A Change of Direction

Introducing Agile Wire

Hello Readers,

I’ve been away from writing for a while, and I’ve been trying to come back but struggling to do it.

I’m a Scrum Master, but one who has been between work assignments for a few months. In the meantime, I’m working with some teams who are handcuffed by their organization and can’t really act in an Agile way. This has been frustrating on several levels, as I’m in a place where I’m not empowered to help the teams improve, and due to the nature of our organization I could be pulled off a team with little to no notice for an assignment with a client.

I’ve had a hard time lately formulating innovative ideas to share with you, as those innovations I’m attempting are met with such a stonewalling that there are no successes to validate my efforts.

I’ve tried writing some things that are straight from my brain or based on my previous experiences, but I feel like I’m largely rehashing the same ideas over and over, and I haven’t been happy enough with anything I’ve written recently to publish it.

My impression of the conversation around Agility on LinkedIn is that we’re still arguing about the same petty things we were 3 months, 6 months, and a year ago. The Agile community there is built of small factions, each of which now just acts as its own echo chamber, and there is very little constructive discussion between people with differing viewpoints.

Is SAFe really Agile? Should you use a Definition of Ready? Are one-page Scrum “cheat sheets” ok or not? Is Scrum really immutable?

I don’t want to keep reading tired opinions on these topics alone for another year, but it appears to be the bubble I’m trapped inside.

There are people writing new, interesting ideas around Agility, Scrum, Product, and software development. I’m just not seeing them easily without hunting them down on my own. LinkedIn suppresses posts with links, so I just stay in doomscrolling mode and have to weed through countless infographics and carousels on Scrum basics to find anything new and valuable.

So for these reasons and others, I’d like to make a change to the format of this newsletter. Inspired by a well-known site dedicated to American politics called Political Wire, I’m calling this “Agile Wire.” I may still update the name, but for now this will do.

My aim here is to collect and curate articles on Agility and Product Development that are truly worth reading. I want not just for me, but for everyone else who desires to learn more, the freedom to escape the algorithms of social sites like LinkedIn.

You can watch for my site to be regularly updated, and I intend to send a regular digest email of recent updates. I don’t yet know if this will be daily or just weekly. It depends upon the volume of content I’m able to collect and recommend.

If you write something you’d like me to read and consider posting to the site, or if you see an article from someone else you feel deserves to be shared, I invite you to email me those recommendations at jeremyrandall@substack.com. I hope to quickly broaden the number of sources I’m pulling from to find articles worth your time.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and listened to me so far as I’ve talked about Scrumifying Your Life. For those of you who decide to move on after this change, no hard feelings and I appreciate having had your ear thus far.

Look for this new content to begin today.