AA74 - Bad Certification Experiences & Maybe Bad Certifications...

The topic is bad certifications. So why don't we start by walking through your bad experience. Let's walk through a, a made fatigue example. okay. This isn't, this isn't one of those uh, a non recipe shows where we should say, here's what I made earlier. This is a real life example. Right. So we can maybe talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Let's let's retread that story. so, alright basically. I decided to , go ahead and get certified as a product owner through scrum Alliance. CSPO right. CSPO yeah. Yep., and although I would have preferred to do that in person, , just from a financial and timing perspective, I happen to have some time available over this next week. This was literally yesterday. I started the first day of two., this second. Would have been actually completing right about now. Yeah. And I don't have to be tending that second day cuz it was that bad. so a little bit of background is I do have product experience. I've been working in product as a product owner for five years. So I met coming in this as a brand new person. I do have scrum knowledge. I feel pretty confident in that, but that said there were 19 people in this class, the majority of which had minimal to no knowledge. So this was the first time that they were being exposed to this. Right. So that's number one. at some point during this and, and so I understood. Alright, okay. He did a little survey. People were asking questions. He's like, okay. Oh, I see. There's a lot of BAS and a lot of PMPs in this class. So we're gonna go ahead and guide it in that direction. My first thought was like, why? like, I'm not a BA or a PMP and all right. But I'll go with the flow., and we went through lots of scrum, basic, literally the scrum guide. Here's a person who talked to us for multiple hours. There was very little to no engagement with the actual audience of 20 people, including myself. And, first of all, there was an exercise that came up where he asked us to do a RACI chart. Essentially. It was just a quad. and in this quad, if you could imagine one corner was an other group. One corner was a scrum master group. One corner was the PO and one car corner was the dev and there were multiple then stickies that it, that were things that we, he would ask us to place where they are most appropriate, according to whose responsibility it was. And the one example was definition of done. so we broke up into bro, went out into, broke out breakout groups and discussed this. Now I referenced the scrum guide and the scrum guide very clearly states on the next to last page. If you wanna look it up that if there is already a definition of done that has been, established by your organization, then that must be followed minimally. If there isn't one established then is up to the scrum team, the entire scrum team to create the definition of done. So when he was going through and talking about this, he said it was up to the dev team to create the definition of done. And I challenged him on this and I said, well, isn't it. The scrum team's responsibility to do this. Cuz he was correcting our kind of chart. and so he went through and, and made the couple of references and basically said, well, no, it's actually the devs. And as a scrum master, I would need to uphold the devs opinion on this. And it would probably not be a bad idea for them to consult with. And I might encourage them to consult with the product owner, but that would really be up to them, but it's not up to me to tell them what they should and shouldn't be doing. So again, I challenged him. I brought him to that specific comment page or comment in the, in the actual scrum guide and asked him, I said, at this point you've given me three different answers, like basically the product owner's responsibility, the devs responsibility or coordination between the two. And I'm saying it's actually none of those. It should be the dev team, including scrum master product owner. Right, right. So here was the first experience. And then that ultimately led into a rant about agile Alliance and how much he despised it, which I thought was so odd being that he was providing a scrum Alliance certification but how much he hated it. And it was, they were awful and money hungry and all these things. And I had to kind of calm 'em down, going like, okay, there's benefits to all of these organizations. Not all of them are perfect. I happened to be a member of all of them, and I pull some good from all of these places. and then finally, towards the end of the daylong class of which I spent eight hours still waiting to figure out what information am I going to get about a product owner since this is why I'm taking this class. And at this point now I've spent eight hours and learned nothing about a product owner. So then we had a Q and a, and I decided to stay back and kind of listen in and maybe ask a couple of questions. one of the questions, something came up about JIRA from someone else. And he went on a rant. and when I say a rant, holy crap, a rant about how much he hated JIRA. It is up to us as individuals to make sure we are in control of our own destiny. We make the decisions and we should never choose a company that uses JIRA. It is awful. It is there for management to do nothing more than to micromanage and to push down on the developers and to monitor them and to punish them. And right. And I agreed with him to some extent, and I said, you know what? I, I can tell you that I've seen these things happen. I have, but what I hear you saying over and over and over again, it was that there were people that were using it in this way and so my objection is that the tool isn't the problem, but the people in the manner in which they're deciding to use it is the problem. And I also brought up thinking that there are 19 other people, most of which have zero experience. And he has just told them never to work for a company that uses JIRA, which is the number one industry standard, and now will limit their job pool exponentially. and I mentioned those things to him and he got very angry and basically said, it's up to you. You get to choose. And I choose, I choose not to ever work for a company that uses JIRA because it is awful and all these things. And I said, I'm very frustrated with JIRA. I get that. But I can't blacklist JIRA. Every company that I've worked as a product owner has used a JIRA. Absolutely awful and surprisingly so, because I did my research and realized. in hindsight that honestly scrum Alliance did a very poor job of representing in my, this is just my opinion I would hypothesize that the biographies and the information that is provided on the actual trainers are probably provided by the trainers or the train or the, or the companies that they work for. Probably. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's the case. Yeah. And they're probably not validated either. Right. So, yeah, that was my intensely horrible experience. So had I completed today's eight hours, which all you need to do to get your CSPO is just attend two eight hour days. I would've been awarded a CSPO badge and I could have proudly placed that on and said I'm certified as a, as a product owner. However, my goal was not to go in and get the badge. I really did want to enrich myself. Yeah. And my career. So I chose to actually abandon the class and, and find another more valid trainer. That's a nice way of saying you staged a walk that's right. I did.. I mean, well there's so many questions. I have so many questions. Yeah, there's right. There's, there's a lot here. Right? I don't know where to start. First of all, I'm proud of you for staging a walkout. I feel that I should in some way, shape or form try to present the other side. I mean I, I already know. I, I can already hear every corporate dirt bag I've ever worked for on the other side, just keep your mouth shut and get your shirt. Yeah, yeah. And go apply for your jobs. What's your problem. How come you can't just be for every person who like you, who walks out there's 18 other people that just kept their mouth shut and got their shirt that that's, that's the arguing point of this one. Yes. That I can't like, I feel I can bring up, but I can't really. No and that is exactly what I refuse. I mean, I refuse, I I hope that at some point I will be able to be providing some quality education, , for other potential product owners or people who are looking to do kind of change in, in their organizations. And I want to do that through experience and learning from people who can, as I said, enrich me, and this was not that. Yeah. Yeah. So given that certifications are a necessary evil, they're here to stay. I mean, you just can't avoid that. The thing that's important here is this, if you look at the, the graph of a number of certificates or people that have been provided certifications, and had their precious dollars robbed off of them. The graph has just gone up exponentially over the last few years, and my mind goes back to where it all started. This industry really mm-hmm, started with PMI. Initially that graph was fairly flat and people used to say, oh, I'm one of only 200 certified PMPs in the world. And it went from 200 to 1000 to, I mean, just through the roof, right? Yeah. What's really a shame. Is the organization put out a goal saying by this Christmas we hope to reach 50,000, who would be the 50,000. Right. Really? This is your goal. And, and, and this is continuing with these other bodies, scrum Alliance. Sure. You know, well, agile Alliance, anybody really, I you name an Alliance or, or certified provider org, scrum, they're all in it for the money. and they really don't care. So as a result, they've got these trainers to your point earlier out there that can stamp out certificates and with COVID. I think that acted as the gasoline on this fire, because people could stay home. People could get a certification from somebody who is of dubious quality, anywhere in the world for a third of the price for less than a third in places these people are offshore. so if you're looking at it from your own perspective, you say, well, it's the same agile Alliance certificate or scrum Alliance certificate that I'm getting, but I'm getting it for a fraction of the price. And I don't have to travel. There's no flight cost hotel costs. So consequently, the number of certified folks just went up even more through, through the pandemic. so here I understand all about, do your research, right. And all of that stuff. But that said, if the bodies were really looking to put out quality in terms of, people that can come out and, and practice their craft, as opposed to just wave a certificate, we wouldn't be in this spot, unfortunately they're just in it for the money. So it comes down to that. I believe that that's what I say. the other thing is, as far as these trainers, they have to be certified themselves. Mm-hmm and I personally believe there's a, there's a huge gap here, which. You can get a certificate by sitting in a class for two days, get the next one, get the next one. There are many that you can get that way. You may once in a while, have to take a little test here and there and that's it at no point, is it a requirement to have worked in the field? Well, the, the, well that's, that might not be true because the scrum Alliance you have to prove a certain amount of expertise. I remember when I took the A-CSM , you have to prove that you worked as a scrum master or in a capacity that kind of towards being a scrum master for, I don't remember what it was 18 months. I don't, I don't remember was it? It is you're right. Something like that. So there's many more requirements to say that now, now I only have the entry , PO cert because after taking the ACSM, I was like, I don't really see a lot of value in going back and getting the advanced. Or professional, any, anything quite honestly. Uh, so you you're right. I don't what you need to go to the professional level above the advanced level. I don't know what you need. You need the advanced certificate is what you need. Yeah, but I don't know how much more industry experience they require past. I'm not aware of it. I've I've gone through it. I'm not aware of it. Okay. What I don't, what I know also is that from the professional, getting up to CST, you do need to shadow people. You need to you need to get certain number of hours as it were coaching hours under your belt, et cetera. But that's academic mm-hmm that is not practicing using the knowledge you've acquired for a living mm-hmm working for a company doing it in the field. Right. I think that's lacking personally. Yeah., yeah. I mean, look, the PMI requires a thousand hours of something, project admin, something like that before they'll grant you a certificate. Yeah. But that's not real. Work practicing as a project manager, you're doing something to say I've worked essentially. Yeah. which I think is a gap. I really do. I think if you are at the top level, providing certificates as certified trainer, you need to have worked in the industry as that person for a while, it's a, as a PO for a number of years, perhaps even led something senior in the company. I, I think that's fair. I don't know how you don't do that and still come out with the quality that's needed. I can say with a hundred percent certainty that for the CSPO that this was a certified scrum trainer for product owners and he did not have any product owner experience firsthand. Now as a SCR, he was a scrum master and a developer., practiced, both knew the scrum guide forward and backward, , interpret it uniquely, but knew the scrum guide. but had zero yeah. You know, firsthand knowledge. Yeah. What, what he did do was work with product owners as a scrum master, but that's not the same. That's not the same thing. Is that like a, like a movie based on the book? Is that like really a TV movie based on the book? let me, I don't ever get to take the you can do it opinionated. Yeah. You, you go to the other side home because I need someone to back up my rant for a second. All right. If you tell me that your developer. and you're the scrum master for your team? I'm automatically suspect automatically I'm suspect. Cause a lot of times I see technical leads or somebody in a supervisory level in development who plays the role of the scrum master. They think that like, that they think the scrum master's job is just to like run the meetings and go down the board and be like, what are you working on? What are you working on? What are you working on? How, how come you hadn't taken this item, you should be done with this item, pick this next item up. And that's what they think is a scrum master. Right. But beyond my, my normal incendiary rant cause I'm on the heavily edited Brian cam right now. I, I would challenge those people to say like, have they ever climbed the ladder in their organization to lobby for change? Have they ever in their organization connected with leadership to try to influence the way that product does roadmaps or to influence the way that budgets are done or to influence the, the way that teams are broken down or to lobby for small teams and end to stay out of particular key discussions about the way certain things are developed specifically. Like have they done that while also serving in the capacity as a scrum master? And usually I find out that's not true. No, they haven't. No, they they're. They're just the boss with a new title because they think that's what most applies. That that's what I have seen and I'll stand by that one. And I I'm happy to die on that hill. I have experienced and witnessed the same, the, the same thing what's interesting is that I didn't know that the animosity, that there is the undertone of animosity, that there is in so many organizations and it may be something similar to what you're describing between development and even scrum masters and maybe it's scrum master or slash developer integrated and the product owner where I. Have always worked truly as part of that scrum team. Right. and embraced that and worked collaboratively with my scrum master. Yeah. And I'm finding that that's not necessarily the case where you've got the villain product owner, who's the dictator trying to shove things down your throat. I, I mean, I haven't personally ever done that or learned to do that or experience that. So that's just not the way I learned to work, fortunately. Mm. So I'm gonna take the contrarian interview cuz we have to it's time argue gradual it's it's time. Yeah. Brian, anybody on the team could play the role of a scrum master. Why not a developer? Why not tester? I'll self organizing. Right? I'll take a tester over a developer any day of the week because their, their discipline lends itself to what a scrum master does empowers a team unblocks, a team drives out into the organization for what the team needs rather than a developer, because. there is a chance, with the tester, there is a chance of like the, I feel you need an extraordinary developer to be able to both see the technical domain in front of them, the business problem in front of them and how it connects to what connects to the customer. There's three things, there's it? There's the internal, technically the internal team, the external to the rest of the business, but still in internal to the company and then external from the company to the customer. There's three different viewpoints when you're talking about any one thing and that person needs to see those three perspectives. So I guess what I'm saying to, to wrap what I'm saying is there needs to be whoever. Playing the role playing, playing around. that's good to own land who whoever's playing the role needs to have a certain level of empathy for a wide range of audience. So staying on the opposite stance, I'll say isn't that what we have the POS for and product managers. They talk to the customers. They're the voice of the customer. We talk to them. They talk to the customer. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I wasn't, I wasn't listening. Say, say that again. I'm sorry. I didn't catch any of that. So the pro that the product owner was the advocate and the translator for the customer to the, to the developer. So the developer doesn't need to think about that and have empathy for the customer. They far removed. Sorry. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I still wrong. Still didn't catch any, I'm sorry. Like on purpose in, in the world that you've brought up, somehow everybody on the team doesn't talk to the customer like that, that that's, that's, what's getting lost. So why, why I'm losing what you're saying, maybe in the editing, it'll be more clear to what you're saying can you please restate what you just said? I will restate the developer who is playing the part of his scrum master, in this case, , you're saying need to have empathy. The customer. Yes. And I'm saying as that developer taking on that hat, which is very uncomfortable, by the way, that , the, the developer would argue, why do I have to be em, empathetic with the customer? Isn't that the product on his job there, after all are the voice of the customer. You, did you tell us what? And we'll figure out how and leave me alone. I'm going back to the basement with my team. Okay. You get, you get him stormy and then I'll jump on after I have him mentioned that so as a good product owner, so number one, I should be or a good product owner should be involving the entire scrum team. With the customer. So one of the practices that I that I regularly enact is getting my development team and the scrum master dependent on if they're assigned directly to our team or potentially multiples, but getting them involved with, , regular interactions with the customer and what I've found to be very effective is and beyond just the sprint review. So I'm talking about literally that, that middle of the, so we get feedback loop we're getting that feedback loop in sprint review, but as a product owner in between those two weeks, I'm continuously going back or should have scheduled time to work with my friendlies or people that I am kind of checking in with and saying, here's what we're moving forward with. I might have some really low fidelity ideas and that's a meeting that I have found. Intensely beneficial to bring my development team into and all of a sudden, and oftentimes those development teams have never experienced anything like that. So they're developing, or we have an idea and I'm going to put it in front of a customer and I'm going to do kind of an AB test or I'm going to do some low fidelity type thing and go like, tell me how you would use this. Tell me how you might how would you use this? And all of a sudden they're seeing themselves get stuck because they have a modal popped up and it says start and right below it, there's a start on the bottom of the screen and they're going I'm confused, which start. And all of a sudden I have a developer that's going like oh, I can see why that would be confusing for the end user. Sure. Light bulbs are going off. So I think that's on the product owner to absolutely should be on the product owner. Everyone should be empathizing with the end user that's who we're building for and all of a sudden, oh my gosh, the mind shift change of that development team. So that's been amazing. Number two, just a point that I wanted to make to yours. And that is that if you have a good scrum master and you have a scrum master who is instilling all of the knowledge and values and truly in helping your team embody whatever framework you happen to be using, but agile principles or scrum or XP or kanban, whatever it is, I mean, ultimately they should be working themselves out of the job, out of a job. Right? So ultimately we should have a development team that can be able to make those decisions and facilitate a meeting because they are mature enough or have become mature enough, to do that. Right. So if you've got a good scrum master and you've got a mature team there is definitely a possibility that you could have a team that is able to be self functioning in that way without necessarily the overarching, constant eye of a scrum master. So while I agree with everything you said, I'm gonna stay on this side. Okay. I'll put on my defensive posture. So as a developer, you're saying, why are things not getting done in the sprint, but then you involve me with all these meetings, with the customer and everything else. And just a waste of time. Really? For developers. That's somebody else's job. You take the scrum master. If you want, take the BA you'll just leave us developers alone. What do you say to that? So, I mean, we should be so we're empirical, right? Oh, I was gonna say you're fired. Get off my team. No. So I'm gonna meet you where you are. So try to figure out why is it that you're feeling that way, right? So you are pushing back because do you not have enough time? You know, you're feeling stressed. You don't have enough time to get done what you need to get done. Your needs aren't being met. You don't have the tools you need. I mean, what is it about this? Do we not have trust? Right. Have I, I created that trust and you don't see the value in it because maybe you haven't tried it. So I'm going to meet you where you are and say, you know what? let's have an experiment. Come to, and I'm not asking you to do this every week or multiple times a week, maybe once a sprint, maybe once every other sprint. Right. So that you can stay related. And what I have never had a team that didn't get so much out of those meetings and feel like, and have light bulbs go off and go like, wow. So I would ask you and say, you know what I hear what you're saying, and I would try to do a little of an exploration and figure out where are you coming from? You're pushing back and I wanna try and figure out why and whether I can or not. I'm gonna ask you to trust me and just come to one, see if we can get some value out of that. And then we're gonna talk about it in the retrospective. Okay. Well, I'm gonna stay on this side just for this one last bit. It's very uncomfortable here. okay. Story. I can do that, but you know, my matrix manager. I wants me to log the hours I do and what I'm doing, how do I log this? You spent time with the customer. I'm not developing, so I'm afraid I'm gonna be judged cuz they're the ones that are judging me, evaluating me, et cetera. so that's gonna come down badly on me. I won't get the raise I want, because they're gonna see fewer hours worked my hands on keyboard. Okay. They're they're fired too. yeah. So yeah. So now I hear, I hear, I hear an issue with psychological safety here immediately. So I would be collaborating at this point probably with the scrum master. That's an impediment for you, right?, so I'm hearing some issues with trust and psychological safety., I dependent on the dynamics in the office. It might be something that I feel comfortable kind of addressing IME., interacting individually., it may be something that I want to, and probably most appropriate for me to get the scrum master involved and make sure that they're aware and see if we can, speak to this person and make sure that they understand where we're coming from. Make sure that they get on the right page with. So that you're not feeling the pressure that you're gonna be somehow punished. Right. And so we can come back to you and say, you know what? This has been cleared. We've got it okayed. We've created a bucket for you to put your time in, so that's probably how I'd address that. All right. I'm off the other side. I don't like being there. I know, I know I, how you do it, we can week out. I know. What are your thoughts? I don't have any thoughts. I, I, you have so many thoughts. My mind is a a quiet rage at this point you guys just you've funneled it down to the scrum master's job of driving around the organization to figure out like, wait a minute. Is this person's development manager looking at them from the perspective of how many hours are you punching into an actual development work doing versus doing. You know, quote non-development work or, or non-productive work. I gotta put it that way. Right, right. like it's not, non-productive like, I, I, as a product owner would be what's the word in, in size? Is that the word inci, like in sensens in size? I don't know. In senses, in, in inside devised would sense. No, enraged would be my clear word. In a matrix organization, I have to assume that my developers that are on my team as a product owner are under the supervisory, level of some development manager or director of development or somebody somewhere else. And then maybe my testers are under some test manager or something like that. Sure. And maybe all the product owners are under one product and maybe, maybe the scrum masters are under whatever. If we actually have, if we're lucky enough to have scrum masters, maybe they're under some. I agile coach or something like that, organizationally, or maybe developers are, people are playing their role halftime or whatever part-time and we don't really have any the nice thing about organizations like that, like I used to not like organizations like that, because I feel that if they're not valuing the role of having somebody as an organizational change agent full time they really don't understand what they don't really understand the agility and they don't really care about improving and all that stuff is just like nonsense to them. You know what I mean? So fluff, I, I don't know a better way to explain I used to think that way and then,, it's still sort of think that way , but, when my developers like ask me like, Hey, well whoa, other than running the events what should I be doing as a scrum master? I'm like, well, you should be climbing in the organization to your next supervisory level and the level above that to implement change, that helps our team, that unblocks our team. And if one of the blockers of our team is, for example, oh, we're all measured individually with the number, the number of check in checkouts or whatever lines of code lines of code or something like that. We're all individually matter. At the end of the year, our performance is measured based on that or that number of bugs or something like that. We all work as a team and everything gets checked in and needs, a couple of , code review, check off whatever on the PR you know, a couple different people to approve the PR or whatever approvals. That's what it's called., it's called that why are the metrics, the hard metrics I'm being judged by? Why are they one way? And then the entire way that I work day to day is a completely separate, is completely separated from what I'm judged on, you know? So, the, the, I should be judged on the teamwork, the whole team, and then the bonuses and all that stuff should be collective as a team. And then the, the, the pushback on that, I already know the pushback on that. You don't, so you don't need, oh, so you don't need to, I've already lost you're at the pushback. The, the pushback of that one is the pushback of that one is like, well, what happens if somebody slacks on the team? Well why don't you leave that to the team? to deal. They'll figure it out. Yeah. You know, why don't you leave that to the team to deal with and then, and then like you, you don't think that, the test manager is not gonna hear the gripes of the team members saying like, my test person is super slow. You don't think that the development manager who owns all owns who, huh? All the developers across the whole organization is not going to hear that. You got one developer that's super slow with everything. You don't think they're gonna hear that like, like what you are trying to solve. Doesn't even warrant solving. Yeah. It doesn't even want, yeah. It's it's first of all, it's not your problem solve, right? It now is a manager in the organizations problem to solve. It always was fir first of all, it always was, this is, this is the whole reason to have management in the organization. If we roll the clocks back to 1913, and we go all the way back to the core of the original management in. Organizational design. Like those manager's job was to see who was and was not doing as prescribed on the checklist and then to, to call'em out on it and to deal with things. So, , why would you go and create a chart that says I'm gonna go pick up pig iron, and it should take 56 steps to go from that pile to the train cart to drop it off. And I've got one employee who takes 80 steps and takes three times longer than the other employees. You've documented it, you know how long it takes a normal employee, you know that person's not cutting it. Why are you not stepping in and doing your job? Not like now we've, we've, we've taken this discuss. Of like, you know what I mean?, we've taken the discussion back to, to, to the core of where a lot of our discussions go to is like, why is management know this problems? And they don't do anything about it. Right, right. No, that's the spot. I think we're getting way away from some of the agile principles we're talking about. You're right. El self-organizing teams. Sure. And, so the opportunity to say within a team, typically we have different levels of expertise, people who have different, different experience levels, different interests , and typically I have found. Left to their own devices. Teams actually find great ways to create that balance. Now, if you have somebody coming in and just truly being dead weight and not pulling, pulling their weight, rather than someone who's just trying hard or maybe been assigned something that they're just not good at or not aware of. And then you have a team. I mean, I've seen multiple teams where we have somebody who's a more junior and they will pair program with somebody who's more senior and all of a sudden, now we have a stronger team for it. Yeah. this is not something that I would step in and on, or ask management to step in on. And if we do, we have created already a break in trust, micromanagement, and we're going away from the principles that we want to instill in these teams. Yeah. I'll give you the opposite of that from a product perspective. I was at an organization one time where I was product manager and I was not in charge of hiring in any way, shape or form any of the developers on the team. I don't remember the organiz, the director of development, some somebody on that, that level, the director of development. So the director of development hired all of the developers and I was the product manager and I had two teams at that organization and the director of development purely used offshore talent. All the developers were offshore. And all the developers that were offshore were also there, there were some, there, there was a mix of senior and junior devs, but the way that this director of development hired, he hired front end developers and he hired backend developers. And there were, there was like one or two people on the whole team or, or across both teams. There was like, there was like one or two, I can't remember that were like full what you would think of as full stack developers. So there was like one, I would probably say there's one, there was one full stack developer and everybody else was either a front end or a backend developer. And, as the product person, I basically had to plan not only, well, we went through a team split where there, it was one giant team that went into two separate teams, but I had to go through and I had to say, well, when I'm going through a team split, I have to make sure that I have either a balance of front end back end, cause you can't have with just one team, be a front end all the front end developers on one team. So I was like, each team has to be able to be handed a business problem and to be able to solve the full business problem both front end and back end. Right. I, of course would've preferred both of my teams to be just completely staffed with full stack developers so that I can hand them a problem. And it doesn't matter who works on it. But that, that was an example where I had to deal with sort of a constraint because when I was bringing work in, I had to make sure that there was the back end front end. We're talking to each other when we were going through playing, like I, I might have written a story and then let the developers split it out between back end and front end between the two of them. But I think I was telling the story because, you don't always have control as the product owner about these things, but, but every time that we had a session with the executives, like a, like a higher level product session, like a product management type of session of like, this is what we're doing and whatnot like I would highlight because you've chosen to spend less money by hiring more junior developers that have to do this front and back end stuff. That's why we have to proceed in this fashion. Where I'm BA I'm basically moving half as fast because I have from the perspective of like, yes, we're spending half the cost on developers, but we're basically moving half as fast because we only have one developer can do a back end task. And then that task has to sit while the front end developer codes it, and then it can't go out. We are doing agile development inside the sprint, but it's sort of like, it's a less com component based teams. Yeah. It's tough. so I actually had a fantastic experience. I don't know if this would've worked where you were at, but, that used in a similar case now this was, it would be different a bit different. So this was Greenfield. We were, we ended up, we had five teams product owners. Mm-hmm we had created the, the roadmap and, and, yeah, the beginnings of the roadmap and had decided which big portions of that we were going to be responsible for. We literally had an MVP deployable, something that we were going to deploy within three months. An actual product, and then building on that over the, the following year. and we had, we decided to have self-selecting teams in the manner in which we did this. So each of us as product owners came together. We knew generally what we needed to solve in the next 3, 6, 9, and 12 months in, or in what order. Right. And we came up with a rough way to do that, a rough roadmap we decided and, and kind of figured out, okay what's the level of work, what's our expertise, what are we interested in doing? And then we came up with a general idea of kind of buckets of things that we wanted to be responsible for. Then we held a a half day session where we bought all of our development teams that were already on. And in an effort to kind of use change management and change to get them in the mindset of change management, we decided to change from teams to squads, right. So using the Spotify terminology, but it helped us get into that change mindset. Sorry. He says Spotify let's continue. So it's not a model. Right. But we used terms. Right. So the, the point there though was to actually use a different term, which got us into the, the mind, the, the change mindset. Right. Mm-hmm so, all right. So we went from teams to squads. each product owner went up and presented. Here's my mission. This is what I am attempting to accomplish. Here's generally the timeline that I'm going to accomplishment and, and, and you know what I want to accomplish. Sure. Then each of us went to a table and we did have leadership there and they laid some ground rules and they're like, all right, developers now what we need to accomplish and who's responsible for what. we're gonna give you half an hour, 45 minutes, whatever you're gonna go around, talk, meet, decide where do you wanna work? What do you wanna work on? Whom do you wanna work with? Mm-hmm it's up to you to make sure the teams are full stack are balanced in regards to their their experience. So they gave some ground rules and they said, if you can't do it on your own, then management will step in and leadership will step in and need to reorganize. I will tell you, at the end of that half day, we didn't have to reorganize anything. As a matter of fact, we had someone who was senior and looked over and saw a team that was just mostly junior devs and said, ah, man, they're gonna struggle. And he's like, you know what, let me switch took that on himself. It was an amazing experience. And here's what we, what happened. There was, they had ownership. like all of a sudden they, they had ownership, right. They were able to immediately be involved, engaged, trust was established. Like it was amazing all of these, these intangible things that ended up happening. That's obviously not possible in all scenarios, but gosh, if you can do it, I, I just can't even describe the experience and how absolutely fantastic it was. That's great to hear because in, in most organizations, especially large ones, you don't have that luxury. You get handed mm-hmm, a list of crew. This is your team. Now I was gonna say like, my experience has been the opposite. Like the more, the more senior developers that are in charge of things like that, or that have influence into things like that. they'll want to hand down things from. Team to team. Like they they'll want to take away the empowerment of teams. Like it's funny cuz they do it to themselves. Yeah. And then they'll turn around and complain about about it. POS doing whatever or setting unreasonable deadlines when, when they are the ones committing to the unreasonable deadlines in the first place. The experience that you went through, I could, I could, I could tell, I was gonna say smell. I could tell that this, this trainer's background was more technical bent. Oh yeah. And he definitely wasn't a PO like maybe he was a developer. I don't know. But he was, yeah. But I, I could tell because I would expect a, a class led by a product person to have a completely different. Tone than a class led by a developer or, or a scrum master for that matter, actually mm-hmm cause if you think about the entry level CSM and the entry level, CSPO again, I went through both of them. I, my experience probably 75%, I don't, I don't know how much the actual curriculum, but I, I, and it was a while ago too. So I recall about 75% of the content between the CSM and the CSPO is basically shared. So you take one, you're not really you're getting a lot of duplication of learning once you go to the other one. but , I would say that there, if the PO classes were actually led by people who did the PO job assuming that they had assuming that they had some kind of say over the. You know that the curriculum is not mandated in some you mm-hmm, certain amount of curriculum is probably mandated in some way, shape or form, but assuming they could blow through that quickly and get onto the part that you actually care about. I would say you probably would've a different experience. Agreed. I have no doubt. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I really almost, I feel like that should be a prerequisite. I mean, how many how many classes do you go to where you have instructors that don't have experience in the subject that they are teaching? Unless you're a coach teaching science in a high school kind of thing, but you know, I mean, coach Khan shout out to you. Yeah. Sorry. but yeah, I think that would make the difference. And then to your point, as far as the overlap and I think there's some, so number one, I think that one of the ways that that could really benefit to your point is to require some actual working knowledge, some industry working knowledge, working in that role. number one, and number two, since you mentioned, there is so much overlap. And what I can tell you is from my experience just eight hours yesterday, almost all of it was spent on the scrum guide. Mm-hmm , which I think probably had a lot to do with the fact that this was a developer who was also a scrum master and knew the scrum guide and exactly where to point to this and that. So that was kind of, that was his safe space. That's what he knew. Mm-hmm but. for instance, the CSM, which is the certified scrum master, which is all about the scrum guide. Yeah. A hundred percent front to back. If that were prerequisite, now we create that baseline knowledge as a prerequisite and cannot have all of that duplication and actually start diving into the meat and potatoes of product ownership. Yeah. Yeah. I, that's an interesting, interesting proposition that a CSA would prerequisite for CSPO. I certainly agree. You need a baseline level of knowledge to build upon when we go into a class, cuz not everybody's on the same page, right? When, when you had 18 people, 19 people in your class, mm-hmm, not everybody is at the same place, so they have to cover a certain amount. I understand that., if you had to mandate a CSM, some PO some. Wanna be POS , may say, why do I have to do that? I just want pursue a PO role, not scrum master. So why do I have to do a CSM class first, right. That I have to pay for. So perhaps a way out kind of like a compromise might be that, and this is true. What I'm about to say, I would say is true of not only a CS P class, but also a CSD or a CSM, even right. Mm-hmm is to have a prerequisite of the agile fundamentals class, which is where they cover all of basics, fundamentals of agile to bring everybody at that level. And then when you go in, if you're a developer taking a CSD class, you can focus on that. If you're a CSBO you focus on that CSM, you focus on that. That might be a way out. the other way, if you're mandating a CSM is. Yeah, the scrum lines will be happy. I'm sure. Cuz they're getting more money. Right. But a lot of the attendees may not be, cuz they're having to spend money on two certifications. Mm-hmm when all they wanted was the CSPO it's just something to think about. I don't know, man. I'm thinking about the, thinking about what the arguing point to this would. And I'm not coming up with anything great. Like I, the, the, the, the thing that I'm coming up with that's great is just delete the middle tier certifications, like delete them, or don't, don't actually, don't delete them, delete the first tier certifications. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. And replace them with the CSM. Yeah. Okay. And so everyone, like what will be the, the arguing point is like, well, what would be the advantage of having your POS have to go through CSM first? Like they wouldn't want to do that cuz they don't care about CSM. I'm like, eh, yeah. I mean, I, I understand kind of what you're saying, but this CSPO is a retread of the CSM anyway. Mm-hmm so you might as well learn the rules of the game that you're operating in first. And uh, like you're basically saying like everybody should know the rules of the. The developers, scrum master team member, do whatever. You know what I mean? The PO doesn't matter. You should know the rules again. You should know their events. Here's what happens at the events. Here's how to facilitate the events. Here's what is expected during each one. Here's what you look for. I know what the basic one does anymore. Like here, here's the basic things leadership should be looking for I, I don't know. Yeah, it's all of that. That's what it's in the edge of fundamental for super basic type of stuff. but then the step up from that for a scrum master are these advance what you get in the advanced CSM class. So the step up from that for scrum master is here are some advanced facilitation tactics. Mm-hmm , here are some ways to engage your leadership. Here are some ways. Climb in the organization without getting blocked or here are some basic coaching skills mm-hmm to try to, to, to advance relationships. And do you know what I mean? That, that kinda stuff, whereas the PO side of that beyond the how to facilitate ceremonies, whatever you wanna call 'em right. Then ceremonies. What, what the basic framework is the next step up for a PO from that is how do you manage backlog? How, how do you better split stories? How do you how do you take some of these? Some things we talk about spike stories and stuff like that, that aren't really well defined. Like how do you take things when your team is not punching out the exact same widgets every time where everything can fall into the same complexity box at the same time. How do we deal with situations where we have to deal with ambiguity in the situa like that, that kind of advanced stuff. You know what I mean? That's what I think of for, for and then I don't know what you get with the the professional level cert, because I, I don't have the professional level cert. I mean, look, I think if you just reduce the middle layer, as you suggest, mm-hmm, one of the things they have to do in my opinion is to then mandate a certain level of experience before you can get to that. Sure. cuz you don't want people that take a class and then next weekend they take the next one, right? The advanced one. That's not gonna serve them any good mm-hmm or the industry. so yeah, that could work potentially, but go back to the providers of these papers. right. It's it's less money the minute you eliminate one of them. Yeah, I get that. Um, so that that's probably not gonna happen either. I, I get that, but this is like this, this is, this is my pie in the sky version of it would be nice. If like scrum lines for, I just picking one outta the ear like on their website, , they will tell you this person has X amount of experience in in the product owner role. The problem with that is like you, you would have to dig deeper to, to double check you'd have to go there, LinkedIn you'd I don't even know where you run a background check require FBI fingerprinting I don't, I don't know how deep you can get into this there's a certain amount of, of like, that would be the, that would be the counterpoint to like, well, don't pick a bad trainer. Yeah. You know what I mean? That, that would be the counterpoint to that. Yeah. I agree. Absolutely. And being recently on the scrum Alliance website and trying to research trainers there isn't any opportunity to do ratings on scrum Alliance. So some of the trainers have links to like trust pilot or Google reviews, but there's nothing on the scrum Alliance website. Yeah. That allows you as a student to rate a trainer period. Yeah. I would think that's on purpose. Sure. I was just gonna say that, but I mean, but yes, unfortunately that is tarnishing their, I mean, from, I just imagine that's tarnishing their name. I mean it is, is it the crappy one? Is it because all these crumps, all these scrum trainers are stamping out certs and paying them money. So, I can bring this back to something that's very real for everybody to listening to the podcast, which is why I hate social media. Like I hate social media because it like I'll I'll, I don't know which one to pick on. Uh, I wanna pick on Instagram. I wanna pick on LinkedIn. I wanna pick on LinkedIn because I feel they've just taken the bad ever since Microsoft bought them, they they've been taken the bad from all over the place. Uh, but I wanna pick on Instagram because like Instagram used to be like, just you'd take pictures of things. And like, I I remember having an Instagram account when there, like you couldn't even, I don't even think you could write text. It, it would literally was just pictures, you know? And people would like your pictures and I'm like, this is cool. This just, you take pictures and you post 'em, there's not there's no, there's no drama involved. and I was like, it's really cool. It's like, it was a thing for photographers and whatnot like that. It was like that type of social, like sort of like flicker. Way back in the day it's like the, the photographers, social media we like filters and stuff like that. So but like now it's the they wanna be TikTok, you know what I mean? They, because they're like, oh, we like money. And we want people to stay in the app, cuz that, that is the, that is the metric that we've rallied behind of time for users in the app in one session. And we will literally burn our entire app to the ground to increase the time that people spend in the app. And the experience is garbage. It's just, it's nothing but ads now so again, like the reason I kind of bring that up is like it, what your company prioritize. Kind of changes the whole experience until the whole product is garbage mm-hmm right. And that that's again, if the only thing you care about is like, well, we got our money. Mm-hmm I, every time they turn into training class, they're sending us, our, our, our, our bucks. So I think you can make money and still be ethical. And I think there's actually an ethical issue here too, in the sense that, yeah. Okay. They're making money., but with these subpar trainers and with the experience that I had yesterday with 19 other people in the room, the majority of which this was their intro into agile scrum mm-hmm product period. They don't know what good is. So their ex their basis of what good is, is what they experience their basis of what agile and scrum is, is what they saw. And I know that not to be true, just because I've been in, I've been in this for a little while. I'm not some OG like you guys, right. You've been a lot longer than me, but long enough to know that what I saw was a bunch of BS. So it's just a matter of time. If we're churning out these people who are being trained in a subpar manner, they are ultimately, he. You they're ending up, over a period of time, just eliminating themselves right. At, at what point do we surpass? So you said exponentially they've been growing as far as trainers, right? What percentage of those trainers actually meet any particular level? Which by the way, we don't have any way to gauge that. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. So what benchmark is, is any one of those actually meeting to train these people properly. And those that are falling below that benchmark and the people that are walking away, trained and now certified, and now on their new way to become the next trainer, this is getting watered down and worse and worse. And we wonder why we have companies who can't grasp agile, like right. We can't have, we we're, we're churning out people that don't freaking know what it is. Let me add gasoline before you before we jump on that one, because I wanna, I want, I want to crowbar this into the topic of, we've gone to training with people like this in training classes like this, where I'm like, I'm very worried about these people going into industry mm-hmm with what they've taken away from this class. And those people move into director of agile development roles, or, you know what I mean, high, high level roles in organizations. Cause they've got 15 certs or whatever, you know what I mean? Right. Under the belts that they had gotten in within the course of six months , and they become. The face of industry. I wanted to crowbar this into the category of these people will come onto companies in high level positions over time. And they will be the ones to hire people or, or the other thing is companies looking to like, oh, oh, this agile thing, we gotta get this agile thing going on. Like, they'll look to hire these people and they'll look to the market and they don't have anything to grasp onto. They don't know how to hire good candidates in these positions. So they'll more certifications the better mm-hmm like that, that, so the, the, the problem propagates. pass the, the, the certification industrial complex into industry and now industry gets diluted down. Yes, I talk when I ever, I talked, I, I, I seriously talk to head hunters. every, probably every two weeks I will be talking to head hunters and they're just, they don't know what they're looking for. Mm-hmm, the companies there we're trying to recruit for. Don't know what they're looking for. Absolutely. And I don't mind sitting down, I'm not really looking for a job, but I, I don't mind sitting down and talking with them and talking about like, Hey, these are the questions you should be asking. These, these are the red flags. You should be looking for actual experience candidates that you're gonna be getting. These are the things that if you find that they're not gonna. Look for these positions. Like they they're gonna run from these, if these situations are happening. Yeah. They're gonna run from these positions and like may, like maybe you can take it way, way back to like the first 10 minutes of podcast. Like maybe if you have I don't know, recruiters are just recruiters that are just trying to put butts and seats and collect their 20% or whatever, 50% or whatever they're trying to get. Like maybe they don't, they could care less. Like whatever dude I'm getting paid, leave me alone. Mm-hmm right. It's possible. But that, that's the thing like the, the, the problem with the training body only caring about money is they're not helping industry at that point. The same thing with college, you know what I mean? Just, just, just taking people's money and churn out degrees. You are not helping industry. You're just saddling people with a bunch you're basically taking people's. and you're not giving them something. That's gonna be valuable if we're going, if I'm gonna put a product slant sure. I would be remiss if I didn't mention what I think might be worth trying as a remedy to this situation is go back to the old days of journeymen and women work with somebody. Yeah. Forget the certifications. That's right. Forget them. I said, right. Oh, go back. Work with somebody for years. Work there and then have that person vouch for you. Mm-hmm yes. He's good. No, he's not. Yeah. He can catch a fly with one chopstick, whatever it is. Mm-hmm . That is the only way I know. I, I keep thinking about Mr. Miyagi. Oh, Hey, you wanna challenge? Yeah, one job. Just one chop seems excessive. Yeah. Little excessive. That was Bruce Lee. Not, not Mr. MIGI. The one chop check was yeah, no, no. No, yeah. Anyway, so yeah, I think it's worth thinking through this right? While we still have a few people that can actually do the job yeah. Is for them to take onto their belt. You know, some of these people bring them in and groom them. Uh, yes. I'll use that word cuz I mean that in that way mm-hmm, groom them through the trade mm-hmm you know, and then have them come out and do the same thing. Mm-hmm the only thing that flies against this approach is volume. You don't have certificates, you don't have volume. There are only a few people that can do this and do it justice mm-hmm yeah. That's what I'll say. Yeah. I love that. You said that and I will tell you that actually is something that I have been desperately looking to find in, in for over the last I would say. I don't know, six or eight months, cuz you know, a after I've decided to kind of move towards this mission, just I love to teach because I love to learn and the more that I teach, the more I learn, the more relevant I stay, I just enjoy it. And I always have but I want to be somebody good. And so my goal has been to try to find for instance, consulting agencies, or maybe that has some kind of a, a leveling approach where they bring you in and allow you to work with a team. Yeah. So you, you could really learn the ropes now. I mean, I have a, a great understanding. I have confidence I can get up. I can talk, but I wanna do it. Right. And I don't wanna have to use clients as I refuse to use clients as Guinea, pigs mm-hmm . And I refuse to perpetuate what I have for by firsthand experience experienced as an, a huge problem in this industry as of yesterday. Well, hat off to you for, for taking a stance there, cuz most people don't. So first of all, kudos for that. Absolutely. Well, thank you. I think strong Alliance is Missing a truckload of money right there. I think again, I think if we're gonna dip into fixes for a second, like I, cuz I totally want to get talking about your if we're gonna dip into fixes for a second talking about how can we help companies, um be more aware and to be more I guess, effective in their hiring mm-hmm um, yeah, there, there probably should be some kind of base level. I, I think the base level entry though, I don't know if I agree with retitling it as like ALIST or whatever. I would want anyone who goes through the base level entry to be able to conduct the sessions, to be able to conduct the events mm-hmm to, to understand the importance of each event, to be able to explain each event and to be able to actually run them. Should, should they be designated as the person to run them? I, I would expect you to come and honestly you probably could like a day mm-hmm maybe to, to these are the events, this is how to run. Hmm a day. Yeah. I don't two, almost like a mock kind of thing. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've done mock interviews for other reasons, not particularly in that manner, but I've had to do presentations and I mean, that would make sense to me. are you guys familiar with Stephan wooer yes. Yeah. So he has some great information out there. I mean, in regards to, specific interview questions for scrum masters, for product owners. Yeah. And how to kind of like weed out the imposters, so to speak., but they really get into not just definitions but situations. Right. Mm-hmm so in this situation, what would you do? And so it gets you into some more critical thinking and going like, all right, this is somebody who's done this before. And so yeah, so he has some great material out there. Yeah. I'm just like, I'm, I'm trying to come at from, from the perspective of if we're gonna train the whole organization. Mm. Well, like we need to encompass the whole organization. We need to encompass. Okay, here, here are the basics. Mm-hmm , here's what you need to be a scrum master, right? May, maybe a day outta that. And then now if we're gonna branch off into specialties. And what, what I think of is like the advanced versions. Again, I don't know what's in professional, so they, they could knock my socks off for professional and I, I could totally be like, oh, I'm wrong completely professional's a whole different world. I kind of suspect it's not, but, who knows I could be wrong? I'm kind of, I would branch out to say there should be like a, I also don't know what's in developer track. There should be a PO track in advance, scrum master track, like some, some kind of advanced facilitator and change agent, etc, etc. Servant leader maybe developer track with whatever they have in development track. I don't know what they have in that track right now., and then maybe the leader track, maybe the certified agile leader track encompasses. HR, the matrix type manager and their role in organizations how , finance, budgeting, finance, and budgeting works. Mm-hmm yeah, maybe targeted more as managers. You know what I mean? But like, you still need to do the CSM first. Mm-hmm I don't see how you, he jumps straight into that and don't know how any of the events work. So just to learn about those kinds of things like events, and you know what scrum is all about. You don't need to do a CSM, you can do a fundamentals, which is only one day, and it covers all of these things so kind of a different prerequisite. So basically that prerequisite that requires you to gain an understanding of agile and whichever framework, or maybe multiple frameworks dependent on what certification you're going for, but yeah. To get those baselines in. And I think that would be applicable to each and every certification. You must understand those things. That's exactly where I'm coming from. Cause it covers scrum and compound. It doesn't cover everything, but it's enough to start with. Yeah. And it's a one day, but plus the biggest thing is it's not a certificate so you can attend it. It's it's for free and anybody who's a CSP or I believe yeah. A CSP CSP, scrum master, or a CSP PO is entitled to teach one of these classes. Mm-hmm . So, oh, that makes sense. And you know, what, if it's gonna be a free class, it should probably be in online and maybe even recorded or something doesn't necessarily have to be live and should require, some kind of testing I think too. So some kind of anyway, I think we're getting, yeah, we don't need to plan out this, this whole thing. No, but one of the other thing I wanted to Brian, a point I wanted to make is that none of this works, unless you have leadership truly engaged in making a cultural change. unless, I mean, there are certain situations where that's not necessarily true, so you can have an organization where you actually have kind of like a little microcosm, like you're almost a mini organization yeah. Where you're broken off. And sometimes that is a development section where you're isolated from, or even protected from kind of business mm-hmm . But if that's not the case, but even if it is, you still got leadership, that's going to be on like, okay, when are we getting what we're paying for this? You know, their leadership must be involved, engaged. And you talked about making this kind of organizational or looking at this from an organizational perspective. I think that's numero uno.. You have to have leadership involved, engaged, have an understanding and truly. Truly being the change agents., so we need to figure out, so then they would need to figure out why, why are we doing this? Because we heard agile is cool and we're supposed to be doing this, or what problems are we actually trying to solve? So we need to get management on board with determining that, and then they can buy into, all right, we're gonna make this change. We're gonna lead this change and we're gonna be help to be the change agents for it. Yeah. So when you were talking about having the entry level be like an agile fundamental class, right? I was gonna say I, I was gonna take that one and argue about it, but now that you've introduced, there are some prerequisites that's organizationally in order to be effective, that we might as well not bother doing, trying to do scrum or whatever combo, any kind of agile, anything, if we're not doing like there's some, there's some base level stuff that we have to do. so I started changing my mind. What, what I was gonna say originally was I want everyone to go through the CSM because the CSM has some floor level understanding. Like you gotta have teams mm-hmm you gotta have products. You gotta, you have teams that maintain the products. If, if you're not doing that, like the whole model falls apart. So maybe, I want everyone that comes in to go through the CSM first. Mm-hmm that that's kind of where I'm going back to, and kind of, my brain is now anchoring on that because we brought it up and it made sense in my mind. Now I'm stuck on that idea. And the reason is because. No matter where you sit in the organization, no matter if you're C level executive, no matter if you're a single developer on a single team, no matter if you're on an enabling team that's scaled across you have seven teams that work for you and you're on an enabling team. And you're, you're like, you're a team of leads and you have a bunch of teams that work under you and you just kind of pop in, pop out as they need stuff. Doesn't matter where you're at in the organization. you are doing scrum or whatever, right? Mm-hmm scrum or one or the other. You're doing scrum Orban at some level. Mm-hmm, so everywhere in your organization, even at the C-suite, you're doing probably a executive combine level. Right? Program leads level, you might be doing scrum. You might be doing koban whatever. You need certain base level entry skills. You need to know what. the scrum master's job is because at any time you could be called on, on that team to do the scrum master's job, or you might be doing kanban in support of other teams doing scrum, but at your level in the program, you're doing kanban. So you need to understand the correct way to do kanban the, the proper way. I don't know. Correct. Correct. Has connotation. So whatever you, you kind of understand at a, and I think the further up in the organization, the more important it is to understand the, the process that your teams at at lower and lower levels in the organization That you understand the processes they're using. So you know what process they're using. So the appropriate most effective way to go about communicating with them. That's a much better way that is. Yeah. Not, not to, to not make stupid requests. If I put I'll put on my hat that I don't like, okay the contrarian hat, most organizations are doing that before we were doing agile, we were doing waterfall and we had project managers. And now this, our masters, we got 'em same people forget about leadership, right? That doesn't, these people are doing any job, any sense? That doesn't make any sense to me. So you don't have an empowered scrum master. You don't have an empowered product owner, unless you have leadership. That's going to empower them and respect them. I think, to your point, like going back to that, I I'm buying into your CSM. Kind of double down because yes, the entry it's like, it's, it's the price you gotta pay to enter the dance, right? Like you need to know the, the, you need to know how to dance before we let you in mm-hmm like we can't have a bunch of clowns around the dance floor who aren't gonna be involved in dancing. Cuz we just have a bunch of dudes standing around. You need to know how to dance, to get in. That's your price of admission. We're having a hard enough time getting leadership to take Cal classes, nevermind CSM. I think the CSMs more important potentially than a Cal class to understand and respect the role and understand their role in empowering. and empowering those people to be able to do their job in my experience, the biggest impediment to a product owner or a scrum master, being able to actually do their job appropriately is leadership. So a lot of leadership that are in those positions here, directors and above, they don't want to take a class. That's a scrum master class. We have scrum masters for that go it something they don't that they dress it up. It pretty, they don't have scrum masters for that first. They have, they have project managers with a scrum master head on. I've never, I've never seen. Yeah. I was gonna say, I've never seen organization that has leadership with that attitude that actually does have scrum masters. Yeah. They, they just have labels. That's what they have. So, so make some pretty little like fancy dancing, special leadership class that is basically. A CSM class, it's an introduction to agile and scrum, and they get to understand exactly what a scrum master does. Exactly what a product owner does and how they must support them, that they must empower and respect their developers. And that, that we're going to be have self-organizing and we're gonna trust our teams. They're gonna learn about psychological safety. So I think I, yeah, listen, we, we don't disagree. I'm just thinking that selling that two day class to senior level leadership is a taller climb than selling them a six hour class that walks 'em through basics of agility now, which includes their role in it. Yeah. It does include their role in it. Yeah. Now that I do, I definitely do not disagree with mm-hmm I, I think the, the curriculum needs to be broken up in a way where you could break it up to, divide it over the course of an entire week to get. People who are otherwise very busy read between the lines, like people who are completely slaves to their calendar, who just can't break out., you need, it's a badge of honor for them. Yeah. I know it is. you need to break it up where people that are in those positions can make time for it. Yeah. And it needs to be broken up that way. You know, now the way it's sold and that kind of stuff, like that's that's yeah. It's beside the point. The point that we're on now is building a better curriculum. Again, the reason I brought this up. I think that if you're gonna build a base curriculum I, I definitely agree with you agile fundamentals why are we doing this? You know what I mean? What, what is agile? Why, why are we doing it? I mean, where is it contrasting compare to waterfall or whatever whatever nonsense uh, somebody, I wish I could remember the quote, somebody who's talking about small companies is like the, the most successful small companies, like they, you think of small companies, you think of like chaos in their processes, you know what I mean? They just kind of are working on whatever latest fires. But like, if you really think about it, sit down and think about for a second that's actually not true. Like small companies. the launch communications are, are, are much, much cleaner and shorter, shorter. Fewer of fewer. Yeah. Few fewer. Yeah. so when they have some, something that is not covered in an existing process, it is much faster for them to just stop what they're doing. Come up with a process. For the thing that they've encountered that is new or not covered and then get back to business. So the idea is you are by introducing everyone to CSM slash cuz now we've introduced like Theban training in by introducing everyone to like, these are the two processes that can basically cover everything in your business and giving them a day or two, to cover. Here are the basics for each of these processes. Now you can apply them in your organization at different levels. And from those two, from, from that, from that one thing from that fundamental class, now you get certifications. Now you can, arrange the basic process for whatever your company's using. Now, from here, you become a specialist. Do you wanna become a specialist in the product domain? Do you wanna become a specialist in the facilitation slash coaching slash scrum master? Like there's not a good name for it, right. domain, do you wanna be a, a specialist in the leadership domain? those are the tracks. But I mean, is that, is that a better curriculum? You know, like if, if we can, if we can, if agile Alliance, scrum Alliance, whatever comes to us and it's like, oh, you can change our search. What do you think? Om and Stormy, like what, what do you think like give, give me a, a better track. Give me a suggestion. Like what, what would your suggestion be to, for a better curriculum? A better curriculum than what they have would be to not compartmentalize from the get, go to your point. Mm-hmm just have the basics covered. So everybody at least understands the same language. Right. And they're not lost when somebody says something. So when a developer hears, for example, value chain, they don't go the X one is those right. Or roll their eyes. Cause they yeah. Or roll their eyes. Here we go. Right. So, yeah. So for all of those purposes, we, we need a level of understanding. It's sort of like learning your ABCs. You know, mm-hmm and otherwise you're not speaking the same language. Yeah. So do that and then synthesize on top of it, to your point. Some things that go to more specificity toward development, for example scrum, masters, coaching, product ownership, but I almost wanna say abolish those advanced level ones for the time being, let people grow at that point and then have them do the other. So if you came up through, let's say scrum master track, I'll call it that have them take some classes later. Once they've matured a little on the product ownership class and have them play the role because it's one thing to sit in a class and take a CSPO and it's another to play the. Of a product owner. I'm not suggesting you throw 'em out to the wolves. Maybe a product owner can take them under their wing for a project for a little while. Mm-hmm . and, and you know, that, that's what I think might be worth doing. Okay. Just an idea here. So we do a lot of in a lot of industries, they have cross training mm-hmm right. So we will actually have, for instance,, even in development where we'll have developers who are working on something very specific maybe they're getting bored, maybe they're getting tired. Maybe we need some cross pollination. but maybe that's part of the requirements for elevating is the elevating kind of that career path is being able to share that knowledge. And pass that on to someone as a CSPO to a CSM or vice versa. So I dunno, just throwing some things out there. Yeah. That cross pollination. And I mean, they're all part of the same team. Right. And I think actually developers would be great to put in the mix here too. Not necessarily I don't need, I don't need to, as a PO to know development, but it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to sit with and understand, understand the process and how they're going through. And then the, the same for them, for me to really kind of understand that process that creates again, empathy trust, right? So those things, they, they do help to build great team dynamics as well. Well, I agree play like almost a day in the life off, but obviously do it over a longer period of time here and there. You don't have to do that for a week sitting next to them, but for as a PO for you, it might. It might be useful to know what they mean when they say merge my, go to the main lines. Mm-hmm say, well, the next one of those, that sounds like a train station. Mm-hmm whatever. Right. So I think it's useful to at least normalize the language mm-hmm and then see some of the challenges that they face mm-hmm right. And vice versa. I'm sure. Yes. what about the product managers out there that are like pseudo product managers? Like they're actually product mark marketing managers. Okay. So yeah. First you need to define product manager. Yeah. You can't really well, like product manager is like, I can't think of like. I even think that scrum master is kind of more settled than product manager at this point. I think product manager is more in the wild west kind of evolving than, than the even scrum master is. because when I see product, even going back to the last podcast, when you were here stormy, like the, the there's a lot of product managers out there that they don't even have a development team. Yes. They, they just hand things off to the engineering manager and the engineering manager takes care of it. And then, not only could they not hang in a technical discussion and they would, they would not be useful in discussion of the technical roadmap versus whatever roadmap versus features or whatever like that. They're just not even, they're not even interested. In being in that conversation and their bosses completely support them of like, why would you get nugget? You're a product you're not Al in any way. Why would you be in that conversation? Like, I, that makes me super scared. Mm-hmm because I'm like that the, the, the quality of the product and the technical foundation on which the product is built is just as important of are we making the customer happy to me, but then like, I I I understand, like somebody might be screaming at me and the comments, like writing angry tweets of like, no, Brian, you're totally wrong. You don't need to know any of that to be an effective product manager leaving, dropping, marketing out, and then making 20,000 more dollars or whatever, like a that I think literally we could have an entire freaking podcast on this topic. It would be a rant. It'd be right. It would be so that I have so many thoughts. Like I have like, literally I have so many opinions and thoughts on this. And particularly coming out of the, the conference last week. Woo. And the transition that I am witnessing happen and the confusion in nomenclature between product owner and product manager and what I seem to be witnessing happening, where product manager is becoming the term. Yeah. Right. Which is overtaking product owner. And I have some really, I have some opinions on or hypothesis on why that's happening, but yeah, I've got some, I'm not even gonna get into it, but I got a lot to say about what you just said. I feel the future rent task coming on. Good. we do rans on those. I like I need to collect my thoughts on that one because I feel to be able to portray that category in well, on the podcast, I need to be able to support both sides before I bring it up, which I can't right now. But we haven't even talked about JIRA. Let's talk about JIRA. That's a whole podcast too. No, that's JIRA. And then I can talk about JIRA. Like the, the, listen, I like, if you want a badmouth JIRA, you are on the right podcast. Cause I love to bad mouth JIRA. However right. However, I will say JIRA is like you, you could implement the most simplistic version of JIRA mm-hmm JIRA con board mm-hmm and, JIRA backlog and have like, oh, don't add anything new to your workflow or whatever. And have it be super basic and get your needs met. If you're gonna overcomplicate JIRA and have a bunch of stuff and add the time now, now, now. I, I realize I'm making the case for JIRA, which scares me quite frankly. However, JIRA does have some built in fields that are bad. Mm-hmm okay. Some, some time in hours, estimation fields and stuff that are just like bone head. Why did you add those? Well, they don't have to be included. You can turn them off. Yes. But by default they are on. Okay. Why would you start with everything as a project in JIRA? Right. Well, that's where I'd start. Forget about individual fields, but talking about fields, right? So you could, you could estimate in JIRA now in fractional story points, story points are confusing enough out there. Forget about fractional, who cares, who dies on that hill when it's two points or 2.5 points and not three? Well, you can turn off the story point field and not estimate two. And well you want that. You just don't want fractional. Well, well that again, they, they give you an open field to do whatever you want with. if you wanted to implement JIRA in a hardcore mode I would turn off the story point field and just count the, because their software inherently lets you count the number of stories. Sure. It lets you do your estimates by story points, hours, number of stories. So I would just turn off that our estimate field and I'd turn off the story point field and I'd just do it in a number of stories and I, and I I'd set it to hard code and then I'd hide everything. I'd create business value, I'd hide everything else and it would be JIRA on hardcore mode and each team would have their own dashboard again. Like again, it's it's, there's a simple mode of JIRA. Mm-hmm like, again, the issue is Atlassian is one of those companies. That like I, I, I just went on, I, I had in the last podcast, I didn't put it in the recording. I didn't keep it in the recording. But one of the last times we were here, I showed one of the one of the features that I had voted on that I, I, I thought that would be very, very valuable. And one of their product managers got on and was like, oh, we decided that we were, we're gonna descope this. And we weren't gonna do it anymore because there's no, there's no, basically there's no money. He didn't phrase it this way. But he basically said, there's no money in this feature for us. Mm-hmm . And it basically was, was allowing you to create multiple dashboards that were aggregate between multiple teams up to a higher dashboard. So basically showing multiple teams on one dashboard. Oh, and it would've been a very helpful feature. Mm-hmm but again, there's no money in that for, for Atlassian. So he, so he was the hatchet man for that feature, but I went and I looked into this particular, I'm not gonna name him cuz it would just be poor poor, poor behavior. Yeah, my poor form. Um, but uh, he, he had been like an intern like 18 months ago and it was obviously his first job. He's just doing what he's told to do. Right. Mm-hmm it isn't like poor following a script. Yeah. But the funny thing is I, I started like the funny thing with, with paying for LinkedIn is it automatically like pops up his coworkers and all that started going through their backgrounds and all again, I was like, oh, that's so weird. Like all their product managers are all this like straight outta school intern first job kind of like do what I say. Or else, and I'm like, mm I'm starting to get a good starting to get a good scope of your organization and what they're really about but I can't like, I can't really blame Atlassian. Like they're, they're not really like, I, I, I told somebody very recently, I was like they're not like that. The principal centered and driven type of agilist type of people. Like they, they may have been that type of company at one point I'm sure all those people are gone by now. It's, it's the people that are like, if we sell the implementation, we gotta get more butts in seats on a license so we can charge more. And then we gotta force in to buy more plugins because we get 50% of every plugin that we sell. And like that's their business model now. Mm-hmm so every much like the Instagram example I used before like, because their incentive model pushes a certain behavior. The case for evil has taken over rather than the case for good propagating forward. Like that it's, that is, that is the way that that has happened. So I like to rip on JIRA. My, my real feeling is if you keep it simple, there are certain things you could do. There are certain plugins that actually are worth it. I, on one hand, can't bring myself to pay any money to, to Atlassian in any way, shape or form. So I work around plugins, but if you keep it simple, you can do it. Can do the job. If you keep it simple, you can just his Trello. No, I hate Trello more than I hate Jira . People might be surprised by that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Well, let us know what you think about this and any other topics you wanna talk about or you want us to talk about that's a bad summary, but that's where we're at. I don't think, I don't think there's a better summary. Quite honestly. I like give, send us your certification. Hate mail. Yeah, you could do that. Let us know. Oh, in subscribe and like, oh, that's that good one. Some subs, some ideas on, Hey, what your thoughts are and how they might solve this problem. Keep trainers accountable or create. So what's the. What's the central location to make sure that to bring as far as reviews are concerned to, so that we have an opportunity to go and look and have an, to, to review these trainers in an appropriate manner. Yeah. That, that's funny that the the, the PO certifications they don't have something as simple as a net promoter score for their POS. That's funny that the, they don't the POS POS the irony don't use. Yeah. The irony of not. Yep.