Agile Changed My Life

industry has completely changed my career, and I wanna share it with you. 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 focus on who you need to become in order to lead teams. So let's hammer down those fundamentals to create a

truly unique and powerful force in this industry. And remember, if this helps you, share this episode with your friends. When I think about what agile has taught me, now that I don't do real development team stuff anymore, I think about all the things that it's allowed me to bring into my personal life in development, but also equally important to the business that I run. So it's worth showcasing. What did it create for me? What did it do? What did I learn? Why does that matter? Did it open

doors for me? What was this whole apprenticeship for over the past almost 20 years? What did I walk away with? Those are great questions to ask because I think in a time where you're wondering where did my agile career go? What are we supposed to do next? This could be valuable for you too if you're willing to look at it in a similar way. So first, it taught me what a business does

and some of the best ways for a business to make money. Most importantly, I learned that no matter what a business does, there are 2 primary objectives in mind. One is to make money, where the business that doesn't make money is called a charity, and you have to decide whether you're working for a business or whether you're creating your own, how you're gonna help

the business do that. And the second thing you need to realize is that all money is generated when you create value, when you solve a valuable problem for some kind of customer. And that leads me to the second thing that it taught me. It showed me the human side of business and product, and taught me to put the user's need, whether that's a pain or whether it's a desire. Ahead of all the other smart people in an organization who think they know what the product

should be or do. Here's a problem we face as Agilist. Tell me if this is true for you. If you work for a company, but you're not working on their core product, just something ancillary that supports the product, so think of a bank, The core product is probably not the software that you make, but even if you make the software that drives the online banking app, that is secondary to their

core business. Whether that's collecting funds on deposit, or making money on the interest on loans, whatever it may be, what you do is not the core product. So oftentimes when we make product, we fail to ask the question, what does this need to be for you? How can we solve an important problem for you? How could this

make your life easier? And we spend more time working on the features that we internally think that the customer might want or might value with little or no proof that they actually do. Problem gets worse when the customer never directly pays for this product. So by being agile and working in all different kinds of projects and conditions, you learn that unless you have that core customer value, the thing that they most desire, the pain that they most desperately want to make go away,

that needs to be your focus. And how you research and how you talk to the customer and how you make decisions will be forever changed if you take that knowledge to heart. Again, related to this, it taught me that a lot of the things that we build are not valuable. And so we can always improve the value that we bring to the people who hire us or the customers that we chase and attract by, once

again, focusing on those things. And the final thing that Agile taught me that's so so important is not to play by the rule book. A lot of people in my industry, a lot of people that I work with are super concerned with meeting the expectations of the agile bible or the employee handbook. And that was probably the biggest breakthrough for me Because the truth is that

what spoiled agile is mediocrity. Those who tempt us with a steady paycheck in a process controlled scaled environment, when really the most important lesson that agile should be teaching us is to take controlled risk, flop on your belly, fail. Don't let certainty and the desire for safety spoil this excitement, this excellent skill that you now have. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Agile works best in

environments where we have never done this thing before. We don't know how to get to an outcome because we've never gotten it in the past. We're gonna experiment our way to greater knowledge, more learning, and more certainty. But if we use agile as a process control, as a way to manage projects and deliver more certainty, we're gonna struggle. If certainty were available in those kinds of projects, you wouldn't need agile. What we're after is not delivery certainty, but something completely

different. And you could make a difference. You could go boldly. You could stop giving your time to people who don't understand or want agile or your agile skill, all they really want is your labor, your time by the hour, your conformity, your compliance to process. And for me, this knowledge, this observation

changed my life. Because I was able to start a business and interact with customers and deliver a service that is not about glorified project management or budget management, but instead to truly help people innovate and to delight and impact customers as directly as possible. So what did I do and what could you do with all of this learning? Number 1, I've said this before. You could use these skills to create your own side hustle.

Build something. A lot of people who graduated the forge took this knowledge to go and build a business for themselves. Now if entrepreneurship doesn't appeal to you, then make your side hustle something inside the organization. Be an intrepreneur. Find ways to create new value elsewhere in the organization, and I talk an awful lot about how to do that for non technical departments or divisions. Or you could go somewhere right straight

down the middle. Keep your day job while you work on something that you have a hunch can make a difference in the world, can make a dent. Maybe it wouldn't change the world, but it would just make the world a whole lot more fun for a certain group of people. What group of people? People just like you. People who love what you love. People who like what you like. People who think the way that you think. Never underestimate the power of

helping the person that you used to be. Tim Ferris sometimes says scratch your own itch, which means build the product that you yourself wish you had. You don't have to have a 1000000 customers to create a super successful business, and you don't have to quit your day job to run one either. Now whether you work for yourself or you work for somebody else, you could use this knowledge to make your own products or services better by focusing on the

customer and what they want. Now you have to start asking questions. Now you have to do your research. Now you have to think about things that product people have to think about, demographics, psychographics. What causes people to buy? What language do they use? How do they talk to each other? What do they wanna hear? If you do this, if nothing else, you could help guide product owners to making better decisions and better priorities based on real customer feedback

and real knowledge of the people that you serve. And look, at the very least, you could use these skills to create a unique perspective or voice. If you refuse to play by the rule book, if you refuse to do corporate zombie agile, you could start saying things that help other teams do better and be better. A fresh perspective, Some people have never heard of or thought about before. You'd be

surprised. The extent to which an outlier, somebody who says something that doesn't normally get said, can create not only attention and by the way, attention translates directly to income, to revenue, but also to elevate the craft. Hey. We're in need of that right now. I've said many times that agility is struggling because we've broken trust. We don't add value the way that we were supposed to, the way that we wanted to. So if you got something to say about

it, say it. Here's something else that I think these learnings can do. Certainly did it for me. Teach yourself to challenge yourself. Push your limits. Find out what you're capable of. If you do any of these things, if you break the rules, if you focus more on customers, if you're determined to add more value to an organization or your own business, you're learning to do something that's very important. How do you capitalize on opportunities? If you have agile skill,

this is the next level stuff. We're supposed to be helping companies innovate. We're supposed to be helping them pivot and respond to market challenges as they come up. So show a business that you know how to do that, that you know how to capitalize on a market opportunity. Hit that need first and fast, and you'll be helping your customers whether you're consulting for a bank, working full time for an insurance company, or creating products and services for your own market. If you do

that for them, they'll trust you. They'll learn to lean on you, to rely on you. And if you do it well, they'll want you to keep coming back. I think that making dev teams more efficient is not a visionary job. And so if agile has grabbed hold of you too, and you want more of the promise and more of the passion, then these are the kinds of things you might wanna know. Not only you can chase, but they can be profitable,

prosperous, and highly fulfilling. What I love most about this is that when I was a kid, before being honest, I was never really pushed that hard. And so I developed this bad habit of thinking that things would be okay, opportunities would just come to me and I never learned how to stretch and take whatever talent I had, whatever knowledge I had built and

try to create something bigger. And Agile gave me that. It forced me to look at the behaviors and mindsets that I held that caused me to doubt myself and to fight to overcome them. And when you overcome something like that and you become unstoppable, you become limitless. World feels like a playground, and life's a lot more fun. See in the beginning, Agile was in demand. So I had a healthy income, a reliable career, and a decent amount of demand just

because Agile was in vogue. But later, it became obvious that I had something to say, and I trusted myself to make this show and to find you all so that we could talk about it together, and if I've opened your eyes to some opportunities, if I've given you insight into how to be more successful with the tools and the knowledge that we've got, then damn. I've done a great thing, and I built it myself. I learned to make it profitable. I created my own economy, my own industry, and

the doubt by the way never fully goes away. Sometimes I think, uh-oh. I'm sliding backwards because interest in agile might be waning or it's all been said before. But I know it in my heart that I can never go back to employee thinking.

I can never go back to people pleasing. Because when you do that, you're taking that full time job or that contract, and you're agreeing to a point to sell off your soul, to sell off your passion, to co opt and borrow against your life blood, to create something that's only good if it passes the approval of some bigger authority. And I feel like most of the people who listen to the show want something more.

So think about what Agile has done for you, and think about how can we use that now to do something amazing, something that's not in the playbook inside your company, outside of any one company, with your own customers, with your own products and services? What could it be? Well, the truth is it could be anything, and that's what Agile gave me. And I remember that forever, and I'm grateful forever. Hope this one inspired you. You can find me as always at badassagile.com.

Don't forget to check out the forge and my other products and services. Links are all in the show notes below. I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time, and until then, stay badass.