(2024-03-13) Rothman Unemployed Agilists

Johanna Rothman: Unemployed Agilists: How to Show Your Value to Support What Managers Want, Part 1. Every day, I hear more stories of agile coaches or Scrum Masters losing their jobs.

many agile coaches and Scrum Masters do not add more value or realize the value they are supposed to deliver. ((2021-10-29) Cagan Process People)

If you want a new job that will allow you to support more agility in teams and organizations, I recommend you speak the language of the business. That means everyone needs to understand what managers care about and want: more net income.

Let me start with a very simplified profit and loss discussion using the ideas of AARRR “Pirate Metrics” to describe what managers want.

Managing expenses means reducing the costs of supplying products and services to customers. All the costs: marketing costs to acquire customers, onboarding costs to activate customers, and product development costs for the product itself.

There are three elements of value everyone offers for their next position: tangible value, intangible value, and the peripheral benefits

open a new document and put your most recent position at the top of the page. Write down every action you took that focused on any of: customer acquisition, activation, retention, referral, or revenue. In addition, write down every action you took that decreased the costs of product development. Consider the flow metrics, because they're the data that counts.

But if you didn't use the flow metrics? I can hear you yelling at me, “But I made a better environment for the team! That has to count for something!” It does. Those are the intangible or peripheral benefits.

Unemployed Agilists: How to Move from a Staff Role to a Line Job, Part 2. Managers think agile coaching and Scrum Mastering is a staff job, not a line job.

Staff jobs only offer intangible and peripheral value

But line jobs offer value that can result in something the customers can use, which means those jobs offer some sort of net revenue increase

Define Staff and Line Jobs

Staff jobs support the organization's overall mission—as overhead

many staff jobs are commodity positions. While managers can determine how different various developers, testers, UX, etc people are, very few managers can differentiate one agile coach from another. Or, one Scrum Master from another. (legibility)

That often means managers want to categorize an unemployed agilist in “overhead,” not in “R&D.”

Rethink Your Expertise So You Can Apply for a Line Job

Before you became a coach or a Scrum Master, what did you do? What kinds of technical skills did you have?

Functional skills, such as how you build or test the product. For Scrum Masters, have you ever been a project or program manager

Subject matter domain expertise (problem-space and solution-space). At what level do you understand the products you've worked on?

Tools and technology:

Industry expertise.

Assess Your Technical Skills

How many of your technical skills are still useful? I like to say I am an old programmer, because my tools and technology skills are in old languages and operating systems that no one cares about and often, no longer exist.

But I've consulted for a long time.

These skills plus my deep agile and lean understanding, would allow me to use the flow metrics to increase agility.

Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3. I assume you have some sort of functional product development expertise. If not, why are you in technical product development?

Functional skills are not nearly enough. This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility.

Assess Your Product Subject Matter Domain Expertise

There are at least two kinds of domain expertise: the product itself, and agile/lean expertise.

If you can read code and understand the product from the inside out, you have solution-space domain expertise. I expect anyone who touches code to have solution-space expertise. Many testers and UX people also have solution-space expertise, because they understand, from a deep level, how the product works.

If you can assess the product from the outside in, you have problem-space domain expertise. I expect anyone who understands what customers value and expect to have problem-space expertise. That's often product managers, testers, and some UI/UX people.

The more collaborative your team, the more everyone can gain both kinds of expertise.

Assess Your Subject Matter Domain Expertise

All the agile approaches, including Scrum are a subset of lean thinking. Have you read the Kanban guide? If not, read it now. And if you're using Scrum, have you read the most recent version of the Scrum Guide?

hiring managers expect deep agile expertise that connect to the Pirate metrics. (These managers might not know how to ask for what they want, but that's what they want.)... Deep agile subject matter expertise does add value to a team. But surface “expertise”? That add little to no value.

Assess Your Previous Agile Expertise and How it Added Value to Your Previous Teams

Many of these unemployed agilists are victims of the Agile Industrial Complex. Their “Mastery” certifications occur after a two-day class where they played games but did no product development.

if you are also unemployed, you can't easily differentiate your experience from people with light agile expertise.

Or, these people are life coaches who got jobs “facilitating” teams, when they have no sort of product or agile domain expertise... Life coaches have no place at work... If you are a life coach, stop trying to inflict help on people at work. If you have not yet read Bob Galen's Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching (my Amazon affiliate link) or his Agile Coaching Collection on leanpub, read that now.

Unemployed Agilists: Review the Hype Cycle & Your Agility to Help You Manage Future Job Changes, Part 4. Just because people paid you for your past work does not mean they will pay you in the future. All jobs evolve and change as any industry changes. Especially because I see “Agile” as in the “trough of disillusionment” in the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Review the Hype Cycle and the Satir Change Model

that trough of disillusionment (the Transforming Idea in the Change Model) is where people realize there is no silver bullet. Especially, Agile is Not a Silver Bullet. Every change requires work. We can't get something for nothing, and agility requires that managers change the culture.

No one can force change on people with more hierarchical power. Instead, we can invite them to change, by showing the value with the pirate metrics. And, us agilists need to change.

In general, the agile community has either ignored or blamed managers because managers did their jobs. (Just look at the agile manifesto. It has nothing for managers and no link to any form of corporate value.

Many of us agilists have been trying to help managers change. I wrote the Modern Management Made Easy books to support more humane and agile ways of working, but not because these ways are agile. These practices are the most effective ways to manage.

While we now know how to manage agile and lean programs (with both hardware and software) and create an agile approach to the project portfolio, too many organizations do not use those approaches. That's because flow efficiency thinking is so contrary to general accounting practices.

Successful agilists don't expect managers to change. Instead, agilists need to change.

One big idea: integrate agility everywhere, not only in the teams.

start with the pirate metrics (from Dave McClure's 2007 talk) so you can focus on the value you can provide. And use the flow metrics so you can see progress.

Consider these ideas to make agility (not a specific agile approach) more valuable to the managers:

how can you make agility something managers want?

Start any agile effort at any level with principles, not practices

Limit your WIP. So many agile coaches and Scrum Masters want to do “everything.” Or teach “everyone.” Or some other large WIP. How can you show your value doing one or two things extremely well?

Never use story point estimation or measure velocity, because they actively remove value from what managers need to know. Instead, measure cycle time and decide if your current cycle time is okay for your needs.

the world changes constantly. That's why I wonder when agilists tell me they need to do anything “by the book.” The whole point of agility is to learn from what we did before and use that knowledge to adapt to take the next bit of work

integrate adaptability and agility into your life.