Stay ConnectedWe bring amazing agile minded individuals from product, coaching, entrepreneurship, and engineering space and bring you an immersive learning experience through stories and practices.
If you are an aspiring or new Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Product Manager; you will take away a lot from these conversations!
Copyright: © Vivek Khattri
It’s round 2 of our two-part series of The Agile Coach, where Vivek Khattri welcomes a former colleague, Nikhil Nambiar. Nikhil was a former Lead Technical Instructor in the Agile Coach and is now a Senior Consultant for Slalom Consulting. Nikhil will be spending the time of this 2nd episode discussing the basic understanding a scrum master should have, and what is really important with the role of a scrum master.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Nikhil: “No, you don't have to be technical to be a scrum master. But you need to have a certain level of understanding and certain level of curiosity around what technology is, and what are the things that developers go through in order to be a great scrum master.”
Nikhil: “It's not about knowing how to solve the problem. It's about identifying the problem. And getting the right people in the room to solve that problem.”
Nikhil: “Scrum Masters, first of all, don't even look at that as a problem. Because they'll go like, Oh, this is compliance. This is how the company operates.”
Nikhil: “Agile is not about perfection. So whatever you're trying to do here, is like, you need to view it from the lens of this team. Yeah, not from one Agile principle that has been followed in the industry.”
Nikhil: “DevOps, in general, is a team that is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure where code is deployed.”
Learn more about Nikhil in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and are interested in learning more, you can check us out at the link below:
Today is the first of a two-part series of The Agile Coach, where Vivek Khattri welcomes a former colleague, Nikhil Nambiar. Nikhil was a former Lead Technical Instructor in the Agile Coach and is now a Senior Consultant for Slalom Consulting. He will be sharing a bit of his background today and will talk about what Agile means to him, and the importance of quality in product development.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Nikhil: “I think there's a large perception of how developers view agile people is most likely because we have had poor Scrum Masters and poor product owners, or a lack of quality of resources, or people in those roles, brings about certain impressions.”
Nikhil: “So when I'm when we are developing things, a lot of times it is easy to get caught up in the details and to go into different rabbit holes, because the technology being a knowledge-based profession, especially for engineering, yeah, you can quickly start spiraling out into trying to make things perfect.”
Nikhil: “My opinion is that if you truly want to move quickly, you are going to have issues with your application. And that is something that you need to accept as normal.”
Nikhil: “even though, yeah, the fact is that there are going to be issues, that does not mean that as developers, we shouldn't be improving the quality of our application, our overarching goal still needs to be that we need to deliver high-quality solutions in a timely manner.”
Vivek: “I've been a product person, and we don't need a perfect architecture, we don't need perfectly clean code, we just need something to put it out there.”
Learn more about Nikhil in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and are interested in learning more, you can check us out at the link below:
It’s round 3 with Senior Director of Agile Coaching and Kaizen Lead for Pfizer, Matt Philip in this exciting new episode of The Agile Coach. In this episode, Matt will be sharing his views on the Iron Triangle, Fitness for purpose, the significance of experimentation, and many more.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Matt: “I think that the whole Iron Triangle of project management back in the day was it served some, some benefits. There was there's some rigor around managing processes, managing projects, there's a lot of good stuff there.”
Matt: “The most important thing is whether someone will actually use this product and how quickly they'll use it. “
Matt: “ Only the customer, only the consumer can define if it's fit for their purpose.”
Matt: “We see this a lot, whether it's software or otherwise, people are afraid to change stuff because they don't know what they're going to break.”
Learn more about Matt in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and interested in learning more, you can check us out in the Link below:
It’s round 2 with Senior Director of Agile Coaching and Kaizen Lead for Pfizer, Matt Philip in this exciting new episode of The Agile Coach. In this episode, Matt will be sharing with Vivek a little overview of the “8 Stances of a Scrum Master”, and gets down to the details about the “Coaching Stance”. Our duo will also be discussing why it is important to quantify goals when coaching a team.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Matt: “I think there's some great stuff that we can learn from our friends who do experience design as a professional.”
Matt: “I've also found a lot of coaches including myself, it's hard for us to really feel like the sense of accomplishment because it's like this a soft thing. I'm helping other people succeed. But how do I know if I succeeded?”
Matt: “It's actually quite meaningful for a coach, I think, to be able to say, ‘ ‘Alright, here's the quantified value of what I've helped me this to do. And it creating small experiments to get us toward that bit.”
Learn more about Matt in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and interested in learning more, you can check us out in the Link below:
The Agile Coach goes big in its latest episode as Vivek Khattri welcomes Matt Philip, to talk about leading the Agile Transformation in a large organization. Matt has over 15 years of experience in the Software Development industry, and is now the Senior Director for Agile Coaching and Kaizen Lead in Pfizer, leading the company’s Agile Transformation.
Matt and Vivek will be discussing what it takes to lead the Agile Transformation for large organizations with multiple levels and teams, what challenges you may encounter, and what matters in building an Agile Team.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Matt: “One pattern I've seen across multiple companies, the organization doesn't have the capability to do this stuff.”
Matt: “Helping the organization own it, rather than just kind of have something installed on itself, that's the real hard work that coaches, Scrum Masters, and product people do.”
Matt: “I try to work at the highest levels, I can't, at some point, you're gonna get frustrated, you're gonna get the resistance. So part of it is understanding how you deal with change.”
Matt: “I think a lot of organizations suffer from a lack of psychological safety, organizationally, in teams.”
Matt: “For leaders, managers, always be working on yourself first. You know, I realized how much I fail, and how much I want to improve. And so always be reading, always improving.”
Learn more about Matt in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and interested in learning more, you can check us out in the Link below:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-coach-llc
Facilitating a retrospective is one tough cookie to crumble. But you don’t have to panic so much, because our hosts today, Vivek Khattri and Joe Ziadeh, will be giving you the information you need to successfully facilitate a retrospective. In this episode of The Agile Coach, Vivek and Joe will be exploring Esther Derby and Diana Larson's five stages of a retrospective and will be explaining them to you with their own flair.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Joe: “Very first stage. And number one thing they call out, set the stage, if you show up panicked, if you're freaking out, they're going to be freaked out.”
Joe: “Next step, gathering the data, now look, if they have a bunch of data, great, have them bring in the data and then look at the data.”
Joe: “Now, we're going to go from just having data to gathering insights. So there's a difference between data and wisdom. Data is just information, wisdom, or the insights that you gather from that data.”
Joe: “Your job isn't to have the answer. Your job as a facilitator is to help them process through the framework. It's to help work them through the process so that they can solve these problems on their own.”
Joe: “The next stage is deciding what to do. So you take a list of all these experiments and you vote on them again.”
Joe: “Make sure that you celebrate. Let these people know that they accomplished something. And then document the experiments. Don't just do all of this work and say that was really great. And then walk out of this room and let all the experiments fall on the floor.”
Learn more about Vivek in the link below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and interested in learning more, you can check us out in the Link below:
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Peter: “I've really seen agile find its place in a lot of major companies, from an IT perspective, from a business intelligence perspective, from an enterprise and data analytics perspective, as really the modern way to help push those companies forward.”
Peter: “Companies prefer to get value to the customer early on, they almost want to bring value to the customer on a weekly basis, and that's where they actually need talent who can think in that way.”
Peter: “If you don't have a strong software background, the way that I've always thought about agile as I've gotten started, is it's really the way that we go about living our lives as we take on a project.”
Vivek: “Everything is teachable and coachable.”
Peter: “You are going to wear many different hats and that's really what Agile promotes is it allows that you know, you on a team can wear many different hats in any given time.”
Learn more about Peter and Vivek in the links below:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and interested in learning more, you can check us out in the Link below:
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Peter: “It really comes down to having an inquisitive nature, and then also being comfortable asking questions and guiding those conversations with stakeholders and product owners and product managers, so that you can really start to understand and derive value in the organization that way.”
Vivek: “As a BA you need to be a few Sprint's ahead, and you want to refine those stories in your product backlog in partnership with the product owner or a product manager”
Peter: “For me, conveying that in the interview that I want to shadow somebody that I want a good relationship with another business analyst is crucial. Because if they say, “Oh, that's not something that we do”, that's actually a red flag for me in the interview saying, well, “How am I going to learn?”
Peter: “In the interview, and then actually executing in your role, you want to make sure that you communicate how you are good at aligning on what the most important thing is to focus on. Because as a business analyst, there's always 1000 different things you could do.”
Peter: “Companies are born out of chaos, right? There's something chaotic in the world. And as a function of that you create a solution. And so your goal isn't to fight the chaos, it's to embrace it.”
Learn more about Peter in the link below:
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Jess: “But I think today, you know, if we really look at the word networking, and how I see it is really just making connections with people, connecting other human beings, learning about them, sharing your own experiences, you could be networking all the time.”
Jess: “I think networking is powerful, because you never know who's going to open what door”
Jess: “I really love the magic and the idea of like, wow, you never know what's gonna happen. You never know what piece of information this person could give you that could shift your whole path or your whole world”
Vivek: “The world is so vast, there's so many interesting people, there's so many interesting things.”
Jess: “Show up in curiosity, say, Hey, I'm really interested in the work that you're doing. I'm really curious to know about what your day to day has been like, you know, what thoughts are on working for this company? Being curious works, because people want to share about their experience”
Jess: “What's happening in your mind is going to affect how you show up, right? And how you up is going to affect the results that you get. So if you're reaching out to people with this super needy, desperate energy, you're going to get a different result than if you are standing in your power and saying, I know I offer value, right. And I'm curious and open to learning, that's going to get a different response. So I would say be aware of what's happening in your mind, get curious about the dialogue that you have with yourself, that's a good place to start, looking at literally what are your thoughts saying to you, is kind of where you could start diagnosing where you're at shift from there.”
Vivek: “Most of the recruiters or hiring managers, like they hire people, because they want to solve a problem, they have a vacancy, they don't really hire because they're nice people, and they want to give me an opportunity.”
Jess: “I will have limiting beliefs my whole life, right? They're gonna, they're gonna change and they're gonna be there. And that's okay. We can still be successful. Even with them there, I guess, is a message that I would want people to know, too, right. Like, think of all the things that you have achieved, even when you were feeling like not 100% Confident? Yeah. Once they were like, Jess, you feel like crap. And look what you've created in that feeling. Imagine what you could create, if you elevate out of this, right?”
Jess: “The first thing (habits) that comes to mind is self care. We can totally burn ourselves out, especially when it comes to job searching.”
Jess: “Networking is really powerful. These people have the power to like when you get in connection with people, they can give you feedback on your resume. They can tell you what to expect in the interview process. They can refer you to their companies, which is really powerful if you're making a transition.”
Learn more about Jess in the link below:
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Richard: "Because look, if it wasn't for agile, I don't think you need the idea of a product owner, if we were shipping every three years. Those were the old days, I was in those projects, those big waterfall projects where you did requirements for nine months, it coded for a few months, and you did a bunch of integration testing for twice as long.”
Vivek: “It's a very demanding job. It's a really rewarding job in a minute, you know, you have to be technical. There's a lot of elements of leadership, prioritization, which is so important.”
Richard: "A product owner needs to still be sitting there, readily talking to customers, readily talking to your internal teams, they care about your product, and regularly talking to engineers.”
Richard: "There's gonna be different paradigms. I think the important thing is who's going to make sure that you don't add a lot of friction between; what are we trying to accomplish? And how does that get broken into work that engineers can work on? As long as you don't add friction to that and mess up that process I don't care what you call people.”
Richard: "And so as a product owner, product manager, I have to be really good at identifying good data sources, adding telemetry to code, and knowing how to find some signal in the noise, because I can just get drowned in data points.”
Richard: “A good product owner leads through influence. They don't have direct authority. They don't have a management staff of people, the engineers don't report to them. No, but you are leading, often by showing that you have their back.”
Richard: “I learned quickly, especially with a few folks who were a little more grouchy, that I have to prove I've done the work first.”
Richard: “If you want a good relationship with engineers, show you care about their thing, and genuinely.”
Richard: “Yeah, I mean, arguably, some of the best parts of DevOps of Agile have these ideas that you should first of all be hiring people who are never satisfied and not in the sort of like, they're psycho. So we're just always mad about stuff. But like you people who don't just settle in go and like, good enough and good enough.”
Richard: “Sometimes your priority is stabilizing it, sometimes your priority is growing something else. Sometimes your priority is maybe just finding a new market. So I think that's the awesome, fun part of this job is that there's no single sort of Product Strategy for each person. But you have to stop, observe your landscape, talk to stakeholders, understand your corporate priorities, and then reflect that in your backlog.”
Richard: “But you know, hey, look, a good product owner says no, a lot. A good product owner does not say yes, all the time. That is a bad product owner, right? Because you should be saying no, you should be retiring features, retiring products when necessary. So first half, you have to think of the end sometimes.”
Richard: “ Are you a learner? Are you someone who's going to come in here and invest in the relationship, you're not gonna, you're gonna have some courage, and you're gonna have an opinion. And I want to hear your point of view. And you're not just a yes person who comes in and says yes to everybody, or, you know, you're going to come in with an opinion, you're going to be observant, you're going to listen.”
Learn more about Laxmi in the link below:
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
