# Professional Scrum Trainer Spotlight w/ Yuval Yeret

Editorial note: edited for readability from local ASR and diarized into speaker turns.

## The friction around safe / scrum

**Dave West:** Welcome to the Scrum.org Community Podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, we feature professional Scrum trainers and other Scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, welcome to the Scrum.org Community Podcast. I'm your host, Dave West, CEO here at Scrum.org.

Today's podcast is focused on the journey of one of our professional Scrum trainers (PST). Yuval Yeret has joined our podcast today. Welcome to the podcast, Yuval.

**Yuval Yeret:** Hi, Dave. Great to be here.

**Dave West:** Good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming. Well, listen, I'd really like to know where you're speaking to us from, Yuval. Where are you speaking to us from today?

**Yuval Yeret:** Greater Boston area, I think you're familiar with that space.

**Dave West:** Yes, not that far away from me! Isn't it funny that we see each other more frequently electronically than in person, but the nature of the world that we live in today.

Okay, so a gray and cold Boston afternoon we're talking together. All right, let's start talking about why we are here. Tell us a little bit about your background.

**Yuval Yeret:** So I used to do DevSecOps before there was even the name for that, before DevOps was even the thing back in the 90s in the Israeli Air Force. So my original story is in IT. And over the years, I've also done work in product development in the storage networking world, multiple technology startups back in Israel.

Well, and some of the time was in the trenches. Some of the time was mixing work in the trenches and leading teams, leading teams of teams. So VP Engineering, those kind of roles, that's my background. In the last 15 years or so, I've been helping others improve how they develop products and eventually how they run and develop their businesses.

**Dave West:** And it's interesting. So you sort of developed a passion for this, for what I've observed, this sort of empirical approach to effectively delivering value to customers. Would that be sort of like if you're going to have a t-shirt printed with your mission in life? Would that sum it up or have I completely misunderstood that?

**Yuval Yeret:** I mean, to be honest about it, if we dive a bit deeper into the journey, I encountered Agile back in 2006. I don't think I had empiricism in mind as the solution to the problems that we were facing at the time. But I was looking for ways to deal better with uncertainty and complexity of building products without really knowing how they're going to work and how to fit everything together and whether the clients and customers would really benefit from what we're building.

I found Scrum, I later found Kanban. Over the years, I've done work at scale with companies like Siemens, HP, CyberArk, and Intel. A lot of that work was in the space of actually driving Kanban into enterprise scale into product development when it was used more for maintenance and operational things at the time, so more into the space where Scrum traditionally plays.

And in 2017, when you and the team invited me to become a professional Scrum trainer and help bring flow into the professional Scrum world, to be honest, that's when empiricism had explicitly become a much stronger part of my belief system for what makes all of those agile behaviors and flow behaviors tick, what makes them work, why are they so powerful. So the brainwash definitely worked.

## What is really happening in the system

**Dave West:** Well, thank you. It is interesting. We also got a lot out of that brainwashing experience just for our listeners. Yuval was heavily involved in the development of our Professional Scrum with Kanban course, the Kanban Guide that we provided, and really working with our community to introduce the ideas of flow to our community and provide that consistent terminology and understanding about how Scrum and Kanban and Flow can all work together, which certainly opened my eyes to what real transparency meant, including the use of a banana skin. But we'll talk about that maybe a little later and that always sticks in my mind.

But the reason why I brought that up, and even though this is perhaps a little bit of a surprise, I didn't mean it to be a trap, but it's because I think that's a really interesting—you could call it brainwashing—but that you came from very much a transparency flow perspective and then added that empiricism to it. And I think that's a sort of mission you've taken upon yourself. So tell us a little bit about some of the things you're exploring around that sort of mission, particularly OKRs, scaling, and the like.

**Yuval Yeret:** Yeah, so in parallel to my work on scaling using Kanban and Flow and Scrum, those were the years that SAFe became a big player in this space and I started looking at do I believe it's useful, what I like about SAFe, what needs to be improved. And my take on that, which might be controversial to some people, I still have arguments with others in the professional Scrum community and the agile community, but my take is that when you look at the challenge that many organizations have of making the transition from traditional to more evidence-based management and empowerment, and all of the good stuff that we believe in, one effective way to manage that change is through evolutionary change.

And SAFe seems to have figured out useful patterns, both from a commercial perspective as well as change management perspective, to actually help you along the way. And that's the way I've been using it. I've been using it to help enterprises, to help companies manage that tough change from traditional and opinion-based and functional focus and activity-based cultures and operating systems to evidence-based management and flow.

It's not the typical way that people look at SAFe. It's not the typical—if we're honest about it, a lot of people don't look at Scrum as an approach towards empiricism, they just look at it as a way to micromanage. I still remember a client in the early days of me actually coaching others. He was the VP R&D of a startup in Israel in the project management space specifically, one of those modern project management tools. And he confided in me saying, "I really, really love Scrum. Scrum gives me a good excuse to micromanage my people." That's not necessarily the answer that you want to hear from people that are really, really into Scrum. But there's a lot of that out there.

There's a lot of classic project management and classic management period style hiding under the facade of Scrum and SAFe. And my mission is to help people, some of these organizations, towards healthier ways of working that actually have more of a chance to deliver value. And the same happens in the OKR space. You mentioned OKRs. OKRs are another management technique that has a lot of potential if you actually include empiricism and empowerment and transparency as part of it. But you see so many organizations that just don't get it.

**Dave West:** I think that what I've been working with you now since 2017, Yuval, and what I really love is that combination of transparency and empiricism outcome. Why those two things, when you apply them to professional Scrum, obviously create not only that more effective way of working but also ultimately deliver more value.

You're exactly right though. Scrum can be a great way of telling people what to work faster and I think that's what you experienced with that early exposure to Scrum in Israel. So tell me a little bit about where you're going with some of these ideas and what really excites you. You know, we talked a little bit about scaling, we talked a little bit about OKRs, flow, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing in the market, what you're really doing today.

**Yuval Yeret:** So another aspect of my journey that helps explain where I'm going is that, over the years, there's this balance between my belief in evolutionary change and being pragmatic about these ideas on one hand, really believing in empiricism, empowerment, and flow, but on the other hand, not being dogmatic about how to achieve them and at what pace.

This has come really useful when trying to tackle non-traditional environments for Scrum and Agile, beyond software development, whether it's marketing, whether it's razors in Gillette, whether it's a biotech environment where we're not just talking about Scrum in technology and big data, but also in how to actually change the way the wet lab works and the journey to find the beneficial capsids. That work expanded my view and brought me to the space of OKRs and Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and Scaling Up. I've been more exposed to how organizations and companies are managing themselves and it's opened some interesting opportunities that I'm exploring for how to actually leverage all of the pillars of Scrum, the spirit of Scrum in those environments.

## The practical shift

**Yuval Yeret:** For example, OKRs are a framework for alignment that could be and is intended to be used as an operating system for a company that's trying to achieve results in the space of uncertainty and aspiring to deliver value on bets. But a lot of people are implementing OKRs like traditional project management. So my mission right now is to figure out ways to inject scrumminess, evidence-based management, agility into how people are implementing OKRs and help them fix or accelerate their OKRs.

Similarly, people that are using entrepreneurial operating systems of one sort or the other could also benefit from evidence-based management and most of them aren't even aware of what we have in that space. That's where I'm trying to play these days.

**Dave West:** Yeah, it is kind of interesting that your evolution, your journey through where you came from, the flow stuff, then the infusion of empiricism, and then obviously the scaling ideas, SAFe—you're an SPCT, fellow. And the way you brought that in, isn't it interesting that's led you to the sort of ultimate business challenges of: how do we get clear objectives? How do we build an organization that pursues those objectives with a result bias?

And then how do we inspect and adapt that continuously to evolve us to do a better job of both understanding the objectives, but also the results that come from that and then the solution that we delivered to create the results? I think it's an interesting journey. At the end of the day, empiricism, transparency, clearly understood objectives, and dealing with the challenges of scale—it sort of brings us all to this point where we have to start building empirical organizations at the end of the day.

**Yuval Yeret:** Yeah, I mean, when I look at it in retrospect, it almost looks natural, to be honest. If you look at what we should be doing as true leaders who serve our teams, as Scrum Masters, if we are good at building effective teams, at some point we'll realize that the impediment is outside the team, that the impediment is systemic.

In order to achieve flow, we need to look upstream and downstream. We need to figure out the right topology between teams. We need to tackle some scaling questions, right? And whether it's through SAFe, Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Nexus, whatever, it's all about figuring out ways to make collaboration more effective and less needed, to be honest. How do we create cohesive teams?

And at some point you realize that actually in order to deliver value, it's not even just the software or technology that you need to work on. There was this orthopedic network up in Maine, the good folks at Spectrum Healthcare. And what we've done there is we've established a team of teams that actually involved people both from technology (IT), as well as clinical professionals, finance people, admins, and marketers. They were all intermingled on Scrum teams and teams of teams, using SAFe practices like Big Room Planning, PI Planning, and trying to build business solutions together.

To me, that's a natural evolution if what you're focused on is delivering value. If what you're focused on is just Scrum, you won't necessarily get there. If what you're focused on is doing things within the confines of your political fiefdom in the organization, you might not get there. But if you're applying the systemic view and you're really focused on your customers and what they need and creating value, eventually you're getting there.

I believe that the industry will get there over time. It's a journey that requires cultural change and political maneuvering inside organizations, and there are a lot of impediments to doing that, but that's what makes it interesting.

**Dave West:** But you do have to have a clear idea of where you're going and you need that transparency along the way to help you see how you're progressing against that. And I think that's what you bring and that's what you're focused on, because without those two things, I don't think we will get there as an industry or as a series of organizations. If we are so concentrated on our fiefdoms and trying to optimize our small areas without transparency in that clear line of where we're trying to get to in terms of business outcomes or objectives, I don't think we'll ever get there, honestly.

## What leaders should pay attention to

**Dave West:** And I think that ultimately is the thing that excites me about our conversations, because that is the pursuit that I'm interested in.

**Yuval Yeret:** Yeah, I believe this is the future of where we're going. I see a future where it's less about the practices and the mechanics. They are still important, and the skills needed for managing backlogs, owning a product, and facilitating effective events are important, but focusing on them too much might actually hurt your transparency towards what's the bigger problem that you're trying to solve.

So I think we're in for an interesting couple of years of reckoning around what's the focus of agility. It's interesting to be on the front lines.

**Dave West:** Yeah, I completely agree. I wrote a blog called "Has Agile Stalled?", really to highlight the fact that I think agile is about to pivot to be exactly what you're describing: value, outcome, whether it's OKRs, scaling, flow, empiricism, or Scrum, whatever you call those things. Ultimately, that's going to be our focus: the outcomes that matter and the ability to build organizations that respond to those outcomes in an effective way.

So I'm glad you're on this journey with me, Yuval. And thank you for spending the time. I could talk for hours to you about these topics. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your journey to become a Professional Scrum Trainer.

**Yuval Yeret:** Thank you, Dave. Thank you for the opportunity.

**Dave West:** Okay, everybody. Well, that was Yuval Yeret talking to us about his journey to become a Professional Scrum Trainer. You heard how the focus that he's applying of these ideas is in non-traditional spaces, the impact of the empirical process as he described it, and how that's become front and center in his merging of OKRs, SAFe, Scrum, and Flow.

This has been the Scrum.org Community Podcast. I'm your host, Dave West. Hopefully you've enjoyed today's conversation. Please listen to future conversations, and there's a great archive of really interesting talks with PSTs and others around the industry about our journeys.

Thanks, everybody. Scrum on.