← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The Product and Service Story That Every Scrum Master Needs to Hear | Lai-Ling Su
00:18:35
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- [00:04]
A
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if, for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame warfree and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's the Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
- [01:12]
B
Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. And this week, joining us from my perspective, the other side of the world, in Sydney, Australia is Lai Ling Su. Hey Lai Ling, welcome to the show.
- [01:25]
C
Hi Vaskar. Thank you. And welcome to everyone who's listening.
- [01:29]
B
Absolutely. So Lai Ling fixes the gap between operating model design and real world delivery through her interim executive consulting, capability building and executive coaching work. She also equips products and transformation leaders with a capability everyone expects, but no one teaches how to navigate the people, the politics and the performance expectations that come with their jobs. So Lailing, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?
- [02:03]
C
Wow. I wrote my first business check at the age of 8 and I grew up running family owned hospitality businesses. I was constantly finding myself at the intersection between having to balance and service the needs of customers, community and the commercial outcomes that come with running a business. And the skills required were, and the talents required were what you would expect to see from a Scrum Master today. But I've never actually held the title of a Scrum Master. I'm actually someone who's always embodied the traits of a Scrum Master. But I've held other roles whilst I've done that and I've really anchored it through the active use of servant leadership which has been around since the 1970s. All right. And so for me, Scrum mastery as a craft is so super important. That's versatile, transferable and is almost like a non negotiable for me in the way that I work with people in the way that I lead. And I've done that through three different careers. So my first one was in hospitality, operating those businesses. My second career was really around managing financial products like complex financial products and building trading systems. During the gfc, I was the one that leaders throughout the multi year, multimillion dollar investment programs that were failing and went big set for us. So I had a lot of fun doing that in both Sydney and Hong Kong. And then my third act, my third career has really been around keeping big businesses competitive by transforming their operating models, ways of working their workforce and capabilities and all those wonderful things that takes us to today.
- [04:10]
B
Yeah. So that's a great story and I think also an inspiring thought for all of our Scrum Masters out there. We are as 2026 rolls in, we're starting 2026 as we record, we are at an inflection point in terms of agile adoption. And to hear you say that actually Scrum Mastery is a craft that applies to all kinds of businesses and all kinds of positions in those businesses is so inspiring because I think it is too. In fact, I wrote a blog post many years ago saying that Scrum Master is where CEOs go to grow. Right. Like you, if you are a Scrum Master today, you're actually getting ready to become a CEO because the type of problems and the type of interactions you have are those of a leader. And it's really inspiring to hear you say that.
- [05:02]
C
Yeah, the, the people focus of the role is probably one of the most crucial aspects of Scrum Mastery that you just can't, cannot underestimate. A lot of people focus on the technical side, the mechanical side of the role. But what gives you that supercharge and the boost of performance and career growth and potential is leaning in on the human aspects of life and at work
- [05:31]
B
and of course leaning in on that side. Understanding the business impact, the impact on the community, the impact on the people within the business as well as the customers. That's a huge domain to kind of get familiar with, hopefully get good at like you did. But it's not all ups. There are some downs. Right. And today's fail Monday. Here on the podcast, we want to explore one of those stories. So when you found yourself in one of those servant leadership positions like we do as Scrum Masters, what was one story that you remember as a critical turning point? The learning experience. Tell us that story first we'll go into the learning and what changed in you and because of that for you at that time. But tell us that story first.
- [06:17]
C
I'm going to start right at the very, very beginning because the story I'm about to share with you is one that I've told many Scrum Masters, many product owners and many people in the transformation and business spaces. And it deeply resonates with them because everyone can take a little bit of everything from this story. And it's one of my favorite stories to tell, even though it's probably one of my biggest failures of all time. So I'm based in Australia and we have something called Workers Clubs here. These are registered community focused social clubs that are designed to provide like leisure, dining, entertainment and sporting facilities for their members. When I was a about 11, we won the tender to run a business inside a restaurant business inside one of these workers Clubs. One of my biggest failures and most believable lessons that I got coming out of that experience happened within about three months of us opening up that restaurant. The club's management had booked a band to come in and play on a Saturday night. And we'd never experienced delivering a la carte to a venue that could house about 200 people for an entertainment event. It was ticket at the door and so we had no idea how many people would turn up and how many people would be wanting food before, during or after the show either. We were running completely blind and it turns out the event was sold out, the venue reach max capacity and almost everyone wanted food. And to say we were woefully underprepared is a gross understatement. But at that time we were probably about three months in from having opened. I was running all of front of house at 11 when all of my peers and friends were out running around outside playing sports, having the best time of their childhood. This was me trying to keep a 200 person entertainment evening alive. That was a big learning curve.
- [08:44]
B
That's what we would call a baptism of fire.
- [08:47]
C
Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And it makes me smile every time I start that story and every time I tell that story, my grin just gets wider and wider because every time I remember it, something else comes back to me. So this is why, another reason why I love sharing the story. But I want to tell you about specifically a father and son I met that night to kind of illustrate what you have to do to balance the needs of the customer, the community and the commercial outcomes. In a high pressure environment like that, which is live, you've got no do over and you work with what you've got. You've got to adapt to the situation. Because you can't control it whatsoever. We had about 40 orders that were already in play when the father placed his order and paid for his food. And back in the day we didn't have the ticketed order stubs with numbers that you hand out to people and you kind of match the order number to the stub to figure out who, whose order was what. We relied on pure memory to figure out whose order belonged to, you know, that person, this person, et cetera. It was so chaotic that night. It took us about an hour, hour to get to his order. And I remember circling the venue probably about three or four times looking for this father and son, but I couldn't find them for the life of me, I could not find them at all, knowing I had other orders to get out and other customers to serve, and we were woefully understaffed. I took the plates of food back into the kitchen, popped them in the oven to keep them warm. About 10 or 15 minutes later, the father approached me and he full on yelled and screamed at me about how long the food was taking. Yeah, ouch, that was painful. So I went to the oven, took the plates out, handed them over to him and he yelled at me again about how poor the service was. The food had taken forever, he had failed to be recognized and the food was no longer like piping hot straight out of the wok. It was, it was still hot, it was still no, completely within range of edible, etc, but it wasn't like straight from the wok onto the plate, kind of steaming, piping hot. I apologize profusely and quickly, but I had to move on to the next customer and get the orders going because we were just so busy and I kind of just left it as that at the end of the night the, the interaction just kept playing through my mind over and over again like a really, really bad earworm that you just can't get rid of. I had nothing to lose at that point. And so I found the father and son again, apologized again, and then asked him in a way that only an 11 year old could fearlessly do. I asked him point blank why he reacted so strongly to the situation. Because, you know, he was one of probably many customers that night who were in the same position and no one else had reacted to as strongly as he did. I felt terrible through the entire night because I could see what was happening on the customer side, but no one reacted as strongly as he did. And so I just point blank asked him. Eleven year olds have no fear, they just blurt out what they're thinking and deal with the consequences afterwards. Right. I've learned to be a little bit more refined since then when having courageous conversations, but that, that was what happened at the time. And his response just floored me. He said that he had only been able to get his son every other second weekend and wanted to create a great memory of them together. And that night was meant to be full of fun, full of music, full of great food. And instead they were hangry for most of the time and neither really enjoyed the evening. And so it was ruined for them in a way. And it was kind of at that moment that I realized community was about providing people with the opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And whilst you could technically execute your product or service well, the customer experience is fundamentally a deeply emotional one. And you know, it determines the fate of your long term reputation and it also determines your commercial outcomes in the long run as well. And so, you know, that experience was both deeply triggering but also deeply valuable from a learning perspective. And, you know, after that day, I just started inspecting every single little thing that we did in our restaurant operations. And for about a decade after that experience, I just kept continuously looking for ways to improve how we serve the customers in the community whilst remaining commercially viable at the same time. Because they're kind of really hard things to balance when you're.
- [14:43]
B
I really love that story because it shows that, well, first of all, it wasn't about the food, although the food influenced. Wasn't about what you did, although what you did influenced it. It was about something deeper. It was something that had meaning beyond the. Even the evening. Right. Like that was the expectation of a father who had limited access to their son and wanted to provide an experience to their son that would create those memories that in the end those, the memories that stay with us and that makes us feel what we feel about our lives and in this case, our caretakers. So that's a beautiful story also because it illustrates the fact that as leaders in the business, like you were at that precise moment when you were delivering the food, even though you were only 11. As leaders in the business, we need to think about who we are serving and what that interaction means for them. And we don't always know like you didn't know in that moment, but it is upon us to figure out what that is. Right. Like, and we'll be talking about product and product owners later this week. And I think that's also a great and inspiring story for us to realize that it's not about delivering products. It is about recognizing. Which is a word you used. Recognizing the people we serve in a way that allows them to feel appreciated and recognized in who they are and what they are trying to achieve.
- [16:05]
C
Absolutely. 100%.
- [16:07]
B
That was a great story. Thank you for sharing that.
- [16:09]
C
Lai Ling my Drama is happy to have had the opportunity to do so.
- [16:18]
A
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- [18:08]
B
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- [18:14]
A
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- [18:18]
B
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