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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS X-Matrix and Obeya: How to Make Strategy Visible and Actionable for Everyone | Jim Benson and Karl Scotland
00:43:01
BONUS: X-Matrix and Obeya: How to Make Strategy Visible and Actionable for Everyone with Jim Benson and Karl Scotland In this BONUS episode, we explore the groundbreaking work of two renowned agilists - Karl Scotland and Jim Benson. Together,...
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- [00:07]
Vasco Duarte
Have you ever wondered what it really takes to make Agile work well? At the Global Agile Summit, we're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action. Whether you're a leader, a product innovator, a developer, you'll hear practical insights from those who've done it. They'll be telling their own stories from the stage. I'll tell you more about this at the end of this episode. So stay back and listen to the full detailed description of what we have in store for you at the Global Agile Summit. But if you can't wait, you can go right now to globalagilesummit.com and check out our full schedule for now onto the episode. But I'll see you at the end of this episode with more details on the Global Agile Summit. Talk to you soon.
- [01:04]
Hello everybody. Welcome to this special interview. And today for this very special bonus episode, we have not one, but to count them, two amazing agilists, Carl Scotland and Jim Benson. Hey Jim and Carl, welcome to the show.
- [01:21]
Jim Benson
Thank you.
- [01:22]
Carl Scotland
Hey Vasco, good to catch up.
- [01:25]
Vasco Duarte
Absolutely. So Carl is known for his groundbreaking work with the X Matrix. You should read all about it in his blog. The link is in the show notes of course. And he has been instrumental in integrating agile practices with the more, let's say, strategic view of the organizations. And his innovative approach focuses on aligning True north aspirations, strategies, tactics and evidence into a single and collaborative visualization. That's Carl, Jim, who's been on the podcast not too long ago. Carl was a while back, 2018 was when he was here last time. Jim has been here last year in 2024. He's the visionary author behind a personal Kanban and the Collaboration Equation. Jim's expertise lies in collaborative management, visualization of work and fostering more humane, team driven environments. Excuse me. Together they've developed a new course, we'll be talking about that today, designed to help organizations make strategy accessible and actionable for everyone. So, Carl and Jim, let's talk about the starting point. I mean, of course this collaboration doesn't come from, you know, outer space. You guys have been working on collaboration visualization and strategy, both of you, for a while. What were, in your perspective, the most significant challenges or gaps that you saw in how organizations approach strategy and collaboration that eventually led you to develop the practices and the tools that you now present in that course you're hosting to together. Let's start with Carl.
- [03:16]
Carl Scotland
So I think for me it's, it's the strategy side of things. I, you know, well, going back we, Jim and I and, and, and you and I think we all met back in the Kanban days of the Kanban community. And, and that kind of led me my kind of personal journey to think around Kanban in terms of, of strategic strategy. So as you kind of move from the tactical stuff of the day to day of implementing Agile and you start moving up and you're kind of going, well, it's not about Scrum, it's more about the workflow and the limiting work in progress that's kind of moving towards more strategic thinking. And then you end up at the organization level actually. And I still remember being asked, going into an organization and one of the first questions I got asked is, well, how are we going to know whether this Agile thing is working? You know, challenging me as an Agile coach. And I, and I kind of fairly flippantly, I think literally said, well, how do you know whether anything is working? Like it's not about whether Agile works or not, it's about whether your business is being successful. Like how do you know whether your business is being successful? And couldn't really answer that. And I think that's kind of fairly common. So it's trying to tie that like, well, okay, agile is a good thing, lean is a good thing. There's lots of good stuff to be. We probably, you know, we want to be doing it, but if we start doing it too dogmatically, we're not going to get the benefits from it. So trying to tie it up to both the organizational strategy, but actually even if we're going through an Agile transformation or implementing Agile, actually what's our strategic approach to doing that so we don't get sucked into just following the latest trendy framework that's out there. So that's kind of, I guess that's my journey.
- [04:59]
Vasco Duarte
How about you, Jim?
- [05:01]
Jim Benson
Well, for me, the thing that I just kept seeing over and over again, whether it was an Agile transformation or a lean transformation or whatever we wanted to call it, Kanban transformation, is that everybody was so focused on the transformation that nobody was actually focused on knowing what was going on. And a big part of this was exactly what Carl said, is that sea level people would come down and they would say, hey, I've just dropped $150,000, a million dollars on you people who are running around doing this transformation. Is it working? And then you would say yes. And then they say, okay, what does yes mean? I say, well, it's more this way than it was this way yesterday. And they're like, somehow that doesn't work for me. And so there was never a story, a full story from what the corporate needs were through, what the team needs were through, what the customer needs were through, what the individual professional needs were. And so no one actually knew when they were working if they were doing the right thing. Like, is this the right thing that I'm doing at the right time? I've run into this problem and it bothers me. Should it? So strategy has often been things that C level people do when they go on a retreat to Cancun and they'll go off and they'll drink a bunch and they'll come back and say, hey, now we're going to go after the Latvian market. And everybody's like, why? And they're like, cancun, you know, the story of how that came about isn't there? So therefore no one can actually deploy it. So what I love about what Carl was doing with the X Matrix and the class that we were teaching together is this is how you can set up strategy collaboratively. And then you can visualize in Eurobea, the X matrix, the kanbans, the, the A3s, the, all of these different things that are ultimately geared towards seeing that strategy through to fruition. So that was my biggest thing.
- [07:15]
Vasco Duarte
Yeah, let's continue with that. Because one of the things that your course promises is to help teams, quote, see strategy, tactics and work in one place, while of course fostering professional engagement, we hope, and alignment necessary for execution. What are some of the key tools, the key practices that you introduce in the course that help exactly, to deliver on that promise that everybody can see strategy, tactics and work in one place.
- [07:48]
Jim Benson
Okay, I'll start. You can go.
- [07:51]
Carl Scotland
So, okay, there's. I mean, there's. I think there's two levels of granularity of that which. And Jim and I maybe would both kind of attack this at a different level. So for me, it's. It's the X matrix itself as a starter. So, you know, maybe for people that don't know what the X matrix is, it's an A3. So it's a single sheet of paper on which we lay out the true north, the aspirations, the strategies, the tactics, the evidence. So we have all those five elements and that's a framework I call taste. So you can start seeing what all those elements are. And then the reason it's called the X matrix is because you have matrices in each corner of the A three piece of paper that kind of looks like an X that you Then show how some of these different elements correlate with each other. So if we've got a tactic, why are we doing that tactic? How does it correlate to one or more of our strategies? If we're measuring and we're looking for evidence, how does that evidence correlate? How is it coherent with the tactics? Which tactics do we think should be generating, which pieces of evidence, et cetera? And it's many to many. And then you go strategies down to aspirations. So how do our strategies help us to meet our aspirations? Where our aspirations are, the results, the lagging measures, the ultimate results of business success. And then you kind of go full circle, and in a way, you kind of go, well, how do our leading measures correlate to our lagging measures, our evidence to our aspirations? So it tells this whole story of all these things, how they correlate to each other. So you can literally see on this one piece of paper, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? How do we know whether it's working? And what ultimately does success look like? And then what Jim kind of brings to that then is, well, that's just a single piece of paper. There's a lot of depth and richness. And the rest of the conversations that happen to populate the X matrix, we can then show that on an obeyer.
- [09:54]
Jim Benson
Yeah. So in the obey, we've come up with a bunch of archetypes. So there's a lot of different ways to visualize work. And when you create that X matrix, you're creating lofty goals. You're creating projects to see those pro those lofty goals through. But then you're also creating measurements, metrics to evaluate your progress and then learn and pivot. And so all of those things require you to manage work in real time, to understand where the flow of work is, to respond to change, to build learning into the system. So the healthiest X matrix would be revisited on a regular basis, and you would actually be doing the work, and you would come back and you'd say, okay, we've got these five ways to measure. We had these expectations that the measures would look like this. They actually look like something else. Here are some opportunities to pivot where we will actually change perhaps some of our tactics or something else to build that. So then you don't create an annual strategy, but you create a living, strategic conversation within the organization where everybody is constantly saying, I'm doing this to support the strategy. And oh, look at this, it actually countermands the strategy. And that's the thing that's most exciting to me. So the, the, the seven things that we have, I think seven, maybe it's eight are VSMs, the X matrix, A3s, the lean, a three time series data, personal Kanbans, what we call inators, which are like collaborative problem solving tools, statistics and KPIs. And then commission, you buy boards and we put all those things together. You kind of get a family of visualizations that could go into an obey but need to respond to the actual needs that are coming out of that X matrix.
- [12:11]
Vasco Duarte
So one of the things that really captures my interest and curiosity right from these descriptions is of course we, we need to have clarity at the strategic level. Right. Like Carl already described that then we need to have the ability to keep that strategy alive through the execution period, whatever that is. And that I understood you guys use Obeya, but if I understood you correctly and you talked about keeping the conversation alive, which I really appreciate especially because of conversation in the context of Eskokilpi's work and I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. Conversations in Eskokilpi's work are the way in which organizations share, transform and eventually agree on decisions.
- [12:59]
Carl Scotland
Right.
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Jim Benson
Sharing processing unit.
- [13:01]
Vasco Duarte
Correct.
- [13:02]
Jim Benson
Right.
- [13:03]
Vasco Duarte
So, and that part is really interesting. So tell me a little bit more about how are you using these two concepts. So the X matrix and obey to first trigger, maybe catalyze, initiate those strategic conversations and then keeping them alive through the execution period.
- [13:21]
Carl Scotland
So I mean I think of the X matrix as an architecture. I kind of described it as an architecture for your obeyer. And as Jim said, it's continuous strategy. So we don't do the X matrix, photocopy it or save it a PDF, send it out to everybody going here's our strategy. It's about that collaboration conversation. So what you just described for me kind of ties into the, the lean concept of catch ball. So once you've got this idea of what are we doing, why are we doing it, how are we going to meet? You then need to kind of, that's just the start. You then need to kind of go, okay, we've got our tactics, we now, we now need to kind of figure out who's going to work on that. Do they understand the mission? Do they, do they have the right people skills, resources, whatever else they need to do the job? Do they have a plan? So for me, I then bring in concepts of back briefing from Bungay where you effectively treat that as a back briefing process where you're giving people a mission, they brief back to you their understanding of the mission and then they go off and start carrying out their mission but coming back. So you need to have this kind of cadence and feedback cycle in place that, as Jim said, then you then start looking at your evidence. Well, is the evidence telling us that we're making the progress we thought we did, or is it telling us something different? So there's at least, you know, a quarterly monthly review and feedback process you put in place to. So you can steer. We used to call it. So, I mean, a lot of my early experience with this was when I was at Rally Software, we used to call it, you know, strategic steering on a quarterly basis. So we're not, we're not coming up with a new strategy effectively. Our true north is still the same, but we might have drifted off course or we might need that. We want to set a new direction. So it's just that kind of tweaking. And then I still think it's useful on an annual basis to do a kind of a slightly bigger reset. But it's not an all or nothing reset.
- [15:31]
Vasco Duarte
So Jim, your perspective on this. Call it conversation maintenance or strategic conversation maintenance. Role of the Obeya.
- [15:44]
Jim Benson
So first off, the thing that I like about Carl's taste model is the carefulness with which he has chosen words that people take for granted. So the word evidence is a painfully poignant word. So metrics and measures are things that people presuppose they understand. The meaning of evidence is something that grows over time based on investigation. And so when we enter into that situation where we get to the end and we say, okay, this is, this is the evidence we're going to gather instantly says, these are the things that we are going to learn. So imagine if companies approached their Kanban with that question and not how are we going to increase our throughput? How different would the Kanban look and what different triggers would be in it and what different conversations would arise because. Because of those triggers? Because, you know, no matter how much your throughput increases because it will increase when you visualize your work. But is it really increasing because we're visualizing it because we're trying to get the work to flow faster, or is it, is it happening because we're changing the nature of the conversations? And so what I find too often is that the visualizations that people build are to solve a problem that is not a root cause, and that the root cause is actually that we're not having the right conversations at the right time. So in, in our meetings, class on Modis Institute. In the very first video it says specifically, everyone hates meetings. Which is a shame because it's the only reason you go to work. You don't go to work to type, you go to work to create. And you don't create alone, you always create collaboratively. Whether we're using Catch Ball or back briefing or any other system, the key is to have that system where the conversation is expected and you are expected as a participant to bring something to that conversation. And then when that happens, suddenly you have psychological safety because you're expected to talk, you're expected to discover something. And so that's the other reason why I like evidence is evidence is saying come back and tell us what's going wrong. Not be afraid and hide at your desk because you think something's going wrong. So those are the things that I love about this, I love about this work. It's fun to watch people when they've been working in a stilted, difficult environment for a long time, suddenly get a healthier, less toxic way of working.
- [18:45]
Carl Scotland
So actually if you're going back to the origins of the X matrix. So taste framework is. The language is mine. The X matrix itself comes from manufacturing. I can't remember whether it was Hitachi or one of those. It's one of the few things that lean things that doesn't come from a Toyota, but it was very manufacturing focused. So their language for the evidence portion I think is typically process because they're talking about process metrics. And when I kind of took that and started wanting to use it with Agile, it's like I was really uncomfortable with this idea. Let's measure our process. Process, because that's not really what it's about. So I think evidence came about and one of, one of the other reasons I use the, the word evidence is because also it's, it can be subjective and objective. So evidence could be people are doing more good stuff, behaving in a positive way rather than less bad things happening. So that kind of idea of narratives and we see more good narratives and fewer bad narratives. So yeah, that's also so aspirations is also deliberately trying to avoid. These are our annual targets.
- [19:55]
Vasco Duarte
So one thing that I wanted to point out is this aspect that Jim mentioned when he said it's too bad you don't like meetings because that's the only reason you come to work. And Esco had this very prescient definition of how you create value at work and he called it interactive value creation, referring to that aspect that you can't create value in Isolation. And that gets me to the next question. But before I go to the next question, I do need to introduce it. Now, conversation and interactive value creation, as Esko used to call it, comes from the fact that we accept that we don't actually know all that we need to do before we get started doing it. And this is actually a very important aspect. You both are agilists. I'm an agilist. And shifting gear a little bit. And moving on to why you guys have come to where you are today talking about X Matrix and Obeya and conversations and interaction between the individuals. I need to talk about the Agile alliance and PMI merger because PMI represents the opposite. PMI represents the analytical mindset, the separation of strategy of work, so the planning and the work itself, so the doers and it assumes up front the possibility of separating the strategy of the work, like creating work breakdown structures and Gantt charts and so on, and the actual execution of the work, which is actually the coordination and getting things done and so on. Now they have a few workarounds, we don't need to go there in order for that to be possible. But the fact is that their theoretical model already goes against one of the most fundamental aspects of what we've been talking about and what Agile is about. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. So now I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on that merger. And now from a perspective of a committed and caring agilists that want our industry to move forward, what are your thoughts on that? Let's start with Jim.
- [22:06]
Jim Benson
Oh, okay. Well I'm well known and overspoken for saying that individuals only interact through processes and tools. So I've never particularly cared for the wording of the Agile manifesto. The the recent purchase is part of an ongoing commodification of Agile and agile practices that has been going on for a very long time. So this is a logical next step in an industry that priced itself out of the market. So the more that they flooded the world with cheap CSMs and so forth, the more that CSM classes became, you know, they went from thousands of dollars down to, you know, 50 buc that at that point it became very difficult to continue the Agile industrial complex because it had basically done the equivalent of shipping all of its stuff off to a cheap country to do all the work for it. So the ability for Agile people to maintain a standard of living became tenuous. Everything also ends up being bought. So the world is a pac man game where large companies run around and eat small companies. And so this was A logical move, business wise in that way. What this means for the future of Agile is I will tell you right now that right now Lean is having the exact same conversations that Agile is. Okay, so I'm part of six groups right now between Agile and all of these other process religions of people trying to stay relevant when what's actually happening is they're a menu. And the world has discovered that the world is more than you know, it's like, it's like, it's like England when they figured out that the world wasn't just bangers and mash and Sunday dinner. They're like, oh my God, look at all the other food. And then the next thing you know, London is a big food hub because there's all these other, other foods. That's what's happening now. All these other foods are coming in. We have a way, we have an opportunity now to build ways of working that involve bits of everything and not have to worry so much about is this Agile, is this Lean, is this Six Sigma? But you have to worry about is this us? And I think that's very exciting.
- [24:49]
Vasco Duarte
What do you mean by is this us? Can you be a little bit more specific about that?
- [24:53]
Jim Benson
Your individual way of working is individual. So you can pull x matrix and A3s and stand up meetings and retrospectives and other things from these different menus, but your particular team or your particular company at any particular time needs to do work in a particular way. So I've never created the same Kanban twice because every team is different. If you have a Scrum team and you're doing Scrum by the book and half that team gets fired and you hire a new half a team, your team will work fundamentally differently the next week, even though you're doing it by the book. So I want people to own the individuals that are interacting, create the process themselves, which is the agreements of how they will interact and then they deploy tools like their obeya to facilitate that process and those interactions. So that's why it's not just a pedantic thing. It's like when I say that it's individuals and interactions through processes and tools, it's that Agile took away our desire to build our own processes not because of what it should have been, but because of what it became. So if it being sold to PMI means that we don't have to have that conversation anymore, I'm elated.
- [26:28]
Vasco Duarte
I think you misplace your hopes because don't forget that the Agile alliance was not doing anything anymore at the time so all the processes were coming from elsewhere.
- [26:40]
How about you Carl?
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What's your take on the recent changes?
- [26:45]
Carl Scotland
I mean kind of broadly similar. Jim's I guess. I, so when I saw it I was, I was, I wasn't surprised and I was kind of ambivalent. It's like, oh okay, whatever, because, because like you just said, like what, what was the Agile alliance doing anyway? So my experience of the Agile alliance was really that it was, it was basically the annual big conference in America and I've not been to that for a long, long time. You know, certainly pre covered I did try and get stuff submitted to it but actually, you know, you just get lost in the noise. I think the last time I did go it was a bit of an echo chamber. That may have changed but you know, you know, I, Chris, Matt's talked about community of needs versus community of solutions, solutions versus needs. It had become a kind of a solutions conference which was basically, you know, it was all, it was all marketing, it was all branding. It was all people just go in there to sell stuff. So yeah, I, you know, I never, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't getting anything. I certainly didn't pay any money to the Agile alliance and that's probably why they were, they were struggling because you know, their only revenue stream seemed to be the conference and the vast majority of their membership was probably people who got free, free membership by going to the conference. I'd be curious to know how many people actually paid money to the Agile alliance without going to the, without, you know, getting it free through conferences and things. So yeah, my, but, but I guess what, you know what started the Agile alliance and what started those conferences was like minded people coming together to you know, share and explore and discuss. And you know my first Agile conference was, was extreme, the Extreme programming conference in 2001 and then that kind of got, became XP and Agile Universe and then I got sucked into the, the, the big conference and they got bigger and bigger. So we kind of started creating smaller conferences again and some of the, the early lean conferences again there's a little bit of trying to recreate that of like minded people coming together to, to come up with cool new stuff and share ideas and be heretics and be, be weird to. Jay Bloom said. And then we kind of lost all that again. And I still, you know, I still have regular conversations with people about how can we recreate that again, how do we. And I don't think it'll ever happen under a brand again. But you know, that's One of the things that drove me and Jim to kind of get back together and start collaborating again is like, okay, we're like minded, let's work on some of this stuff together. And we'll be having conversations with other people who are things. And there's a strategy meetup that's just started that is kind of interesting, which is like people that are like minded on strategy. So I think there's going to be these little small pockets now. And I guess the PMI Agile alliance thing is just that large corporations, organizations want to have this big validation body that they can refer to and kind of go. Their PMI says this, Agile alliance says this. So to me that's all it is.
- [30:12]
Vasco Duarte
So I'm happy you guys have this different perspectives I think in the community we do need many different perspectives because I do think we are going through a process of reassessment and reevaluation. Jim said that the lean community is going through the same right now. In fact, the lean community in my experience was already going through the same in the early 2010s. I remember the big blog post about Lino, as in lean in name only, and the complaints from people about lean just being another word for downsizing or redundancies and all of that. And we are never free from that. But I think that one of the things you two coming together already points to is that there's a lot of value in the community that we can take advantage of. So I'll put the link to the course in the show notes. Everybody check it out. And of course check out Carl Scotland and Jim Benson's videos on YouTube. They have a lot of content free out there and in fact going to the course is a great opportunity to talk directly with them. Tell us a little bit more about how the course goes, how many sessions, how many are self paced, how many are live, how does it go?
- [31:30]
Carl Scotland
So there's a number of different levels, different ways of doing it, but there's just the pure self paced one is just videos. There's 10, 10, 15 videos to go through there between 5 and 20 minutes each. And then on top of that we've got some, some live workshops that you can choose to do as well. Which is so we're just gonna, we're doing one February, starting next month, four workshops. And the idea is you watch the videos and then you get to come and talk about them and ask questions. So you know, we don't have to kind of go through all the basics and stuff in the class. We can actually have like a meaningful conversation about people's real challenges and experiences and kind of talk about really specifically their context. And then you know, when we can get be in the same geography at the same time where we're looking to do in person classes as well, which is just a one day class. We did one in Brighton when Jim was down for Lean Agile Brighton last year. And that's just going back to that community thing, you know, like small conferences to create nice communities as well. And then fingers crossed, we'll try and do one in March as well when Jim's over in London.
- [32:46]
Jim Benson
Yeah, the, the, so the, the online class, the study at your own pace class currently has the kind of intro to how to do the X matrix and then we have three more planned that will basically make a family of courses that will start to talk more about the collaborative aspects and the deeper aspects both of the X metrics and of work visualization. But the fun thing about working on this project is that it has shown me as someone who during COVID locked myself in a room and just recorded a bunch of classes, this stuff is a lot better if you do it with a friend. Like work is just better if you do it with somebody that you like. And so it was like it was so effortless to create the X Matrix class. And it's also pretty effortless to get together and teach it. And I'm looking forward to that becoming more of a model of what we do at Modis Institute about that. And we are trying to be what Carl said, which is we're there to play with ideas, not to move forth necessarily a centralized agenda. And to make sure that in this post Lean and post Agile world there is someone where people are at some place where people are actually thinking about what comes next in a practical way and not just in a theoretical way.
- [34:16]
Vasco Duarte
All right, Jim, let's stay with you. For those of us who want to dive deeper into Agile strategy, the obeya, the xmet X matrix and keeping the collaboration going, what's one resource besides the course? The course will be linked in the show notes, of course. What's one resource that you would like to recommend for our audience?
- [34:36]
Jim Benson
I guess the easiest resource that I can think of is our Discord server so you can come in and talk about all of these things to your heart's content. And I will make sure that you get a link, an invite link to that so that you can put it in the show notes. It's free. It's a Discord server, so it's free. And what we're finding in there is that we have what I would call micro conferences, which is someone shows up, asks a compelling question and then like for four days people talk about it nonstop. Then they all go home. Then two weeks later someone else comes in and does it again. So it's not like you go into that Discord server and it's like just flying text all the time. It's actually pretty directed, spontaneous conversations that happen. So it's been strangely rewarding that way.
- [35:33]
Vasco Duarte
Very good, very good. How about you Carl? What's one resource you would like to recommend?
- [35:38]
Carl Scotland
Well, I guess just my blog probably. So availability.co.uk. you probably got the link, but I have a page so forward slash strategy deployment which is really where I collect all the blogs that are strategy deployment related with some sort of very loose organization. So rather than just having to go on the tag and get them in time order, there's kind of some sort of organization in there. But yeah, that's where all the writing I've been doing was about trying to, trying to me getting my head around this and how to articulate it and I describe it and how do I socialize this. So not just the X matrix itself but a lot of the, the deeper content. So you know, Jim talked about the, the classes we're going to be recording this year. There's a lot, you know, talking more about back briefing and some thoughts around back briefing, thoughts around how strategy deployment relates to other approaches, agenda shift, you know, the Spotify model where I kind of just try and you know, bash these things together and see how they fit. So yeah, there's a, there's a ton of stuff there.
- [36:48]
Vasco Duarte
Absolutely. We'll put the link to all of those in the show notes. And how about you Carl? Where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing?
- [36:58]
Carl Scotland
So LinkedIn if you want to I guess contact me and then I mean all say my blog again, videos, conferences, I try and keep that up to date with where I am and what I've been doing. I put all my, all my slides and things on there as well for getting visuals and things.
- [37:17]
Vasco Duarte
Absolutely. We'll put the link to that also in the show notes. And Jim, where should people go if they want to talk to you? Besides the Discord server?
- [37:25]
Jim Benson
Besides the Discord server, yeah. So I've completely opened up real time access to me but every day I try and post something on LinkedIn and it's, it's kind of like almost micro blogging where I'll talk about a client or talk about a problem that I've seen in this so LinkedIn, which is LinkedIn, slash in slash. Jim Benson I'm super easy to find. Everything that we do, I try and make sure that it has been broadcast through that channel.
- [37:59]
Vasco Duarte
Absolutely. We'll put the link to that Also in the show notes Carl and Jim, thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [38:06]
Jim Benson
Thank you for having me.
- [38:08]
Carl Scotland
Yeah, it's been fun.
- [38:11]
Vasco Duarte
Hey friend, thank you for staying here is all you need to know about the Global Agile Summit if you've ever suffered or know people who are suffering from Agile fatigue, this event is for you.
- [38:24]
Agile fatigue is that feeling that settles.
- [38:27]
In when we can't really see a light at the end of the tunnel. We get discouraged, especially when conversations revolve around the same old frameworks, the same old buzzwords and theories. We don't feel that energy anymore. Well, the Global Agile Summit is a different kind of event. We're bringing you real life first person stories of agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action and transform the way you work. The Global Agile Summit will happen In Tallinn, Estonia, May 18th. That's the workshop day, and then 19th and 20th, the conference day.
- [39:08]
And Tallinn, Estonia is one of the.
- [39:10]
Most innovative tech hubs in Europe. The Global Agile Summit is hosted together with Latitude 59, which is kind of a citywide celebration of software startups and groundbreaking ideas. And we'll have a shared ticket for you to attend those events as well. So who will be speaking? Well, we've got an incredible lineup of thought leaders in software and Agile. For example, Clinton Keith, the person who wrote, literally wrote the book on game development with Scrum and is busy bringing Agile to the world of game development. You must check his session. The very famous and well known Jurgen Apello, author of Management 3.0, will be talking and exploring about AI's impact on leadership. We also have Goiko Adsic, who's taking an unconventional look at product growth with his Lizard Optimization keynote. Other speakers include, for example, Sixven Dietz, who's challenging everything we know about software development by ditching, literally ditching contracts and estimates. Can you imagine his teams deliver software before their competitors are even done with the contract negotiation?
- [40:28]
How Agile is that?
- [40:30]
But there's more. We'll cover engineering practices in our developer track with talks on, for example, AI assisted testing, driven development, developing products in minutes with a different approach to how we develop, configure, deploy platforms, and much more. We also have a product track where.
- [40:53]
We cover cutting edge ideas around product.
- [40:56]
Discovery, delighting customers with product delight frameworks. We'll have a talk about that. And we also have an Agile Business track where we will talk about, for example, Open strategy, a very agile approach to managing organizations and delivering software faster to clients faster than you can even write a contract.
- [41:21]
Literally.
- [41:21]
I mean, I already told you about Svendit's story is amazing. It definitely is a must see. I'm sure you'll be inspired and get a lot of ideas for your own own software projects and software delivery. Now whether you're a business leader, a product innovator or a developer, you'll definitely find value in our three focused tracks.
- [41:45]
That's Agile Business for those working with.
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Businesses and organizations, Agile Product for product managers, product owners and innovators and Agile Developer for the builders making Agile work in practice. The coders, the testers, the designers, the producers, the Scrum masters, you name it. If you join, you will meet over 200 agile professionals from all over the world. People who just like you, want to grow, want to share and want to learn by challenging the ideas that don't work anymore. At the Global Agile Summit, you'll get new connections, fresh ideas and the energy to take your own Agile to the next level. And who knows, maybe even find your next career opportunity. So don't miss out. Check out the full program and grab your ticket now@globalagilesummit.com I'm really looking forward to seeing you all in Tallinn, Estonia in May.
- [42:49]
I'll see you there.