860 Angela Johnson: Secrets of Scrum

Oftentimes people turn the daily scrum into a status report when it was really intended to surface, to give transparency to are we going to make our goals and objectives or not? And if not, why wouldn’t any business want to immediately know about it so that we can do something about it? And when people aren’t comfortable to give that level of transparency because sometimes the ego is a powerful thing. And that little internal voice will say something to you like, “Well, you can’t admit that you’re not on track. You can’t admit that you need help.” No, we want to hear about those things so that we can help each other, hence working together in this rugby approach.

Every business wants to find more efficient and productive ways to work and meet shared goals and objectives. Popularized by technology companies, Agile Scrum has become to the go-to methodology but as scrum expert Angela Johnson says, most companies get it wrong and fail to leverage its true power: Keeping everyone on track, aligned on goals, and able to easily course correct. Today we talk about how best to use Agile Scrum in your business.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. This podcast is all about catalyzing an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other …Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is a certified scrum trainer helping companies successfully implement Scrum and Agile to achieve their goals and objectives, as well as people to get certified as scrum masters. Angela Johnson is the founder of Collaborative Leadership Team, host of the podcast Ignite Agility, and author of the book The Scrum Master Files.

Angela will be here in a moment, and first,

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What is the best way for a business to master cross-disciplinary collaboration with transparent communication that keeps everyone aligned, on track, and productive?

A methodology called Agile Scrum first emerged in the technology startup scene some 20 years ago, and since then it has expanded far beyond Silicon Valley to companies of all shapes and sizes. Problem is, it has also morphed into something often unrecognizable to the folks that know how best to make it work.

So today we’re talking to Angela Johnson, a certified scrum trainer who helps businesses implement this powerful methodology successfully. The founder of Collaborative Leadership Team, Angela also trains and certifies scrum masters. Today we’re going to get into the do’s and don’ts of agile scrum so your business can effectively align its team around goals and accountability that allows for iteration and course correction.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Angela Johnson and be sure to download the interactive AI powered podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Angela, welcome to Wings.

Angela Johnson:

Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

A lot of business people really think they’re very familiar with scrum. They think they’re using scrum, but do they really know what they’re doing?

Angela Johnson:

In my experience, not so much.

Melinda Wittstock:

What are they missing? What’s everybody missing about doing scrum and agile methodology faithfully?

Angela Johnson:

A lot has been subverted out in the marketplace as people have latched onto these buzzwords. And a really, really good idea was lost. Scrum is not an acronym. It is a metaphor for working together in a rugby like huddle. So if you’ve ever watched a rugby match and you see the people in that circular formation, that’s called a scrummage, and it’s all about working together to head towards a common goal, get the ball going towards a common goal. If we’re pulling in disparate, opposite directions, we aren’t going to accomplish our goals and objectives together. So scrum was created in 1993 by Dr. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. And so here we are in the year 2023. It’s not new. It’s 30 years and counting old.

Well, okay, so then in the year 2003 when scrum was just turning 10, it got a little certification behind it and I’m one of 250 people on the planet who can certify people in scrum and I have to say scrum guides scrum, the official rules of the game. Because if you said the word scrum in the year 2003, people would all be thinking the same thing. But here we are in 2023 and you have for-profit corporations that have taken scrum and said, “No, no, no, no, no. Here’s what we think it means.” And they’re not doing anything illegal because the creators of scrum regrettably made it open source. They put it in the Creative Commons so nobody can own scrum. They gave their ideas away. They never dreamed for a minute these for-profit companies would say, “Ah, here’s what we’re going to sell as scrum.” So when I sit down with leaders in an organization and they say, “We’re using agile,” I’m like, “Well, what the hell does agile mean?”

In the year 2001, when it was created, it meant seven different frameworks. There were seven frameworks that came up with that idea. So do you mean scrum? Do you mean extreme programming? Do you mean DSTM? We mean scrum. Awesome. Do you mean the official version of scrum? Do you mean scrum studies version of scrum, scrum inc’s version of scrum, Safes version of scrum? Holy crap. They usually go, “We thought scrum was scrum.” And I’m like, “No, it’s not anymore.” So if you are confused, imagine what your people are going through who you’ve asked to work this way.

Melinda Wittstock:

I first became aware of scrum and agile in the context of software development, and I’ve seen it used all manner of ways. For instance, scrum meetings in many companies are getting together early in the morning and people are like, “I’m doing this. I’m blocked at this. I need help with this. Next. I’m doing this, I’m blocked with this. I need help with this. Next.” So everybody’s on the same page. And that has been my experience of most scrum meetings. How accurate or not is that?

Angela Johnson:

A bit of both. And fun fact, the scrum framework didn’t even come up with that 15 minute synchronization or get on the same page. Some people call it a huddle. We just call it a daily scrum in the scrum framework. It was actually borrowed from companies that the two scrum creators were studying at the time. So it became hugely popular, especially like you mentioned in the software community, because in the software community, we tend to be early adopters, but that kind of 15 minute or less, let’s get on the same page, actually had been around for decades in other organizations. Scrum just popularized it. And when they were newer at popularizing it, they did give a little bit of a framework saying, “What have I accomplished towards our goal since we last met? What am I focusing on today towards meeting our goal? And then are we blocked from reaching our goals and objectives?”

So modern scrum has actually taken away those crutch phrases or those little prompts because oftentimes people misuse them and turn the daily scrum into a status report when it was really intended to surface, to give transparency to are we going to make our goals and objectives or not? And if not, why wouldn’t any business want to immediately know about it so that we can do something about it? And when people aren’t comfortable to give that level of transparency because sometimes the ego is a powerful thing. And that little internal voice will say something to you like, “Well, you can’t admit that you’re not on track. You can’t admit that you need help.” No, we want to hear about those things so that we can help each other, hence working together in this rugby approach.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The problem starts with not having clear goals and individuals not necessarily knowing how their goals fit into the wider goal. And so I see that kind of happen all the time. So it’s hard then to hold people to account, not in a kind of punishment or retributive sense, but more like, “Okay, so this was where we want it to be by Thursday, are we going to make it? What’s standing in the way?” And if people don’t have clear goals, how do they even know? Is that where a lot of it goes wrong?

Angela Johnson:

Absolutely. One of the things I point out when I coach leaders on implementing this is that oftentimes what can look like resistance, what can look like non-compliance is actually confusion. So if the leader hadn’t set the tone, if they hadn’t made the goals and objectives abundantly clear, how is somebody supposed to achieve those? And so instead of asking, because if they feel like it’s an organization run by fear or like you said, there’s going to be retribution, then they might not feel comfortable saying, “I am confused. I could need this clarified, or I do need this clarified. I could use some help.” So those are the things that we really want to promote. So if leaders want to work this way, they have to understand the responsibilities they have to change and to be crystal clear in their communications because they make assumptions too. This one that springs to mind is I said, well, “How did you communicate that you wanted people to work differently in this manner?” And he says, “We sent out an email.” And I said, “Did you now?” Okay-

Melinda Wittstock:

So even if you read that email, you might not even understand it or it wasn’t communicated well or people just don’t know what to do. So Angela, let’s go back and describe the scrum system working in an ideal way, how you help businesses and organizations work in scrum? What are the baby steps and what should it actually look like?

Angela Johnson:

One of the very first things because I heard the word ideal, ideal way, is that people understand this means change. Definition of insanity. If you don’t want to change, don’t change. Because there’s a whole lot of scrummy and agile words being used out there. That’s just lipstick on the pig. People are using the lingo, but they haven’t actually changed. So one of the things that’s imperative is teamwork and not having these specialists who have a mindset of I only do one thing and then I hand off to somebody else, or I’m downstream from someone else. Nope, we are all in this together. This is a we thing, not a me, me, me thing. And so organizations have to make sure they’re setting those expectations that we are going to do the work differently.

Because if we have clear goals and objectives and everybody’s pulling together in the same direction, we’re more likely to hit them. We are going to be asking for more transparency. Scrum uses shorter time boxes. We happen to call them sprints. You don’t need to use the word sprint if you don’t want to. You can say one-week, two-week, three-week, four-week chunks of work. My own team does one-week sprints because we want radical transparency. We want to know immediately if we’re on track for something or not on track for something so that we can pivot, which is the whole point behind agile.

So leaders setting this up in an ideal situation will be very clear about why we’re doing this, why the change, what the change means to everybody’s job, how people’s job is going to change or stay the same, and when it’s going to take effect. And it doesn’t have to be forever. I’m a big fan of experiments. We could say we’re going to try this, and if it does improve outcomes, if it does improve us achieving our goals and objectives, we may go further with this. So it doesn’t have to be big bang either. Oftentimes, organizations will say, “That’s too much change.” When you talk about working together or the structure change and everything that comes along with it, great. What one project or piece of work are you willing to run an experiment on?

Melinda Wittstock:

If  there’s one thing in life that you can take for granted, it’s change. A lot of people really just struggle with the concept. It challenges them. I mean, it brings up fears and such. And so obviously any company, particularly a startup or anybody in technology, anyone innovating, anyone trying to do something really amazing as an entrepreneur by definition is a change agent. You’re changing the way business is done. You are changing consumer behavior, you’re offering a better solution than anything else out in the market or something new that people haven’t thought of before as inherently change. And so you kind of need to align your team in that sense. We’re always trying to do better. So how do you get around some of the fears that people have in terms of implementing this?

Angela Johnson:

Yeah, that’s actually what I am dealing with most right now. I’ve been working this way for 18 years. Next year will be my 19th year. And in the early days it was exactly as you described with entrepreneurs and people who are looking to do something differently. And if I look at what’s common across what I would call the success stories, it’s with privately held companies who are small. And my definition of small would be less than 5,000 employees. Privately held is important because leaders in a privately held company are actually empowered to make those changes. As you start looking at large, over 5,000 employees, maybe even 10,000, 20,000 worldwide, globally distributed, and sometimes publicly traded companies aren’t even controlled by its leaders. They’re controlled by shareholders, board of directors. And so the bigger the organization, the more red tape, the more hoops you have to jump through.

And so what I’m battling with right now as scrum is 30 plus years in the making is those organizations that are late to this party. The innovators in the early adopters were around in 1993, in 2003, in the mid 2009-2010 range. The companies now are late adopters. And so by definition, they don’t like change. And so I have to warm them up to why do you want to do this. Because if you really, really don’t want to change, nobody is making you. What’s the impetus? What’s the burning business need? And oftentimes it’s just that everybody else has done it. It’s like we want to be perceived as relevant. We want to make it seem as if we’re on board with this way of working to attract talent. Well, great, thank you for your honesty. But then you actually have to do that because if you just adopt a bunch of lingo, a bunch of vocabulary words, that top talent is going to come in and go, “This is not what scrum is all about, this isn’t really what agile is all about.”

And they’re going to leave anyway. And then you’re going to get a reputation for doing agile in name only or scrum in name only or fake scrum. And that’s what I’m dealing a lot with. Not only with companies that I’m personally coaching, but also in our public classes when people come to learn what this change is all about, I mean I feel like I’m bursting their bubble. They’re like, “Yeah, but that’s not what my leaders think this means. They haven’t even read one thing about it. They just hear agile and say, let’s do that.” Well, therein lies the problem. So we’ve got to get people educated first about this and then let them know change is a choice when you talk about doing the work differently.

Melinda Wittstock:

So a lot of entrepreneurs start out, they’ve worked in big businesses say, or they’ve done a lot of other stuff before they start their first company. And most of the people listening to this podcast are either entrepreneurs or kind of ‘wannapreneurs’, thinking about making that leap or there are various stages of growing their business. And so it’s easy to bring old habits into new things. From the perspective of an early stage company, we’re talking startup, [inaudible 00:15:01] first people. They may have a team of five, they may have a team of 10, and now they’re up to 20, 30, that kind of thing. They want to implement this. What’s the most important thing to do? Because entrepreneurs have a blank canvas in a way. They can start this right from the get go. So what are the important things? Who do you need on your team? Do you need to hire a scrum master? How does this all work?

Angela Johnson:

And as an entrepreneur, I am guilty of having shiny object syndrome when it’s all new. So what’s imperative as part of the scrum framework is an ordered list, and that word is intentional when we say ordered. Something is one, something is two, something is three. If it’s all priority, nothing is. And so without a clear priority, a clear goal and objective, then we don’t have people understanding what they’re supposed to be focused on. Scrum masters, the master of scrum, they are an internal coach. They’re an internal guide and teacher who not only serves that team of people trying to achieve the goals and objectives, but they’re also serving the greater organization in case there are impediments to the team being able to reach those goals and objectives. So in smaller companies, the scrum master may be temporary. My company no longer has one. This is just the way we do work.

In larger companies when there are a lot of those red tape and hoops and things that I mentioned earlier to jump through, a scrum master is imperative. They’re crucial to being able to make these things happen. And so with that ordered list and with that team working together, a scrum master is that reminder, that guide, that coach. As an entrepreneur, I didn’t do a great job when I was newer at hiring people to my team who I wanted to work this way. These days I’ve gotten smarter about it and I’ve really kind of turned over any sort of hiring, firing and whatnot to my team. But it’s to make sure that we are hiring people who are agile minded, no ego, not wrapped up in me, me, me, me, and this is what I think my job is. Nope, this is our job. We’re all in this together. And so really hiring people who have a positive attitude and an aptitude for learning because we really want to build a learning organization. That’s the only way we’re going to grow as a small business,

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so important to get the hiring right at the early stages. And every entrepreneur makes mistakes with hiring because a lot of people say the right things in job interviews and whatnot, and to really elicit and understand who someone really is, sometimes you don’t really know until you start working with them. And so in entrepreneurship is nothing other than constant learning and creativity, which implies change and iteration and being able to like, “Oh, we tried that. That didn’t work, but what can we learn from that and how can we go on?”

So it is necessarily collaborative in that sense, and the ego really does get in the way. One of the things I’ve seen in my own companies all in technology is often the head of product. If you have a head of product or a product manager often doubles up as the scrum master and they may have strong ideas about product, but they’re not necessarily good at the scrum because they can have their own agenda and aren’t necessarily good at bringing out other people’s ideas and that kind of thing. Do you find that that’s sometimes a conflict? Do you need to separate those two roles?

Angela Johnson:

It’s a huge conflict. And in the certification that our own team teaches, it’s even hit very specifically because of how common that mistake is out there in scrum adoptions. We call the person product owner. They are just the product manager as you mentioned, and that’s actually what it used to be called. They simplified it to product owner. To your point, they’re the leader. They have very specific ideas about the product, hopefully. They’re the product owner. They own the timeline, they own the scope, they own the budget, they get the input of where we’re going for the good of the customer and the user. Scrum masters are neutral. Scrum masters are completely neutral.

They are not opinionated about the product because that’s the product owner’s job. The developers, the people who are building the product, well, they are empowered and passionate about how. That’s why we hired them, to be able to build these things. So a scrum master is people, people, people, people and process. And it is a coach because we aren’t shooting for complacency, we want to continue to get better. The analogy I use is a lot of sports coaching and regardless of the sport, I can’t think of a time when a coach has run out onto a field of play and ripped the ball out of the quarterback’s hands. That’s not coaching. So we do have specific accountabilities is what we call them in scrum, but they’re different intentionally and all have to work together collaboratively. But a scrum master is people and process, whereas a product owner is all things product.

Melinda Wittstock:

So in the context of software development where you have UX people, designers, maybe growth marketers, and then you’ve got obviously engineers, even backend, front end. Everybody sees things through their own eyes and prism. And when it’s working really well is everybody kind of understands enough of the other’s work and their own responsibility within the whole to be able to work towards a common goal, even though they’re seeing things entirely through different eyes, right? It’s tricky to get that right.

Angela Johnson:

It is, but it also is an advantage. And I think back to my early software days because I did grow up writing code and I worked as a database administrator for a number of years. And I can’t tell you how many times the UX people would be off in a bubble talking to customers, selling them on this beautiful design that we had no visibility into. We were off designing the perfect data model, the perfect schema, and months later when we would get together and we would show each other the outcomes of our work, we’d say things to the UX people like, “You can’t have a radio button there. That is not what the data model supports.”

Well, we sold the customer on it and that’s what they want. And we are not going back to them. Wasted time, wasted money. And if that’s delighting everybody and reaching the company’s goals and objectives, so be it. But I don’t know about you. This is the day and age where I can go onto Amazon and click anything. They’re the disruptors of the industry or the Googles of the world. And when you look at how their software development teams work, it’s not by having singular specialists that hand off to one another. It’s by having them all together in that rugby-like approach so that you avoid those pitfalls as soon as possible.

Melinda Wittstock:

So talk to me about scrum in that context in working well, in the context of daily, weekly, monthly, on the best way to organize that.

Angela Johnson:

The sprints really provide what we call a cadence when you talked about daily, weekly, monthly. So my own team does one-week sprints. What’s so important about that? Well, in a 52-week calendar year, there are 52 weeks. So think about that in terms of product in this company. That means that we have 52 pivot points, 52 opportunities to be agile, 52 feedback loops, 52 opportunities to course correct and to improve. Now if somebody says, “That doesn’t feel sustainable to our company. We want to work in two-week chunks, two-week sprints.” Awesome. Now you have 26 pivot points within a calendar year, you have 26 feedback loops and opportunities to course correct and so on if somebody says three-week sprints and four-week sprints. So those are questions that we like to ask. It’s like how often does your world change in this business?

How fast do you want feedback so that you can course correct? And so it’s sustainable, meaning scrum isn’t something we do in addition to the way we do work. That doesn’t make any sense. It becomes the way we now do work. And so it should be sustainable for the foreseeable future. And this is just the way we now do work, and companies can change. My own company used to do two-week sprints, but when that pandemic hit in 2020, oh my goodness. We were doing two-week sprints and we thought it felt like an eternity and our world was changing like crazy.

Melinda Wittstock:

A lot can happen in two-weeks, right?

Angela Johnson:

Totally.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of people like two-week sprints because they can kind of hide. If their estimations were wrong, there’s a buffer there. When people push back and are very fearful of one-week sprints in my experience. As a CEO, I’ve always tried to aspire to that, the one-week sprints. I’ve always had resistance, engineers and such, to that. Do you think that’s triggering a fear somewhere?

Angela Johnson:

It’s probably a little post-traumatic stress disorder because I heard you say the word estimate and estimate by definition means guess, so it is wrong.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? Well, that’s the other thing is getting these estimates. I think a lot of folks, people have different definitions of what done means. Done to an engineer would be different from done to a salesperson. What is done? A lot of people are over optimistic about what their timelines would be. If you’re operating in an iterative environment, things are going to come up that you didn’t foresee. And so how much planning before you go into that sprint cycle, and this gets into agile as well because there’s a lot of change in the discipline of the one-week, two-week or whatever your sprint cycle is.

Angela Johnson:

And that’s the flip in the mindset. So it isn’t, hey, there’s this piece of work, let’s guess because estimate means guess at how much time it’s going to take us. We flip the mindset to be, we have a one-week iteration, we have a one-week time box, what can fit in that one-week time box? And then this isn’t about gaming the system, which oftentimes that post-traumatic stress disorder that developers have from being told they had to guess right. Nobody can guess right. You will never, ever, ever guess. And if you can, let’s go to a casino. Let’s just pull the plug on the podcast and go to a casino. It’s like I could use some money. So it’s all about what can we get done in a one-week sprint or a two-week sprint?

And then we use that data. Now we have data to plan the next one, and ideally we pull in more as we improve. This is about delivering more value, not less. And at the heart of what you said about, Hey, stuff happens, yes, it does. Scrum is based on something called empiricism transparency, inspect, adapt. And to kind of bring this back to what you brought up earlier about change, adapt means change. So if organizations by definition are resisting change, I don’t see them understanding empiricism because in a 10-day sprint, there’s 10 opportunities at a minimum to adapt. Hey, we’re not on track. Product owner, what do you want to do about it? Hey, I’d like to pull the plug and reboot this thing. Awesome. You’re the product owner. And I don’t see people doing that. I see them have this waterfall hangover where they think they can’t change, which defies the whole framework.

Melinda Wittstock:

Or the product owner finds out too late to course correct. So if you don’t have the information flows and there’s no transparency, and people are afraid to say they’re behind or afraid to say they’re blocked. I’ve had engineers in the past who rather than asking for help, their mindset is like, “Oh, I can figure it out. I’m going…” You know what I mean? And they can’t necessarily, and then it’s too late rather than just saying, “Hey, I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t the right way, but I’m blocked here.” And so in those scrum meetings saying you’re blocked, and that’s hard for people. So again, [inaudible 00:28:16] company culture, and really it seems like setting this out from the outset and really creating a safe space for people.

Angela Johnson:

Exactly. And that’s why the scrum master is so crucial. So it’s like, “Hey, we want you to talk about it because what if there’s somebody in the team who’s seen this before and they can help you. This isn’t about you being punished.” And I think there are some of those old habits, like you said, that die hard. It’s really about, “Nope, we’re a team and we can learn from each other and we can help each other.” That’s what this is about.

Melinda Wittstock:

So say for instance, you’re just learning this, right? Whatever stage of company you’re at, or you want to change into doing this right. Okay, and let’s talk in the private early stage company and you need a scrum master because you’re building your culture and you want to get this right as early as possible. Or if you’re two years in and it’s not going exactly how you want and you want to start to really do this right and you want to hire a scrum master, who are you looking for? How do you know that that person is good?

Angela Johnson:

And there’s two ways to look at this. One, hiring from the outside or, two, identifying internally in training. So if you’re hiring from the outside, the certification isn’t the end all be all, but it is a starting place. So at a minimum, hiring somebody who has a certified scrum master credential tells that organization that that person has spent two days with a licensed instructor and worked through simulations and they’ve passed a test. I liken it to your driver’s license. You wouldn’t hire somebody to drive for Lyft who doesn’t have a driver’s license. No, you’d want somebody who at a minimum is permitted on the streets. So that certification is a part of that. But then experience and experience is experience. So I don’t get into whether it’s bad or good. Experience is experience. So have they done this before?

There are certainly higher level credentials to look for. There’s an advanced CSM, which does say the person has 12 months of experience validated by a third party or a certified scrum professional, which says the person has two years of validated experience. So those are the things I would look for if I were hiring from the outside and understanding that this person is going to be focused on people and process. So it would be a red flag to me if I were hiring from the outside and the person was drifting into other lanes such as product. It’s like, nope. You’re people process. So if they don’t ask me anything about culture or team, red flag. But I’ve seen people identify somebody internally and then send them to a training class like the one we offer. And they’ve turned out to be amazing. For example, client of mine, thousand people, and they said to me, “We’re going to need to hire a scrum master.”

And I said, “You have a thousand employees at this company. You’re telling me there’s not one person with a shred of people skills in this company that understands your processes.” “Oh, we didn’t think about that.” So they posted it internally and they got somebody from their customer service department who was amazing, and that person already understood the ins and outs and who to go to in the organization to get impediments unblocked and resolved. And she turned out to be just amazing. Sure, she came to a certification class so she could get some of the formal stuff, but she’s one of the best scrum masters. I have the pleasure of no longer coaching. So it could go either way. Hire from the outside or internal.

Melinda Wittstock:

So when you say people skills, this is kind of empathy, organization. Take me through those ideal skills that a good scrum master needs.

Angela Johnson:

One of the first things is they have to understand it’s not about them. They do have to have that servant leadership. And if people don’t like the term servant leadership any more, selfless. It’s not about them and they have to be willing to listen. That doesn’t just mean with their ears. I always say they have to listen with their eyes as well. And a lot of companies are working virtually on Zoom or Microsoft Teams or in a distributed fashion, but we can turn on cameras and we can pick up so many nonverbals just from that simple act because 60 to 90% of human beings communication is completely nonverbal. And so scrum masters have to be really, really tuned in to active facilitative listening, not only with their ears and with their eyes. They also have to be objective. Now, as humans, we all have opinions. We all do, but that doesn’t mean we need to verbalize them and we don’t need to act on them.

And it’s really, really hard to listen if you’re talking. So scrum master has to remain objective and they’re going to pick up on things that other people don’t. For example, I can be in a conversation with one of my clients, whether it’s in person or distributed, and time and time again, the feedback I get is, “How did you just put your finger on where the confusion was? You don’t work here.” And I always say, “I’m paying attention. You’re right, I don’t work here, so I’m not letting myself get institutionalized like some of your employees have become, so I can readily see and hear where the issue is.” Because most of the time it has nothing to do with bad intentions. Sometimes it does, but sometimes people are confused and talking right past each other. So a skilled scrum master hones in on those things and helps people resolve whatever the confusion or the issue is.

Melinda Wittstock:

A hundred percent. Angela, let’s get into agile and agile development and where agile fits into scrum and what people get wrong about agile.

Angela Johnson:

For sure. Scrum is agile because the creators of scrum were present at the 2001 creation of the agile software development manifesto. But agile doesn’t mean scrum. At that snowbird ski resort, there were 17 people present, two of them had created this thing called scrum that had been around for almost 10 years at that time. The rest of the people assembled were software developers. That’s just a fact. And so even though they were writing code and talking about their frameworks, extreme programming, DSDM, feature-driven development and so on, they said, “We all have something in common.” And they were going to call it adaptive, but Jim Highsmith, who was present at the time, had the number one bestselling software book and it was called Adaptive Software Development. And so they said, “No, no, no, no, no. People will think this is Jim’s thing, and it’s all of us coming up with this.”

So one of the gentlemen was reading a business book called Agile Competitors in the Age of Virtual Organizations, and they love the word agile. Can your company turn on a dime for a dime? Can your company pivot? And so they chose that word because they wanted business to take them seriously. So agile isn’t a methodology. It isn’t a process because it’s for values. These people just wrote out four values. Those are warm and squishy. I mean, values to you might be different than values to me and so on. So it’s what it means in our respective companies. There’s 12 underlying principles that support the value statements, but man, are people enamored with that A-word.

And so when people say, “Agile, agile, agile.” I’m like, “What do you mean by agile?” Because there is no such thing as the agile software development methodology. Do you mean scrum? Okay, let’s look at those rules. Do you mean feature driven development? Oh, okay, let’s go look at those rules. And so the world is really subverting these ideas by latching on to that umbrella term. It’s kind of like saying, “I drive a car.” Do you now? What kind of car? What’s the make? What’s the model? So agile is a collection of the values and the principles an organization would embody if they do want to make change with any one of those frameworks.

Melinda Wittstock:

So we’ve talked about this in the context of software because this is where this really came up. It could be used in any department of any company like marketing, sales.

Angela Johnson:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And some of the organizations that we’ve coached through this change, they don’t even do anything with software development for their livelihood. One of my favorite customers makes foam, like the foam that go in your Air Pods. If you’re an Apple user or the headset that I’m wearing right now, the protective foam that’s around my ears, that’s their product. Because scrum is all about product. What’s your product? We have a school teacher using scrum to run her classroom. We have a graduate of ours who flips houses using the scrum framework. So scrum is not about software, it’s about product. The rest of the frameworks that were present at the creation of the agile manifesto are very specifically about software. So I think that’s why scrums popular too, because it’s not limiting you to just software development.

Melinda Wittstock:

How about cross disciplinary collaboration as well between say marketing and sales teams and engineer product teams.

Angela Johnson:

And some people in large companies think that they have to have a person from those departments on the scrum team to do this right, so to speak. And that’s not necessarily true because if you have a product owner, they’re taking input from marketing, they’re taking input from sales, they’re taking input, and we can have people from those other departments talking to our developers, we can have them talking to them. That’s allowed, that’s encouraged, but they don’t necessarily have to work this way. Now if they want to work this way, awesome. I had a sales team that I coached at a private company that’s franchised, and they loved it. They loved working in one-week chunks.

And then the kinds of things they talked about at their daily scrums clearly weren’t the same as what software developers were talking about. They were talking about closing a deal, getting a signed statement of work, getting a invoice out to a customer, but they were loving the daily transparency and the opportunity to help each other as a sales team to reach their sales goals and objectives. Marketing is hugely popular right now. Scrum and marketing is just taking off like crazy because scrum and marketing speak each other’s language. Who is the customer? What is the product. And so marketing teams love that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we think about though too is really bringing a marketing sensibility to the product team in the sense, so that input is there, and then also the data that we’re getting from, in this case, the Podopolo app, how are users using it? What can we learn from them that then dictates change or a product improvement or a feature or just a refinement to the user experience or this sort of thing? And the more that you’re really in the data and you’re learning about the data, you did mention that a little bit earlier in our conversation, the numbers kind of tell the story.

Angela Johnson:

Absolutely. And sometimes it’s hard for software developers to wrap their brain around because they get so committed to an idea. And I remember a very emotional conversation with one of my clients where the product owner was letting the developers know that the stakeholders had completely changed their mind. They had completely changed direction because the numbers just weren’t supporting the use of the product. And it was emotional. I mean, the developers were like, “Well, what if you come back and want it later?”

And the product owner was like, “Well, then it’s job security. We’ll pay you to do it, but I’m telling you, it’s not your money. Nobody is using it right now.” And the CIO had to get involved in the conversation, and one of the developers just brazenly said, “Waterfall would’ve let us finish, so we quit.” And he said, “I’m accepting resignations, who’s going first?” And they went, “Oh, crap.” So that was a very emotional example. But the more transparently you can have those business people and developers working together daily, which is one of the principles in the agile manifesto, then we start to understand and get empathy for each other’s position.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Angela, you mentioned your journey from starting as a developer, a coder, through really learning through your own business about scrum and now teaching it. Tell me some of the challenges you’ve had along the way, what you’ve learned along the way, teaching people about this that applies to your own business.

Angela Johnson:

Yeah, it’s a really loaded question. I didn’t set out to start a business. I just, I’ve always seen myself as a bit of a broken corporate employee, thinking that I could just do this better. And so 13 years ago, I decided to just incorporate just for the sole purpose of marketing my own services. And I got busy. I just wound up being so busy. I had to get like-minded individuals helping me. And the rest, as they say is history. But in the early years, one of the things that we’ve learned the hard way is you can’t tell somebody, you can’t talk somebody into change. You can’t pummel them with sources external to their own situation and just mystically want that to work.

And I look back at some of our communications even on our team, and we’re like, “Here’s this article. Here’s this case study. Surely this will help this customer.” Well, you can pummel the leaders of a company with data all day long, and the data that’s going to make most sense to them is their own. I get that now because in my own company, when people try to sell me stuff, I’m like, yeah, “Here’s all the reasons we’re different,” says every leader in every organization I’ve ever met and me included. And so one of the things that we’ve really had to embrace is running experiments. So the unofficial motto of my own team has become, how hard can it be? Let’s just try it.

And I’ll give you a radical example of where I’m sitting right now. I’m sitting in our 8,000 square foot training and event center, because we were really struggling several years ago with where to hold our classes. It was really reflecting poorly on our brand to do it in a hotel ballroom, gross, and $5 for a can of Coke. And the little training center we found was closing. And so sitting around my dining room table, one of my team members said, “We should open it ourselves. We should do this for ourselves.” And another person said, “How hard could it be?” And the rest, as they say, is history. Because here I am in this 8,000 square foot beautiful event center that we opened in February 2019 right before a global pandemic.

And the funny thing about that, the rent is still due, and then all of our classes are flipping virtual. So once again, we had to pivot. We had to be agile. So we sat down and said, “Here’s all the things we can’t control. We can’t control lockdown. We can’t control the fact that the rent is due and we’re in a five-year lease. What can we do?” Boom. All this innovation happened. Podcasting. Built these little studios out of some of the smaller rooms, licensing the space out to all these companies who’ve let their brick and mortar space go. And now our little center is booming, and we just renewed our lease because we’re so busy licensing space out to companies who need it.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so interesting. I think there’s a lot of innovation during the pandemic. I mean, you either gave up or it forced you to think outside the box and either innovate within your business, change your business pivot or whatever. A lot of people launched businesses in that time as well. It seemed like it accelerated innovation when we look back on it. It was hard, but it did.

Angela Johnson:

I know so many other trainers who said things like, “I’m going to cancel these next few classes and wait it out.” And I was like, “There’s no waiting this out.” There’s no waiting this out.

Melinda Wittstock:

I remember those early days, “This will last a couple of weeks.” No.

Angela Johnson:

No, not going to happen.

Melinda Wittstock:

So tell me, you mentioned you work for a lot of large companies, but tell me all the different… Your ideal client and how it works for anyone listening to this that thinks, “Oh man, I really need a scum master. I need this training, or whatever.” Tell me about your ideal client, who you’re looking for.

Angela Johnson:

Our ideal client is a privately held company, 5,000 employees or less, with an empowered CEO, CIO, empowered C-suite. And we come to the table anymore asking for that conversation. That’s another lesson learned from when we were newer. We would go right in and say, “Yes, we’ll train your team.” Now we realize that’s a mistake because I can train a team all day long, no problem. And what inevitably happens is they say things like, “Well, why are we doing this? Well, how does this apply at our company? Well, what’s the goal?” These are great questions for your leader, not for me. These are great questions for your leader. So now we start with the leaders so that we can reinforce their intention, and if they don’t have their intention identified, we can help them craft that message and pull that together. So ideally, we would start with the C-suite, and we only usually get taken seriously there, 5,000 employees or less privately held company.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Now, you mentioned you had a podcast, is that right?

Angela Johnson:

We do. It is called Ignite Agility, and it is a team podcast, so sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s a member of the team. And oftentimes we feature leaders, students, scrum masters, in all kinds of aspects of this journey.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s fantastic. Well, if you have a podcast, it’s on the Podopolo app, my company. We’re using AI to really revolutionize search and discovery of podcasts, but also monetization for podcasters. So you should check that out and invite everybody to listen to Ignite Agility and what’s the best way to find you. We’ll have all of this in the show notes as well, Angela. If people want to hire you to help you… Oh my goodness. Sorry, I’m just going to say all that again. Forgive me. And so invite you all to check out Angela’s podcast, Ignite Agility. And Angela, what’s the best way for somebody to get in touch with you if they’re thinking they could really use your services?

Angela Johnson:

The best way is to hit me up on LinkedIn. Now with a name like Angela Johnson, 32,000 Angela Johnsons are going to come up on LinkedIn, but if you remember, I’m the one talking to you about scrum and you put in Angela Johnson’s scrum, I pop right up to the top. And the best thing to do is message me and let’s start a conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and sharing all your wisdom with us today.

Angela Johnson:

My pleasure.