KatAnu Connect Podcast

Our 200th episode! Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith dig into one of the common problems Kate sees with clients: capable teams sitting still, waiting for work to be handed out. They start with what a genuine self-managing team looks like: it understands the goal, evaluates requests instead of passively accepting them, owns the product, and swarms to get work over the line. Then they get into why teams don’t pull work: managers who won’t let go, the belief that whoever coordinates the team should hand out tasks, a lack of psychological safety, individual performance cultures that build skill silos, and broken commitments that send the business straight back to command and control. They close with practical moves: make the work visible and ready, protect priorities, use work in progress limits, coach instead of rescuing, and pull one item at a time instead of pre-assigning. Plus a friendly disagreement about dividing up work after planning.

Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith unpack the return to office push from both sides of the badge reader.  Kate has just been on site with a hybrid client where nobody was mandated in, and the office had real energy.  Ryan is four days a week in a big, branded office where most of the people he works with are somewhere else. They dig into Gallup’s latest numbers: most remote-capable US workers want hybrid, only 6% want to be on site full time, and engagement has dropped below 30%, falling fastest among remote and hybrid employees.  So, is the office the answer?  They talk about the buildings organizations have paid for, leaders who need to see people working, layoffs that hit the people far from headquarters, and why being told takes away control even from people who like the office.  They close on why this is a leadership gap, not a location problem.

Great teams don’t happen by accident. So what separates a great team from a group of people who happen to report to the same manager?Back to Basics turns to the team itself. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith build a list of 10 characteristics of great teams, starting with people who are invested, not just showing up. With Gallup putting US engagement at 31%, they talk about why it keeps slipping: return-to-office crackdowns, a workforce that can work for anyone anywhere, and layoffs that come with “we’ll replace you with AI” messaging. Kate makes the case that psychological safety and trust sit underneath everything, from Google’s Project Aristotle to Lencioni’s pyramid. They get into team size and the two-pizza rule, hiring for values as well as skills, and Ryan’s airport test for new hires. Then come knowing each other beyond work, clear roles and accountabilities, clear priorities, effective communication, continuous improvement, and why a Sprint Retrospective sometimes needs to become a game of M&Ms. They close on the difference between a team and a collection of individuals.

Back to Basics turns from frameworks to accountabilities, starting with the Scrum Master. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith explain why the Scrum Guide’s switch from roles to accountabilities matters: if you do the work, you are the Scrum Master, whatever your badge says. Many org charts give the Scrum Master two lines, while the Scrum Guide gives it the longest list of the three. The hosts cover the four hats (coach, mentor, facilitator, trainer), plus the protector who says “not right now.” Anu admits she failed as a Scrum Master because she missed having authority. Kate shares the client that dropped Scrum Masters because they weren’t billable, and the experiment that brought them back. The hosts get honest about the hard parts, from cameras-off events to being the lonely voice defending Scrum. They close on what to look for in whoever holds the accountabilities, and why a great Scrum Master is the reason the team doesn’t need one in the room.

We have done Scrum. We have done Kanban. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith take on everything else, starting from one question: did anything else survive the evolutionary process? Plenty did, depending on where in the world you work and what you build. The list runs from XP and Lean to Crystal, DSDM and Scrumban. Next comes DevOps, and why two week Sprints with six week deployments made it inevitable. Then XP, the software-only framework that gave everyone else user stories and velocity, plus the person who wrote “As a, I want, so that.” It is not who you might think. Then the case for Lean as the root of every agile framework, and why cutting waste beats faking Scrum. “Agile in HR” gets retired in favor of HR agility. Then scaling: SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, Nexus and Disciplined Agile, why leaders love them, and what happens when you scale a team-level mess. It closes where every framework choice should start: what problem are you trying to solve?

Last week was Scrum. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith turn to Kanban, the framework most teams think they already know because they have a board. They trace it back to Toyota and just in time manufacturing, then walk through the part that usually gets skipped: the three change principles, the three service delivery principles, and the six general practices behind the board. Ryan explains why work in progress limits are the practice people blow past first, and how he uses Kanban to calm a chaotic team. Anu orders a pizza to show why no organization has only one workflow. Kate shares the client board that showed a client it had the wrong mix of roles, and all three take on the practice everyone forgets: making policies explicit. Along the way: the theory of constraints, Kanban for refinement alongside Scrum for development, and why your teams do not all need the same process.

Last week was frameworks for agility in general. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith put the best known one under the microscope. They walk through where Scrum came from, why Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland waited fifteen years to write it down, and what the new Simple Guide to Scrum from Bob Hartman and Tobias Mayer changes. Kate makes the case for the 2020 switch from roles to accountabilities, and it turns out the three hosts cover all three of them between them. Then the can of worms: can you implement Scrum partially? From there it is Product Goals as Scrum’s answer to OKRs, why so many teams cannot write a Sprint Goal, why the Sprint itself counts as an event, and the two events teams struggle with most: the Sprint Retrospective and the Daily Scrum. This episode closes with the line of the week, borrowed from a PMI colleague. Think big, do small, iterate often.

The last three weeks were the mindset: the Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith move on to the frameworks that help you live it.  Anu starts with the difference between a mindset, a framework and a methodology, and a picture frame analogy that does a lot of work for the rest of the conversation: change the picture as often as you like, but saw a side off and it is no longer a frame.  From there it is how organizations choose between Scrum, Kanban and XP (Ryan's honest answer: most default to Scrum because it is the only one they know), the questions each host asks a client before recommending anything, and why Kate once ran Scrum and Kanban side by side with the same team.  Then the Business Agility Institute framework for the leaders who shut down at the word Scrum, the scaling frameworks and the ones that quietly faded.  It closes with four questions to ask before you adopt anything, starting with the one that matters most. What problem are you trying to solve?

Last time it was the WHO: customers, businesspeople, face to face.  This time it is the HOW.  @Kate Megaw, @Anu Smalley and @Ryan Smith finish the Back-to-Basics run through the 12 Agile Principles with numbers 7 through 12, asking the same question of each: what wording would keep someone in legal, marketing, or finance reading?  Working software becomes delivered value in about ninety seconds, no notes.  Sustainable development turns out to be the most ignored principle of the twelve, partly because it says development and partly because people think sustainable means 40+ hours a week.  Technical excellence loses the C-suite at the word technical, and then the three hosts split on whether design has to go too.  Simplicity and the retrospective principle survive untouched, which raises the obvious question of why the retrospective is the first event teams drop. 

The 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto are the most skipped page in agile. Plenty of people can quote the four values.  Far fewer know there are 12 principles sitting underneath, and fewer still could name one. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith continue the Back-to-Basics series by working through the first six, one at a time, asking the same question of each: what wording would make this land for someone in marketing, finance, or HR?  Software becomes value, then the three of them discuss whether value is too vague.  Business people and developers becomes stakeholders and teams, because “I am not a developer” is a very easy way to leave a conversation.  The word project shows up twice and nobody minds anymore, which is a shift from five years ago. And face to face gets a defense from Alistair Cockburn that is worth quoting the next time someone tells you a remote team cannot do it.  The point is not a new set of principles. It is that people shut down when the words do not fit their world, so hand them words that do.