Episode 1 - The Status of Agile as a Platform and Navigating Agile Career Pivots

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/episode-1-the-status-of-agile-as-a-platform-and-navigating-agile-career-pivots/transcript.md ## Published episode notes What's the future of Agile? Agility? Agile as a career choice? I recently joined Jonathan Stark on his podcast Ditching Hourly to discuss the current state of Agile as a platform, how it has evolved over the years, and what practitioners should consider as the platform matures. Jonathan primarily focuses on advice for freelancers/consultants on ditching hourly billing through positioning, productized services, and pricing advice. If, like me, you're a freelancer/solopreneur agile practitioner (or are considering becoming one), I'm sure you'll find Jonathan's materials interesting. (I do.) He recently published a series on Platform Specialization, which I thought was very relevant to the Agile space. One very interesting part of the conversation was how to apply Jonathan's advice (e.g., the Why conversation) if you're an internal or employee agile practitioner trying to survive or thrive by moving from agile theater toward a more outcome-oriented, evidence-informed positioning. What are YOU doing about what's recently happening in the Agile space? To hear more, visit yuvalyeret.substack.com Agile as a Platform and Agile Career Pivots – https://yuvalyeret.com/blog/the-status-of-agile-as-a-platform-and-navigating-agile-career-pivots ## Transcript This transcript was edited from automatic speech recognition for readability. Speaker turns may be wrong or absent, and it may contain recognition errors. Check the audio before quoting or attributing a passage. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/episode-1-the-status-of-agile-as-a-platform-and-navigating-agile-career-pivots/ ## The friction around safe / scrum What's the future of Agile? Agile is a career choice. Welcome to Scaling with Agility. I'm Yuval. A while ago, I joined Jonathan Stark on his podcast, Deaching Hourly, to discuss the current state of Agile as a platform, how it has evolved over the years and what practitioners should consider as the platform matures. Jonathan primarily focuses on advice for freelancers, consultants on ditching hourly billing through positioning, productized services, and pricing advice. If like me or a freelancer, solopreneur, agile practitioner or are considering becoming him on, I'm sure you'll find Jonathan's materials interesting. I certainly do. He recently published a series on platforms specialisation, which I thought was very relevant to the agile space. One very interesting of the conversation we had was how to apply Jonathan's advice, for example the why conversation, if you're an internal or employee, agile practitioner trying to survive or thrive by moving from agile theater towards a more outcome-oriented evidence-informed positioning inside the organization or in the market. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Jonathan. I'd love to hear from you in the comments what you thought about this and what you're currently doing about what's happening in the agile space. Hello and welcome to Ditting Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark and today I'm joined by I guess to you've all year it. You've all welcome to the show. Thank you, John, the Tom. Good to be here. Today we are going to talk about the status of agile as a platform and what to do with platform specializations, if you want to pivot. But first, you've all, could you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do? In my background, I'm an engineer, developer. I've been in engineering leadership for a while and I discovered the the Agile world back in 2006. And after spending some time bringing, using Agile to improve my own engineering product organization, I switched over to the dark side of consulting and coaching and helped other organizations, other leaders like me, drive change in their organization and improvement using agile techniques. So I've been in this space for a while. If you do the numbers, I've seen it rise to popularity. I see it cross the cousin, you might say, and your notes, your recent emails about platforms, specialization, have definitely been interesting to think about from the perspective of what's going on in the agile world. So that was almost 20 years ago when you sort of discovered agile. What was agile like back then? What was the, to the extent that you were aware of it as a platform? You used it as a tool and then what happened? Yeah, so even back then, Agile was an industrial complex of sorts, as we call it these days. There was a certification industry. I looked at different things. I read some books, but eventually one important thing that I've done is I went into a classroom for two days and learn from a certified scrum trainer and became a certified scrum master. There was a secret handshake. And I left the room being certified to master scrum and go make my organization agile. You can probably notice the cynicism as part of that because what can you do after two days? But that was that industry. the people leading, you know, the Edgelwald figured out a way to commercialize it by focusing on roles that created a lot of success and mass adoption for this industry because there was a clear thing people could do to jump on the Edgel bandwagon, to join the platform. But I think if we close full circle what's going on today, some of what happened with the roles and the certification is coming back to haunt us. We'll be talking about that. Yeah, so okay. And at that time, you're in-house, right? You were in-house at an organization? Yeah, I was a VP engineering for small technology startup. Makes sense. And then what was the, was that, knowing the secret handshake, is that what inspired you to go solo. What was or did you maybe did you see the trainer and like, oh, that seems like a good job. But do you remember what sort of prompted you to go out on your own? Yeah, the the main thing that prompted it was that I noticed that over several leadership positions that I held, you know, in the the early 2000s, my interest turned more and more to optimizing the organization, and less so to optimizing code. And it felt like being focused on, I mean, there's a limit to how much you can do that as a VP engineering of an organization. That was my take at the time. You could argue about that, but in the sort of organizations that I was in, it was a very interesting opportunity to go and impact more organizations spread the Raspberry Jam over more organizations from the outside. Okay, so that makes sense. And you did that in how long, what year is that that you went I didn't really go solo. I joined in a firm at coaching firm. That was 2009. And I've done that until 2022 essentially. So at one point I opened the the branch of that firm here in the US, was originally in Israel, and I went truly solo three years ago. A lot of available hours, as you might imagine. Yeah, and in that period, were you, what combination of things were you doing? Was it just training, was it a combination of coaching and training or what was it? Yeah, initially it was mostly coaching. advisory work, helping teams, helping leaders like me before navigate this space of what should we actually do, what does it make sense to do, who should be in which roles I helped bring an approach that was more evolutionary nature and required less of the what you might call these days, the process overhead into the clients I was working with. We used more Kanban and Flow and less emphasis on being prescriptive with Scrum. I started over time to scale that to training, So I built some classes, I started to teach, you know, more formal classes and over the years I guess it was a mix of 30% training, let's say 70% consulting advisory coaching work. And so now as things change over the year, I sort of alluded to the fact that things are different now than they were in 2006, 2009. What has been the evolution of the agile industrial complex as you called it? What happened over the years is I consider, I wasn't one of the first people to go agile back in 2006, but I was still, I would call it part of the early bunched at early adopters. In the 20 years that passed, Agile has become mainstream, you might call it, for most of corporate America technology organizations and product companies. And this created the reality where the people that are organizations that are currently adopting at all are the late adopters. They if you read Jeff Rimmure the cousin they need a full solution. They don't want to think too much about how to... Some of them, the laggards are doing it just because it's, you know, we're decommissioning waterfall at this point. Nobody knows how to use it. Sun setting. Yeah, sun setting waterfall. And, you know, this created this pattern, which I call the agile theater, which is essentially just give me the easiest thing to do. so that I could say that I'm agile. It's like, I don't know, to use the technology world. It's like, I would need to go to the cloud. So let's lift and shift our application and put it on the cloud. Is that really going to help a lot with the things we're looking for the cloud to solve? I don't know. But if we don't, if we all we're doing is trying to go to the cloud in order to say that we're in the cloud, then maybe that's good enough. We'll worry about the Amazon Google cloud costs afterwards. And that is happening in the agile world. People are slapping names like Scrum Master and Sprint and User Story and Daily Scrum and product owners different terms on the way that they've been doing things already. And it's like slap, you know, lipstick on a pig. It's not really creating any impact other than a bad name for a job. And a bad name for people in these roles. And that created an environment where the early adopters for 2006 and even later, they think This is a joke. They don't see value in anything that touches agile, agile has become toxic to them. So it creates this sort of dynamic where people are starting to push for, let's call it, post-agile ideas, like a product operating model. And they're starting to talk about, you know, agile has created a feature factory. you need to go beyond the future of factory to become an empowered product organization, which is true, it makes sense. And a lot of people in the trenches of the agile people that chose to jump on the bandwagon and become practitioners, both, and it's slightly different stories, but both internally in organizations, as well as externally, they're finding themselves on a burning platform to use your metaphor. And it's funny because we use the burning platform metaphor for change management as well. The reason some organizations went into agile is because their previous things didn't work. But a lot of organizations went into agile just because of formal. Right, yeah. So a couple of things to just call out for the listener. That's the book, Jeffrey Moore's book, cross in the chasm is what you were referring to. And the early adopters all the way, the laggards, and it sort of goes through the mainstream on the way there. And this happens regularly with successful platforms of all types, certainly not limited to Agile. I mean, the book is about a product reaching sort of mass adoption or whatever you call it, whatever he calls it. In the platform space, just to give some background on the emails that you refer to, the platform space, it can be very, very beneficial to a practitioner to be an early adopter on a platform that does end up crossing the chasm and reaching mass adoption and then eventually tailing out to the people who don't really want to do it, but they're kind of forced or it's FOMO or and they don't really care and they're not going to do it, air quotes the right way. And what happens when when I talk in the emails about two different reasons why you might end up wanting to jump off the platform specialization that you have. And one of them is that the platform is so successful that too many people jump on the bandwagon and they just like pollute the whole area, the terms become meaningless because they don't really understand them. They're just saying them, they're it's there. They're just saying saying the lines without really understanding what's behind it and the other way that the platform just never crosses the chasm. It has a real good ramp up with early adopters and people seem to get really excited about it but then some new shiny object comes along and it doesn't last that long. So mobile was definitely like this for me. A lot of the things that you just said, I remember getting to the laggards when they were just like, we need mobile responsive. And I was just like, I was like, okay, this is over. Like people are asking for something they don't even understand what they're asking for. It's just a checkbox that they have to report to their board of directors or something. I don't know what the actual motivation was, but even mobile, which was the most widely adopted technology of all time, eventually, tails out. Eventually it reaches everyone or it just fails. It becomes a commodity. Yeah, exactly, right. And you get all of these early adopters, I mean, sorry, you get these late adopters that jump on the bandwagon and they're younger, they don't have as many lives in kids and dogs or spouses, kids and dogs, and they undercut you and they make a bad name for the platform. All of these things happen. And eventually, I guess it's sort of a natural life cycle for a platform to go through one of these things, one of these things. ## What is really happening in the system eventually they don't, it's hard to think of one that lasts indefinitely in a way that's beneficial to people like us who are platform specialists. Okay, so there's a little bit of background there. It's not just agile, it's everything really. If you have a platform specialization, I didn't say the good part, the good part just briefly is at the beginning, you don't have to do any marketing because you're one of the early people and the platform is taking off. So they have money to spend and people are clients are throwing money at them and then they distribute the money to the platform. They usually have different names for them, but like some kind of experts in your case was certified Scrum Masters or instructors and the certification program. But whatever it is, you get a huge business benefit early on because the platform itself is attracting clients for you. So keeping an eye peeled for when it starts to get into the laggards is a good idea. Or if you go to a conference for the platform, like an agile conference and everyone is half your age, it starts to be like, okay, we might be to the bandwagon stage. So what's the, how, you know, you're just one person, how many agile practitioners do you think there are? Like people that are, let's say certified. We're talking hundreds of thousands. I think it's hundreds of thousands of people that have been certified at this point. So quite a few. And you're just one. So like how prevalent is this idea? Like are you way, way early to recognize that things, you know, not all as well? Or is it just the early adopters? I mean, if you, the meme around agile being dead is, is going around the religion religious wars between the product operating model gang and the agile gang, it's going around. I think it's, it's pretty much out there. And there's concrete data about certification, market demand going down dramatically and it's not just the economy it seems, there are multiple things that are happening. It's like a perfect storm. It's both, the way it feels to me, it's both what's going on in the lifecycle of agile, people want a different learning experience, people are spending less on enablement roles. The biggest issue with agile, I think, or I see is the over-reliance on specific roles in organizations. I wrote last year or two years ago, even I think about the future of agility is not, or at least shouldn't be, the future of agile roles. I mean, if you go back way back to my organization in 2006, I was the VP Engineering. I learned to be, I learned Scrum Mastery. leaders, you know, the team leads, the engineering managers in my organization, they learned about it and we did it. We didn't bring in dedicated people to do it. Many of my clients, that's my recommendation to them over the years that the people that should be applying mastery of edge all should be the leaders. And that's not the model that be consulting firms use. That's not the model that works for stuffing agencies that want to bring you dedicated people to do this. And there are other reasons why there were a lot of dedicated scrum masters and other roles in organizations. And now that is coming to an end. and fewer organizations that feel like this is worthwhile. It's a whole interesting conversation, the relationship between, what do you really expect? I mean, would you expect as a consultant to work with one team forever or even for years? Or does it make more sense for you to hop in between organizations and help them in a very specialized or more nuanced manner, which makes more sense to me. And is different than the classic edge of the approach. Okay, so what are, what are you seeing the sort of, especially the early adopters, the people that sort of see the writing on the wall and saw it early, what are those folks doing in terms of pivoting their business? Or are they just like aging out and retiring? Some of them made a killing training people through the, you know, the bowling alley years of the model and they can retire and count their Teslas. There are people that are hunkering down for years of change, trying to look at what's the new training modality, what's the new modality of people learning, of people getting help. I'm specifically looking at, okay, how can I work effectively with people that don't necessarily want to bring in a consultant? They would a mastermind of people that want to focus on agility, be useful to these people. Is it community-based courses rather than live cohorts? I don't know. There are a lot of pivots to consider. And a lot of the serious people in this space, especially, you know, the, let's call it the external players are doing this. I think it's a lot of the people that were internal are are scrambling, like they don't know what to do. Oh, right. People that weren't people that aren't consultants, They're like, yeah, people that were scrum masters or even agile coaches or other, let's call it dedicated, agile roles inside organizations. They're they're scrambling to find what what to do. Do they find another role or do they go back to what they were doing before? Or do they take on other enablement roles that don't have an edge old name. There are a lot of things that those people are considering right now. So that's a very interesting way to think. So let's think about this angle from the internal employees standpoint. So I usually don't think about that. And presumably, you tell me because I'm just going to guess it'll hold a bunch of stuff and then you can correct me. Presumably, the Scrum Master let's say that's in-house at where IBM or something like IBM is a technology company and a consulting company let's go for I don't know bank of Providence. I assume that's not a bank but let's use one of the big ones. Yeah so I'm a Scrum Master Bank of Providence. I'm an employee and I've got this title that is no longer attractive, but that's where I'm going to start guessing. But that's just a label on the activities that I do. And one would think that my manager or my boss or whoever would see some value in the activities that I'm doing if they're providing value. And that my title happens to be Scrum Master would be irrelevant in terms of my job security because the boss knows that whatever you call it, this person is making things run more smoothly, or helping things run more smoothly. Now is the title so poison that that doesn't matter? Let's rewind a bit. The Bank of Providence chose to go agile because of FOMO. McLoyed, the Kinsey, whoever they're working with convinced them that they need to be agile. And trainers like me maybe made some good money on training a lot of people in that organization. You know, the neither the organization or a lot of the scrum masters, unfortunately, are asking themselves why are we here? Why are we really here? What's the real outcome? Okay, they're doing it. They're doing it. There's a lot of yeah, they're doing the theater and Although they're not billing hours They're doing hours And the organization is waking up to see that there's not enough value in these hours. It's become You know It's become too much of a theater that's not connected to real outcomes So we're going to do this these days. Yes, it is. So my advice, to be honest, to, I mean, there are two kinds of, there are different situations. One context is it's too late. There, you know, the Bank of Providence decided to cut all of its, you know, agile roles and, you know, all of these people will enjoy the, enjoyed the unemployment policies of the great state of Rhode Island. For a while, and we'll look for other organizations where they can do this. The other situation is that the bank of provenance is starting to ask some tough questions around why should we do this or that those scrumasters or any people in that role will learn from what we need to do as consultants and focus on evidence on outcomes. Have that why conversation. there's this Netflix, I don't know what you talked about it, but there's this Netflix question where people are in, people managers are encouraged to have a conversation with their employees once in a while, how hard will you fight for me to stay here if I decided to go somewhere else? So the employee asked their own manager this? It's a conversation that they should have. Why is that called Netflix? Why is that called Netflix question? Because Netflix used that. Oh, they do this. They talk about it. Yeah, they talk about it in their in the book about the Netflix culture. I can look up the reference. It's a very pointy question to ask. It's a version of your why. Why conversation for an internal employee? I think a lot of people in the agile space would be frightened to ask this question right now. Yeah, yeah, okay. But they should start with asking it themselves. They should start with for themselves thinking, you know, what do I need to do that doesn't rely on my title to be here, that will provide value. How can I connect what I'm doing to evidence, to expensive problems? And hopefully that can help them get off the platform of agile and start to be, start to be useful. I mean, this is just general good employee advice across the board and really anyone who's accepting money from someone you should be trying to provide a positive ROI in a recognizable format. So the difference here or sort of the... But the thing that makes it extra painful or widespread is that there's a label on all of these people that rightly or wrongly is, according to what you're saying, is sort of getting, is now toxic or frowned upon. It's just like to get rid of all of the agile people. And it's easy to find them because it's right in their title. And maybe it's too broad of a brush because maybe some people were doing really. delivering outcomes, but it becomes a Bad sign or whatever. This is what happens when platforms flip It's like it turns from a good thing into either the old way or the way that doesn't actually work or whatever And it just gets it ends up the bad the bad name starts coming around. Yeah, I mean I to be honest I Don't know the details of the mobile platform bandwagon and it will be interesting to see what happens with JNI in a couple of years. But at least in the agile space, it's not just that agile has become a commodity and you don't need these people. It's not just that we solved all of the problems and everybody you know has a great mobile responsive site or a great agile team that's able to deliver value. The whole reason for the rise of the product operating model is that there are a lot of agile theaters, there are a lot of product theaters and feature factories and people aren't really driving work around outcomes and why the irony is like multi-layered. But the question that I think We as agile practitioners, the agile community leaders in this community, and I see myself as a leader in this community at some level. We need to ask ourselves, how have we been complicit in creating this condition? And I think we have in a way both as leaders and as well as practitioners with, we've created this reality where we are considered overhead and not value-add. It might be too late to do something about it for agile. It might not be too late. But there's... We're still sunsetting waterfalls. It's an each individual. ## The practical shift Yeah, yes. Each individual should problem. I mean, I mean, it's a question I think individuals should start asking themselves, how have I been complicit and what can I do about it to create the different reality? Yeah, so I can chime in with a little anecdote there that would perhaps give some people hope if that's warranted. But like when I was in 2000 from 2001, early 2000s for about four or five years, I was specialized on a platform called FileMaker. And I would, and by the time I got to, I got bored with it. It's a very, it's not a huge, it's not an endless area to learn. It's not that big of a product. And you can learn all of it pretty much, at a given version. And so I was getting bored of it, but also I felt like the company, the platform company was making decisions that I just wholeheartedly disagreed with. Because back then, the web was nothing, well, it was starting to show signs of being what it was gonna turn into, but I was like, the web, this is not a web technology, inherently not a web technology. And I was like, they should be making decisions to go more in that direction. And they weren't. All right, this platform's dead. There's no way it's going to survive. And so I, because of that and just being bored, I did like a half pivot into web stuff. And I started doing like projects that involved both file maker and some kind of web component, because it was horrible at the time. It was horrible with any kind of even small web scale. It was too slow. And so I started learning LAMP stack and MySQL and all that stuff with PHP. And pivoted went pivoted into mobile when that happened a couple years later. And that went great. But file makers still around. And I still have friends who make tons of money doing file maker development. And you could argue that it's kind of like, well, maybe the talent pool of people who do it professionally as a consultant has gone down because people haven't been getting back on it. Like the bandwagon was over for years. It's been 20 years since I left. So maybe the, you know, now like cobalt developers can make tons of money if you can find one. So it could just be a supply and demand thing. I'm not saying that'll happen with agile, but if, if the bandwagon people, if a whole bunch, let's just say a whole bunch of bandwagon people jump ship on mass, like Lemmings, Sia, I'm out of here. This, this was a mistake. All of a sudden for the people who do, for the clients who do still care about it, and perhaps are doing it correctly. and getting benefit out of it. Maybe there'll be a resurgence of demand. I wouldn't bet on it, but these things and the joke about, we're still sun setting waterfall. It's like, this could last for, it could be a long, slow decline. It really depends on, it comes down to supply and demand, but what's for sure is the early years, the rocket launch of the early years won't come back. There's no way that's coming back. So, you know, I don't know if there's a silver lining in there anywhere, but it could take longer, that you know, the sort of dooms. I was a total chicken little about file maker. I was like, anybody who wanted to hear about it, I was like, this thing is dead. It's never going to survive this. You know, and it's totally, I mean, we're in version 36 or something now. It's like, it's like an established technology that runs lots of businesses. It's a little bit different situation than agile because agile is a process. It's not how, well, I guess we don't need to go into that. I guess I'd be more interested to find out from you. Where do you think the product operating model is the sort of new hotness, and then that'll have a 20-year run, and then that'll cross the chasm and go to the laggards and people will be like, ugh. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about a 20-year run. I don't know if it has enough meat on the bones for what it is compared to, I mean, what it adds on top of agile. The way I look at it recently is it's building on the shoulders of giants. The product operating model is not a totally new thing. If you come to an organization that somehow got stuck in Waterfall and just left the cave, they would struggle a lot to implement a product operating model. There is only a chance to make the transition reasonable because you are a feature factory. Feature factory is better than an actual theater. It's better than what I had in my organization in 2006 becoming a feature factory was progress. So my hope is that after the toxicity that we're going through, organizations will realize, yeah, it's not that agility isn't relevant anymore. It's just a different shape, a different form, a different way to activate and instantiate it. We don't need each team to have a role that focuses on facilitating this process, like we will learn that we don't need a daily scrum, let's say, you know, to manage all of the work, but we might need a different way for people to actually get together and hash through some stuff. Those shifts would happen. I think the bottom line is we will have a significantly smaller number of people that dedicate their career to something like Agile, whatever it's called. You will need to specialize. You will need to start to think, like consultants need to start to think and build your solar system. What are you focused on? Where are you really valuable? Make sure that you can talk clearly about what you help people do and not just say I am a Scrum Master. Just I facilitate the daily Scrum, but what is it that I help people deliver magic together? Whatever it is, I'm the glue that makes teams work. In Parlel, which is another silver lining promising thing, is I do see companies that are not the classic corporate America technology organization just getting into this space. Whether it's the glets of the wall that are using agile techniques to design razors more collaboratively and to have faster feedback loops, whether it's biotech firms in the Boston area that are just starting to figure out how to do this, how to leverage. And we'll leave specialized help. Or whether it is, you know, I was just chatting with somebody swimming schools. Small private equity backed, you know, organizations that have a technology organization that is smaller, that haven't gone through the buzz in the form of the large organizations that they're still working on these things. I know you talked about your experience with the credit union. in the past. But units are agile already, but most of them. But there's still more and more organizations that would do this. You don't have to go for the Bank of America and Capital One and do agile there. One of the things that I talk about in terms of what are your options when you're on a platform that has either reached the bandwagon stage and you're just getting undercut. too much supply, where the platform is genuinely in decline or both, what can you do? And for people who have been doing it for a long time and have as consultants and a dead giveaway is if they get rehired and referred by past clients, it means they did something right. So whatever you label it, you've been doing something right, even though you, you know, I might say, oh, I'm a file maker expert. And we have file maker, we like it, we need it, and it has some problems, could you fix it? And then if file maker disappeared, there are tons of skills that I developed in that capacity around just like, they're basically, I didn't know this at the time, but they're basically product skills, like talking to the end users and understanding what their actually use cases are and like prioritizing features based on low-hanging fruit all of these things. And I just didn't know that. And so one thing, one, there's two things that I'll tell you. One thing is that you can focus more on, you know, for people that are actually not doing theater, people have been delivering value and you can tell because you get really hired or referred. Those people might be able to sort of deconstruct or just sort of remove the agile carapace off of their actual skills and sell those. So like organizational change management has been a thing since there have been organizations. So like, okay, but that's very general sort of horizontal capability that benefited at one time from having the agile label wrapped up in an agile wrapper. Now the wrapper's gross so we don't want that wrapper anymore. So people could pivot to just the outcomes of the underlying thing. So like I help you ship features faster, like I help you crank through your backlog, I help you have fewer show stopping bugs in production, whatever the outcomes are that you have delivered to clients in the past, focus on the outcomes and sell the outcomes. So that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is even if you don't take the wrapper off. Looking back over your past clients and saying like, you know what, I really feel like I delivered a lot of value with my biotech clients or one particular biotech client or one bank or credit, whatever. One or two, maybe it'd be great if you had three clients that were in a sector. There's something similar about them. And you're like, okay, I'm going to specialize in those. And then decide whether or not you're going to jettison the agile language in your marketing based on where they're at in their journey, let's say. So a lot of people I work with, like me, I used to work with Fortune 500 companies, I'd just get emails from Fortune 500 companies being like, we need to talk to you, it was great, I thought it was going to last forever and then mobile topped out. So what ends up happening is a lot of times the sweet spot for a solo consultant is a client that's of a particular size, headcount wise. Depends on the industry which heads count. So like they have a lot of field workers that might be, they don't count as much. It's really only 10 people in management. There's like 800 guys in trucks. But it's a lot of times around a revenue number or a headcount and those things are often correlated. So if they're doing around 10, maybe up to 50 million and they've got maybe 150 to 250 employees, You could specialize in organizations of that size, maybe not even a sector, you know, or you could pick a sector and say like, okay, companies of this size, they're probably going to be experiencing the kinds of growing pains that, that I mean, you could guess, you could, if you're experiencing, you've been doing this for a long time, you could almost guess what the problems they're going to be having are. And you can also spot them just by doing a LinkedIn search and connect them, have conversations with them, hang out where they're hanging out, start to change your messaging to the pains that those specific kinds of companies have at that particular phase, again, whether it's biotech or not, whether it's a vertical or a size, which I would almost call a demographic characteristic. But you could combine those things, but just get more specific and try and niche down into some specific pool of ideal buyers where there would be something like 2000 to 10,000 of them in maybe not in your area. You probably work remotely. So the idea being that the second way is to focus your marketing on these sorts of people and then whether or not you would shed the platform label would depend on whether or not it was still resonating with this particular group of people. Because like you said, some people don't know it's toxic. They're just totally not involved with it. They kind of heard of it one time, even though it was from a book that was 20 years old or a friend who's been retired for 10 years, like, oh, I guess we should do this. So I think those two things, those two ways, those are the, those are the ways that I've seen people get out of a burning platform, like escape the burning platform. The, the other part of the burning platform metaphor or story is that it's a burning platform in the North Sea. and the water is freezing, which makes it a very tough choice. And for a lot of the practitioners in this space, they've been comfy on the platform. There's a PlayStation, there's heat, you know, it's a good life. Oh yeah, no, this is not fun. the freezing water, I mean, yes, cold plunges are the thing, but it's not fun to jump out of the platform. ## What leaders should pay attention to It's not fun to start to see yourself, you know, as somebody that has to, I mean, a lot of these people don't want to become consultants. And there's a nuance on how you actually apply all of these recommendations as a W2 employee or whatever you're wearing out. I think there's probably a thing there. There's probably a, you know, I start to look specifically in the sort of organizations that you talk about and not look for, you know, positions in, you know, the usual places. No, I'm not going to go and look at the other bank across the street because, you know, what's going to happen. I mean, another, what I see a lot of these people do is they actually go for more generic roles, like program management. people that have been a Scram master a lot of time come from being a program manager, project manager in the past. So they look back at these roles and whether that's the right move or not, it might be a survival move for now, but it's also creating a lot of supply for those roles. So I talk to people in the trenches and I'm hearing some some some worrying stories. I mean, there's a chance that this is gonna look like the Midwest, you know, cold towns. I don't know. But and that people that really want to escape this reality would need to do something proactive to escape it. just waiting in these towns and waiting for people to continue to mine. Oh, yeah. It's not going to help. That's I think the key message. So do you think that, speaking specifically around this example, do you think that Scrum people in a typical scenario, Scrum people in an organization, do you think they're redundant or are they just ineffective? It depends. Because if they're redundant. Some of them are redundant. The way they're delivering value right now. Some of them are not delivering any value, they're just running the theater, that's more than redundant, I would say. There are some of that going on. There are some great people that are caught along with this. So here, I guess I think in a head couple of years. By painting a clear picture on what providing evidence and language around what's the value that we're providing. So I'm thinking a couple of years out. Let's just say like all big organizations like lay off all of their scrum related people. I would be pretty surprised if they didn't hire, hire after that happened. I'm not saying they'd hire the same people back, but if they clean house and they're getting rid of, you know, even 10% of the people they love lay off were adding value and 90% weren't, they're going to probably, I would think, feel a deficiency, they're going to feel really busy, they're going to feel disorganized, I feel like they're going to, I feel like there would be some downside from doing that. And the pendulum might swing back a little bit. And it'd be very interesting to know if this, if anybody has done this already, if any companies have already jettisoned all their Scrum people, what did they hire next? Because they're going to need project managers or something or VPEs or something. Like they're not going to have a dev team just. Yeah, it's happened in a couple of banks to be specific. But what did they hire back? They hire back same people. They hire back some of the same people to be more focused on delivery, let's call it, rather than improvement. That's part of the picture. I also see organizations that generally are taking the approach of we don't need that many people in agile roles, in enablement roles in general. We need to be much more strategic in how many people we have in these roles, creating platforms inside the organization, product operations is an example. Product organizations are building a product operations capability, but they're not saying each product manager should have a product operations person next to them. That's not scalable. The part of the issue with agile is that it's not really scalable having so many people doing this, but you still need the smart organizations are realizing there's some level of expertise that you need in a large organization to still do this well. Small organizations might not need a person on staff but might need somebody like me on an advisory retainer as a second opinion for doing things due to drive things along instead of having people internally. I think part of the positive thinking around this is that this isn't the age of big consulting anymore. This is the age where smart organizations connect to people that have a very clear value proposition and helping them fix agile and make it something that's more of the valuable being agile organization than the theater and they know to pick and choose who to bring into their organization, who to work with and you know if you want to stay in this space that's something I believe You really have to start. You should have started the thing about this months ago, but you know, the the best time to plant the tree was five years ago, the next best time is today. Yeah, exactly. Or go into an, you know, be in a AI transformation consultant. Consultant. It's also becoming a popular thing for Agilis to do. Is that right? Well, it's the next, yeah, it's the next hype cycle, right? Yeah, I mean, there's some sense cynicism aside. There's some sense to that as well because, you know, when you implement something like AI in the organization, it's not just the technology, it's organizational change management to go back to your previous point. What do we need? How do we actually do that in an iterative way that involves people and collaborate around it? The Philippier company using product techniques is, you know, I think part of one of the future frontiers. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that this is cold water to be swimming around in, but businesses have problems. And a lot of them are organizational, systemic around managing people. So if someone genuinely has the skills behind the labels, there's probably value they can add, but to your point, it's like, how have you been articulating that? What would your boss point to say, oh, yeah, it was a big whoever? Alice completely contributed to this outcome. not agile, who cares if Alice wasn't here. I don't know how we would have done this. Maybe there's someone else who could have done it. Who knows? Probably maybe. Who knows? But Alice did earn her salary that year, basically, is how they're thinking about it. So it's not like, it's not like, it's not like companies are going to let go of their scum people and be like, ah, now we have no problems. That was the last problem we had was we were paying too many scrum people. So there's something there and you're in, you know, for folks who are inside organizations, there's something there somewhere. Maybe you're not well positioned to help them with it, but it would be great to at least recognize it and say like, okay, maybe this is the next thing I can do. Maybe like, well, you were, when you were VPE and you were, you felt like you could have a bigger impact if you were sort of operating at a more strategic level or a higher level than just managing engineering team. And maybe that's another theory for an employee. I'm trying to think like an employee now. If you noticed something internally that was a little bit higher level, maybe, or adjacent that was like, you think was a really big problem in that organization, maybe that would be a next thing for you to do. Maybe that problem exists in lots of organizations. it probably does. So, you know, deciding what to pivot to is like, it's kind of hard to say. It's like, it's a minimum in your organization, connect to the real problems. Know what is the most expensive problem for your organization right now. Connect to working on that problem. And if you're working on that problem and you're showing traction, you have better odds of survival, I think, from what I've seen, the people that are just in the periphery going through process overhead. You just give me a Rolodex moment, actually. Another student of mine just put together a video course that's kind of like for people in tech who are career people about how to, I think it's called Unblock Your Career. And it's not for people who want to go out and be consultants or whatever, but I just reviewed it for them. And it's great. It's like really, really good. So for folks who are listening to this that are in the internal, you know, W2s or whatever, I'll put a link in the show notes to that if it's ready. I think it's ready. I think it's published. But that it's, it's, and it's exactly what you, it's very similar to what you just said, where it's like, you know, look for talk to your manager, how could I add more value? You know, you just talk in a way that is much more consultative, and it's not, it's going outside of your job description almost certainly, but yeah, that's very cool. I'm glad that occurred to me, because I feel bad for those folks. I don't normally think about employees, so I feel I don't want to leave people high and dry. Every employee is a future consultant, Jonathan. Yeah, not every one of them, but you know, it's like hormones, helping people get to $10 million and then they become these clients. It's next up. How do we become a consultant? So this has been great. Do you have any closing thoughts or is there some place people could go to find out more about what you're doing and you're thinking on this subject? Two places. One is that article about the future of agile roles and agility. The other piece that I think would give people a good framing for some of the things we discussed is this new. I've been playing with the private podcast thing. If you're listening to this. You're probably a podcast fan. So how to, this whole landscape of agile theater and future factories and now the product operating model, what's the relationship between all of these things and how to navigate this space? And it's designed for product and engineering leaders. I think any agile practitioner would do well to start to think, you know, from the perspective of these personas. So even if you're not a product or engineering leader, you will probably find it useful. Yeah, that's a good share of the link in the show. Yes, yes. All right. Well, thanks for joining me, you all. Thank you, Jonathan. All right, folks. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.