight: the plans are wrong, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can respond to what's actually happening. The second pattern was equally powerful: for the first time, construction workers started thinking about who actually uses what they build. You'd think building a school or hospital makes the end user obvious, but Felipe says people in the industry can work for years and never once consider who receives their work. Agile forced that question, and the answers changed how they prioritize.
"Inside of every process are people. Everyone faces resistance to change... when I stopped trying to teach people, and I started inviting people, things changed."
Here's the cross-industry lesson Felipe wants software practitioners to hear: resistance to change is universal, and the breakthrough is the same everywhere. Every speaker in the track had a moment where they learned something new and didn't want to go back to the old way. That's the same moment every Scrum Master, product owner, and developer has lived through. The universal tactic that worked? Showing rather than telling. Case study after case study revealed that the real breakthroughs came not from training sessions or slide decks, but from demonstrating results and inviting people in. Stop teaching, start inviting — that's a principle that works whether you're pouring concrete or shipping code.
"The best thing you're gonna do on Monday after the summit is you're gonna start to ask really intelligent questions. That is gonna be priceless. That's something that AI doesn't even do for people."
Felipe's take on what attendees will walk away with isn't a new framework or a certification. It's a shift in the questions they ask. Twenty years into practicing Lean Construction, Agile, and Scrum, Felipe says asking better questions is the one thing that has stuck with him the entire time. Better questions melt away resistance, open up new perspectives, and make new ways of working accessible. The ideas in the track are, in his words, "not terribly complicated — they're actually quite simple, and I would even say elegant." And the speakers are approachable — Felipe personally vouches that every speaker in his track answers emails. There will also be live Q&A sessions during the summit for direct interaction.
"My chief orchestrator said, you should have your own website. So felipe.engineer was built."
In a delightful closing moment, Felipe shared that his personal website at felipe.engineer was built by his AI agent. Not suggested and then hand-coded — fully built, complete with a style guide the agent had strategically created two weeks earlier. Felipe jokes that the AI was setting him up: first planting the seed that he needed a style guide, then recommending it be applied to a brand-new personal site. Felipe also has a session in the track about building an AI bot for construction sites — another reason to check out the full lineup at globalagilesummit.com.
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide — and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.
You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.
You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.
In this BONUS episode, we preview the Agile in Gaming track at the Global Agile Summit 2026 with track host Eagan Rackley. Eagan shares how he curated a lineup of speakers that spans indie studios, AI-driven game platforms, and multi-studio leadership — all focused on the human side of game development during one of the industry's most turbulent periods. If you've ever wondered what Agile looks like when artists, designers, sound engineers, and programmers all need to ship together under pressure, this is the episode.
"You helped me recognize strengths I'd been dismissing in myself as a leader that I could turn the volume up on, and helped turn me on to some of my more people-first instincts into actual leadership accents."
Eagan's path to hosting the Agile in Gaming track started when he worked with Vasco at Malwarebytes in the early 2020s. That coaching relationship shifted how he thought about leadership — moving from dismissing his people-first instincts to leaning into them. When the Global Agile Summit opened up volunteer spots in 2025, he jumped in and co-hosted the development track. Game dev speakers drew strong audience engagement, and when the team suggested a dedicated gaming track for 2026, it was an easy yes. For Eagan, hosting is not just about giving — it is about learning from peers in an industry he transitioned into and loves deeply.
"A lot of the problems we solve in gaming are the same problems people are solving in Agile everywhere, just with a different space. But also, Agile is very specific in gaming — even something like storyboarding is functionally different because you're describing a car in a city that makes these sounds, that drives with physics in this way."
Gaming sits at a unique intersection of disciplines — art, sound, design, engineering, narrative — all collaborating under tight constraints. Agile shows up differently here. The frameworks are similar, but the mechanics of how multidisciplinary teams coordinate are distinct. At gaming conferences, you rarely hear people talk about agility the way the Agile community does, and at Agile conferences, gaming is almost never represented. Eagan saw that gap and built a track to bridge it. The problems — building trust under pressure, introducing change to skeptical teams, managing cross-discipline dependencies — are universal. The context just makes them more vivid.
"He doesn't like Agile at all. He runs a really humanist-centered version of waterfall that can pivot quickly, which my argument is it's fairly agile, but it's not something he believes in — but it's also one of the most agile places I've ever worked."
One of Eagan's most striking observations comes from his current studio, led by an executive producer named Chris Whiteside. Chris explicitly rejects Agile as a label — likely burned by past implementations where someone tried to install a framework rather than nurture a mindset. Yet the way he runs teams is deeply human-centered, responsive, and adaptive. It is a useful reminder that the label matters far less than the behavior, and that some of the most agile organizations don't call themselves agile at all. The pattern Eagan has seen across studios mirrors what happens everywhere: framework-only installations that generate resistance, versus environments where the mindset develops organically.
"I wanted to create a track that felt like accessible excellence. Just pushing beyond right where we were, but you could watch these talks and say, I could do that, that could be me. On Monday morning, I want to go in and try to be that person a little more."
When selecting speakers, Eagan drew on an unlikely reference point: a 1990s skateboard video called Zero Hero by a company called Zoroac. The skaters were not doing impossible three-story drops — they were doing moves that felt just one or two steps beyond what you could already do. That is the energy Eagan wanted for the track. Not aspirational keynotes from unreachable experts, but stories from people whose work makes you think: I could try that on Monday. He deliberately chose speakers across a range of experience levels and industry positions to hit that sweet spot.
"I want this track to be the answer to the question of whether it's worth it to stay in the industry and keep going — with some evidence that there are people out there doing this work thoughtfully, doing it well, and finding ways to remain human."
The track features a deliberately diverse lineup. Clinton Keith delivers the keynote, titled "The Game Industry As We Know It Is Ending — And the Future Could Be Much Better," which examines why the old AAA model is failing and where the industry is heading. Umar Ajaz focuses on building Agile into indie studios from the ground up — a timely topic as the industry shifts toward smaller, more agile teams. Kat Antonovich brings a social work background to team dynamics and change management, and Eagan intentionally sought an associate-level speaker because junior professionals have been disproportionately hit by industry layoffs. Marcos Jordt presents on Bitmagic, a fully AI-driven game development platform, along with his experience setting up Agile in Finland. And Kari Koivistoinen addresses the macro level: how to run multiple studios while preventing crunch and keeping team environments healthy.
"These are the same problems everyone is solving in Agile. How do you build trust on teams under pressure? Introducing change when people are resistant or skeptical. Those show up everywhere."
This track is for curious people — whether they work in gaming or not. If you are interested in how teams solve problems with creativity and constraints, how multidisciplinary collaboration actually works (or breaks down), and what happens when an industry goes through a genuine transformation, there is something here for you. The goal is not prescriptive solutions. It is about getting down to fundamentals: what makes people do their best work and what makes teams function well. For people already in the gaming industry, Eagan designed this track to be the answer to the question many are asking after years of layoffs, studio closures, and canceled projects — is it still worth it? The track says yes, and backs it up with evidence.
Eagan Rackley is the track host for the Agile in Gaming track at the Global Agile Summit and a seasoned software engineer and Agile leader with 24+ years of experience spanning game development, enterprise architecture, graphics, and highly parallel programming. A passionate problem-solver, he excels in building collaborative teams, driving innovation, and turning conflict into opportunity. He thrives on creating software that empowers people and transforms ideas into impact.
You can link with Eagan Rackley on LinkedIn.
The Global Agile Summit kicks off on May 4th, and the People track is one of the most loaded lineups this year. In this episode, track co-hosts Pete Oliver-Krueger and Alina Thapliyal share the story behind the track, the sessions they're most excited about, and why — in a world increasingly focused on technology and AI — the people dimension is more critical than ever.
"Every transformation still comes down to how people feel, how they communicate, how they work with each other, how decisions are made, and how leaders can create a space and conditions for them to thrive."
The People track isn't new to the Global Agile Summit — it's been part of the event for several years, sometimes combined with the Product track. But this year, the volume and quality of submissions made it clear that the topic deserves its own dedicated space. Alina frames it in terms of the VUCA world we operate in: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity make the people dimension more important, not less. Pete picks up the thread with a sharper edge — as AI and technology increasingly dominate the conversation, it's easy to lose sight of the people creating, designing, using, and selling the products. That tension is exactly why he wrote Shift: From Product to People with his co-author Michael. The book exists to pull practitioners out of product-as-a-thing thinking and into product-as-people thinking.
"When we lose sight of the people around the product is when things start to suffer."
When Pete reviewed the track submissions, he noticed a telling pattern — a divergence that confirmed the track's reason for existing. Many submissions talked about product as an artifact, focused on deliverables and outcomes, with no connection to the humans involved. Then there was a second group that immediately saw themselves in the People track. Pete explains the dynamic: we all start by caring about people and solving problems, but at some point we pick a solution and the work of getting it done becomes all-consuming. The task becomes the goal and the people become objects. Unless we consciously leave space to think about relationships and human dynamics, we drift into laser focus on things. The sessions in this track are designed to be the antidote.
"It's so inspiring to just listen to it and think that I can also do it. We can give people a second chance. We can focus on what's good and increase the good, rather than focus on what's bad."
Both Alina and Pete highlighted Marcus Bullock's keynote as a must-watch. Marcus, CEO of Flikshop, started from a deeply difficult place and built his way to leading a business and empowering others. What makes his story stand out isn't the arc from adversity to success — it's the honesty. Pete, who has known Marcus for over 15 years, points out that Marcus's story includes genuine ups and downs, and his people-first approach is what helped him weather all of them. Alina was struck by the energy Marcus brings and his focus on amplifying what's good in people rather than minimizing what's bad. It's a message that resonates whether you lead a team of five or an organization of five thousand.
"Take a product, give it to a customer, and don't say anything. Just let the customer try it, let the customer experience the product. We need to have the courage to shut up."
Alina's second highlight was the session on usability theater, where the core idea is deceptively simple: put your product in front of a customer and resist the urge to explain anything. No "look what we did here," no guided tour. Just observe how people actually interact with what you've built. It takes real courage, Alina says, because our instinct is to showcase and defend our work. But the insights you gain from silence and observation are worth far more than the comfort of narration. This is one of those sessions that sounds simple but could change how you run your next product review or demo.
"There is a necessity to understand ourselves and have some of this confidence, but that's true for everybody, even our leaders. They may be stuck in permission loops with their own bosses."
Tara Scott's session on agency and breaking the permission loop touched a nerve for both hosts. Alina shared that in companies she's worked for, drawn-out decision processes wasted resources and drove people to leave. Tara's session tackles how to empower people to actually make decisions. Pete adds a crucial nuance: the permission loop isn't just a top-down problem. Leaders are stuck in their own permission loops too. Everyone in the chain faces the same challenge, and the solution can't be found in a vacuum — it requires understanding where each person is coming from and building flexibility across the team and organization. If this topic hits close to home, Tara is also doing a live Q&A during the summit.
"Every time I have a conversation with Jeff Patton, it just goes in all kinds of directions, and I have so much fun."
Pete flagged two more sessions worth watching. The neurodiversity session with Anita promises to open up a topic that deserves more airtime in the agile community — how different minds experience and contribute to team dynamics. And Jeff Patton, whose conversations with Pete apparently never follow a straight line, brings his signature blend of product thinking and people awareness. The full track covers a wide range: trust, leadership, inclusion, decision-making, neurodiversity. As Alina puts it, these topics are universal — they're about human behavior, and that's valuable in any field where you work with people.
"I think people can take away from the track the ability to see other dynamics in their workplace that maybe they currently aren't spending a lot of time paying attention to, or didn't even realize were there."
When asked what attendees will walk away with, both Alina and Pete landed on the same metaphor: a new lens. Alina described it as a better understanding of how human dynamics shape culture and performance, paired with practical tips that can be applied immediately — no theory, just real-life stories from real practitioners. Pete took the metaphor further, comparing it to putting on night vision goggles. After watching these sessions, you'll start noticing dynamics you'd been walking past every day — relationship patterns, permission loops, communication gaps. And with that new visibility comes influence. You'll realize you have more ability to shape your environment than you thought, simply because you can now see what was always there.
Pete Oliver-Krueger is an Executive Coach with the Library of Agile, and co-author of the book "Shift: From Product to People", a novel that tells the complex story of how leading "people-first" is required to solve tomorrow's biggest problems.
You can link with Pete Oliver-Krueger on LinkedIn, and visit Pete OK's website at https://www.shiftingpeople.com/.
Alina Thapliyal is the Scrum Master for a team within the public sector. Her aspiration is to become an agile coach. She grew up in Romania and has been living in Germany for 13 years. She loves jogging, reading and actively listening to people's life stories.
You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.
The Global Agile Summit is around the corner, and the AI in Organizations track is one you don't want to miss. In this episode, track co-hosts Michael Dougherty and Michał Parkoła walk us through what they've built — from the thinking behind the track name to the sessions that stood out, and why this isn't just another AI conference lineup.
"AI will not only be useful to existing organizations, but it will reshape organizations in a very significant way, the same way cars reshaped cities."
Michael and Michał drew a deliberate line with the track name. Michael points out that AI has been around for decades — it didn't start with ChatGPT. The real shift now is AI agents scaling to enterprise level, replacing automation that used to require specialized tools. Claude Enterprise holds about 29% of the enterprise AI market, Gemini around 15%. But Michał pushes the framing further: the first-order effect is applying AI to existing work. The second-order effect — the one he's most interested in — is how AI will reshape organizations themselves. New species of companies will emerge, smaller teams will achieve what used to require hundreds of people, and some existing organizations won't survive the transition. That's the conversation this track is designed to start.
"There was a bit of AI slop in the submissions. There was a lot of talk that, unfortunately, was meta-talk — there was no real value that I could glean."
When session submissions came in, Michael was disappointed by how many were surface-level — big promises with no practical takeaway. The ones that stood out were practitioners showing what they actually do. Dave Westgarth, for example, demonstrated how he uses AI with Lovable and Claude embedded in Miro whiteboards to enhance real team interactions. On Michał's side, the standout was Max Pirata, who challenged the "vibe coding is slop" narrative. His argument: the quality of large-scale software has never depended on the infallibility of individual engineers — it depends on disciplined engineering processes. The same applies to agentic engineering. Your first attempt at vibe coding will be rough, but there are ways to apply engineering discipline to AI-assisted development. That's what Max will be talking about at the summit.
"Now I've got 20 prototypes that I can choose from. Which ones are the best? Which ones do I need to clear out? Product managers now have a different game they play."
Two sessions capture opposite sides of the AI-in-organizations tension. Dave Westgarth's "Vibe UX: Prototyping at the Speed of Thought" shows how vibe coding lets you build full working systems instead of Figma mockups — so fast that the bottleneck shifts from creation to selection. Product managers and product owners now face a new challenge: clearing the closet of AI-generated options rather than validating a single bet. On the other side, Shawn Wallack's session — "Even With AI, Your System Will Never Be Better Than Its People" — brings the counterpoint. Michael explains the systems-thinking angle: AI does what you tell it, fast and accurately, but that speed reveals human bottlenecks everywhere else. He shares the cautionary example of AI declining twice the insurance claims humans did, with the human-in-the-loop rubber-stamping instead of actually checking — leading to a class action lawsuit. The lesson: AI doesn't remove the need for human judgment, it makes it more critical.
"True to his roots, he is exploring spec-driven development now, which is one of the popular threads in agentic engineering."
Gojko Adzic — the author of Specification by Example and Impact Mapping — brings heavyweight credibility to the track. Michał reveals that while Gojko is exploring spec-driven development in the context of agentic engineering, the interview focused more on his hands-on experience building his own AI products. For attendees, this means real practitioner insights from someone who literally wrote the book on how specifications drive software quality — now applying those principles in an AI-first world.
"My favorite case would be people who will quit their jobs and start new companies that will be able to achieve wonderful things with much smaller teams than we would otherwise imagine possible."
The track is designed to meet people wherever they are. Pierre Beaning covers the basics of using Claude for beginners. Jason Little — who Michael describes as a "techno nerd" and "grand poobah" — shows how to build and scale multi-agent systems for business. The spectrum runs from "I've only used AI to plan a vacation" to "I'm orchestrating agent teams." But Michał's vision for the ideal attendee is bolder: someone who walks away ready to start a company. Michael backs this up with the story of an AI unicorn — $1.8 billion valuation, one guy and his brother, in the pharmaceutical industry, just a few months old. Hype? Maybe. But Michał's pragmatic take lands it: "If you make a few million, even if it dies later, that's not such a bad thing." The goal of the track is to blow away the fog — throw flares into key spots so people can sketch a map of what's possible and decide which areas deserve a follow-up.
Michael Dougherty is the Co-author of Shift: From Product to People, leadership coach with 30+ years helping organizations adopt people-centered, agile ways of working. Co-owner of the Global Agile Summit.
You can link with Michael Dougherty on LinkedIn and find out more at shiftingpeople.com.
Michał Parkoła is an Agile practitioner based in Warsaw, Poland. Previously hosted the Value-Centric Product Development track at Agile Online Summit 2024. He is building Tapestry, an AI planning assistant.
You can link with Michał Parkoła on LinkedIn and check out Tapestry at growwithtapestry.com.
In this episode, we refer to product owner anti-patterns and product owner interviews on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Great product owners are always asking: what if? How can we do it differently? How can we simplify?" - Viktor Glinka
Viktor describes great product owners as fundamentally curious people who constantly look for simpler, better ways to do things. But curiosity alone isn't enough — they're also skilled negotiators who navigate conversations with teams, stakeholders, and customers. In scaled setups, their work shifts from clarification to prioritization, and they delegate effectively. Viktor highlights their visualization skills with a concrete example: one product owner showed stakeholders a work composition chart revealing that more than 50% of the team's work was technical debt, making it impossible to deliver new features. That single visualization changed the conversation. Great product owners are also systems thinkers who understand dynamics and root causes, avoiding local optimization. Viktor adds something rarely discussed in frameworks: mindfulness. Product owners face constant pressure, and the ability to make peace with decisions — to move forward without regret — is critical. They also share their passion and vulnerability with development teams, telling them personally why they want to build something. It's the emotional complement to data-driven negotiation.
Self-reflection Question: Does your product owner use data and visualization to negotiate with stakeholders, or do they rely on authority and deadlines? How could you help them build those skills?
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"This fear of not being allowed — it's an illusion. You can always do more. Just try. No one will fire you for a suggestion." - Viktor Glinka
For Viktor, the worst product owner anti-pattern isn't about skill or knowledge — it's about empowerment. He believes every person can learn to become a great product owner if they are empowered and trusted by the organization. The red flags are clear: when a product owner talks about deadlines and commitments but never about return on investment or outcomes, that's a sign they're being pushed rather than empowered. Viktor shares the story of a product owner who was struggling to give direction because stakeholders just wanted their features delivered. He was a middleman — afraid to communicate his own vision to the team, afraid to challenge stakeholders. But inside, there was a spark of passion about the product. Viktor helped him uncover it using a simple tool: the product vision canvas. They sat down together and put his thoughts on paper. Once the vision was written, the product owner started thinking about the next step on his own: "What if I show this to stakeholders? What if I tell them there's a better way?" The product vision canvas became the bridge from learned helplessness to ownership.
Self-reflection Question: Is your product owner telling themselves "I'm not allowed to" when they actually could do more? What's the smallest experiment you could run together to test that assumption?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Viktor Glinka
Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.
You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Product management skills are crucial for Scrum Masters. Once you understand how retention impacts your return on investment, you will be able to coach your product owner." - Viktor Glinka
Viktor offers a nuanced perspective on Scrum Master success by distinguishing between short-term and long-term success. On the long-term side, he argues that the purpose of a Scrum Master extends beyond working with teams — it's about helping improve the system as a whole. To do that, you need to connect your contribution to the product's success by helping build specific capabilities. Viktor grounds this in practical terms: start by asking what the business goal of your company is, and check whether people around you actually know it. Never assume everyone does. That simple act of curiosity gives you the information you need to figure out how to contribute. In his experience, the key capability his teams needed to develop was multi-learning — the ability to work across components — and that directly served the business goal. Viktor makes a strong case that Scrum Masters need product management skills. Understanding how metrics like retention impact long-term success allows you to coach product owners and analyze product dynamics. His practical advice: if you're not experienced in this, go shadow your product owner, spend time with the sales department, and look through customer support tickets. You'll understand far more about the system than staying at the development organization level.
Self-reflection Question: Can you clearly explain how your work as a Scrum Master contributes to your product's success? What specific capability are you helping the system build right now?
Viktor's approach to retrospectives is refreshingly pragmatic: it depends on the team. For teams not yet used to actionable improvements, he starts simple — review previous retro decisions, ensure new concrete ones are created, and bring data as food for thought. He particularly likes using the cumulative flow diagram and time distribution histogram to help teams reflect on consistency in delivery. One team he worked with adopted this as a natural habit over time. For mature teams, format matters less — one team ran a simple "good, bad, to improve" retro in 30 minutes on their own, without a Scrum Master, and it was one of the most engaged and effective retrospectives Viktor had ever seen. He also values the free-talk format when first meeting a new team, coming in with genuine curiosity and no biases. And when something clearly went wrong — an incident, a failure — Viktor drops whatever format he had prepared. "In those moments, it's important to trust your instinct, read the room, sense the tension, and step into the danger directly."
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Viktor Glinka
Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.
You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Our customers do not buy our components. They use the product as a whole. And when it comes to integration, the real problem pops up." - Viktor Glinka
Viktor brings a challenge many Scrum Masters face: transitioning from component teams to cross-component, cross-functional teams in a large-scale Scrum setup. Picture 8 to 10 teams, each owning their own part of the system, never touching anything else — and the company stuck in delivery for months. The premise behind component teams sounds logical: specialization leads to speed. But as Viktor explains, that speed is local — optimized for the component, not the product. When integration time arrives, responsibility gaps appear, rework multiplies, and teams start identifying with their components rather than the product. "We're the billing team — we don't deal with anything else." When they reorganized into cross-functional teams, the complaints were immediate: "I was really productive before, and now I can't finish anything." Viktor and his fellow Scrum Masters took a two-pronged approach. First, they secured time credit from leadership — a couple of months where learning was prioritized over deadlines. They ran mob programming sessions, coached teams, and removed impediments. Second, they shifted focus from outputs to outcomes, organizing customer interviews that helped developers understand what users actually needed. The development director reinforced this by joining refinement sessions, telling teams: "You might not develop anything if it still satisfies the customer need." The result was a shift from transactional stakeholder relationships to genuine cooperation, and teams that began to see beyond their component boundaries.
Self-reflection Question: If your teams are organized around components, what would it take to run one experiment — just one sprint — where a team picks up work outside their usual component? What would you need to make that safe?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Viktor Glinka
Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.
You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"The root causes for destructive team patterns often lie outside the team itself." - Viktor Glinka
Viktor shares a story from a manufacturing organization where one team stood out — and not in a good way. The team was composed of both internal and external members, and what no one saw coming was that their implicit goals were fundamentally divergent: the external members were focused on maximizing revenue for their own company, while the internal members cared deeply about product quality. The signs were visible to anyone who approached them — they barely talked to each other and preferred to work individually. When Viktor tried to raise the topic of cooperation and trust, he was met with awkward silence. One team member finally told him: "I don't want the team to blow up. In my previous experience, I raised this topic and that was the end of the team." Fear kept the truth underground. Viktor brought his observations to the manager, who acknowledged the lack of a shared goal as the root cause — but couldn't fix it because he wasn't authorized to manage the external people. The takeaway was clear: three key success factors for any team are the right team composition with people who want to work together, a shared goal that unites diverse perspectives, and clear expectations set by their manager.
In this segment, we talk about LeSS self-designing team workshops and the importance of team composition in scaled setups.
Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a shared goal that everyone — including external members and contractors — genuinely understands and cares about? When was the last time you checked?
Viktor recommends The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland as the book that sparked his passion for Scrum. As he puts it: "I know the title is very controversial and often criticized, but I could deeply relate to the stories inside the book. They sparked a passion that is still with me." Viktor also recommends a bonus book: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, which showed him the real power of self-organization and validated what he had already started experimenting with in his project management career. It pushed him to explore holacracy, sociocracy, intent-based leadership, and coaching.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Viktor Glinka
Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.
You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"I wanted to change the organization overnight with my eagerness and passion. Instead of helping the system to evolve, I created resistance. I became the problem myself." - Viktor Glinka
Viktor shares one of the most honest failure stories we've heard on the show. Early in his Scrum Master career, he joined a finance organization as a Scrum Master for a newly created department — his first experience in a scaled setup. Each team owned a particular part of the user journey, organized around components. After getting exposed to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) through a colleague, Viktor became overexcited. He started pushing for structural changes daily, telling the head of department that the current team composition was wrong and they needed cross-functional feature teams. But he was disconnected from reality. For this particular organization, even having partially cross-functional teams was already a big stretch. Worse, the head of department wasn't even authorized to make the changes Viktor was pushing for. Instead of helping the system evolve, he created resistance. What proved his approach wrong? That same department later received a European Award for being the best mortgage department. It took Viktor a few more years and similar cases to fully absorb the lesson: read the room, develop sensitivity to the system's pace, and stimulate reflection in decision makers rather than pushing your own agenda.
In this episode, we refer to organizational development, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and systems analysis. Viktor also mentions the interview with Bas Vodde on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you pushed for a change because you believed it was right, without checking whether the system was ready for it? What would happen if you started by asking decision makers what they think would be a good next step?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Viktor Glinka
Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.
You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.
In this special BONUS episode, Peter Swimm—conversational AI veteran, creator of BotKit (the open-source chatbot framework that powered Slack and Teams bots), and former Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot Studio—shares what 25+ years in tech taught him about working with AI. From his brutal experiment of running an entire business on voice-based AI for a week, to why he treats AI more like R2-D2 than C-3PO, Peter offers a grounded, practical perspective on where AI fits in software development teams.
"We had the number one bot in the Slack app store, because there were only 8 bots, and ours used regex. To show you how far we've come."
Peter's journey into conversational AI started with a newspaper ad and a creative writing background. When Slack launched its API, Peter and BotKit co-creator Ben Brown immediately saw that building bots wasn't just a technical challenge—it was a social and creative one, like writing scripts for plays that interface with people in their daily lives. That insight powered BotKit into becoming the backbone of Slack and Teams bots, and eventually led to Microsoft acquiring the company. Peter spent years inside Microsoft shaping Copilot Studio, working on connectors that bridge the gap between APIs and real-world work. But the experience also gave him a healthy dose of perspective: he can show you slide decks from 2016 that promise the same things today's AI pitches promise, always saying "within 5 years." That pattern recognition shapes his practical, no-hype approach.
"At the end of the day, if I've been prompting all day, I should have a computer program that works offline, that works without a subscription. Otherwise, I didn't really make anything."
Peter ran a week-long experiment trying to run his entire business using only voice-based conversational AI. The result: 3,000 generated scripts. After static code analysis, he discovered it was really only 5 programs made thousands of times—and those 5 programs were really just 2 or 3 core abilities. He deleted 36 gigabytes of generated code and kept 50 megabytes of what actually worked. This brutal compression led him to an "AI-last" philosophy: build reliable runtime software that works confidently in one click, then use AI only for exploration, connection-making, and creative riffing. The payoff is striking—within 3 weeks of a given application, his team sees a 90% reduction in AI usage in the first week, dropping to 0% within 13 days, because once a computer program does everything you need, you don't need AI anymore.
"I think of our AI use more like R2-D2 than C-3PO. R2-D2 doesn't talk—bonus points. He doesn't interject his fear. He saves your butt. He's silent until you need him, and visible when you need him."
Peter's Star Wars analogy captures his team's philosophy on AI integration. AI should be like a smarter linter—a quiet, capable tool that handles the boring, repetitive tasks so humans can focus on creativity and shipping. His team treats AI as a "super junior" with infinite time: set it up as if it invented Python, have it write buy-the-book code with unit tests, and then a human reviews and accepts (or rejects) the output. The tooling isn't consistent enough to ship autonomously or commit directly into the codebase—even frontier providers don't fully understand what their models do. The practical benefit is enormous for setup and configuration: what used to be a painful, arcane process of tracking down dozens of AWS or Azure docs becomes a 20-minute "hello world" that's actually a working proof of concept. Your job isn't to become an expert at cloud services—it's to ship product.
"All it does is automate all the mistakes you made, all the way, at AI speed."
When asked about the most common mistake organizations make with AI, Peter is blunt: they port their existing infrastructure into AI-governed systems instead of rebuilding from the ground up. Companies with a self-inflated opinion of their processes think AI is just a million-person force multiplier—so they'll ship faster. But if your process was broken before AI, you'll just generate broken output at unprecedented scale. That 3,000-script experiment proved this firsthand. Peter's recommendation: rebuild from the bolts up. Start with AI-last architecture where reliable, offline-capable software handles the core, and AI is reserved for the edges—filling gaps, translating between systems, and making connections that don't exist yet.
"The one thing AI is good at is transforming between boundaries."
Peter's team has been divesting from SaaS providers, replacing the patchwork of middleware subscription plans that forced everyone to copy and paste between CMS, Excel, meeting notes, and email. His approach: product people use Notion, developers use GitHub, and the two cross-sync without needing Jira as an arbitration layer. Everyone tracks work in the tool they already live in. AI's real superpower here is translation—between APIs, between languages, between formats. Peter sees a future where small translation layers between CRUD operations replace the bloated, one-size-fits-all SaaS tools that are "built for 99% of users with generalized features nobody uses." His team also freed themselves from tools like Figma: the designer works in their preferred graphics program, the developer in their preferred IDE, and AI arbitrates the differences.
"5 to 7 people is still good, because you need a diverse set of people who are intensely focused on certain areas. But they should be allotted that savings in time to ship all the things that get cut."
Peter pushes back on the idea that AI changes the ideal team size. The 5-to-7 person team still works—what should change is what those people do with the time they save. Instead of loading teams onto more projects or increasing portfolio velocity, reinvest the AI productivity dividend into quality: ship with unit tests from day one, ship WCAG-compliant from day one, and stop cutting features to hit deadlines. Version 1.0 should no longer need an immediate 1.1 follow-up. Peter also challenges the notion that AI eliminates the need for experienced practitioners—velocity metrics become meaningless when a 6-week coding plan finishes in 25 minutes. What matters is using the saved time to make software genuinely better.
"I can show you a working demo of the thing at the first meeting, and you can pay for it. And then we can make it better than your dreams."
Peter sees AI transforming the consulting and product development lifecycle from "launch, listen, and learn" to "listen, iterate, and launch." As a consultant, he now brings working demos to first meetings instead of $20,000 six-week proposals. Clients see the product in motion and immediately identify improvements—before money changes hands. This shifts the power dynamic: products iterate toward quality before launch, not after. Peter envisions a future where we ship solid releases that iterate in quality, with interfaces that show users only what's relevant to them instead of "90,000 buttons that don't apply to me."
About Peter Swimm
Peter Swimm is a conversational AI veteran with 25+ years in tech — from managing data centers to building Botkit (the open-source chatbot framework that powered Slack and Teams bots), to serving as Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot Studio. He's the founder of Toilville, a consultancy helping businesses build conversational AI solutions.
You can link with Peter Swimm on LinkedIn and visit his website at peterswimm.com.
In this episode, we refer to the SPIDR slicing method.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"If your product owner can phrase what the user wants to do — not what the button should look like — it is going to be a night and day difference." - Efe Gümüs
Efe describes the great product owner as someone who creates focus and a clear product vision, so the team knows what they're building and why. The foundation is simple but powerful: describe what the user will be able to do, not what the interface should look like. Instead of specifying a red subscribe button with exact text in three languages, say "as a user, I want to subscribe to my favorite channel." That shift unlocks the team's ability to contribute design insights, architecture decisions, and user journey thinking — the kind of expertise no product owner could anticipate alone. Efe highlights the SPIDR slicing method as one of his favorite tools for breaking product backlog items into consumable pieces — by interface (iOS, Android, web), by data, by rules. When the PO frames work around user value and slices it effectively, the team delivers visible value in iterations, and sprint goals become meaningful. Without this, the team becomes a ticket delivery machine.
Self-reflection Question: When you look at your product backlog right now, are items described in terms of what users can do — or in terms of what the interface should look like?
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"If you are doing everything your customer says, then you are not managing your product. That's the foundation." - Efe Gümüs
Efe names people-pleasing as the worst product owner anti-pattern — the "customer is always right" mentality applied to product management. When a PO says yes to every request, the consequences cascade quickly: multiple priorities competing simultaneously, everything marked urgent, no meaningful sprint goal, constant context switching, and new items injected mid-sprint. The team loses focus entirely. Efe has seen this in startups where the CEO walks in with urgent customer requests, and in larger organizations where multiple customers each demand customizations. In both cases, the PO becomes a pass-through instead of a decision-maker. The customer might be happy today, but will they be satisfied in six months when nothing is coherent? As Vasco notes, when you're serving multiple customers and saying yes to one, you're saying no to all the others — you just haven't told them yet. The result is chaos: steering blindfolded without navigational tools, trying to go everywhere at the same time. A product owner's most important skill is coherent, aligned decision-making — and that means learning to say no.
Self-reflection Question: How often does your product owner say no to stakeholder requests — and when they do say yes, is it because the request aligns with the product vision or because they want to avoid conflict?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Efe Gümüs
Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.
You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"The healthier your collaboration with other roles — developers, product owners, managers — the more successful as a Scrum Master you are." - Efe Gümüs
Efe defines Scrum Master success not through team velocity or timely deliveries, but through the health of relationships. A successful Scrum Master actively contributes to organizational matters, increases transparency on both problems and solutions, and bridges the gap between roles. At the team level, the signal is clear: if people feel safe enough to approach you with their problems, if they speak freely in team events without fear of blame, if they can raise risks before the last day of the sprint — that's success. But Efe is honest about how hard this is to maintain. Relationships with stakeholders have constant ups and downs, and the work of understanding people never stops. His advice starts with empathy — not just reading the room in the moment, but understanding that every colleague carries a different career history, different coping mechanisms, and different experiences that shape how they react to change. For younger Scrum Masters especially, Efe emphasizes that what worked for you won't work for everyone. Speak the common language, understand their perspective, give them assurance through visible, outcome-focused progress. The health of those relationships is the measure of your impact.
Self-reflection Question: Beyond metrics and deliverables, how would you describe the health of your relationship with the key stakeholders around your team — and what's one thing you could do this week to strengthen the weakest one?
"When you have diverse perspectives, a growth zone, converged thinking, and then action points — that diamond — people actually own the actions." - Efe Gümüs
Efe doesn't name a single retrospective format as his favorite — instead, he describes the structure that makes any retrospective effective: the diamond. Start by opening up diverse perspectives (diverge), create space for exploration and growth (the growth zone), then converge the thinking toward clear action points. This diamond pattern — diverge, explore, converge, act — ensures that the team moves from broad reflection to specific, owned commitments. The key word is "owned": when people arrive at actions through this structured exploration rather than being told what to improve, they commit to the follow-through. Efe connects this directly to his broader philosophy: the best systems don't depend on any single person, and the best retrospectives produce actions that the team drives forward without needing the Scrum Master to push.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Efe Gümüs
Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.
You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Honor the wisdom of the group — they are more wise than any management, than any agile coach, because they are in the whole process themselves." - Efe Gümüs
Efe brings a challenge he's seen repeated across every company he's worked with: transformation itself. Organizations adopt the Spotify model or launch Agile DevOps transformations expecting that applying a structure will produce results. But as Efe puts it, bringing developers and operations together does not make DevOps for you. The real question most organizations skip is: what makes sense for our business, our products, our clients, our architecture? The transformation that works is the one you co-create with the people doing the work, not the one imposed from above. Efe points out that traditional management needs numbers and progress reports — and when transformations can't deliver those in familiar formats, managers feel uneasy. His approach: include managers in the transformation activities so they see the small gears of execution firsthand. When they experience the complexity directly, they stop expecting a webinar to change behavior. The key insight is the difference between telling people and people realizing it themselves — self-discovery always generates higher buy-in than directives. Set the direction, let people own the path, and build a system that functions without single-person dependencies.
In this episode, we refer to the Spotify model.
Self-reflection Question: In the last transformation you were part of, was it designed as something done with the organization or to the organization — and what would you change if you could do it again?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Efe Gümüs
Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.
You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"When people start creating their own bubble inside the team, it's because they either don't feel safe, or they don't feel relevant to what the rest of the team is doing." - Efe Gümüs
Efe shares the story of an integration team — back-end and front-end developers working across legacy components, a monolithic environment, and a microservices transformation all at once. With so many different workstreams, team members ended up with their own individual projects. The daily stand-up became a status update: people shared what they were doing, but nobody was listening because nobody else's work affected them. The daily grew from 15 minutes to 30, sometimes an hour, morphing into an unplanned refinement session. Participation dropped — some stopped showing up, others attended but went silent. The team that had once been interactive and collaborative splintered into silos. Informal conversations disappeared entirely, and that was when Efe knew it was too late to make small fixes. Without trust, without a common goal, they were no longer a team — just a group of people sitting together. Then COVID hit, and remote work removed the last chance for accidental collaboration. The daily meeting, Efe realized, is your best radar for team health: pay attention to the energy, the interaction, the engagement — and you'll see the deeper dynamics before they become irreversible.
Self-reflection Question: How engaged is your team during the daily stand-up right now — and does the level of interaction tell you something about how connected they feel to each other's work?
"The book is all about building success mechanisms inside your own mind. If you can set your life goal, then it's way easier for you to set your career goal, your team goal, your sprint goal." - Efe Gümüs
Efe's most influential book isn't about Agile at all — it's Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, a psychology book about building success mechanisms in your mind. Recommended by a fellow agile coach, the book helped Efe see the parallels between personal goal-setting and the iterative progress at the heart of Scrum. When you feel lost or stagnating, the exercises in the book help you create small pieces of progress — not quick wins, but genuine forward movement that builds momentum. Efe connects this directly to Agile: every event, every sprint, every review is a small achievement toward the next one. If you can set a clear life goal, setting a sprint goal becomes natural. The clarity of purpose unlocks action — and that's as true for individuals as it is for teams.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Efe Gümüs
Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.
You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"The biggest problem when I reflect on it now is the stance changes, because as Scrum Masters, we have to establish our impartiality when we are facilitating and when we are coaching." - Efe Gümüs
Efe started his career as a network operation automation engineer, fresh out of an electrical and electronics engineering degree. When his manager asked him to take on a part-time Scrum Master role alongside his developer duties, the challenge of switching between those two stances became immediately real. As a developer, your mind focuses on solving problems. As a Scrum Master, your job is to help teams own the solution — not solve it yourself. That split led Efe to a bigger realization about scope and boundaries. When he stepped too far into the Scrum Master role, he created an unintended authority dynamic. When he stepped too far back, he became invisible. The turning point came when he stopped an alignment call that wasn't working — the information was flowing one way, and the Scrum Masters didn't feel like peers. By naming the problem and co-creating the session format, he found the middle ground: describe your expectations, get agreement, and let people tell you where they need help. One small action from you can move a problem forward in two or three steps — but only if you know about it.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you paused a meeting that wasn't working and explicitly renegotiated how the group would interact — and what held you back from doing it sooner?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Efe Gümüs
Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.
You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.
Philip Su has spent two decades at the highest levels of software engineering — Microsoft, Meta (where he reached Distinguished Engineer, IC9), OpenAI, and now building his own product solo with AI. In this episode, he makes a provocative case: the individual contributor role as we know it is over, code reviews are becoming a liability, and the best engineers are already managing AI agents instead of writing code themselves.
"Every day at work, I lifted six tons of packages with my arms. No one learned my name. And it was the structure — the ability to leave work behind when I clocked out — that pulled me out of a spiral."
Philip's path through tech is anything but typical. After scaling Facebook's London engineering office from a dozen engineers to 500+, he stepped away from Big Tech entirely. During Peak 2021, he worked the floor at Amazon's flagship warehouse south of Seattle — 11-hour shifts, processing 15,000 packages a day. He documented the experience in his Peak Salvation podcast, exploring depression, the divide between the wealthy and the working class, and the maddening inefficiencies inside one of the world's largest employers. That experience reshaped how he thinks about work, systems, and what actually matters when you strip away titles and stock options. He later joined OpenAI as an individual contributor — going from leading hundreds of engineers to writing code again — before leaving to build Superphonic, an AI-powered podcast player.
"We'll one day be scared, positively petrified, to use any mission-critical software known to have allowed human interference in its codebase."
Philip borrows the concept of "lights-out" from data centers that run with zero human workers and applies it to codebases. A lights-out codebase is one where no human ever sees or edits the code. He's already built two apps this way — Tanya's Snowfield and OTD: On This Day — without looking at a single line of code from repository creation through production release. His argument is not just about efficiency. Code reviewers are becoming the bottleneck. The volume of AI-generated code is already too high for humans to keep up, and the same LLM that wrote the code often catches bugs that another instance of itself introduced. Philip has been running both Codex and Cursor as PR reviewers on GitHub, and has been surprised by how often they identify issues in both human- and AI-generated code. He believes we are approaching a threshold where human intervention in codebases will be seen as risky and irresponsible — not the other way around.
"You're not building the thing anymore. You're pondering and tweaking the machine that builds the thing."
In his widely discussed essay "AI Killed the Individual Contributor", Philip argues that maximizing productivity with AI now requires engineers to spend their time on what are essentially management tasks: setting priorities, resolving conflicts, delegating to agents, reviewing output, and giving feedback. The IC role isn't disappearing because AI codes better — it's disappearing because the highest-leverage use of an engineer's time has shifted from writing code to orchestrating the systems that write code. Right now, it feels like managing a team of barely competent interns. But Philip expects that to change fast. Soon it will feel like managing high performers who are faster and more capable than you — and the engineers who thrive will be the ones who learned to let go of the keyboard and focus on judgment, direction, and taste.
"20x productivity means we have 20x fewer PMs than we need."
Philip is putting his thesis to the test with Superphonic, an AI-powered podcast player he's building essentially as a solo founder. What would have required a team two years ago, he now ships alone — leveraging AI agents for coding, testing, and review. But the productivity multiplier creates its own problems. When you can build 20x faster, the bottleneck shifts from engineering capacity to product judgment. You need to know what to build, not just how to build it. Philip's reference to The Mythical Man-Month is deliberate: adding more people (or agents) doesn't solve the fundamental challenge of building the right thing. The hardest part of being both the architect and the manager of your AI agents is knowing when the model breaks down — when you need to step in and do the work yourself rather than delegating.
"There is a lot more that can be done to increase the quality of AI output even if all progress on foundation models stops."
For Scrum Masters and agile coaches helping teams adopt AI tools, Philip's warning is clear: don't treat AI as just another developer on the team. The integration requires rethinking how work is structured, how quality is assured, and what it means to be an engineer. Teams that bolt AI onto existing workflows without changing the underlying process will get marginal gains at best. The ones that redesign their workflows around AI capabilities — including accepting that humans may not need to review every line of code — will see transformational results. Philip's practical advice: do the work yourself first. Understand what the AI is doing before you delegate wholesale. The engineers who skip this step lose the judgment they need to manage the output effectively.
Philip Su is a Distinguished Engineer (IC9) who scaled Facebook's London office from a dozen engineers to 500+, served as site lead at OpenAI, and now builds Superphonic — an AI-powered podcast player. He writes about the future of software work at Molochinations on Substack. LinkedIn
You can link with Philip Su on LinkedIn.
In this episode, we refer to Nate's previous BONUS episode on the brief-execute-debrief cycle and alignment.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"The best product owners are really part of the team. They attend all the ceremonies, they give their daily stand-up status, they're shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches." - Nate Amidon
For Nate, the best product owners he's worked with share one defining trait: they act like teammates, not managers. They show up to daily stand-ups and report on what they worked on, what they completed, and what they're blocked on — just like everyone else. They listen to ideas from the team without being dismissive, recognizing that engineers often know the user just as well as they do. They don't treat the product owner role as a position of authority over the team, but as a different function within the same unit. Nate draws from his military background: leadership is "care and feeding of the people." When product owners internalize that the team's success is their success — when they feel genuine allegiance to the people they work with — backlogs get better organized, priorities become clearer, and collaboration happens naturally. As Vasco adds, alignment is the real purpose behind Scrum ceremonies, and when POs are there, alignment follows.
Self-reflection Question: As a product owner, do your team members see you as someone who is part of the team — or as someone the team works for?
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"It eventually becomes a leadership void on the team that someone will step up and fill — and usually it's an engineer, or the Scrum Master becomes a quasi-product owner." - Nate Amidon
Nate views the product owner role as fundamentally a leadership position — leadership of the backlog, prioritization, and the connection between business needs and team execution. When a PO doesn't embrace that responsibility, the symptoms are predictable: throwing half-baked stories over the fence with a "just figure it out" attitude, constantly shifting priorities without considering the downstream impact on a team that just spent two weeks building something, and being absent from the daily conversations that keep everyone aligned. What follows is what Nate calls a "leadership void" — someone else on the team, often an engineer or the Scrum Master, steps in as a quasi-product owner because the work still needs direction. Meanwhile, without a PO acting as a filter, stakeholders start shoulder-tapping the team directly, competing directors play corporate Game of Thrones over whose priorities win, and the team gets whiplashed between conflicting demands. The biggest red flag? When you hear the team say: "We just did what you told us."
Self-reflection Question: If your product owner disappeared for two weeks, would anyone on the team notice a gap in leadership and direction — or has someone already quietly stepped in to fill that void?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Success for a Scrum Master is maximizing value of the product through the organization. That's a full stop statement." - Nate Amidon
Running a company of contract Scrum Masters gives Nate a unique perspective on what success actually looks like. For him, it comes down to one thing: are you increasing the value of the product through the system? Everything else is either a leading or lagging indicator. Practically, this means starting with the most fundamental question: why does your team exist? Nate suggests asking three team members separately what the team does and who they do it for — and checking whether the answers match. Once you have clarity on purpose, you can work with product and the organization to figure out how to measure whether you're getting closer. But here's where Nate pushes boundaries: he believes a Scrum Master's scope isn't limited to the Scrum team. If success is measured by value flowing through the system, then you have to take ownership of the entire idea-to-deployed pipeline — product prioritization, cross-team dependencies, QA processes, CI/CD, release schedules. You happen to work as a Scrum Master on a team, but your responsibility extends to anywhere value gets stuck.
In this episode, we refer to Vasco's OTOG (One Team, One Goal) principle and Nate's previous episode about the brief-execute-debrief cycle.
Self-reflection Question: If someone asked three different members of your team what the team exists to do and who they do it for, would the answers match — and have you checked recently?
Nate's favorite retrospective format might surprise you: the Meme Retro. Give everyone 5-10 minutes to find a meme on the internet that describes the last sprint. Then go around the room, share the meme, and explain why you chose it. It sounds lighthearted — and it is — but that's exactly the point. As Vasco notes, "laughs per minute" is a great metric for retros, because when people are laughing, they can talk about serious issues without defensiveness. The memes give a different angle on what happened during the sprint, surfacing deeper feelings and patterns that traditional formats might miss. It's especially useful when teams are getting fatigued from running the same retro format over and over.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"User stories are getting done, velocity is fine, people are fairly predictable — but features, epics, and value isn't getting delivered." - Nate Amidon
Since the COVID shift to remote work, Nate has been seeing the same challenge across multiple clients: organizations spinning up engineering teams in opposite time zones, shrinking the overlap window from eight hours to barely one or two. But the time zone gap is only the surface problem. The real issue runs deeper — misaligned incentives between internal teams focused on value delivery and third-party vendors measured on output metrics like story completion counts. On the surface, everything looks fine: stories get done, velocity is stable, predictability is there. But zoom out and you see that features, epics, and actual customer value aren't being delivered. Nate shares a striking example: offshore QA testers incentivized by the number of bugs they found were creating Russian-doll ticket structures — bugs within bugs within bugs — flooding the system with noise while adding no value. His approach starts with making everyone feel like they're on one team — cameras on, real conversations about who people are, what they like, where they live. Then he works to expose the constraint: how is each group actually measured and incentivized? You can't always change the enterprise contract, but you can mitigate. In the QA case, he got leadership to communicate directly with the vendor that the new, leaner process wouldn't penalize their people.
Self-reflection Question: Do you know how every member of your team — including vendors and contractors — is measured and incentivized, and have you checked whether those incentives are aligned with the value your team is trying to deliver?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Product and engineering are in the same boat. We need to visualize and internalize that it's one team, one fight." - Nate Amidon
Nate was working as a Scrum Master on a full-stack team building an internal mobile application when he noticed tension forming between product and engineering. It started small — finger-pointing about missed requirements — but quickly escalated into a full-blown blame game. The QA started siding with product, creating a product-and-QA-versus-engineers dynamic. Engineers began refusing user stories unless they were "100% baked" with every detail spelled out, turning the team into lawyers negotiating contracts rather than collaborators building software. What's revealing about this pattern is what it looks like from the outside: a project manager might see meticulously detailed user stories and think the team is doing great work. In reality, it's a symptom of broken trust. Nate points out that in high-performing teams, you actually see less detail in the issue tracker — because people are talking, aligned, and adapting together in real time. His approach? He drew stick figures in a boat on sticky notes — one labeled PO, the other Engineering — and stuck them on people's monitors. Simple, visual, and direct: you're in the same boat.
Self-reflection Question: What are the smells you're noticing in your team's interactions — and could overly detailed user stories actually be masking a deeper trust problem between product and engineering?
Nate recommends every Scrum Master read Deep Work, and here's why: "Shoulder taps are expensive. If you go and bother an engineer that's in the zone, in deep work, you're adding about a 15-minute reset for them to get back into that zone." For Nate, safeguarding engineers' time is one of the most important things a Scrum Master can do. He also recommends Project to Product by Mik Kersten for Scrum Masters moving into Agile coaching — especially its emphasis on team structure and why "the team needs to be sacrosanct, and work should go to teams."
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"I had built up the trust quotient, but then I didn't think about continually maintaining it." - Nate Amidon
Nate had done everything right. As a junior Scrum Master on an internal software team, he started by building trust — showing up, listening, and letting the team know he wasn't going to make things worse. He even managed to shift their reporting metrics from velocity to predictability, a move the team embraced because it focused on what they could actually control: how well they broke down and executed their plan. But then came the overconfidence. Riding on the capital he'd built, Nate proactively designed a "sprint churn" metric to track how much work swapped in and out of a sprint. The idea wasn't bad — but he rolled it out without consulting the team first. The pushback hit hard. Engineers pushed back: adding more work mid-sprint shouldn't automatically be negative, they argued. And they were right. The real failure wasn't the metric itself — it was bypassing the collaborative process that had earned him trust in the first place. Nate learned that trust isn't something you build once and bank on. It's an everyday job. As he puts it, the Scrum Master's role is to help the team, not direct it — and the moment you start solving problems the team hasn't agreed exist, you're directing.
In this episode, we also refer to Nate's previous BONUS episode on the podcast, where he discussed the brief-execute-debrief cycle from military aviation.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you introduced a change to your team without first checking if they saw the same problem you did — and what happened to your trust quotient as a result?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Nate Amidon
Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.
You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.
This episode is a cross-post from The EBFC Show, Felipe Engineer-Manriquez's podcast exploring Lean and Agile in construction. In this conversation, Felipe interviews Vasco about the #NoEstimates movement, throughput-based planning, and why traditional project management is still stuck in the middle ages of managing creative work.
"When you go into a daily meeting and you start looking at the people in that room, maybe they are the exact same people that were there yesterday, but the team is totally different. Somebody might have had a bad night's sleep, somebody might have had an argument with their spouse. These are human beings. These are not machines that you can just distribute work to."
Vasco's path to agile coaching started with a realization that most practitioners eventually reach: the problems in software development aren't technological. They're about people — getting agreements, sharing information at the right time, making the collective brain of a team actually function. The Scrum Guide gives you organizing principles — how many meetings, who's in them — but it says almost nothing about the real-time feedback cycle between humans that makes or breaks a team. That's why the Scrum Master role exists: to be the lubricant for human interactions, to break down complex ideas into items the collective mind can process. It's the piece that makes Scrum work, and it's the piece that's hardest to teach.
"The PM wanted 15 items per sprint, and the team said 'yeah, we can do 15.' I said, this is not gonna happen. The team had been delivering between five and eight items per sprint. I said, I'm gonna be positive — I'm gonna say seven. And no surprise, by the end of the sprint, they delivered seven."
Vasco started as a project manager — and not the easy certification kind. He went through IPMA, which means six months of training, a four-hour written exam, and an expert interview, just for the entry level. Planning and estimating was the job. Then he ran his first Scrum project, specifically to prove it couldn't work. By the second month, he couldn't understand how anything else could work. The team delivered something to show every single sprint — something that never happened with traditional project management. The turning point came when he made a bet with a product manager: the PM needed 15 items per sprint, the team committed to 15, but historical throughput was 5-8 items. Reality delivered seven. That moment crystallized the #NoEstimates insight: we can't fight reality, but we can choose which seven items to deliver.
"Never believe the plan. Or as in Scarface — never get high on your own supply. It's so unbelievable how project managers still today believe their freaking plans."
At Nokia, Vasco managed a program of 500 people across 100 teams on four continents. No way to get everyone in a room. So he tracked system-level throughput — features delivered to integration per week. Six months into a twelve-month project, the data said they'd be at least six months late. He told the program manager: cut scope now. The program manager did what every PMI-trained program manager does — sent an email asking all 100 teams if they'd deliver on time. Every single team said yes. Nobody wants to be first to admit they're late. Twelve months in, they discovered they were six months late. The project got canceled. 500 people, millions of euros, all because somebody believed the plan. Linear predictive planning is useful for exploring what might be possible if nothing goes wrong. It is not reality. The only tool that reflects reality is throughput — the number of items completed per unit of time.
"It's not earned, it's spent. It's not value, it's cost. It's not management, it's just observation. Monty Python could not have come up with a better name."
Felipe shares a story that mirrors the absurdity: an industrial project with a dedicated 35-person earned value management department. Before the meeting even started, the department head announced, "Let's all acknowledge that earned value management is more an art than a science." Their charts were made up, the contractor's charts were made up, and the goal of the meeting was to agree that the project would finish on time — regardless of what any data said. This is where traditional project management ends up when it disconnects from throughput: a $30 million scope addition with zero additional time, defended by charts that a mediocre attorney can invalidate in the first week of litigation. Felipe knows — he spent a year being cross-examined by forensic schedulers whose full-time job is proving that construction schedules are fiction.
"Never convince anyone. Convince yourself. Once you're convinced, whatever other people say, it doesn't really matter because you're not gonna take them seriously anyway."
Here's how to validate throughput-based planning with your own data: take the last 10 sprints (or periods). Calculate the average throughput and control limits from the first five. Then check whether the next five sprints fall within that range. They will. If you're in software and using Jira, you already have this data. You don't need anyone's permission. You don't need to change anything. Just look at what your team actually delivers versus what they planned to deliver. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between superstition and reality.
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international keynote speaker, Project Delivery Services Director at The Boldt Company, host of The EBFC Show podcast, and a proven construction change-maker implementing Lean and Agile practices on projects from millions to billions of dollars worldwide. He is a Registered Scrum Trainer™ (RST), Registered Scrum Master™ (RSM), and recipient of the Lean Construction Institute Chairman's Award. His book Construction Scrum is the first practical guide for applying Scrum in construction.
You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.
In this episode, we refer to story mapping as a key tool for maintaining focus and alignment.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"She had this section called 'Not Required Anymore.' Every time, it was a very subtle and a very respectful way of saying to the team: great idea, but the goals changed. We don't need it anymore." - Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin describes a Product Owner who turned prioritization into a living discipline. She built a culture of co-creation where everyone contributed ideas to the backlog, but she also saw the biggest risk coming early: misalignment from siloed ideas. Her approach was to use story maps extensively in refinements and planning, communicating weekly with customers to collect feedback. When the direction changed — and it regularly did — she articulated the shift clearly: "Goals changed, here's what we're doing now." Her stroke of genius was a section on the story map called "Not Required Anymore," where deprioritized ideas landed respectfully. Nobody felt offended; they understood customers' needs had shifted. This created a culture where people kept contributing ideas courageously, knowing that even if priorities changed, their input was valued. The result was a team that could adapt without chaos, maintaining focus while embracing change.
Self-reflection Question: How does your Product Owner communicate changes in direction? Is there a respectful, transparent mechanism for showing the team what's no longer needed — and why?
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"I was looking for those keywords — a change in priorities, a change in the roadmap. Those conversations were missing. And when I asked about the roadmap, I got crickets." - Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin shares the story of a Product Owner who was brilliant at articulating value in the backlog — customer-centric stories, well-structured work. On the surface, everything looked great: goals were being met, the team was delivering. But something subtle was wrong. The roadmap never changed. Priorities never shifted. There were no conversations about customer feedback changing direction. When Bhavin got curious and asked to see the roadmap, he realized it was a static delivery plan, not a living document. The Product Owner wasn't collecting feedback from customers, so there was never a reason to adapt. The team was essentially building in a vacuum — shipping features nobody was validating. It's an anti-pattern that's easy to miss when the team is performing well on internal metrics but disconnected from real customer value.
Self-reflection Question: Is your team's roadmap a living document that changes based on customer feedback, or has it become a static delivery plan? When was the last time a priority genuinely shifted based on what you learned from users?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin joins us from Australia. Bhavin is driven by unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty, and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation, and learning from failure. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness, and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others.
You can link with Bhavin Shukla on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Success is not always good vibes, good environment for us as Scrum Masters. For me, it's about confronting the reality, the ugly truth, which takes the team to tougher conversations, more constructive challenges." - Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin shares a pivotal moment in his career that redefined what success means for a Scrum Master. He was working with a fantastic team — great culture, people who believed in quality, knowledge sharing, strong bonds. But sprint goals weren't being met, and stakeholders were constantly chasing the Product Owner and Scrum Master for answers. Bhavin got his hands dirty with the data: lack of clarity on work, context switching, patterns emerging. When he presented the data to the team, he was met with silence — a confronting kind of silence. The team was essentially saying, "We were happy. Why would you do this to us?" Bhavin's response was direct: going for coffees and laughing together isn't the whole job. If he wasn't showing them reality, he couldn't look at himself in the mirror. The team eventually used that data to raise their own voice, pointing out systemic issues with external vendors and organizational constraints. The data gave them a platform to speak truth — not as blame, but as discovery.
Self-reflection Question: What conversations did you avoid this week that could have unlocked progress for your team? Are you bringing data to those conversations, or relying on vibes?
Bhavin shares an unconventional use of the newspaper headline technique — typically used for roadmaps and vision — as a retrospective format. The idea is simple but powerful: ask the team to write the newspaper headline they want to see about themselves. What would the story say when they succeed? By authoring their own headline, the team takes ownership of the narrative — they define what success looks like, what must go right, and what risks could derail them. "Putting them in that newspaper headline, they authored the story. They own the accountability to make it successful," Bhavin explains. He also shares a second technique for Kanban teams under pressure: a rolling two-column whiteboard — "Frustration of the Day" and "Success of the Day" — with no meetings required, just real-time data capture that becomes a continuous retrospective, reviewed every 2-3 weeks.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin joins us from Australia. Bhavin is driven by unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty, and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation, and learning from failure. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness, and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others.
You can link with Bhavin Shukla on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Before people understand what needs to change, and how they need to adopt, what it means to them in their day-to-day work, and how it's going to help and add value — those conversations are missing." - Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin brings a challenge many organizations face but few talk about openly: de-scaling. He's working with an organization that adopted a scaling framework for consistency — shared language, standardized tooling, uniform processes across business units. It worked for alignment, but it also created bureaucracy. Now leadership wants to become leaner and more nimble. The problem? The de-scaling itself is happening cookie-cutter style. Changes are being rolled out — new framework versions, new tools, flow metrics — without explaining the "why" to the people affected. The result is burnout and two parallel ecosystems running simultaneously: the old meeting structures people never abandoned, and the new Scrum events layered on top. Bhavin and his coaching peers ran a "Million Meeting Minutes" workshop, collecting data on how much time teams spend in meetings, what decisions get made (or don't), and who dominates conversations. The data revealed the overlap and waste. The experiment now is mapping those parallel systems and working with teams to understand which problems each structure actually solves — consolidating where possible while maintaining the consistency of language the organization genuinely needs.
Self-reflection Question: In your organization, are there parallel meeting structures addressing the same problems? What would it take to map them and start a conversation about consolidation?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
About Bhavin Shukla
Bhavin joins us from Australia. Bhavin is driven by unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty, and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation, and learning from failure. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness, and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others.
You can link with Bhavin Shukla on LinkedIn.