Show notes
Join Brian and Mike Cohn as they unpack the five essential pillars that take Agile from “just the motions” to meaningful, measurable impact. Plus, get a behind-the-scenes look at their revamped course built for real team transformation. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian is joined by longtime collaborator and Agile thought leader Mike Cohn for a deep dive into what really makes Agile stick. They explore the five foundational pillars—mindset, practices, roles, teamwork, and support beyond the team—and share stories of what happens when teams get them wrong (like obsessing over story point math or demoing a copyright update in a sprint review). Along the way, they introduce the newly available Working on a Scrum Team public course and explain why it’s designed for entire teams, not just isolated roles. Whether you're new to Agile or knee-deep in transformation, this episode will help you rethink how to build an Agile approach that actually works. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mike Cohn#80: From Struggling to Success: Reviving Agile Teams with Mike CohnScrum Team Roles and ResponsibilitiesWorking on a Scrum Team CourseMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleSubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00)Welcome in, Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. Thanks for joining us. I'm with you, as always, Brian Milner. And today, I have the one and only Mike Cohn back with us. Welcome in, Mike. Mike (00:12)Thanks, Brian. Good to be here. Brian Milner (00:14)Always happy to have Mike on the show and really appreciate Mike making time to come on. Wanted to have Mike on because there's some things Mike's been talking about recently that are really interesting and people have been asking a little bit about this and I thought maybe it'd be just a good opportunity to talk through some of the stuff that Mike's been writing about. I know you spent, Mike, a lot of time helping teams to not just do Agile but to really get solid results from it. to see impact from it. And I know the topic you've been talking about recently is sort of these five pillars of supporting real agile improvements, the mindset, practices, roles, teamwork, and support beyond the team. So I thought maybe we could just dig in and drive through those and maybe learn a little bit about those as we go. Obviously also to talk a little bit about the exciting new course that's being launched here, the working on a Scrum team course, because I know that was originally just for private classes, right? And now it's being open to the public. Mike (01:23)Yeah, we've done working on a Scrum team as a private class for probably 20 plus years. It's been kind of our main offering to private clients. But we're hearing from a lot of people that they have one team and they can't really get a private class approved with the budget and such. So what we're doing is going ahead and making that course available as a public course. So two people from your company, five people from another company all in the same class the way we've done our certified courses for decades. And so we're going to start offering this as a public course. And the exciting thing there is that it's really meant to be a team-based class, where things like Scrum Master training, great class, but it's really meant for the Scrum Master, right? And working on a Scrum team is really designed, and you and I helped you and I design this course together, but it's designed to be something that is a whole team training, right? So good for anybody on a team. Brian Milner (02:16)Yeah, yeah, it's been really great teaching those in the private classes and I'm excited to think about the public being able to come in and take that now. Let's talk a little bit about these pillars and, I think people are gonna be really intrigued by the concept here. The first one is mindset, I think, and just wanna start there and say, what does it actually mean to... think Agile and what is the found, why is that kind of the foundation for successful transformations? Mike (02:43)Remember the kind of the early days of agile and there was a lot of conversation about could you be agile without understanding the principles, right? If you just did the practices, were you agile? Other people were saying, no, you have to start with the principles, right? And so do you start with principles? Do you start with practices? And I remember these early debates and they often devolved into a discussion of the karate kid movie, right? Remember that one, right? And, you know, can you just wax on? Brian Milner (03:12)Ha Mike (03:12)for long enough, just do the practices. And then all of a sudden, your karate instructor or your agile coach is, OK, you're agile. And it's like, wait, all I know how to do is wax a car, right? And so there were these discussions about practices versus principles. And I was kind of always on the side where you better understand the principles to do this. Just knowing the practices, waxing on all day, is kind of just going through the motions. And so you have to understand the principles. And the idea that I wanted was that if a team truly understood all of the principles underneath Agile, I don't just mean just the manifesto, but all the principles that are there from Lean, from Kanban, from everything, that if you really understood those, you'd kind of invent the practices, right? You do those and you go eventually to go, hey, we should probably meet every day. Or hey, if we tested first, that might be a really good thing. Brian Milner (03:57)Yeah. Mike (04:05)So you'd invent the practices if you really had that type of agile mindset. And so for me, when we're working with organizations to get them truly agile, and I don't mean like more agile than less agile, but agile in a way that's going to stick, you got to change mindsets, right? You've got to do more than just the wax on. So people have to get the mindset. Brian Milner (04:27)Yeah, I love that. I know that I've experienced some things in the course of working with people that's it's sort of like you, if you're not on the same page with the principles, then you start to talk through the practices and you run up against a problem. And really what you find out the core of it was, well, we weren't aligned on really the principle behind this. So why would I want the practices then, right? ⁓ Mike (04:49)Yeah. Well, that's where you also end up then with a lot of team debates about things, right? Because you're arguing about the practice. if you'll say you and I are arguing about the benefit of some practice, if we agree on the principle, we might just have different views on it. But deep down, we'll probably agree on some practice, or we might find an alternative one. But if you don't agree on the principles, you end up with a lot more of these kind of annoying. mean, team debates are great. I mean, I love. Brian Milner (04:54)Yeah. Mike (05:12)you know, having a team debate, arguing stuff like that, but not about pointless things, right? And not without some sort of foundation. They just kind of get in the way. It's just frustrating for everybody. Brian Milner (05:21)Yeah. Well, I'm kind of curious, what kind of signs or signals do you think teams should look out for to kind of clue in and let them know that what might actually be going on here is more of a mindset issue? Mike (05:36)think sometimes it's when you hear the appeal to authority, right? Somebody says, you know, well, we got to do it this way because the scrum guide says, right? Or the one that annoys me is we have to do it this way because Mike Cohn says, ⁓ you know, that was like, no, I, somewhere else also said, think, right? Don't just, you know, don't just, you know, blindly do story points or something. Cause I say they're a good thing. I want you to think too. Brian Milner (05:50)You You Mike (06:01)And so I think that kind of appeal to authority when teams are debating things. It's where we also see teams who think they're agile because they do a set of practices. We use a particular agile tool, so we must be agile. We do daily meetings. We must be agile. And those are not the things that make you agile. Those are artifacts of being agile. If you're agile, you're going to meet a lot. You're not going meet a lot, but you're going to talk a lot. Um, and so those are the artifacts of behaving in an agile way. And so I want to understand why we're doing those things. So I look for those kind of appeals to authority. Um, you know, emphasis on that type of stuff in an argument talking about how this is the right way saying there's only one right way to do something. Brian Milner (06:49)Yeah, yeah, that's great. How does working on the Scrum team deal with this? How does that address it? Mike (06:55)Well, one of the things we do, it was actually one of my favorite exercises. We do this exercise at the start of the class where we ask people to kind of map out how the organization talks about certain adsel principles and then how does the organization behave. And so for example, if a company says, people are our greatest asset, and then they treat people like dirt, we've got this kind of problem between what we say and what we do. And so I like to kind of map this out. And so we do this with the principles in the Agile Manifesto. And once we map those out and we start to see things that we say we value, but we don't behave that way, really helps us understand if we've really embraced that mindset. Or are we just doing things because an Agile coach told us to, or a boss told us to, or we did it that way in our prior company. Those are all bad reasons to do something. Brian Milner (07:48) Yeah. So this is great. So I agree. The mindset's really foundational. And there is this symbiotic relationship between mindset and practices, which came first and which comes first, as we talked about. I know a lot of teams get stuck doing Agile, though, in really only name only. So when we talk about practices, what makes the difference between going through the motions? Mike (08:00)Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (08:11)and actually doing things that work. Mike (08:13)Well, practices is kind of our second pillar, right? You have to have the mindset, right? But you also have to have the practices that come from having that mindset. so, again, I try to think of that team on a desert island, right? And they're isolated from the world. They've never talked to anybody, but they have an agile mindset. What practices are they going to invent, right? And I think those are kind of the core practices. We see a lot of problems with as an example, teams that misunderstand sprint planning. And I know when I first started teaching about sprint planning, I'd have a slide up there to have a picture of a sprint backlog. And the sprint backlog listed tasks like code this, design this, test this. And then there were estimates next to code this. It's going to take four hours testing. It's going to take three. And so we were able see all these numbers and think the point of a sprint planning was these numbers. And Even in the early days of this, I was always saying, no, it's not about those numbers. It's about deciding what product backlog items you can pick. if taking a, I don't even want to call it an estimate, but taking a wild guess about, it probably can take four hours to code. If that helps you decide how many backlog items you can commit to, great, put those numbers up there. But it was never about the numbers. And it's one of the most common problems that I see with teams in sprint planning is they get obsessed with How many hours did we bring in? How many points did we bring in? And I remember one team I worked with where we did sprint planning. Having those estimates were helpful for them on their sprint back. They were helping. And we finished the meeting. And we're using Google Sheets in a meeting to do this. We've got a row with the estimates in there. And as we start to wind down the meeting, I deleted that column that they'd spent so much time talking about. They're all kind of pissed off at me. Why'd you delete that? We spent all this time talking about it. I said, because we got the benefit, right? You got the benefit of those numbers. The benefit isn't a week from now remembering that you said five hours, because it's going to take what it takes. The benefit was the discussion that it led to of can we take more or are we already full? So I see teams get obsessed with that. This is one example, but that's one of the problems with sprint planning as a practice. Brian Milner (10:25)Yeah. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. And that's one of the things I know I've talked about with people going through the course is sort of understanding the purpose behind the things. Just going back to, know, harkening back to what you said about, don't just do it because someone told you, you know, understand why the purpose behind it. And, know, otherwise we, I'm sure we've all had that experience before where someone just tells you to do something and says, you know, why? Cause I told you so, you know, that, that doesn't, that's not very convincing. Mike (10:52)Thanks, Mom. Brian Milner (10:53)Right, right, thanks mom. Yeah, not very convincing, but it's much more convincing when they can tell you, well, no, you do this because this is what we're trying to do. And I think you're right, that makes all the difference there. ⁓ Mike (11:05)It just, don't know anybody that responds well to being told what to do, right? My instant reaction is no, right? mean, you it could be, you know, a really, you it could be a really good thing. Eat more vegetables, you spend more time outside. No, right? Don't tell me what to do. So. Brian Milner (11:09)Right. Right. Yeah. It's almost like our default response is no until you convince me. Are there other common practices? We talked about sprint planning. Are there other kind of practices you see teams struggle with? Mike (11:28)Yeah, yeah, for a lot of people. think a huge one is product backlog refinement. I don't know what a better word would be than refinement. refinement is about making the backlog better. It's not about making it perfect. And I see teams that get stuck on backlog refinement and feel like they have to resolve every open issue, that everything has to be tiny and…
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