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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

By: Vasco Duarte Agile Coach Certified Scrum Master Certified Product Owner
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About this listen

 Every week day, Certified Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Business Consultant Vasco Duarte interviews Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches from all over the world to get you actionable advice, new tips and tricks, improve your craft as a Scrum Master with daily doses of inspiring conversations with Scrum Masters from the all over the world. Stay tuned for BONUS episodes when we interview Agile gurus and other thought leaders in the business space to bring you the Agile Business perspective you need to succeed as a Scrum Master. Some of the topics we discuss include: Agile Business, Agile Strategy, Retrospectives, Team motivation, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement, Scaling Scrum, Lean Startup, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Paper Prototyping, QA in Scrum, the role of agile managers, servant leadership, agile coaching, and more!(c) Oikosofy Oü Politics & Government
Episodes
  • When Your Technical Expertise Becomes Your Biggest Scrum Master Weakness | Natalia Curusi

    When Your Technical Expertise Becomes Your Biggest Scrum Master Weakness | Natalia Curusi
    Dec 15 2025
    Natalia Curusi: When Your Technical Expertise Becomes Your Biggest Scrum Master Weakness

    Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

    "I thought my technical background was my biggest strength, but I understood that this was my biggest weakness—I was coming into stand-ups saying 'I know how we need to fix that issue,' and I was a Scrum Master." - Natalia Curusi

    Natalia stepped into her first blended role as team leader and Scrum Master full of confidence. With years of programming experience behind her, she believed she could guide her team through any technical challenge. But during morning stand-ups, she found herself suggesting solutions, directing technical approaches, and sharing her expertise freely. The team listened—after all, she was their former leader. They implemented her suggestions, but when those solutions failed, the team didn't have the thinking process to adapt them to their context.

    Natalia realized she was preventing the team's learning and ownership by taking control away from them. The turning point came when she made a deliberate choice: she selected the most technical person on the team to become the technical authority and committed to never stepping on his feet again. From that moment forward, she focused purely on the Scrum Master role—asking questions, fostering collaboration, and shutting up to listen actively.

    Years later, that technical lead followed her to another job, and they remain friends to this day. Natalia learned that her contribution wasn't about giving solutions—it was about keeping the team from losing ownership of their work.

    Self-reflection Question: When you attend your team's daily stand-up, are you contributing to collaboration, or is your contribution keeping the team from owning their work?

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    🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥

    Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.

    🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

    Buy Now on Amazon

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    About Natalia Curusi

    With over 20 years in software delivery, Natalia Curusi is an expert in Agile Transformations, Delivery Optimisation, and Systems Thinking. As an Agile Coach at Endava, she leads Asia Pacific initiatives, driving business agility and continuous improvement while mentoring teams to build customer-centric, high-performing, and collaborative cultures.

    You can link with Natalia Curusi on LinkedIn.
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    15 mins
  • Swimming in Tech Debt — Practical Techniques to Keep Your Team from Drowning in Its Codebase | Lou Franco

    Swimming in Tech Debt — Practical Techniques to Keep Your Team from Drowning in Its Codebase | Lou Franco
    Dec 13 2025
    BONUS: Swimming in Tech Debt — Practical Techniques to Keep Your Team from Drowning in Its Codebase In this fascinating conversation, veteran software engineer and author Lou Franco shares hard-won lessons from decades at startups, Trello, and Atlassian. We explore his book "Swimming in Tech Debt," diving deep into the 8 Questions framework for evaluating tech debt decisions, personal practices that compound over time, team-level strategies for systematic improvement, and leadership approaches that balance velocity with sustainability. Lou reveals why tech debt is often the result of success, how to navigate the spectrum between ignoring debt and rewriting too much, and practical techniques individuals, teams, and leaders can use starting today. The Exit Interview That Changed Everything "We didn't go slower by paying tech debt. We went actually faster, because we were constantly in that code, and now we didn't have to run into problems." — Lou Franco Lou's understanding of tech debt crystallized during an exit interview at Atalasoft, a small startup where he'd spent years. An engineer leaving the company confronted him: "You guys don't care about tech debt." Lou had been focused on shipping features, believing that paying tech debt would slow them down. But this engineer told a different story — when they finally fixed their terrible build and installation system, they actually sped up. They were constantly touching that code, and removing the friction made everything easier. This moment revealed a fundamental truth: tech debt isn't just about code quality or engineering pride. It's about velocity, momentum, and the ability to move fast sustainably. Lou carried this lesson through his career at Trello (where he learned the dangers of rewriting too much) and Atlassian (where he saw enterprise-scale tech debt management). These experiences became the foundation for "Swimming in Tech Debt." Tech Debt Is the Result of Success "Tech debt is often the result of success. Unsuccessful projects don't have tech debt." — Lou Franco This reframes the entire conversation about tech debt. Failed products don't accumulate debt — they disappear before it matters. Tech debt emerges when your code survives long enough to outlive its original assumptions, when your user base grows beyond initial expectations, when your team scales faster than your architecture anticipated. At Atalasoft, they built for 10 users and got 100. At Trello, mobile usage exploded beyond their web-first assumptions. Success creates tech debt by changing the context in which code operates. This means tech debt conversations should happen at different intensities depending on where you are in the product lifecycle. Early startups pursuing product-market fit should minimize tech debt investments — move fast, learn, potentially throw away the code. Growth-stage companies need balanced approaches. Mature products benefit significantly from tech debt investments because operational efficiency compounds over years. Understanding this lifecycle perspective helps teams make appropriate decisions rather than applying one-size-fits-all rules. The 8 Questions Framework for Tech Debt Decisions "Those 8 questions guide you to what you should do. If it's risky, has regressions, and you don't even know if it's gonna work, this is when you're gonna do a project spike." — Lou Franco Lou introduces a systematic framework for evaluating whether to pay tech debt, inspired by Bob Moesta's push-pull forces from product management. The 8 questions create a complete picture: Visibility — Will people outside the team understand what we're doing? Alignment — Does this match our engineering values and target architecture? Resistance — How hard is this code to work with right now? Volatility — How often do we touch this code? Regression Risk — What's the chance we'll introduce new problems? Project Size — How big is this to fix? Estimate Risk — How uncertain are we about the effort required? Outcome Uncertainty — How confident are we the fix will actually improve things? High volatility and high resistance with low regression risk? Pay the debt now. High regression risk with no tests? Write tests first, then reassess. Uncertain outcomes on a big project? Do a spike or proof of concept. The framework prevents both extremes — ignoring costly debt and undertaking risky rewrites without proper preparation. Personal Practices That Compound Daily "When I sit down at my desk, the first thing I do is I pay a little tech debt. I'm looking at code, I'm about to change it, do I even understand it? Am I having some kind of resistance to it? Put in a little helpful comment, maybe a little refactoring." — Lou Franco Lou shares personal habits that create compounding improvements over time. Start each coding session by paying a small amount of tech debt in the area you're about to work — add a clarifying...
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    34 mins
  • The Agile Organization as a Learning System With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

    The Agile Organization as a Learning System With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel
    Dec 12 2025
    BONUS: The Agile Organization as a Learning System Think Like a Farmer, Not a Factory Manager "Go slow to go fast. If you want to go somewhere, go together as a team. Take a farmer's mentality." Simon contrasts monoculture industrial thinking with the permaculture approach of Joel Salatin. Industrial approaches optimize for short-term efficiency but create fragile systems. Farmer thinking recognizes that healthy ecosystems require patience, diversity, and nurturing conditions for growth. The nervous system that's constantly stressed never builds much over time—think of the body, trust the body, let the body be a body. Value Masters, Not Scrum Masters "We need value masters, not Scrum Masters. Agile is a useful tool for delivering value, but value itself is primary. Everything else is secondary—Agile included." Tom makes his most provocative point: if you asked a top manager whether they'd prefer an agile person or value delivery, the answer is obvious. Agile is one tactic among many for delivering value—not even a necessary one. The shift required is from process mastery to value mastery, from Scrum Masters to people who understand and can deliver on critical stakeholder values. The DOVE Manifesto "I wrote a paper called DOVE—Deliver Optimum Values Efficiently. It's the manifesto focusing on delivering value, delivering value, delivering value." Tom offers his alternative to the Agile Manifesto: a set of principles laser-focused on value delivery. The document includes 10 principles on a single page that can guide any organization toward genuine impact. Everything else—processes, frameworks, methodologies—are secondary tools in service of this primary goal. Read Tom's DOVE manifesto here. Building the Glue Between Social and Physical Technology "Value is created in interactions. That's where the social and physical technology meet—that joyous boundary where stuff gets done." Simon describes seeing the world through two lenses: physical technology (visible tools and systems) and social technology (culture, relationships, the air we breathe). Eric Beinhoeker's insight is that progress happens at the intersection. The Gilbian learning loops provide the structure; trust and human connection provide the fuel. Together, they create organizations that can actually learn and adapt. Further Reading To Support Your Learning Journey Resources & Further Reading Explore these curated resources to deepen your understanding of strategic planning, value-based management, and transformative organizational change. 📚 Essential Reading Competitive Engineering Tom Gilb's seminal book on requirements engineering and value-based development approaches. What is Wrong with OKRs (Paper by Tom Gilb) A critical analysis of the popular OKR framework and its limitations in measuring real value. DOVE Manifesto by Tom Gilb Detailed exploration of the DOVE (Design Of Value Engineering) methodology for quantifying and optimizing stakeholder value. 🎓 Learning Materials Tom Gilb's Strategy Ringbook A comprehensive collection of strategic planning principles and practical frameworks. Tom Gilb's Video at the Strategy Meetup Watch Tom Gilb discuss key strategic concepts and answer questions from the community. Design Process Paper by Tom Gilb An in-depth look at value-driven design processes and their practical application. Esko Kilpi's Work on Conversations Exploring how organizational conversations shape thinking, decision-making, and change. 🧭 Frameworks & Models OODA Loop The Observe-Orient-Decide-Act decision cycle for rapid strategic thinking and adaptation. 🎯 Practical Tips Measurement of Increased Value Focus on tracking actual value delivery rather than activity completion. Establish baseline measurements and regularly assess improvements in stakeholder-defined value dimensions. Quantify Critical Values Identify the 3-5 most important value attributes for your stakeholders. Make these concrete and measurable, avoiding vague qualities in favor of specific, quantifiable metrics. Measurement vs Testing Process Understand the distinction: measurement tells you how much value exists, while testing validates whether something works. Use both strategically—test hypotheses early, then measure outcomes continuously. 🔗 Related Profiles Todd Covert - Montessori School of the Berkshires Educational leadership and innovative approaches to value-based learning environments. About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in ...
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    22 mins
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