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The Liberators Podcast
This is the podcast of The Liberators. Our mission is to unleash organizations and teams all across the globe from ineffective product development. We rely on insights from scientific research as much as possible so that you don't have to take our word for it.
In each episode, we look at the challenges faced by Agile teams, software teams, and product teams. We discuss relevant research, share our experiences, or challenge existing beliefs. Each episode ends with practical and actionable recommendations on what you can do with your teams.
Most episodes are written and presented by Christiaan Verwijs. Our music was written and performed by Jasper Huiskamp a.k.a. Basanite. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp. The music for episodes before 91 is licensed from Yummy Sounds.
Episodes
104 episodes
In-Depth: What Is The Optimal Size For A Scrum Team?
How many members did the best Scrum teams you worked with have? It’s an age-old question amongst practitioners who are new to Agile methodologies: “What is the optimal number of members in a team?”.The
5 Effective Ways To Increase Management Support For Agile
In our workshops and classes, participants often lament how difficult it is to get “management to do their part”. And my experience in this area has also been one of many struggles. Some managers get Agile and Scrum. But others seem to have mad...
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In-Depth: Is SAFe® Really That Bad?
The mere mention of SAFe® often results in groans among Agilists. It isn't hard to find skeptical views of SAFe® and similar large-scale Agile frameworks. Honestly, we're not a fan either.We also believe we need to ground our beliefs in...
In-Depth: How To Make Pair Programming More Effective
How can we make pair programming more effective? We know that some developers love it, and others hate it. Pair programming is a common practice in Agile teams. As we reported in our previous episode, the scientific evidence from meta-a...
In-Depth: The Costs And Benefits Of Pair Programming
We are fans of pair programming. There is something very satisfying about passing the keyboard back and forth and sharing the mind space for a problem with someone else. But other developers hate it for various reasons. Some find it wasteful. O...
Scrum Is Just A Recipe
Scrum is great. We love it. And it's also just a recipe. It needs a lot more to result in a flavorful, delicious, and nutritious meal.Understanding Scrum as merely a recipe has worked well for us to understand both its strengths and lim...
In-Depth: How Does Working From Home Influence Teamwork?
How does working from home influence teamwork? This question came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most companies switched from fully co-located work to fully remote work for most of the pandemic. But since then, many of tho...
The Church Of Scrum
Have you ever noticed the many parallels between organized religion and Scrum? Or with Agile methodologies more broadly? It's been a recurring joke between us as we attend conferences, interact with critics and advocates of Scrum, and ...
In-Depth: The Evidence-Based Business Case For Agile (Or Why Agile Isn't Dead)
"Agile is dead" is a contrarian opinion that gets thrown around a lot on social media. While it's a nice way to get attention, what does the evidence say? Agile can only be dead if it doesn't work, if it doesn't result in more effective teams a...
In-Depth: How To Prevent High-Performing Teams From Burning Out
“How do I prevent my high-performing team from burning out?” is a question that recently came up in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a positive situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team,...
In-Depth: The Double-Edged Sword Of Diversity In Teams
We're back!How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both?...
In-Depth: How Scrum Motivates Through Shared Goals And High Autonomy
The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives....
In-Depth: The Fine Art Of Making Your Improvements Actionable
“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.”The improvement actions that come out of Sprint...
In-Depth: What Makes A Good Product Owner?
What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more -...
Why Doesn't The Agile Community Practice Empiricism?
"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.But where is the evidence to support these ...
Liberating Structures Should Be Everywhere People Interact
"It slowly started to dawn on me that something else was happening during these gatherings. Something I hadn’t seen before so clearly in my previous work with groups. I saw so many happy faces around me. I saw so many people intently listening ...
In-Depth: Does Scrum Only Work In Small Organizations?
A common belief among Agile practitioners is that Scrum works best in smaller organizations. Things are simpler there, and you don't have all those impediments of your typical corporate. Since much of our day-to-day experience is also with smal...
In-Depth: Are Scrum Masters Sufficiently Focused On Valuable Outcomes?
Are Scrum Masters perhaps too focused on the process, and too little on whether or not that process actually delivers valuable outcomes? How is that for you, as a Scrum Master?This is a hunch based on countless conversations we...
How Work On The Scrum Team Survey Taught Us 10 Lessons About Agile
We are creating the Scrum Team Survey to help Scrum teams and Agile teams to diagnose their process. We also give tons of evidence-based feedback. One of the cool things about developing a product ourselves, and with our own money, is that we g...
In-Depth: How Coherence And Cohesion Are Critical To Scrum
Do your Daily Scrums feel like a pointless ritual where everyone just lists what they’ve done yesterday, and what they do will do today? Does Sprint Planning feel like a waste of time because everyone only wants to know what they have to do? An...
Is Blue-print Thinking Limiting The Potential Of The Agile Community?
Do you start a new Scrum team by explaining the roles, artifacts, and events? Do you rarely consider how to build coalitions and persuade people in power to support your work with Scrum? Are you thinking about the psychological needs of people ...
In-Depth: Stable Or Fluid Teams? What Does The Science Say?
Recently, the concept of “fluid teams”, “dynamic reteaming” or “ad-hoc teaming” has gained traction in the Agile community. Although the concept has many different definitions, a characteristic they share is that members move in and out of a te...
In-Depth: How To Create Better Work Agreements For Your Team
Do high-performing teams communicate more than low-performing teams? 🤔If you think "Yes!", you may want to reconsider. Scientific studies often find the reverse. When researchers compare high-performing teams with low-performing teams, ...
In-Depth: What Scientific Research Has To Say About Technical Debt And Code Smells
Why is code quality so often an issue? Why do software teams — despite their best initial intentions — often end up fighting a codebase that is hard to test, resistant to change, and prone to strange bugs?We have many intuitions about t...
Agility And Business Agility Are The Same
There is a growing trend in our industry to distinguish between “Agility” and “Business Agility”. The idea here is that Agile is limited only to teams and to software and that more is needed. Many consultancy firms are now jumping into that gap...