Chris Williams: You have marketable, valuable skills. But if you feel like
Chris Williams: your career is struggling right now, I don't want you to keep trying to squeeze
Chris Williams: through the same door as everyone else with the same certifications and
Chris Williams: experience. There's 3 things that you're not doing
Chris Williams: that I want you to start doing right now that will transform your
Chris Williams: opportunities and your future. That's this week on the Badass
Chris Williams: Agile podcast.
Chris Williams: Greetings, team. Welcome to the Badass Agile podcast. I'm
Chris Williams: your host, Chris Williams.
Chris Williams: My friend, I'm happy to see you. Thank you as always for tuning in.
Chris Williams: All the conversations everywhere are about, should
Chris Williams: I pivot out of my current role? How do I get seen in a pile
Chris Williams: of resumes? How do I protect myself against layoffs
Chris Williams: and budget cuts? And I think personally the worst thing that I
Chris Williams: see when I look around is that really great agile
Chris Williams: people are getting pigeonholed and stuffed into
Chris Williams: these constrained positions of being glorified project
Chris Williams: managers. What we see in large organizations especially
Chris Williams: is people who don't understand agility trying to make it look
Chris Williams: more like the management techniques of the 19 eighties.
Chris Williams: You have so much value, and there is so much opportunity
Chris Williams: and hope for you and me. I'm gonna tell you all about it right here.
Chris Williams: But first, let's take a moment to remember why we're here. To create
Chris Williams: an elite tribe of leaders who truly serve their clients and communities
Chris Williams: by doing what matters and what works, relentlessly
Chris Williams: chasing value and excellence like a badass. There's so
Chris Williams: many resources out there about what you need to do to be agile,
Chris Williams: but we're focused on who you need to become in order to
Chris Williams: lead teams. Now if this episode helps you, do us a
Chris Williams: favor and share it with your friends. I want
Chris Williams: you to be first in line for what I believe is the
Chris Williams: next evolution of delivering value.
Chris Williams: If you are stuck or locked into framework or
Chris Williams: role definitions, you're already competing with
Chris Williams: everyone else out there in the industry who have the same skills and
Chris Williams: qualifications as you. I want you to be first in
Chris Williams: line. Look. When you see yourself as a leader in any kind of
Chris Williams: market, it's absolutely catastrophic to be
Chris Williams: a follower. And I can tell you from the conversations that
Chris Williams: I have with people just like you and the people who sign deals
Chris Williams: and sign paychecks that there's a need to be
Chris Williams: obsessed with the value that we deliver to organizations. Here's the
Chris Williams: thing. The value is not defined by or
Chris Williams: limited to the delivery of software or technology
Chris Williams: solutions. You've heard me say this before, but I'll repeat it.
Chris Williams: Agility will always be useful as a set of principles and practices.
Chris Williams: They're lightweight. They're very easy to understand and to transmit or
Chris Williams: transfer. We can no longer assume that people
Chris Williams: will be fascinated with what we do because the gloss has
Chris Williams: been worn off a little bit. We can't keep behaving as though there's
Chris Williams: some magic in the word agile, or scrum master, or
Chris Williams: agile coach, or even product owner. There isn't, and
Chris Williams: everybody knows it. In an age of great financial pressure and
Chris Williams: budgetary constraints, companies are looking for us to deliver
Chris Williams: value in unique ways. And the thing is, we're the most
Chris Williams: qualified people to do exactly that, to be useful.
Chris Williams: Actually, to be imminently valuable to the organization.
Chris Williams: Now everyone else is just doing like an iteration of
Chris Williams: the agile practitioner profile. Let me take what I do and shift
Chris Williams: over to product ownership a little more. Let me take what I do and add
Chris Williams: a little bit more financial accountability and reporting to it. Let me take what
Chris Williams: I do and shovel some Gantt charts and dashboards over to
Chris Williams: you. That's not meeting the market where it is.
Chris Williams: Because what you're doing is pigeonholing yourself into the
Chris Williams: role of a glorified project manager, and we offer so
Chris Williams: much more than that. And I want you to be free of the
Chris Williams: employee rat race, of being just one resume in a pile of
Chris Williams: 1,000, and of being tied to a role description.
Chris Williams: We've got so much more to offer than that. But to do
Chris Williams: it, there's somebody that you need to become. We talk
Chris Williams: about that in the intro to this podcast all the time. It's not
Chris Williams: about what you do. It's who you need to become. And who is
Chris Williams: that? It's someone who's free of the employee mindset.
Chris Williams: It's free of traditional role definitions. Most importantly,
Chris Williams: it's the freedom to realize that your
Chris Williams: value is not in your agile coach or scrum master role definition, but
Chris Williams: rather in helping the organization innovate and solve
Chris Williams: their most pressing problems. So it's time for you to change. I've
Chris Williams: spoken recently about either becoming an intrepreneur and helping other
Chris Williams: areas of the organization solve problems with or without technology,
Chris Williams: or maybe you wanna hang out your own shingle. Maybe you've
Chris Williams: learned something about agility or delivery or lean or scrum that
Chris Williams: you'd like to create an offering, whether it's a service, whether it's
Chris Williams: a course, whether it's a book. You have something you wanna put in the
Chris Williams: marketplace. And either you've tried and failed to get the
Chris Williams: reach, the attention, or the results that you're looking for, or
Chris Williams: you're afraid that if you leap, that if you endeavor,
Chris Williams: no one will listen, no one will buy.
Chris Williams: Either way, you have to recognize that you have to get
Chris Williams: much better at understanding where pain points and opportunities
Chris Williams: are, quickly defining proposals, pitches, and
Chris Williams: solutions to those pain points, and then you have to become the kind
Chris Williams: of person who talks about those ideas, who can literally
Chris Williams: market and sell the value you intend to provide
Chris Williams: to the people who will pay you for. If you can do those things, you
Chris Williams: have total freedom and control over your career. And by the
Chris Williams: way, it's way easier than trying to stick all this stuff
Chris Williams: into a resume and hope that someone sees it. You're literally gonna be
Chris Williams: going through a different door, a different turn style as everyone
Chris Williams: else. Have you ever seen a big crowd in a crisis, like a soccer
Chris Williams: match gone wrong or some kind of mayhem in a public gathering?
Chris Williams: People get hurt when people panic and start
Chris Williams: scrambling for the gates. Look for the exits and the
Chris Williams: escape valves that no one else is going through, and not only do you have
Chris Williams: an easier time getting where you're trying to go, but you don't have
Chris Williams: to work as hard. You don't have to fight to attract attention.
Chris Williams: Now once you've made the decision that you don't wanna compete against
Chris Williams: all the other people who are really good at Miro and really good at Jira,
Chris Williams: really good at liberating structures, and all of those other things that we've all
Chris Williams: been trained in, and instead work on the things that
Chris Williams: Agilists traditionally don't know how to
Chris Williams: do. See, there's 3 problems that you have right now.
Chris Williams: You don't know what your customers really need. Part of the
Chris Williams: problem is they don't know either. Here's a really good example. I love
Chris Williams: music. I love audio, so I use a product called Tidal.
Chris Williams: Now I use Apple Music, but Tidal appealed to me
Chris Williams: because their promise was if you love music, you
Chris Williams: love high quality music. You want the best audio experience
Chris Williams: you can possibly get. So they offered these high resolution files
Chris Williams: before anyone else did. Now this was great. My music
Chris Williams: sounded better. It could be a little bit louder, But the problem
Chris Williams: is, when I get into my car and I hook it up to CarPlay,
Chris Williams: it's almost unusable. Maybe today I feel like listening to the
Chris Williams: Tragically Hip or some Rush, or maybe I wanna put on
Chris Williams: my son's favorite music. The idea is when you go to browse artists, they're not
Chris Williams: listed alphabetically. So here's me with 100 of artists that
Chris Williams: I follow, and it's impossible to find what I want when I want it. There's
Chris Williams: no way to search it. There's no way to sort it in alphabetical order.
Chris Williams: It's really, really hard to get to the music I want. Maybe I'm missing the
Chris Williams: point, but I shouldn't need a manual to learn how to use
Chris Williams: an app in 2024. What I really want is
Chris Williams: simplicity. I want what I want when I want it. When it comes to
Chris Williams: music, and especially if I'm driving a car, I don't wanna have to fuss
Chris Williams: and fiddle or worry about downloading a playlist before I leave
Chris Williams: the house. So I'm their ideal customer. I'm
Chris Williams: begging, please take my money. But they made a product
Chris Williams: that's so hard to use that I can't logically make sense of
Chris Williams: it. The experience is frustrating, and it feels like it's not
Chris Williams: designed for me. Someone who listens to a lot of music mostly
Chris Williams: in my car, or when I'm just walking around. So a perfect instance
Chris Williams: of having a great idea, and an assumption that music fans
Chris Williams: will love it, and completely screwing up the implementation.
Chris Williams: So problem number 1 is finding out what is valuable
Chris Williams: to an organization and its customers. What do they really want? What do they struggle
Chris Williams: with? What do they hate? What causes them discomfort?
Chris Williams: What costs them time and money that they really wish they didn't
Chris Williams: have to part with? It's shocking how often we don't pay
Chris Williams: attention to what the customer is really telling us. And you
Chris Williams: would be blown away if you knew how to use the tools of customer
Chris Williams: research properly. How many moments and how many
Chris Williams: opportunities just pop up right in front of you begging
Chris Williams: to be solved. Now here's the next problem, is that
Chris Williams: you, especially if you're familiar with things like lean, know how to
Chris Williams: solve problems with simplicity and speed. You know
Chris Williams: what an MVP is? Of course you do. The problem is, we have a hard
Chris Williams: time convincing our customers to change their mindset so they
Chris Williams: can use these tools. They're locked, they're
Chris Williams: stuck. What they want is more process, and oftentimes
Chris Williams: as agile practitioners, that's what we want too. We think that the way to
Chris Williams: be more valuable to our clients is to create more
Chris Williams: complexity, more mystery, more specialness around the
Chris Williams: framework when that's completely the wrong way to go. The
Chris Williams: fundamentals of agility can be taught in about 20 minutes. The
Chris Williams: magic of agility happens in the doing. Let's go.
Chris Williams: Let's try. Let's test. Let's learn. Let's fail.
Chris Williams: Now problem number 3 is that you don't know how to
Chris Williams: pitch, sell, or market what you do, or
Chris Williams: how to pitch, sell, and market your ideas. It's not your
Chris Williams: fault. We all grew up in the technical realm. We weren't taught
Chris Williams: the other side of business, but to be a real double threat
Chris Williams: in our industry, you have to learn those crucial skills
Chris Williams: of communication, influencing, and compelling people
Chris Williams: to try things the agile way. And those are the real skills of an
Chris Williams: agile leader. It's not how nuanced your framework is because
Chris Williams: nuanced framework just makes for a 700 page instruction manual
Chris Williams: that no one has time to read. We already had that back in the
Chris Williams: nineties and 2000s. We had all of these detailed frameworks and templates
Chris Williams: and flowcharts, and they didn't work. That's how agile arrived on
Chris Williams: the scene. But when you make a habit of going to the organization
Chris Williams: or going to your own customers and
Chris Williams: pitching solutions to their problems over and over and over,
Chris Williams: and refining what you know about them so that you can make your offering
Chris Williams: better and more impactful, and then learning how to speak to
Chris Williams: their specific language using their
Chris Williams: terminology, using their pains and fears,
Chris Williams: connecting authentically, serving with integrity,
Chris Williams: and making their pains go away, you are always
Chris Williams: valuable to an organization. You're no longer a but that
Chris Williams: fits into a vacant seat. You're so much more than that.
Chris Williams: So whether you wanna work more closely with product or
Chris Williams: with business in an organization, as an employee or as a
Chris Williams: contractor, helping them with their needs and solving real
Chris Williams: problems that they're struggling to solve, or whether you wanna
Chris Williams: get the heck out of tech like I often preach, and solve real
Chris Williams: business problems? What is HR challenged with? What about learning and
Chris Williams: development? What about sales and marketing? What about operations? What about legal?
Chris Williams: If you can help them ideate, innovate, and deliver with the
Chris Williams: agile skills you already have, You
Chris Williams: have unlimited opportunity because nobody else knows how to talk
Chris Williams: to these folks. Nobody else understands the industry or
Chris Williams: their customers like you do. And of course my favorite
Chris Williams: is to do what I've been doing for the past 5 to 7 years, start
Chris Williams: your own side hustle. You've got an idea in you. You have a
Chris Williams: service. You have a product. You have an information offering like a course
Chris Williams: or a program or a community, but you wonder if it's
Chris Williams: viable. You don't know how to get yourself heard. You
Chris Williams: don't know the right things to say to attract the right kind of
Chris Williams: audience, the people that you were designed for, and who were
Chris Williams: designed for you. They're out there dying for your
Chris Williams: help. The problem is, how do you find them? How do
Chris Williams: you help them? Think of the laundry list of skills that you would need
Chris Williams: to develop in order to have the freedom of an entrepreneur and to be
Chris Williams: successful as an entrepreneur. You need to know how to research your customers,
Chris Williams: understand their needs, validate your product, market your product, do
Chris Williams: the copywriting and the social media, create your differentiation,
Chris Williams: your unique value proposition, or your distinct voice, how
Chris Williams: to brand yourself, and how to give your brand a voice, how to pivot when
Chris Williams: things aren't working, how to knock on doors and sell to
Chris Williams: organizations or individuals, and how to stay
Chris Williams: laser focused on the value you bring to your customers. There's
Chris Williams: a lot to do there. Now, let me pitch something to
Chris Williams: you. For the first time in the history of our industry,
Chris Williams: let me take the mystery out of this stuff so that you can serve your
Chris Williams: enterprise better or maybe, just maybe, start your own
Chris Williams: thing. If you struggle to get your ideas heard or your
Chris Williams: products seen, and that's the number one skill that you need to
Chris Williams: survive and thrive in this new agile environment, I wanna
Chris Williams: shortcut your journey. I'm gonna give you the mindset,
Chris Williams: skills, and even the scripts that you need to serve the way
Chris Williams: you wanna serve and to live the life you wanna live.
Chris Williams: I have a new product. This product, I didn't intend to build. It
Chris Williams: came completely out of customer demand and request, and it's called the
Chris Williams: forge genesis, just like the forge. It's a 1 year long
Chris Williams: immersion experience. We still train you on the
Chris Williams: leadership, values, and virtues that you need to operate in
Chris Williams: high stakes, high stress, high competition environments
Chris Williams: where failure is not an option, and the road to success is your
Chris Williams: ability to never quit. But I'm gonna fold into that all of the
Chris Williams: skills that you need to market your value inside the
Chris Williams: organization or beyond. You will work with me to get your
Chris Williams: first idea launched in 30 days, whether that's a pitch to
Chris Williams: someone in your organization or a brand new product or service that you
Chris Williams: have been dying to launch so that you can have the freedom of
Chris Williams: writing your own paychecks. Not only will I give you all of the scripts and
Chris Williams: templates that I use to market and sell my products, and keep in
Chris Williams: mind, nobody hands me a paycheck anymore. If I don't hunt, I
Chris Williams: don't eat. So these are the skills that I've used to build a
Chris Williams: lifestyle and a business that does not depend on
Chris Williams: market trends and emotional shifts in people's
Chris Williams: perception of agile, our community, and our value. Not
Chris Williams: only will I give you the scripts to do it, I'll give you the AI
Chris Williams: prompts that I use so that if I need to come up with a pitch
Chris Williams: in half an hour, if I need to do customer research in one
Chris Williams: evening, if I need to generate headlines, social media
Chris Williams: ideas, social media calendars, I can take 80 to 90%
Chris Williams: of the effort out of those endeavors so that I move faster than
Chris Williams: any of my competition. This offering is nowhere else in the
Chris Williams: industry. It is tailored to people with agile
Chris Williams: skill Whether you practice agile today or not,
Chris Williams: let's use the agile principles and techniques to build something
Chris Williams: that is truly yours, to meet the demand
Chris Williams: of the future of business and ways of working. Don't be left behind.
Chris Williams: The demand for this has been absolutely crazy. You'll see me
Chris Williams: launch some info at badassagile.com, so stay tuned to that. But in the
Chris Williams: meantime, if you wanna hear about getting involved in the
Chris Williams: beta of this program, For less than half the price of the
Chris Williams: normal forge, please reach out to me at contact at badassagile.com.
Chris Williams: I look forward to telling you more about this stuff to get your new
Chris Williams: future launched in just 30 days and spending a year
Chris Williams: refining, perfecting and growing it for you. This is an
Chris Williams: example of looking where nobody else is looking.
Chris Williams: So join me. Won't you be part of this? My friend, thank you very much
Chris Williams: for tuning in as always. I look forward to seeing you next time and until
Chris Williams: then, stay badass.