Episode Description
This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Justin Thatil and Erica Menendez. In this episode, they are discussing the fun topic of vacations and how their planning and unfolding can be done in an Agile way. Dan, Erica, and Justin highlight the importance of always keeping your goals in mind, and considering the expectations of everyone involved in the plan. Listen to this episode and find out how following different Agile Principles can help you plan and enjoy your time off!
Key Takeaways
Have a goal for your vacations.
Even if a proposed vacation looks exciting, don’t forget to check in with your goals to make sure they are aligned with the vacation plan.
Brainstorming ideas is a great way to find your ideal vacation destination, to later analyze the particular characteristics of each option to make sure it is congruent with the family goals.
The product owner role is played by the one organizing the vacation.
Doing the research is key to planning a successful trip that meets everyone’s expectations.
There might be a lot of ideas about things that want to be done on a vacation, but being realistic and selective is crucial to managing expectations.
Remember, flexibility is crucial, changes might be implemented at the last moment in order to make the best out of the experience.
What can you learn along the way as you are taking the vacations?
There are many learning experiences waiting to happen on your vacation plans.
Learning and discovering are tasks that you will embrace better after practicing them several times.
Remember the maturity of the tool is not the same everywhere you go. (Justin shares his own example while traveling with his wife through Puerto Rico.)
Experimentation is necessary in order to take the best out of each situation.
Your Daily Scrum can be breakfast.
Retrospectives can be done along the way.
Don’t forget to embrace the new experience you are living with excitement.
Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate in its depiction of the English language or rules of grammar.]
Intro [00:03]:
Welcome to agile coaches corner by agile thought the podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work band pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host coach band agile expert. Dan Nuemann.
Dan Neumann [00:17]:
Welcome to this episode of the agile coaches corner podcast. I’m your host Dan Nuemann. And today I’m joined by Justin FITEL and Erica Menendez. And we are going to be exploring a fun topic today of vacation. We’ll get a little bit more into that and just a little bit, but Justin, Erica, thank you for joining today.
Justin Thatil [00:36]:
Yeah, thanks for having us, Dan, it’s always a pleasure, especially on a fun topic like this <laugh>.
Dan Neumann [00:42]:
So we were recently having one of our internal, I think it was a social, the social half hour hour or whatever it was it just a time to get together, share information with each other. And some of us have had vacations and the recent past, and some of us were planning at that point and we were talking through the, the approaches that we had and that spurred the realization that the, the planning and the unfolding and the approach to vacation was very much agile in a sense, if you will. And so that’s what we’re going to be exploring today. And Justin, you were, you were talking about a little bit about maybe even having a, an objective or a goal for your vacation, is that right?
Justin Thatil [01:28]:
That’s right. So as my wife and I, we were talking about you know, the spawn of us traveling this summer was essentially a friend of us a friend of ours reaching out saying, Hey, why don’t, when did you join us? Here we’re planning to travel to Paris. So me growing up from Paris, you know, that would’ve been a, a great language partner and things of that sort. So my wife and I, you know, we initially reacted and Hey this to be a great idea, great opportunity to go back, visit my friends, things of that sort. But then we took a moment to reestablish and talk through, you know, what are what’s, what’s the goal? What, what was our next goal for the next vacation trip that we take? Right. So it’s kind of drawing back to a sprint goal, essentially.
Justin Thatil [02:16]:
So just she and I talking through rerating what we wanted out of our next vacation. One of them for me, especially is and she and I, what we’ve always agreed is that every time we travel, we’re experiencing new locations, new cultures, things of that sort. So Paris being, you know, the place I was born, it’s no longer new. And the other aspect was the budget, right? So budgetary wise it’s a lot more expensive to travel to Europe. So we figured let’s explore somewhere in the Caribbeans one, the islands, and we ended up landing in Puerto Rico. Was there destination. So wed, our goal was, and this met our goal. So that, that’s how we picked Puerto Rico, sun.
Dan Neumann [02:58]:
That’s awesome. And Erica, you’ve traveled with family members as well. And, and so did you also have a similar type of goal, obviously had a variety of stakeholders in some of your adventuring?
Erica Menendez [03:10]:
Oh gosh. Yeah. And very similar, actually I’m in the middle of planning, our next family trip right now, because apparently I’ve been deemed that the trip planner in our family. So I’ve become the product owner. And I’m going through the storming of the goal phase right now. Okay. So we want to, someone said, I wanna go to Germany and we said, let’s go to Germany. That sounds great for Christmas. And then now we’re going, well, wait, why, why are we actually going to Germany? Does that make the most sense? Do the flights make sense? Does if we wanna go for Christmas? Yeah. I mean, you can do a Christmas market for one or two nights, but we wanna experience some other stuff. So what city do you choose at that point? So kind of the storming based off of your goal of family time, but family, time’s not very specific. <Laugh>
Dan Neumann [03:55]:
That is, that is very general. Yeah. And our, my, our recent vacation was to Australia and that was largely driven by my wife’s interest in saying, you know, as a small child, she wanted to snorkel the great barrier reef or part of it, not the whole thing, obviously. And so that was our kind of our primary objective was, was to go there and, and to have that experience. And then the rest of what we did kind of formed around that, that core nugget of, of what we wanted to do, you know, how long do we take, which cities do we want to go to? How much running around do we wanna do versus going somewhere and staying.
Justin Thatil [04:35]:
So, Erica, it’s funny that you mention the product, I wanna aspect of the role that you end up taking and finding a vacation, cuz I think I found myself doing the same thing and as I was thinking through it it’s kind of drawing a parallel to, to requirements gathering. Right. So, so in my situation, Fiwell I ended up being the planner and doing the research, Puerto Rico is new to my wife and I, we’ve never been, we’ve heard of others traveling there, but didn’t quite have all the details. So I started doing the research and things that we wanted to do explore. So what I was thinking in this drawing, the parallel to our, our team environment, agile team environment is I’m essentially being a requirements gatherer right. All by myself, but there is an aspect of empiricism that’s been at play for years in my situation and that’s, you know, my wife and I with now we’re celebrating our 11th year anniversary on the trip.
Justin Thatil [05:33]:
So it’s, you know, 11 years of iteration, <laugh> learning about each other, what we like. Right. so, so I did have that information to use in my planning. So, you know, when you’re working with the agile team reflect back on the data points, where are your data points coming from? Is it purely from your own experiences or is it gathered from, you know, your customers, your stakeholders and you know, what are, what all are you using to gather those, those data points? So for me in this vacation was that the numerous years of experiences my wife and I, and talking about what we like and what we don’t like. Right.
Erica Menendez [06:15]:
Yeah. And you can even take it one step further than that, because I mean, we’ve got the years of experiences. If we’re talking about family vacations here, where we hopefully know where family’s well enough to, to plan a good vacation, but you still, as you research and, and find different places that you want to go, you look it up and you say, Hey, what do you guys think about this? So there’s still kind of that feedback loop from your stakeholders, even though they’re still part of the team too, in this situation of what, what everyone actually wants to do, there might be something that you were super excited and thought everyone would be really excited about. And then they go, I don’t really know if that’s worth three hours of my time on vacation. So just kind and being able to go with that and not getting too, too excited about it until they’ve made the decision, which
Justin Thatil [07:03]:
That’s right. That’s, that’s the catamari versus a canoe experience for my trip this time around. So I essentially, I was thinking of doing a surprise with my, for my wife. And one of the surprises was essentially a two hour you know, a canoe ride that’s hosted with someone that’s essentially navigating us with flowers and cheese and things of that sort versus an hour ride where we get the experience more of the history of Puerto Rico on a Kaari. So, you know, just knowing how surprises I’ve gone in the past. I essentially asked my wife, Hey, which one would you rather do between the two? I was thinking this would be a nice surprise. And she actually ended up opting for the camera. And we had a great with that.
Dan Neumann [07:51]:
You’re a smart man, smart. You were talking about kind of a requirements gathering. And it turns out the Friday before we flew out for vacation, I was on a different flight coming back from the agile conference. And I sat next to a lady and of course we started talking and she’s like, do it all. She’s like, go do all the things. And I’m like, Australia’s a continent <laugh> you can’t possibly do all the things. And so our approach to the things we wanted to do turned out very much to be a product backlog in a sense of, it was a bunch of ideas of things we might want to do. Okay. When we’re going to be in Sydney, here are some things we might do when we go up to cans. Here’s some stuff we might do, but not, it wasn’t a requirement to do all the things. I vacationed once with my family and then my sister-in-law who likes to do all the things. And I was so exhausted by the end of that vacation. So I I’ve, I’ve become a much bigger fan of the backlog. You order it, you do some stuff and what doesn’t happen. That’s okay.
Erica Menendez [08:58]:
And I think that’s a great way to look at it, cuz I’ve been that person that says, okay, so we have this plan and what I can put up with is not necessarily what my family can put up with walking 10 miles a day around Paris, which is what we did last time was not really what my parents wanted to do. <Laugh> my poor parents by the end of the day were going, we have to walk again tomorrow. And so we had to change what the plans were change our transportation styles, change even what we were going to do for the day, because we learned once we were there a mile feels like a lot further when you’ve been doing it the day before. And so you have that backlog of stuff that makes it easy to change, but you’re not too tied to it, to where you can’t change.
Justin Thatil [09:43]:
And the best is when, when that changed, that that was prompted by your family members, you yourself end up learning or experiencing something that you had not anticipated, right. That turned out to be great and bringing in a great experience. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so we can relate that to a team, you know, essentially exploring or having the slack time to explore right as their solution, as opposed to just you know grinding and responding to, to orders as right. Is the taking the time to explore, you may end up coming up with a much better solution or a much better experience at the end of the day.
Dan Neumann [10:23]:
Mm. What about learning along the way as you go on the vacations do you guys find that, that you discover new possibilities that you hadn’t thought of before heading out?
Justin Thatil [10:38]:
Yes. So there’s one situation that actually occurred for us here on, on per Rico trip. And one of the things I actually ended up planning as opposed to what we used to do exploring on our own this is around food and trying out restaurants. So this time around, we actually booked a a food and culture tour prior to us exploring old San Juan. So this is in a town in, in Puerto Rico, has the historic buildings and the heritage from, from when the Spain was there ruling the, the area. So, so the difference was essentially the time aspect came into play. We were, we experienced a tour given by guide native to the area that knew the history presented the history, what Puerto Rico was about, you know, how it came about. The Thai knows where the original people, the native folks that lived there before the Spaniards came in.
Justin Thatil [11:43]:
And then she reminded me of what I learned in history, Spanish, American war, you know, things of that sort that if my wife and I were just exploring on our own, none of that would’ve come about. And then she ex actually being at a food tour brought us to different unique experiences and food that we probably wouldn’t have encountered. So, so the difference there was a difference there in in the way, the way we normally would’ve gone about and trying to explore just near the local that we were immediately at in our new place. And we just you know, just sheer of convenience, we’d just walk in and experiment that way. But I think this was what was a nicer experience. Cause we were able to be exposed to some more of the culture than then we would’ve right. So, so it’s having relating this back to the team. So having some expert guidance versus the team just solely going out on their own. Right. so mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you can relate to sure.
Dan Neumann [12:47]:
One of the one of the key items in addition to the reef that we wanted to see was seeing a Platypus was high on the list of things we wanted to do in Australia, because where else do you see a Platypus? So off to the Sydney zoo, we go and did you know, Platypus or nocturnal <laugh> I did not know that <laugh> so you go to the zoo, you stare in the tank and you go, where the hell are they <laugh> they’re not there. So then we went to another zoo hoping to catch them out playing. Nope. And so this was part of our learning and discovery. And fortunately we were going to a, a part of the continent where there’s a river and in your chance of seeing them are reasonably high, if you go early in the morning or late at night.
Dan Neumann [13:34]:
But we had that, that learning adjusted our plans. The part that struck me, this kind of agile related is also, we had some pretty firm boundaries, right? The flight to Australia was on a day, the flight between cities was a particular day. We couldn’t, you know, extend beyond the return flight. And so within those constraints, we had the learning. Then we had to figure out what to do with it. Are we gonna take another trip to go stock a Platypus in the wild? Or are we going to decide it’s not worth it to us? It was worth it. We did find one, unfortunately. And so that was, that was another bucket list type of item we got to check off.
Erica Menendez [14:09]:
I hope you have some cool pictures, cuz I’m curious now <laugh> but
Dan Neumann [14:13]:
They’re rather silly looking. Yeah. <Laugh>
Erica Menendez [14:16]:
But the learning and discovery, you can even take that a little bit further and say the more that you do it, the more comfortable you are with learning and discovery. So you kind of learn and build on top of that. And we find that a lot with agile and scrum. So the more you do it, the more comfortable you are with it, the more comfortable you are experimenting when you first start traveling, you probably do a ridiculous amount of research on where you’re going, but the more you travel, I know when I spent a month on the road, by the end, I was like, all right, so let’s look up what I’m gonna do tomorrow or, or in the next few days, versus when I first started, I was going all right, so I have to have a plan and a full spreadsheet of what we’re all gonna do and make sure that it’s gonna happen because you become a lot more comfortable with learning on the fly and, and ex making those experiments.
Justin Thatil [15:04]:
Yeah. Learning on the fly. I think the keywords, right. It’s actually happening during the execution of your plan, right? So being open to your plan, not going fully to plan in a sense <laugh>
Speaker 1 [15:21]:
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Dan Neumann [15:31]:
I Marvel at how people actually got anywhere before Google maps and turned by turn directions, especially with public transit. I mean, an idiot could have followed those directions. I’m like, I want to go from the apartment we’re staying in, you know, down to the Harbor. And it says, you know, walk five minutes, wait up to eight minutes, catch this bus transfer onto that train. And you’ll get there in, you know, 25 minutes. I’m like, wow. So just that availability of, of information. I’m not sure exactly what the agile team parallel is, whether it’s just, you know, the build deploy pipelines or things that are just made to work. But having that information, just being able to follow through something, the problem solved. I just don’t know how to do it. And so get led by the nose, by my digital device, through the process.
Erica Menendez [16:20]:
It’s interesting, cuz I would almost is learning. Because you, when you first start traveling, you might think use Google maps, but Google maps doesn’t work in every country. So like you learn to look up what the best map is and then you can just go from there, but we still
Justin Thatil [16:38]:
The maturity of, of the tool right. A little bit, yeah. Is essentially so on a, on an agile team there DevOps processes, you know, how mature is there, you know, C I CD pipeline, I would attribute it to that. So you have Google maps or and Puerto Rico, we were actually using Uber to get around. <Laugh> so and, and Uber has its own map. You know, so, so then the driver takes the other places that you want. So lots of tools out there for sure.
Dan Neumann [17:11]:
Now use I think you had a decision to make maybe about Ubering or how, how you wanted to get around, is that right? That’s
Justin Thatil [17:17]:
Justin that’s right. So we’re staying so we’re in proper San Juan and our destination was old San Juan. We’re in an area called UHDO, which is maybe a 20 minute 20 minute walk to old San Juan, or actually it was a 40 minute walk, something like that. And our other option was to Uber. So what we opted to do, I saw that they had scooters and so the whole notion that, Hey, we can ride along and, and experience the, the beauty cause we’re on, on, on beach side. So the experience turned out to be what I learned was that there’s a a specific restrained service area for these scooters. <Laugh> so, so as we took the scooter over with the destination, thinking of being all San Juan starts 20 minutes away, the scooter starts beeping saying, Hey, and I don’t, I thought it was the battery running out, maybe that I just complaining about. And then I open up the app and it’s like, okay, you can’t turn off the, the service until you’re in a service region. Right. So what would’ve been a $5 trip on a Uber ended up costing us $25 on scooter <laugh> <laugh>.
Justin Thatil [18:34]:
I ended up being frustrated in the whole experience cuz I had to, essentially once we reached the destination with the scooter, I had to go back and find a service region, you know, using the app <laugh>. So that took over an hour. So the hour, essentially an hour of usage for the scooter turned out to be $25. And then after that, so we, I finally hours passed. I returned the scooter, managed to return the scooter. We sit down on a bench and I see you know, pigeon experiments on, on the floor and here we are in Puerto Rico and a topical weather. I grew up in Paris and I remember, you know, pigeons, when you see that on a bench avoid sitting there. I tell my wife this, okay, I see pigeon on the floor. We shouldn’t sit here, but we still do because of all from all this frustration of the scooter and, and behold, the thing I it’s bit happening, I’m wearing a, a hat pigeon experiment, rattle hat <laugh>
Dan Neumann [19:34]:
<Laugh>.
Justin Thatil [19:36]:
So essentially, you know, we’re relating this to it’s, you know, our execution, we changed it. And didn’t quite turn out the way we wanted it. Right. The experience was not as pleasure as much pleasure as we thought we would’ve be, but you know, there’s still some learnings. We managed to get some really nice pictures, overlooking the water and in the Palm trees. And but we, and we still got to do destination. Right. so encouraging experimentation essentially.
Dan Neumann [20:11]:
Well, yes. And what you’re describing also has a parallel to planning is a pigeon going to relieve himself here. Well, quite likely because it looks like they’ve done it before. Yeah. Is this project gonna go well, well, we’ve done projects like this before and they haven’t. So this project’s probably gonna look like that one. And so as opposed to expecting, you know, what, there’s a bunch of guano on the floor here. I bet the pigeon won’t poop on me this time. Well, no, the pigeon’s gonna do what pigeons do and they’re gonna do it in the same spot they’ve been doing it. So I think that’s yeah, we dilute ourselves with project forecasting in the same way that you diluted yourself into sitting on that bench. I’m pretty sure
Justin Thatil [20:50]:
That’s right. <Laugh> there was an experience.
Dan Neumann [20:53]:
It looked like you had something, Eric. I was,
Erica Menendez [20:55]:
I was that one <laugh> I was trying to equate it though. Because I had the thought earlier that I’ll kind of bring us to, now that your, your daily scrum are kind of your, your mini planning for the day is your breakfast time, your morning time, if you guys are morning people. But so you might have had the thought, okay, so we’re gonna take scooters through here. And, you know, I noticed a lot of pigeons the other day, so let’s, let’s not stop there. Or this happened yesterday. Let’s not do that, but so you might talk through what’s happened in the past and kind of what you went through the day before and what you plan on doing that day. And if you wanna adjust it based off of what you’ve learned so far, like running through pigeons or getting stopped by the scooters maybe that just adjusts whether or not you’re gonna take scooters that day versus Ubers.
Justin Thatil [21:49]:
Mm. Yeah, definitely. The next day when we visited the same city, we wanted to go back cuz you know, the experience overall was good, but it opted to do Uber the next time. Right. <Laugh>
Erica Menendez [22:03]:
Well, yeah, that again, like, okay, so we wanted more of this. Let’s do more mm-hmm <affirmative> instead of let’s move on what we were gonna do today and the next thing in the backlog let’s stay where we were and, and spend more time.
Dan Neumann [22:15]:
Yeah. We had a, a similar experience just kind of thinking through it’s really expensive to get to Australia and back. And so we’re probably not doing that again for a long time. And, and so one of the, kind of a cost of delay standpoint, it’s like, do we want to try scuba diving on the reef? And of course not of course, but I’ve never scuba dived and, and my son hasn’t, but they have a program where they’ll teach you just enough to survive and then you’ll swim, literally holding onto a scuba instructor. So they know where you are and if there’s a problem, you know, they can get you back. And so we looked at the cost of delay, basically, if we didn’t have that experience, would we regret it later? And, and so we ended up not just doing this snorkeling one day, but then my son and I went back and we did the scuba dive experience later.
Dan Neumann [23:03]:
So but it was very incremental. You know, you learn on the boat, you ed six inches below the water and then you eventually get lower and lower until you’re about 10 or 12 meters down. And, and so it was kind of this, this learning, cause there’s significant risk to that experience too. Right. If you don’t know what you’re doing, underwater things go bad really fast. And so there was risk, it was very incremental. Yeah, I don’t know. It was just kind of a, a fun experience of learning and realizing that we had to change the backlog based on, are we going to kind of regret not doing this while we’re here? And so that bumped that up to the top of the list, for sure.
Erica Menendez [23:42]:
It became part of, I mean, I’ll use the word MVP, but I’ll use it loosely. It became part of your MVP. The first time we go to Australia, we have to do this versus that’s maybe next time.
Dan Neumann [23:53]:
Okay. Right. I can, yeah, that might have been gold plating, I think. But yeah, I see where you goal that our MVP was definitely snorkeling. And then I think we decided the gold plate with going down with the complete underwater experience retrospectives. I know Erica, you mentioned that you did a little bit of a, a daily daily huddle, if you will, daily scrum at, at the the start of your day, your breakfast people. Do you guys also do retrospectives along the way afterwards for your next increments?
Erica Menendez [24:26]:
I mean, I wouldn’t say there are future retrospectives, but when you think about it, I mean, at the end of the day at dinner, you kind of go, oh, this was really fun today, or that was really fun today. Or I would change that, but when you get back, I mean, when you’re retelling the story and you’re talking as a family consistently afterwards, you tend to hear the real, what was good and what was bad and what people would like to change for next time. But it, it’s actually a really interesting concept to start saying, maybe we just have a family dinner and talk about how the vacation was another excuse for family dinner, which is never a bad thing. <Laugh>
Justin Thatil [24:59]:
Yeah. Family dinners are for us, it’s going back and looking at our pictures. Yeah. And then over family dinner, sharing those pictures and we talked through you know, what the experience was like. And one of the things that I thought was nice in this particular experience of ours that I thought would be relatable is the culture within Puerto Rico. You know, we learned about their, the origin there, the Spanish influence and then the African influence and, and you can sense it when you’re there. And then there are people that it it’s truly blended. Right? all three of those cultures are very present within Puerto Rico and they’re fully blended. So my wife and I, we were reflecting and, and trying to reflect that and comparing it to home. Whereas we have those cultures here, but it, it feels more segregated in a sense, right.
Justin Thatil [25:51]:
And so the beauty that brought to Puerto Rico that is unique to Puerto Rico and relating, you know, relating that back to when we work with our teams, right. We are the unique individuals on our teams essentially create that unique end product that would only that team could have produced. Right. So similar to Puerto Rico, only the people there, the way they’ve blended themselves together, as a, as a people created an, a unique experience for us just experiencing them in that country. You know? So, so if you think back of your teams and, and make sure that they are given the opportunity to be creative from their own perspective, rather than being told what to do, you know, what kind of beauty that could, you know, creating? So my wife and I kind of connected on that. I, as we thinking through the experience,
Erica Menendez [26:43]:
I love that. Cause I mean, think of how often we tell people, don’t go into one team thinking it’s gonna be the same exact as the other team. It’s not, don’t go into one country. Don’t, don’t go to Germany thinking you’re in Australia or the us, like they’re very different countries. Even if you’re just going to Florida versus Georgia, like we’re, we’re very different states. So don’t go into one thinking, you know, exactly what the experience is gonna be like and what it should be embrace the new experience and the new atmosphere and, and take it for, I’m trying to think of the right word. I’m gonna say glory, but that’s not the right word. Yeah. The excitement that it
Dan Neumann [27:25]:
Was, it was interesting to see kind of the, the differences in Australia, even though it’s largely, you know, I was colonized by, by Europeans. But it’s still a very different experience than, than here in the us in, in a lot of different ways. And so that was that was great. It was still familiar enough. We didn’t feel lost in any way or, or not completely out of place. Somebody did accuse me of having an accent though, which was new to me. <Laugh>, that’s where we were somehow where, where are you from came up? And it was well from the states. And she was like, well, yeah, I could tell by the accent. And I was like, Hey,
Erica Menendez [28:03]:
That’s the one thing about being abroad. That’s made me realize how much of an American accent actually have <laugh>
Dan Neumann [28:09]:
Right. For sure. For sure.
Erica Menendez [28:11]:
I never realized it until recently.
Dan Neumann [28:13]:
Well, let’s maybe collect some closing thoughts. Justin, do you wanna lead us off on your closing thoughts on, on agile and vacations?
Justin Thatil [28:24]:
Sure. so I mean, one of our goals was to relate, you know, make this a relatable podcast for your listeners, something that we can, everyone you know, customarily travels, right. So you can relate it and it’s, it’s usually vivid memories, right? So tying VI those vivid memories that you have of your vacationing, how you plan for it, how you execute it and how you reflected back on it. And our goal was essentially to, to tie that back just scrum. And hopefully you can bring that back to your teams. Closing thought, you know, as we talk through the different experiences that we had you know, keep traveling it broadens your horizon, your perspectives on people and and how important it’s to have those different various experiences and cultures being in incorporated part of your team and just embrace it.
Erica Menendez [29:17]:
Yeah. So I’ll grow even more off of kind of where we just ended not too long ago, cuz it’s really sticking in my mind, but we’re never gonna be in the same team for our entire lives. So don’t think that every team that we’re gonna be on is gonna be the same and the ability to change and adapt and, and grow and bring those past experiences and their past experiences within your team and within the vacations you might plan is just invaluable.
Dan Neumann [29:47]:
Yeah. No, thanks for that. And, and as I think about it, a lot of times I feel like we lose our sanity sometimes in software projects, we treat it so much different than the rest of life, right. It’s oh, we have to do all the requirements. We have to get the estimate or we have, you’re not going to, so what are you gonna do? There’s a lot of uncertainty around it. So what are you going to do within all that uncertainty? How are you gonna handle it instead of kind of rejecting the physics of life and pretending that we’re gonna get the estimate, right. And we’re gonna get all the features and everything’s gonna work the way we want it to. Cause that’s not true in vacations and that’s not true in life and definitely not in, in software delivery. So. Well, thank you both for exploring this topic. I know there’s been some vacationing. Is there anything on your continuous learning journey? I don’t want, I’ll put you on the spot. I say, I don’t want to, but I’m gonna, I don’t know, Erica anything besides vacationing on your journey,
Erica Menendez [30:41]:
I’ll start off cuz I’m actually reading something that’s not researched for vacation, which is very abnormal for me. Well, not abnormal. I’m trying to do better at it. I’m reading the scrum field book again by JJ Sutherland and it’s very interest. I mean, it’s a well known book in the agile community. It’s been around for a minute, but I left it at a friend’s house for about a year or so. And I just picked it back up and I restarted it instead of starting it halfway through where I left off and taking the experiences from my most recent client and seeing the notes that I left from my previous client before that is very interesting and what I’ve learned and, and the everything I’ve taken and the way I’m looking at things differently than I was eight months ago.
Dan Neumann [31:24]:
Interesting. Very
Erica Menendez [31:25]:
Interesting.
Dan Neumann [31:26]:
Yeah. You’re in a different, I don’t remember who has the proper, you never step in the same stream twice, but yeah, you, so you’re reading that book and it’s in a, you’re in a different spot than the first time through. Yeah. Interesting. What about you, Justin?
Justin Thatil [31:38]:
Yeah, for me latest agile book have been exploring is Damon professional coaching for, I picked that up not too long ago, trying to revisit you know, different aspects of professional coaching that’s out there. And how we can bring that into teams. That’s from an agile perspective, from a personal perspective there there’s attention brought to mental health for, for kids. And there’s a, a book particular that a friend of ours backs in his bubbles and essentially kids thought bubbles and bringing awareness to it’s okay. To have feelings, you know? So, so I’ve been reading and trying to read that with my kids as well. So something to do.
Dan Neumann [32:26]:
Very cool. Yep. Very cool. And I think by dumb luck, I only had one book down on the phone when I ended up on international flight and I didn’t wanna pay for internet. So it’s called no, the only negotiating system you need for work and home by Jim camp. So I’ve started reading through that, but admittedly I might have dozed off a little bit, but it’s not, you’re taken in small doses. You go through there, but just kind of giving people permission to start with no, like if this isn’t going to work, it’s okay. Let’s just, you know, make no an acceptable option and see if we can’t find a way to to meet each other’s needs. So that’s, that’s on my little journey right now, so should finish it at some point. Thank you both for taking the time on the agile coaches corner and sharing with folks and I’ll look forward to having you back again. You’re Dan, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks Dan.
Outro [33:23]:
This has been the agile coaches corner podcast brought to you by agile thought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of agile thought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips from this episode and other episodes@agilethought.com slash podcast.
Mentioned in this Episode:
The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, by J.J. Sutherland
Professional Coaching for Agilists: Accelerating Agile Adoption, by Damon Poole
No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home, by Jim Camp
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