Exploring the Impact of Agile Coaches with Mike Lyons from Kairise

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Welcome to the podcast that challenges you from the inside.

Come be more and discover the Agile within. And now, here's your host, Greg Miller. We are thrilled to announce that the Agile within podcast is a gold sponsor of SCRUM Day. Join us on September 14, 2023 at Alliant Energy in Madison, Wisconsin for this one day conference. Prepare to be inspired by remarkable speakers, including the author of A Pocket Guide for Scrum as well as the authors of fixing your scrum. Get insights from Afternoon Keynote Dave west, the CEO of scrum.org Learn invaluable strategies from industry leaders on implementing SCRUM and human resources, technology teams and beyond. Don't forget to visit us at our booth at SCRUM Day. Mark and I'll be there and get your tickets@www.scrumday.org for this incredible event. Look forward to seeing you. Stop by the booth. Mark and I will say hi and we'll see you then. Mark and Greg so Mark was, if you, if you listen to our show, you know we do the huddle. Mark and I are big football fans. Mark was driving me the other day saying how you know, I'm in Cincinnati. Mark's in Columbia, South Carolina. And he went to Clemson. So the Bengals have a player called T. Higgins. He also went to Clemson and they have Joe Burrow and they have Jamar Chase. And Mark sent me a thing over LinkedIn that said the Bengals said, pretty much admitted they can't afford to sign all three players and that he would like to have T. Higgins back at Atlanta because he's the Atlanta or not back, but down to Atlanta to his team, the Atlanta Falcons. So I took a little exception. But for me, but I'm sure it is for Mark. Mark would look because the bang. Well, to be fair, the Falcons have gotten what Desmond Ritter went to UC College and they have, they signed our top safety, Jesse Bates, which we knew we were going to.

Bijan Robinson from Texas is the big.

Splash and you got Bijan Robinson your Runway. So you guys are loading up down there. You're, you're going to be a little difficult.

It hasn't translated to on the field just yet. So I, I get every chance I can to, to rib you a little bit since the Bengals are, are. Yeah. Would you say they're the class of the afc? They're, they're at the top of the class, the afc. I guess I would say they're still.

Not getting their, their cred, dude. They're still not there. It's still, it's still Patrick Mahomes and then they say Josh Allen, even though we beat him last year in the playoffs, the Bills, I'll trade you. You'll trade. You'll. I know. You'll take Josh Allen. I know. Yeah, but why are we not. Why are we still like third? So I think we're going to have to win the Super BO number two. I don't know, something that could be your year, buddy. I hope so, man. We got Orlando Brown from Kansas City. So our left tackle, that was our big splash. So. Yeah, yeah. Did you watch by the, by the way, did you watch Quarterback yet on Netflix? They have Marcus Mariota on there.

Yeah, I've read countless articles. I don't subscribe to Netflix as I've really tried to limit the number of streaming services that I have because it just gets out of hand really fast. But yeah, yeah, my buddies tell me I need to at least get it for a month so I can. So I can watch it.

Yeah, you should watch Quarterback. So anyway, so our guest today probably doesn't care about this. He's not a sports fan. Where he's at, however, he has Victor Wenbana, however you say it, Wembanyana with the Spurs. So he's down in Texas. So he is a partner at a company called Kai Rise and they offer something very interesting. They do asynchronous training, self paced training on the IC Agile. Mark and I both took that through the two day class, but they offer you can go through the IC Agile training at your own pace. His name is Mike Lyons. Mike, thanks for joining the show.

Hey, Greg. Hey, Mark. Thanks for, thanks for having me and thanks for digging into the, the NFL side of things to appreciate that.

I know, I know you love to hear that. I know you were, I know before we recorded you were like, I'm not a sports fan at all. So. But Mark and I are, so. Yes, I know.

That's all right. I appreciate it. There's probably a lot of, you know, analogies we can draw that help us in our, in our career. In the day job though, I'm imagining so.

Yeah, absolutely. So tell us a little bit more about Kai Rise. I gave a little intro there, but that's. You have a very interesting company there.

Well, thanks. Yeah. You know, we formed this company right when the pandemic started in 2020 and me and two other guys who have been in the agile arena for decades now and combined and we worked with IC Agile to pilot this idea. This idea that says getting a foundational understanding of agile ways of working shouldn't be cost and time prohibitive. You know the traditional sort of let's introduce Agile in a two day class.

Yeah.

And well, a little pricey, you know, I mean $1,200 sometimes it's like, oh boy, for, for just entry level kind of. Let me talk to you about the Agile manifesto and the principles and maybe we'll do an exercise where we talk about a skateboard and, and then let's get up and do the sticky notes on the wall. We'll teach you. We won't teach you Kanban, but we'll teach you some storyboarding to show flow of work and you know, it's all the basic stuff and you know, here's how you find scrum guides.org and make sure you use the right language and those are all good things. We just felt like, you know, what about the learner that wants to do that on her own time, doesn't want to take time away from work to do that, doesn't want to give up her weekends either. So we came up with this idea, we pitched it to IC Agile and you know what they said? They said maybe, but we're not going to lower the bar at all. You still have to meet all of our learning objectives that the interactions, the outcomes and we're like, oh boy, okay, well let's give it a shot. And then over about six to eight months and we used Agile to build it. We met with them every sprint and we would demo and we'd say we think this is learning objective 3 or 3.1 and boom. What do you think? And you know what guys? Oftentimes they said it's not good enough and would turn it away. Which is the reality of, I mean, isn't that software development? That's how it goes. By showing it to him every two weeks, boom, boom, boom. We're like, we got there, it took us about six months, eight months. And they said all right, let's pilot this thing. That was early 2021. And then the reviews started coming in and they're like, whoa, this is a new market. And if you've, if you know IC Agile, you know that now they have approved member organizations to create their own self paced IC Agile Certified professional. We are the only ones that have it in the market today. So you can get that, that entry level credential that ICP for. We like to say half the price, half the cost. And then the last thing I'll say about this is, you know, look, we, we don't think that self paced is for everybody not at all. And we don't think that every certification even needs to be self paced. No, but for, but for foundational kind of. Let me understand, maybe you're changing careers. Maybe this is a new interest to you. We think you should be able to do it at your own pace on your own device at a cost that's reasonable. And so. Yeah, so you can check it out@krise.com.

I think that's really helpful, Mike. You know, let's be real on today's economy. Some companies are cutting back on their training budgets so you may have to self fund these things. So that's great. Things are tight. Maybe. Well don't know that we can give you any time to, to dedicate toward training. So you're just gonna have to do that on your own time. Do you really wanna, maybe you do wanna just spend a weekend and get it done. But it's easier to, I know for me personally it's harder for me to, to really digest information in just such a short amount of time when it's broken up across multiple days where you can actually reflect on the information and then come back the next day. So yeah, I applaud you. I think there's a great space for this. So thank you from the agile community for providing this to us.

Yeah, yeah, you hit on something interesting there. Mark this idea that. And we joke about this but you know, when you go to a two day class it's like, well I hope you took good notes because it's exactly right. With our, with our program you get unlimited access to the material.

Oh nice.

Your first retrospective. Go watch the 3 minute video on retrospectives. By the way, download the template for retrospectives. It's right there in the lesson. And then run a retro. It's, it's like, you know, it's how, it's how we learn today. My kids, they want to learn how to change a tire. You know, hopefully I teach them that but if I forgot to teach them that, they'll just watch a YouTube video and go change the tire. They don't need to know how the tire works and how rack and pinion steering. We don't need all that. They just need to change the day. Gum tire. Go watch a three minute video and get it done. You know, so there's something to be said for this YouTubification of learning.

Oh my gosh. It's, it's, I'm a big fan. I, I use YouTube for a lot. I mean my wife got me onto it. She was like, just YouTube, it I was like, yeah, you're right.

Just YouTube it.

Yeah, yeah, I did a, I had, I had a. Well, I had a lamp that went out. My lamp stopped working. Like the, the, the knob, you turn it on, it didn't work anymore and I thought the lamp was useless. She's like, just, no, get on YouTube, you can buy one of these things. And I did and I fixed it in like half an hour. So like, yeah, she's right. So, yeah. So anyway, this kind of leads us into our topic for today. So about kind of around agile coaching. And I know Mike's talking about his, his IC Agile and the whole idea of leading into. Yeah, you know, you're not a, you're not a coach in two days. You're not a Scrum Master in two days. That's right. You do need experience. But we want to talk about, Mike wants to talk about how necessary are agile coaches. This sounds contradictory. I know we're wanting to get certified and everything, but how necessary are they and can we do with or without them? Mike? Right.

Well, yeah, I think it's a bit of a warning too. It's this idea that says, look, your two day certification I do think is important. So I'm not trying to tear down the CSP or the PSM or even the ICP or, you know, whichever path you're choosing, it's important that you get a basic taxonomy. Like we should know the basics. That, that seems reasonable. And, and that doesn't make you a natural coach. Like it doesn't even make you a schoolmaster. You gotta get in there, you gotta start doing the work. And here's where I think it gets a bit interesting. So, yep, get certified. By the way, that certification industrial, you know, in the industry you're, you're likely to earn more earning potential. The data is out there to support that. Certifications lead to higher earning potential, but they don't make you necessarily Scrum Master. Experience does. Well, again, here's where it's like, okay, so once you start delivering, once you start getting on delivery work, whether it's a product or a service or a book or a lesson plan, and whatever you're doing, however you're practicing agile ways of working, it's kind of a trend in the, at least I see it anyway, a trend in the industry that says, well, let's, let's start calling them coaches. In fact, if you're watching Scaled Agile Framework, you know that in version 6 they call them Scrum Master Slash team Coach. There's nothing wrong. I noticed that, but the implication of coach has kind of shifted in the industry where coach is this, I don't know the right term, so forgive me, it's this sort of like life coaching kind of powerful questioning leading to make sure there's psychological safety and I, for the teams and I, I know the Google report about psychological safety. I'm, I'm keen on it, I'm for it. But let me say this, coaches, if you're not contributing to the profit of the organization, you're out of position. If you're not bringing in revenue or decreasing bottom line costs, it won't matter how psychologically safe your teams are.

Yeah, yeah, I know. That's.

It reminds me a bit. You guys were talking about. What were you talking about?

Soccer.

No, I was kidding. I.

Got you. Totally.

Look, I'm not that naive about sports. You're talking about American football.

Exactly.

Well, well, how many coaches get to come in and have a losing year after year after year before the, the, is whoever the owners or whatever who gets fired? Do they fire all the players? No, no, they, they go right for the coach.

Correct. Coach and gm. Usually one of the two. But yeah, usually the coach. Yeah. Is first.

And so when I, when I hear this like agile coaching idea that it can be, you know, you just, you just need to ask powerful questions and you need to be in the right coaching stance and it's like, yeah, okay, as long as we understand that that's in the end that's going to lead to profit for the company. That's, that's got to be our focus. Otherwise you're just an overhead expense. And like an NFL coach, maybe you.

Should go, but do you think that you and I were talking earlier, do you think that, okay, if you take out the agriculture, I mean waterfall, they could go back to waterfall. Right. With the PM and, and you know, I like, I mean if you, if you're like me, any the PMs that I've been associated with in my career at pretty much every company, some of them walk around with the dollars of their, of their projects. They've done like, they lead with that, like oh, I, I'm running a $10 million project or I, you know, I ran a project here, then it's still in production. They say that all the time. I hear that constantly. But why don't we do that in the agile community? Because we could be on. Because now that same project is moved to a product. Right. And we could still be doing the same work, but in the agile manner. And you take out the PMs. And we now have agile coaches and agilists. We could be delivering the same things, but we don't lead with that.

You know, you're hitting on a very interesting topic here. When you started sharing that story about the PM that walks around saying, I'm on a $10 million project, I'm like, well, that's cool.

Exactly.

About that project because I, I've been a project manager. Like I had my p. I know, yeah. And I get it and I understand earn value, delivery metrics and the whole deal. It's all great. It has a place and, and it can be even successful with technology projects. But, but you never see Scrum Masters go, hey, I'm on a 100 million dollar delivery project that's working across and why not? And you wonder, is it because of the term servant leader? Maybe, is it? And I know we don't use servant leader in the new Scrum Guides, but it's still around. We kind of think about Scrum Masters as servant leaders. Whatever we'll call.

Sure.

I just wonder like, why shouldn't we lead that way? Scrum Masters, if you're listening, why wouldn't you lead that way? Why wouldn't you be proud of what you're doing for the top line revenue, bottom line reduction, that's a good thing.

I mean, I, it just came to me, I'm just like, I mean, I think we were talking about earlier and I had it in the back of my head, I'm just like wondering, yeah, why don't we say that it's, it's the same, it could be the same work. Right? I mean, we're going for the same outcome. I mean, I work right now in an area maybe Mark you can talk about too. I work right now and it's called intelligent automation. And if you've heard of that, I work in banking and we're creating bots. And the director of, the product director in my area, who leads the area, he's always talking about numbers. And our goal is to save. So we introduce a bot to automate a lot of manual processes. We're not trying to get rid of anybody's jobs, we're trying to take the people and you know, they can focus on something else, this, all this manual stuff. But we do calculate in what the bot, the value the bot brings to that side of the business is. It's usually in hours saved of a human. Right. And you calculate their salary and you figure out how much that we're saving. Right. Things like that, or cost Avoidance. So our goal is to have a million dollars a month and basically pay for us, cost us a million dollars a month to run our area. There's like four teams now, I don't know, 50, 60, so many people in my area. So that's his goal and he's always leading with that. But I don't go around saying, when I talk to my manager and other Agileists, I don't say, hey, yeah, yeah, I'm saving the company a million dollars a month. I don't talk like that. And I mean, not that we should, but we should maybe say it a little bit. I'm on the team, I'm a part of the team, I'm helping them run. I mean, right? Yeah, yeah.

And maybe don't. Like you said, could it just be another talking point in our tool belt of talking points about why agile ways of working are outperforming sort of legacy or traditional approaches. And guess what? My role is as an agile delivery lead or an agile, you know, I don't even like to use the word coach anymore. That's how much I'm turned off by this. But as an agile delivery lead, I'm responsible for, for bringing in a million dollars worth of, of, in your case, bottom line reduction to the company.

Exactly. Yeah.

I would have it in my tool belt.

That's, that's, that's what, and I mean, I'm, I am not, I'm not creating the bots. Of course I'm not a developer. I never want to be.

But look, Greg, everyone on the team could say that. It's not like you're saying, yeah, oh, look at me, I did. By the way, no one person did make $1 in bottom. Like, we're not. Your executives aren't naive enough to think that, that you're the one that did it.

Of course not.

They're going to know you're on a team of people and, and you should be encouraging as a leader of your teams to tell them to all talk that way too.

Yeah, I think that's an important distinction because that, at least in my experience, that was a lot of the stigma behind your classic project manager, like your PMO group was to be the person that really is the, the driver of the, of the ship and that would make those type of, of claims. It really created a lot of friction with the, with the team because they didn't feel like, you know, yeah, I'm just the whipping boy to, to row the boat and know this project manager at the front that's shouting to Us telling us to row. They're the ones getting all the, all the glory. So I come from the, from the engineering side of the house. That's where I started my, my career. So I'm much more, I guess empathetic toward the developer side. And I like the distinction that you make that that is a tool in our tool belt. Not the only tool. You know, we don't only carry a hammer around in our tool belt. Right around there, there's a.

Because I've been on those, I've been on those teams where I've had the hammer put to me. Ouch. Stop it. I mean, you bring up a great point, Mark. There's a balance there.

Yeah. So real quick story. I'll make it super brief because I've told it at least once before. Greg has heard it, but.

Hey, Mark.

Yeah.

I think we're getting some feedback when you talk on your mic. When you talk. Yeah. Are you hearing it, Mike? Mark. I met Mark.

Yeah, I don't hear it now.

Okay, maybe it's Mike.

I, I didn't hear the feedback, but I'm. As long as we're paused, I'm, I'm watching my mic, little bar and it moves every time you guys talk. So if you're getting feedback, I could have a hot mic here.

Okay, let's see. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think. Go ahead and talk, Mark. Yeah, maybe it's Mike. Maybe it's Mike.

So super, super quick. Yeah. Had a project where. And this was, well, it was a product, but we'll just call it a project that the executives in the company said they wanted this project delivered as of a certain date. Asked for the team to go and do an estimate of how long it was going to take. They told them, the executive, six months. The executive said, hey, that's great. Guess what, you're going to do it in three months. And they were like, okay. So after three months, team in. You know, I wasn't on this team, but I observed this team because they were on the same floor every weekend. You would come in, the trash cans were literally overflowing with Red Bull cans. I'm not exaggerating because they worked, you know, 80, 90 hour weeks. And into the three weeks or in the three months, excuse me, they did go live, but it was an absolute dumpster fire. Think about, think about when the Obamacare website came online for the first time. Oh yeah, like that bad. And it took them another three months to get a stable system. And they were telling that we're moving too fast. We're making, taking shortcuts just to make this date. And so if they would have just stuck with the original six month, which they told them, they would have had a much more robust product and not had so much egg on their face by, by releasing early. So that, to say that just gives me a lesson that I always teach to my teams is that, you know, faster in chasing a dollar is not always better. Sometimes we do need to do things the right way in order to have a quality product, no matter what, you know, sales or executives or whoever is pushing us to do to be able to meet some revenue requirements.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

You're welcome.

Well, there's, there's a lesson in there too for us as agile delivery experts is, you know, even on an original, let's call it six month, you know, program, how much of that can we slice off and deliver in two weeks and then how much can we deliver in another two weeks and, and so on such that when the executive comes in and says you only have three months, we can say, well cool, we got this stuff already for you in production and that's what you get in three months. And it's not a slog of weekends and Red Bull cans, it's a slog of, it's just running your sprint. And you know, when we slice a project into a six month slice, people like me get all kinds of uncomfortable.

That's way too big, right?

Yeah, I think that there's, there is definitely a leftover hangover from our waterfall days. I, I have that myself. But the as agilists we got to have our help, our executives understand agile delivery. And again here I just come back to how do you help them understand that? I think it's delivery. I think it's a lot less. Let me ask you how you feel about delivery. It's, well, give me two weeks and I'll show you what I can put out in production.

Exactly. So Mike, when you say, when you say Agile Coach, is it this, you consider that the same as the agilist? Like I'm an ad, I'm a Scrum Master agilist with the team. I don't have the title of coach. Do you think, are they the same or do you look at them as different? The same or do you look at them as different?

It's a good one. I mean that's kind of where we head a little bit. I mentioned they've renamed it to Scrum Master Agile Coach. Right. And, and I hear people all the time say well, at the team level Scrum Masters are just team level coaches and then I'll, I'll, I'll be out on like LinkedIn or something and I'll be looking at agile coaches who are really just not just, who are bringing a different set of skills, a coaching skill set to a technical product delivery space. And I just wonder. So to answer your question more directly, I do mix up Agile Coach with Agilist but as I'm, as I mentioned, I'm struggling internally with my own like what do I even call myself? And I'm leaning more, Greg, I'm leaning more on like an agile delivery expert.

Okay.

Not so much coaching.

Okay. Okay. I like the term.

It could be all wet on this topic too.

I have the official title is Agilist where I'm at and I prefer that over Scrum Master to be honest with you. I've said this before, I'm sure Scrum won't like that, but only because I view myself as, I think I should be able to do more than Scrum. Agile is more than Scrum. Scrum is obviously the most popular.

Sure. Well that's good.

But I, I, I use Kanban. I have Kanban teams. Right. We have some, we use. Scrum is a framework, right. And they even say you should be able to use other things with it. So I look at myself as being able, you know, xp, Lean, whatever. That's what we're going through that right now where I work with, they're introducing Lean, six Sigma, all different kinds of things that like you said, it's in your tool belt and as an agilist. So that's, I should start, I should be grounded in the Agile manifesto like you mentioned earlier and the values and the principles of that. And then from there I can choose to if the team wants to use Scrum or whatever. But that's kind of how I like Agilist.

Mike. I think the underlying theme of what I'm hearing is agility is not about being agile. That's not the end result, that's not the outcome that we're after. Similar to. Sorry, I've got to use a football analogy. Greg will get this or what our listeners won't. But you know, if you say I'm going to run a west coast offense, it's not about running a certain type of offense, it's about winning games like you said. So yeah, they don't bring there you go in just to implement a certain style of play or what they want to win games and that's what we should be about in the end. So yes, you do have to block, yes, you do have to tackle. But if you can't win games, something needs to change. And you know, honestly we need to take a, I feel like we need to take a really close look in the mirror and if we're the, if we're not getting it done, then if we're not getting it, maybe it's time for us to go. Yeah, maybe it's time for us to go.

That's a little scary though, Mark. I don't know. I'm ready to do that.

It just got dark and this was.

Something I was pondering work. Yeah, it got real quiet. I, you know, been pondering that and, and that's the idea that, you know, Scrum masters just, you know, just be, be careful as you come into this industry, as you begin to think about, well, I really want to become an agile coach. Okay, well are you willing to sort of, you know, risk it all because, and, and that there's nothing wrong with risk. Like I, I enjoy risk. There's great reward with risk. Those are, those are okay things. They're good things in fact. And you can't just show up and say you're the agile coach. And if you're not seeing significant change, improved delivery, reduced bottom line, improved top line. If you're not seeing those things, you, you're not doing your job. And, and you need to be willing to accept that. That's your NFL coach. When, when, when he enters the arena, he knows that is the responsibility on his shoulders. There's not a question about, it's not like, like, oh, I wonder, I wonder if I'm in charge here. No. So if you're gonna, if you're, take the coach mantle, take all the responsibility comes with it.

Right now we're getting, yeah, now we're getting deep I think into like kind of tying back to the, the courses and stuff. I, I have, I have, I have personally witnessed a lot of Scrum masters fall in their face because they've gotten their, their two day class, they're a psm. They put it in their resume. Like Mike said, they get paid money because of that and they can do well in the interview. They can repeat all the stuff in the interview. Right. That they heard. Anybody can do that. You can get past the interview. I think nowadays probably pretty easily. Especially if you're dealing with managers. Yeah, yeah. You have managers, HR people that don't know much about. You can fool them and you get in there. But to your point, and Mark, the idea is not just to get your, get your psm, go in there and just do, and just go through the motions. I think a lot of people do that. I think a lot of people go through the motions. Oh we're just, yeah, we're doing the stand up, we're doing and they think that that's, they're providing value which we need to relook at it. That we're really, that, that really isn't the value. That's just the very, very tip of the iceberg. That's just the more value is to show the business more value is so we can deliver faster, higher quality product. Right? Quality in two weeks, two week incremental. Nice. That's really, I think the heart of what we're talking about really. I think the hardest think of it too.

Greg and, and Mike like thinking about my teenagers, they're not teenagers anymore but when they were teenagers and getting ready to learn to drive, they took the, you know, they had to take a written driving test and they actually had to go on the road and take a, actually drive to take a driving test. After they completed that, were they great drivers? Oh my goodness. I can't tell you how much, how much, how much sleep I lost thinking about my kids being on the road by themselves. You know, just having those few practice lessons that they had and passing a test. They're not great drivers. It takes experience to get that. So that's what I think of when I think about it.

I really like that analogy because you still go, you still go get the fundamentals, the, the driving school or the whatever and you still like we need to go do that. That's good. There's goodness in there for sure. And then one of the things I, I like Greg, you said, you said earlier, I consider myself an agilist and I, I, I really like that term. There's nothing wrong with, with considering ourselves as scrum masters or I got, that's fine. And, and the way you were describing this idea that maybe I dabble a little bit in Kanban or maybe I just focus on flow like whatever it is that's now that right there, if I'm an executive at a company I'm like okay, well what do you mean you're an agilist? And when you, when you say well that means I'm going to focus on getting us the, the highest value delivered as soon as possible. It's going to be high quality. I'm not talking about just pushing junk out just so we can say we're in production. No, it's going to be quality. It's going to be a slice of value that brings value to our users so that we can immediately get the correct feedback and pivot or persevere depending on what that says. We're going to push into the market quickly, we're going to see how the market responds and we're going to pull back in areas where we don't need to keep investing. Now if you show up as a scrum master and say that to me as a, as an executive, I'll bring you on immediately. I would hire you immediately because you didn't tell me. Well, you know what? I'm really good at calendaring the stand ups and coordinating people's schedules. Can 8am seems the best, the best time that works for everybody. And guess what? I had great success in my last job. They had a 45 minute stand up and now it's 15 minutes. No executive could care about that, not bring it up. I wouldn't hire you.

No. But, but the interesting thing is when you interview. I've never interviewed with an executive. Maybe you have Mike and Mark, but I've never been interviewed for a position by an executive. It's always been a manager. Maybe some people on the team, maybe the HR person sometimes, but it's usually quite, they usually ask you the detailed questions like oh, what do you do? What do you do if a team resists and they don't want to do the stand up every, every day? What do you do? That's the questions, kind of the questions you get at that level.

That's a good point. That's true.

But you're right, you can get through that easily. But, but the better question is be what you just said the better question. How are you going to help the team? Give me an example of how you've helped the team deliver better value. Which is kind of what it's actually I'm thinking about my, my own job right now and I think this, this area I'm in has really taken to me. I've been in different areas where they kind of, they didn't really understand what I, what I do and maybe I, maybe I did a bad job in, in explaining it. But um, I think we need to, I think what we're getting out of this conversation is I think I hear you saying Mike, I, I, my, my kind of takeaway is I think we do have value. I think we are needed. If you, if you equate it to a PM, they think they thought PMs were so needed. Right. And waterfall. I think Agile coaches Agile start justice needed over here. We need to do a better job maybe of I guess selling yourself. Maybe is the term in talking about like you said, if you were an executive and you came in and said exactly what you said about I can help you increase this and then get into the details. Don't lead with oh, I can help you, your team have psychological safety. Yeah, that's great. It's part of delivering it. But it's not what he cares about. He cares about, yeah, can I get this into the market faster? Can I be better than my competition? Can I have high quality? When can I get. When can I see money from this? When can I get money from this?

It's all that. I think it's interesting. We often will talk about how agile is a mindset. Okay, well look, part of that mindset has got to be that you are accountable and responsible for delivery of something of value. That should be your mindset, not, not the mechanics of the thing. So we go out of one side of our mouths we say agile is a mindset. Okay, fine. Part of that mindset needs to be how do I. So, so when I'm interviewing with the, you know, you know, middle manager or wherever I'm at for my initial Scrum Master job and they say tell us about a time you helped your team do whatever we our mindset needs to be all about. Well, here's how I delivered value. When you answer that question and it doesn't even matter what the question, just make up any question, whatever you ask me, my answer is going to be well, here's how I delivered value for the organization by blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever point you want to take that question but lead with why we're valuable. Why do we bring value to the organization? You should know that Scrum Masters, you should know what you do and why you bring value.

Right. And kind of to jump off to this and I don't know if Mike, you have any more insight the whole capital one thing when they let go a bunch of was it a thousand eleven hundred agilists and stuff at. And I can only assume they didn't see the value in, in them there and, and they decided to let them go. Do you have any insight or comment on that? Do you have any insight?

I don't. Yeah, I'm, I know a couple people who were let go and but I, I really don't know the backstory or why or anything. I, I've read plenty of people who think they do know sure.

Yeah, sure. I was just curious because. Yeah, they, they.

Well one, one thing, one thing I think we, we can equip our, you know, equip our future agile coaches or whatever we want to call ourselves. Like, I don't know what the term will be. I don't, I hope I'm not coming across as like just bashing all coaching because that's not what I mean. But you know, sometimes the, the idea of the secret to our success is, is by, by having a point of view with our teams that, that is less about the sort of pedantic tactical lever turning of, of agile and more about just again understanding that value delivery is what matters. And the executives and the owners of the company and the board, they are not interested in any agile language whatsoever. They are not interested in that. They are interested in how do we provide value to the shareholders. So just know that and it's not a bad thing. It's just, it's just to know, just to know that and, and work to, to serve that.

Yeah, totally. I think for me, I don't know about you Mark. I think here in the, in the end here wrapping up, I think we have learned if you're an agile coach, scrum master, agilist, listening to this, you want to be in, you want to get into the field. But it sounds like, yeah, you know, get your certification. I know my personal experience that I didn't know the stats that Mike had given that you do make more money if that's what you're interested in. I, I found that that's going to get you the interview certifications. They love to see that. I think that's, you know, I think you need to have some certifications just to, just to kind of prove your knowledge kind of like that. But getting a certification in and of itself is not going to make you in and of itself good in this field. Just be warned that if you just get a psm you probably can get a job but you're probably going to fail.

And it's a, it's a, it's a necessary step in the door. Many organizations, it's just sort of, you know, it's just required. But yeah, to your point, I mean it, the, the best, the best teacher is, is experienced. So look, so get your certification, do, do it, do it, but get as fast as cheap as you can and then get some practice, get some reps under your belt. NFL coaches don't become NFL coaches just by, you know, straight out of college right there. That takes time. They have to get on the field they have to get the experience under their belt. And then again, I think just to sort of round it out is just be aware of the, the heavy responsibility you're bringing to that team.

Yeah. And there are a lot of them, A lot of people always ask. I see a lot of it. How do I, how do I break into the field? Well, like you said, be an assistant. I, I didn't have the job. I was on a team as a, in a different role. Qaba and I, I just watched and observed and learned that way and then I, I learned how to speak the language and then when a position opened I was able to move into that pretty easily. But, but yeah, I think what we learned here today, Mark, is that it's not just going through the motions of doing agile, doing scrum and we need to kind of assert, assert ourselves more, help the team, the business understand our value. I think what I've learned, I think we do have value. I think in, in the right circumstances, hopefully the executives understand. But as long as we can speak the language of bottom line dollar and look at what our. Pay attention to the numbers in, in, in your project, the work you're working on, the features you're working on, the stories you're bringing through. Pay attention to the numbers. We're going to decrease call volume by 20%. You know, we're going to save da da da da da. I think that's the, the main thing that, that shows the business that we, we are part of this and we're helping, we're helping to prioritize the work. Right. We're helping them get the work done in two weeks. You know, get that value out there in two weeks. I think that's even. I found even with a high performing team, they still need someone like us. You walk away for a couple weeks, go on vacation or, and sometimes it can, they can have, they can have issues.

So in closing I'll just. The three of us were having a conversation about servant leaders and how the 2020 Scrum Guide replaced that with a, with a true leader and had that discussion with some people and you know, servant leader, there's two sides to that. You're not just a servant. And many times people tip the scales and I'm looking at myself included, will tip the scales too much in the servant direction and not keep it balanced by having a leader perspective as well. It's important to note that we're not just there to bring coffee and donuts to the team, but we're there to.

Lead as well, that could be another episode, Mark. Yeah, we haven't done that yet. There you go. The leader side. Observant leader. There you go.

You had me at donuts.

Yeah, donuts. Yeah. I'm getting hungry too. It's going to be lunchtime here so. So. All right. We thank Mike. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to.

Yeah. So great to. So good to spend time with you. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So anybody again, if you're interested, and I'm sure you are in getting your IC Agile certification, Mark and I both have that. Mike has that. Mike's company Kairise does the asynchronous training. We'll have the link in our show notes. You can reach out to Mike at his website. We'll have it in there to take your self paced and get your IC Agile. Hopefully. I think it's going to be maybe half the price of what Mark and I paid. Darn it, Mark. We went through. Yeah, sorry, I know. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's a good certification to get. I have it. If you want to get into coaching, go through that with Mike. You can reach out to Mike. It's Mike Lyons. L Y O N S. I'll have his link in there to his LinkedIn profile along with his Chirise. Any other way folks can reach out to you, Mike? Any other way folks can reach out to you?

Oh gosh. If you can't find me over those two like you're hurting, that'll work. Let's use those two. That'll work.

Okay, got it. So as far as, as far as we go here at the Agile within, you can contact me. My email is gregmiller at the agile within.com we have our LinkedIn page that mark set up for us, the Agile within. We have our personal LinkedIn pages. You can reach out to us and Mark is working on. Should I say it, Mark? I don't know. Mark's working on something. Some other way to contact us.

No, it's too late. You gotta go, you gotta go.

Oh darn it. Mark might be working on a website here hopefully for us so. And I own the domain here. So Mark's. Mark's. Mark's a developer more than I'm not a developer. Mark's going to help us with that so hopefully we'll have that. And don't forget been advertising all around our shows and if you've seen it on LinkedIn, Mark and I are going to be at Scrum Day in Wisconsin in September. So if I know Mike's in San Antonio. That's a long way to go. But we're going to be there. So we're going to have a booth and stop by to see us there. We'd love to say hi to you, see some faces there. And I think that's it. So this has been a great show. So thanks everyone for listening and Mark and Greg and Mike Lyons for the Agile Within. We'll see you later. Sa.