3 Skills To Secure Your Agile Future

My friend, I'm happy to see you. Thank you as always for tuning in. All the conversations everywhere are about, should I pivot out of my current role? How do I get seen in a pile of resumes? How do I protect myself against layoffs and budget cuts? And I think personally the worst thing that I see when I look around is that really great agile people are getting pigeonholed and stuffed into these constrained positions of being glorified project

managers. What we see in large organizations especially is people who don't understand agility trying to make it look more like the management techniques of the 19 eighties. You have so much value, and there is so much opportunity and hope for you and me. I'm gonna tell you all about it right here. But first, let's take a moment to remember why we're here. To create an elite tribe of leaders who truly serve their clients and communities by doing what matters and what works, relentlessly

chasing value and excellence like a badass. There's so many resources out there about what you need to do to be agile, but we're focused on who you need to become in order to lead teams. Now if this episode helps you, do us a favor and share it with your friends. I want you to be first in line for what I believe is the next evolution of delivering value.

If you are stuck or locked into framework or role definitions, you're already competing with everyone else out there in the industry who have the same skills and qualifications as you. I want you to be first in line. Look. When you see yourself as a leader in any kind of market, it's absolutely catastrophic to be a follower. And I can tell you from the conversations that I have with people just like you and the people who sign deals and sign paychecks that there's a need to be

obsessed with the value that we deliver to organizations. Here's the thing. The value is not defined by or limited to the delivery of software or technology solutions. You've heard me say this before, but I'll repeat it. Agility will always be useful as a set of principles and practices. They're lightweight. They're very easy to understand and to transmit or transfer. We can no longer assume that people will be fascinated with what we do because the gloss has

been worn off a little bit. We can't keep behaving as though there's some magic in the word agile, or scrum master, or agile coach, or even product owner. There isn't, and everybody knows it. In an age of great financial pressure and budgetary constraints, companies are looking for us to deliver value in unique ways. And the thing is, we're the most qualified people to do exactly that, to be useful. Actually, to be imminently valuable to the organization.

Now everyone else is just doing like an iteration of the agile practitioner profile. Let me take what I do and shift over to product ownership a little more. Let me take what I do and add a little bit more financial accountability and reporting to it. Let me take what I do and shovel some Gantt charts and dashboards over to you. That's not meeting the market where it is. Because what you're doing is pigeonholing yourself into the role of a glorified project manager, and we offer so

much more than that. And I want you to be free of the employee rat race, of being just one resume in a pile of 1,000, and of being tied to a role description. We've got so much more to offer than that. But to do it, there's somebody that you need to become. We talk about that in the intro to this podcast all the time. It's not about what you do. It's who you need to become. And who is that? It's someone who's free of the employee mindset.

It's free of traditional role definitions. Most importantly, it's the freedom to realize that your value is not in your agile coach or scrum master role definition, but rather in helping the organization innovate and solve their most pressing problems. So it's time for you to change. I've spoken recently about either becoming an intrepreneur and helping other areas of the organization solve problems with or without technology,

or maybe you wanna hang out your own shingle. Maybe you've learned something about agility or delivery or lean or scrum that you'd like to create an offering, whether it's a service, whether it's a course, whether it's a book. You have something you wanna put in the marketplace. And either you've tried and failed to get the reach, the attention, or the results that you're looking for, or you're afraid that if you leap, that if you endeavor, no one will listen, no one will buy.

Either way, you have to recognize that you have to get much better at understanding where pain points and opportunities are, quickly defining proposals, pitches, and solutions to those pain points, and then you have to become the kind of person who talks about those ideas, who can literally market and sell the value you intend to provide to the people who will pay you for. If you can do those things, you

have total freedom and control over your career. And by the way, it's way easier than trying to stick all this stuff into a resume and hope that someone sees it. You're literally gonna be going through a different door, a different turn style as everyone else. Have you ever seen a big crowd in a crisis, like a soccer match gone wrong or some kind of mayhem in a public gathering? People get hurt when people panic and start

scrambling for the gates. Look for the exits and the escape valves that no one else is going through, and not only do you have an easier time getting where you're trying to go, but you don't have to work as hard. You don't have to fight to attract attention.

Now once you've made the decision that you don't wanna compete against all the other people who are really good at Miro and really good at Jira, really good at liberating structures, and all of those other things that we've all been trained in, and instead work on the things that Agilists traditionally don't know how to do. See, there's 3 problems that you have right now. You don't know what your customers really need. Part of the

problem is they don't know either. Here's a really good example. I love music. I love audio, so I use a product called Tidal. Now I use Apple Music, but Tidal appealed to me because their promise was if you love music, you love high quality music. You want the best audio experience you can possibly get. So they offered these high resolution files before anyone else did. Now this was great. My music

sounded better. It could be a little bit louder, But the problem is, when I get into my car and I hook it up to CarPlay, it's almost unusable. Maybe today I feel like listening to the Tragically Hip or some Rush, or maybe I wanna put on my son's favorite music. The idea is when you go to browse artists, they're not listed alphabetically. So here's me with 100 of artists that I follow, and it's impossible to find what I want when I want it. There's

no way to search it. There's no way to sort it in alphabetical order. It's really, really hard to get to the music I want. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I shouldn't need a manual to learn how to use an app in 2024. What I really want is simplicity. I want what I want when I want it. When it comes to music, and especially if I'm driving a car, I don't wanna have to fuss and fiddle or worry about downloading a playlist before I leave the house. So I'm their ideal customer. I'm

begging, please take my money. But they made a product that's so hard to use that I can't logically make sense of it. The experience is frustrating, and it feels like it's not designed for me. Someone who listens to a lot of music mostly in my car, or when I'm just walking around. So a perfect instance of having a great idea, and an assumption that music fans will love it, and completely screwing up the implementation. So problem number 1 is finding out what is valuable

to an organization and its customers. What do they really want? What do they struggle with? What do they hate? What causes them discomfort? What costs them time and money that they really wish they didn't have to part with? It's shocking how often we don't pay attention to what the customer is really telling us. And you would be blown away if you knew how to use the tools of customer research properly. How many moments and how many opportunities just pop up right in front of you begging

to be solved. Now here's the next problem, is that you, especially if you're familiar with things like lean, know how to solve problems with simplicity and speed. You know what an MVP is? Of course you do. The problem is, we have a hard time convincing our customers to change their mindset so they can use these tools. They're locked, they're stuck. What they want is more process, and oftentimes

as agile practitioners, that's what we want too. We think that the way to be more valuable to our clients is to create more complexity, more mystery, more specialness around the framework when that's completely the wrong way to go. The fundamentals of agility can be taught in about 20 minutes. The magic of agility happens in the doing. Let's go. Let's try. Let's test. Let's learn. Let's fail. Now problem number 3 is that you don't know how to pitch, sell, or market what you do, or

how to pitch, sell, and market your ideas. It's not your fault. We all grew up in the technical realm. We weren't taught the other side of business, but to be a real double threat in our industry, you have to learn those crucial skills of communication, influencing, and compelling people to try things the agile way. And those are the real skills of an agile leader. It's not how nuanced your framework is because nuanced framework just makes for a 700 page instruction manual

that no one has time to read. We already had that back in the nineties and 2000s. We had all of these detailed frameworks and templates and flowcharts, and they didn't work. That's how agile arrived on

the scene. But when you make a habit of going to the organization or going to your own customers and pitching solutions to their problems over and over and over, and refining what you know about them so that you can make your offering better and more impactful, and then learning how to speak to their specific language using their terminology, using their pains and fears, connecting authentically, serving with integrity, and making their pains go away, you are always

valuable to an organization. You're no longer a but that fits into a vacant seat. You're so much more than that. So whether you wanna work more closely with product or with business in an organization, as an employee or as a contractor, helping them with their needs and solving real problems that they're struggling to solve, or whether you wanna get the heck out of tech like I often preach, and solve real business problems? What is HR challenged with? What about learning and

development? What about sales and marketing? What about operations? What about legal? If you can help them ideate, innovate, and deliver with the agile skills you already have, You have unlimited opportunity because nobody else knows how to talk to these folks. Nobody else understands the industry or their customers like you do. And of course my favorite is to do what I've been doing for the past 5 to 7 years, start your own side hustle. You've got an idea in you. You have a

service. You have a product. You have an information offering like a course or a program or a community, but you wonder if it's viable. You don't know how to get yourself heard. You don't know the right things to say to attract the right kind of audience, the people that you were designed for, and who were designed for you. They're out there dying for your help. The problem is, how do you find them? How do

you help them? Think of the laundry list of skills that you would need to develop in order to have the freedom of an entrepreneur and to be

successful as an entrepreneur. You need to know how to research your customers, understand their needs, validate your product, market your product, do the copywriting and the social media, create your differentiation, your unique value proposition, or your distinct voice, how to brand yourself, and how to give your brand a voice, how to pivot when things aren't working, how to knock on doors and sell to organizations or individuals, and how to stay

laser focused on the value you bring to your customers. There's a lot to do there. Now, let me pitch something to you. For the first time in the history of our industry, let me take the mystery out of this stuff so that you can serve your enterprise better or maybe, just maybe, start your own thing. If you struggle to get your ideas heard or your products seen, and that's the number one skill that you need to survive and thrive in this new agile environment, I wanna

shortcut your journey. I'm gonna give you the mindset, skills, and even the scripts that you need to serve the way you wanna serve and to live the life you wanna live. I have a new product. This product, I didn't intend to build. It came completely out of customer demand and request, and it's called the forge genesis, just like the forge. It's a 1 year long

immersion experience. We still train you on the leadership, values, and virtues that you need to operate in high stakes, high stress, high competition environments where failure is not an option, and the road to success is your ability to never quit. But I'm gonna fold into that all of the skills that you need to market your value inside the

organization or beyond. You will work with me to get your first idea launched in 30 days, whether that's a pitch to someone in your organization or a brand new product or service that you have been dying to launch so that you can have the freedom of writing your own paychecks. Not only will I give you all of the scripts and templates that I use to market and sell my products, and keep in mind, nobody hands me a paycheck anymore. If I don't hunt, I

don't eat. So these are the skills that I've used to build a lifestyle and a business that does not depend on market trends and emotional shifts in people's

perception of agile, our community, and our value. Not only will I give you the scripts to do it, I'll give you the AI prompts that I use so that if I need to come up with a pitch in half an hour, if I need to do customer research in one evening, if I need to generate headlines, social media ideas, social media calendars, I can take 80 to 90% of the effort out of those endeavors so that I move faster than any of my competition. This offering is nowhere else in the

industry. It is tailored to people with agile skill Whether you practice agile today or not, let's use the agile principles and techniques to build something that is truly yours, to meet the demand of the future of business and ways of working. Don't be left behind. The demand for this has been absolutely crazy. You'll see me

launch some info at badassagile.com, so stay tuned to that. But in the meantime, if you wanna hear about getting involved in the beta of this program, For less than half the price of the normal forge, please reach out to me at contact at badassagile.com. I look forward to telling you more about this stuff to get your new future launched in just 30 days and spending a year refining, perfecting and growing it for you. This is an example of looking where nobody else is looking.

So join me. Won't you be part of this? My friend, thank you very much for tuning in as always. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, stay badass.