Are We Preparing Scrum Masters for Success? with Kat Buckwalter

Unlock the secrets to becoming an exceptional Scrum Master with Kat Buckwalter, whose expertise spans neuropsychiatric research to business analysis. This episode isn't just about clarifying what a Scrum Master does; it's about catapulting them from underrated facilitators to the MVPs of the Agile world. Kat and I, Mark Metze, dissect the multifaceted skill set—from CEO-level strategic thinking to the infectious energy of a cheerleader—that Scrum Masters must harness to advocate for their worth in the complex corporate playing field.

Venture beyond the backlog and sprints as we dissect the delicate alchemy of product savvy and business acumen crucial for any Scrum Master. Drawing wisdom from Ram Charan and Daniel Kahneman, we navigate the intersections of customer retention, market analysis, and team dynamics. Our conversation is a treasure trove of strategies for enhancing communication, resolving conflict, and steering teams toward success, armed with tools like the SCARF model and the Savvy Method from "Conversation Transformation." These insights are not just theoretical—we're talking real-life, actionable tactics that you can apply instantly.

The climax of our journey with Kat traverses the art of winning over the C-suite, where every second counts, and every dashboard tells a story. Learn to craft compelling narratives through data visualization and how to be concise yet impactful in your dialogue with executives. As a Scrum Master, you're not just the Agile aficionado; you're the coach, the data wizard, the process mapper. And as we wrap up, remember that this deep dive into the Agile ethos is just the beginning. Join us on LinkedIn, share the wealth of knowledge from our conversation, and stay tuned as we continue to unravel the Agile enigma, one episode at a time.

Connect with Kat on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katbuckwalter/

When in Philadelphia, visit The Victor Cafe for great food and music:
https://victorcafe.com/

DORA metrics:
https://www.atlassian.com/devops/frameworks/dora-metrics

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations:
https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339

What the CEO wants you to know: 
https://ram-charan.com/books/what-the-ceo-wants-you-to-know/

Thinking Fast and Slow:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11468377

Your Brain at Work:
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Strategies-Distraction/dp/0061771295

SAVI at Work (Found in the book "Conversation Transformation"):
https://www.conversationtransformation.com/about-the-authors/savi/

Harvard Business Review podcasts:
https://hbr.org/podcasts

The Real Reason People Won’t Change Article:
https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change

Join the Alliance using the link below:

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Well, welcome back everybody to the Agile Within. This is your host, mark Metz. Today. I want to welcome our guest, kat Buchwalter Kat. Welcome to the Agile Within. This is your host, mark Metz. Today. I want to welcome our guest, kat Buckwalter. Kat. Welcome to the Agile Within.

Speaker 2: 0:49

Thanks for having me, Mark.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Yeah, great to have you. If I'm traveling to Philly for a day, Kat, what's one thing that I have to do?

Speaker 2: 0:57

Okay. So there is a place I always go to food when I talk about Philly. We do have a great art scene, we have a great music scene, but the food is just fantastic. There's a place called the Victor Cafe. It's on Dickinson Street in South Philly and the wait staff is classically trained, so they get up every 20 minutes or so and sing opera, and the food is it's Italian food and it's fantastic as well.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Neat. Can you give us a link to that and I'll put it in the show notes for anybody that might be traveling in the area.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Yeah, and to just add a little bit to that, if you saw the 2006 movie Rocky Balboa, they used the Victor Cafe in that movie, so that was Adrian's place.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Okay, so now I know where you're talking about Very good. So I want to introduce Kat to our guest here today. She has a background in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental research, project management and business analysis. She's also a self-proclaimed positive psychology and organizational dynamics geek who finds joy in alleviating the impediments caused by fixed structures and fixed mindsets. All right, so, Kat, the topic we want to tackle today is are we preparing Scrum Masters for success?

Speaker 2: 2:19

Yeah, this question came up. I'll start with the problem and how it was exposed. I think a lot of people are running into this question or this problem, but for me it came from two separate groups of people in social situations. So I was at two different parties in two different states with two different groups of people and ending up in conversations about work, as we tend to do. And when I brought up being a Scrum Master, I was really surprised at the responses that I got.

Speaker 2: 2:48

So one person was in finance, in tech development and finance, and he said, well, we had Scrum Masters, but we can run our own meetings, so we got rid of them. The other is, I believe, a machinist and he said, yeah, my buddy said I can go to this two-day class and then just make a whole bunch of money doing nothing if I want to be a Scrum Master. And I was really surprised at what people think of Scrum Mastery outside of the agile world. I was used to and that I knew. And then when we went to the Agile Online Summit last year, somebody brought it up and coined it the Agile Apocalypse that people were losing faith in scrum masters or the role of a scrum master.

Speaker 1: 3:31

I remember that.

Speaker 2: 3:32

Yeah. So that really got me thinking like are we just doing these two-day trainings and this test and then just throwing people out there like go do that thing and they, you know, not really preparing them for everything that makes the scrum master role magic?

Speaker 1: 3:50

With your background in positive psychology and organizational dynamics, what aspects of that cat can you lean on to help prepare scrum masters for success?

Speaker 2: 4:04

We have to start advocating for ourselves a little bit better in multiple ways. A lot of the draw of being a scrum master is, you know, coaching a team, removing impediments. There are these moment to moment things that you get into a team and you do and it makes you feel good, it makes the team feel good, but the focus is on the team and how well the team is doing, and it should be for coaching, but we don't sit back and advocate for ourselves, our role, we don't show our worth and I think that's really starting to erode the career path for a lot of scrum masters out there.

Speaker 1: 4:43

So have you seen firsthand examples of this?

Speaker 2: 4:47

Yeah, I think, even just right now, and looking at scrum master jobs online, a lot of them are entry level. A lot of them pay a lot less than they used to. And you read the job descriptions it does read like just a facilitator, and facilitating is not just a job. It's a big part of the job. And it's a big part of the job. And facilitating well is a big part of the job. But it's not the only thing that scrum masters do.

Speaker 2: 5:13

To be a scrum master, you have to think like a CEO, persuade like sales and marketing, improve like a process improvement professional. Keep the focus like a project manager. Hype the team like a cheerleader. Help the teammates like a process improvement professional. Keep the focus like a project manager. Hype the team like a cheerleader. Help the teammates like a business coach. Design tools for sharing our successes like a web designer.

Speaker 2: 5:34

So there's just so much to the job and I feel like that isn't really covered in the short training that we have To get out there and lead without authority, to inspire people, to facilitate well, to coach in communication and technology and processes and even politics, and to advocate for ourselves, to really show what we've done. To do all of that I think we need to start analyzing or showing our analysis more. Analyzing or showing our analysis more. So I think when you get in there and you run your daily meetings and you run your retrospectives and your sprint reviews and your plannings, and that feels like the job when you're getting so much done in those meetings. But we need to sit back and we need to say who needs to see our progress, what is the best way for me to show our progress to the C-suite, to the rest of the company? And we need to analyze more before we even start coaching or leading or advocating.

Speaker 1: 6:38

So can you give us some examples of how one might do that, because that's a daunting list that you gave us. I imagine somebody who's saying, well, hey, this sounds like a cool job being a scrum master and I'd like to pivot into the tech space, but I'm not necessarily technical. This is a way for me to get my foot in the door. But boy, what Kat just said, there's a lot to it. Where do we get started? Yes, there is a lot to it?

Speaker 2: 7:04

Where do we get started? Yes, there is a lot to it. I think we get started with understanding the business. Why are we there? What does the business do and this is an opinion that might not be as popular how does the business make money? As Scrum Masters, we're so focused on well-functioning and oiling the wheels of just processes and communication and you know we'd sit back and go what makes the company money and how do I help them do that? We have to be business-minded and to start doing that we need baselines. So another short story I went on to one of my social media groups for Scrum Masters and I asked like, what are your favorite baselines when you first start a new job as a Scrum Master in a new company?

Speaker 2: 7:52

And I had a bunch of reactions. Some of them were great, with some great ideas, and other reactions were oh, you don't do anything. Don't do anything. Those first 30 days. And I think those first 30 days are really important for observing. But that doesn't mean while we're observing we're not gathering data. I mean, why observe if you're not going to gather the data?

Speaker 2: 8:17

So I think we need to make it the norm for Scrum Masters to come in and get their baselines. They could be the DORA metrics, which is, if you're not familiar, stands for DevOps, research and Assessment, and they're just simple metrics that a lot of people use now. Lead time, so how much time it takes to make a change. Deployment frequency, how often you're putting things into production see how often you're putting things into production. Mean time to restore, how quickly you get back to functioning after an incident, and the change failure rate, which is the percentage of changes that result in disruption or defects or rollbacks. So to know where the team is, just with their general functioning. That's the kind of the baseline of what we need.

Speaker 2: 9:06

But we don't need to stop there. There's also the Scrum checklist I'm probably going to butcher this name, but Knieberg, k-n-i-b-e-r-g Scrum checklist and it looks at a lot of things roles and responsibilities, artifacts, self-assessment and it says you know where how mature is, is the scrum, are the scrum teams, and is there functioning? And a lot of those things can be filled in just by observing. So I think in those first 30 days you don't want to implement anything. Might be a little, might change things a little if you put out some questionnaires, but you don't need to to really rile anybody up to sit back, observe, dive into Jira or whatever system they're using and get some good baseline data so that when we start to make changes and we start to really help the teams make money for the company, we have a baseline to compare that to and you can look back and say, since I've been here, this is what's changed, this is what's become better.

Speaker 1: 10:09

So I want to go back to your leading statement. What you talked about is learning how the company makes money. So you're really delving into the business side of the house, and so I want to paint a little bit of a different picture, because I I first asked you about somebody that wanted to break into tech and saw a scrum master as a role that they could do that. But for those as such as myself, who brought up in the engineering world, that side of the house is more foreign to us. We're more about I want to tune the motor right. Yes, that's the exciting part. I want to solve problems, hard problems, technical problems, and I want to get into the quote unquote bits and the bytes of how things work. So what advice do you have for those of us like myself that may come from an engineering background but want to pivot into a scrum master role?

Speaker 2: 11:10

Yeah, I think there's a book called what the CEO Wants you to Know Super helpful, just, I think Ram Charan I'm probably butchering everybody's names today because I've only read things when it comes to names and it talks about a focus on cash flow like how, on profit margins, on competitive advantage, but does so in a way that's really high level.

Speaker 2: 11:33

So you don't have to. It's probably still a little boring, depending on what you're looking for or what you're interested in, but it can be super helpful to understand really how you bring money into the company. And it's a very unpopular opinion in Agile to say like, okay, we'll learn the business, but we need to know we would have done, because that's saving time and resources as well. So when you're talking about profit margins, that really matters and am I creating value? Does it keep the customers coming back? How does it change our competitive advantage? It's very unpopular to come in Agile and say you need to know the business, but only at a very high level. You don't need to know everything about funding. You need to know what's going to make this business more money, what that I do makes this company more profitable.

Speaker 1: 12:43

How would you compare if someone were to ask you, Kat, what is the difference between knowing the business and, if we're talking software, knowing the product?

Speaker 2: 12:56

Oh, I think knowing the product would be a small circle in the knowing the business Venn diagram. So knowing the product is really important. Knowing the customers is really important. Knowing the customers is really important and what keeps them coming back and what might keep them back in the future. So that's another circle in that larger knowing the business circle. And knowing what else is out there is important too. What can eat into our profits? What new technologies are coming down the pike, what new companies have just kind of disrupted things? Knowing your competitive advantage is really important and a lot of that's going to be the product manager, the product owner. They're going to be keeping their eyes on those things too. But as a scrum master, you need to understand them if, if nothing else.

Speaker 1: 13:47

If you want to become a scrum master and you're trying to be trying to prepare. We've covered a couple of different things Knowing the business, knowing the product. What else do we need to be prepared to know?

Speaker 2: 14:02

Knowing people. I think the thing that pulls a lot of scrum masters in and makes people go, wow, I do want to take on this role is the people. I feel like being able to come in and help people get to where they're going in a way that's less stressful for them. That's better for everybody. I mean, who doesn't want that right? You want to come in, you want to help, you want to make things magical, but to do so you need to know people right. So you need to know a lot about communication, how people react to certain types of communication. So that's when coaching comes in and just understanding.

Speaker 2: 14:42

If you're an extreme introvert and a lot of your background is technical and you're not the kind of person who regularly ends up leading others, it's good to start with the basics. You can start with Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Traversky. Kahneman just passed last month since we've talked, but it's a really great book and even just in the beginning there's a discussion about how perceived social threats are reacted to in the brain the same as actual physical threats. So your brain reacts the same whether a tiger's coming to eat you or somebody's making you feel like you're not up to task. To help with that, you can also look into the Rock book. It's called your Brain at Work and in that book they talk about something called the SCARF model. Scarf stands for the perceived social threats, like ways in which you can perceive a social threat. Perceived social threats like ways in which you can perceive a social threat, and that's threats to status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

Speaker 2: 15:52

So those are baseline books. That's just to understand how all people, no matter how analytical we think we are, no matter how sensible we think we are, we're emotional people. Once you really understand that and have that base, you can start learning how to communicate better. My favorite tool for doing that is called the Savvy Method. It's the system for the analysis of verbal interaction and you can see that in the book called Conversation Transformation. I'll give you all of these links. This might be a lot at once, but Conversation conversation transformation functions a lot like a workbook that shows you how to get through different types of noise in conversations Things like yes buts, things like verbal attacks. You can learn how to talk to people and really earn trust with the person and get on the same page with them and really start making communication flow better.

Speaker 1: 16:45

So I'm going to put you on the spot. Yeah, you happen to have an example of that for us where maybe you had someone who was difficult to either deal with or communicate with that you had to invest some time and energy into, and maybe some techniques and some strategies that you use to improve the time and energy into, and maybe some techniques and some strategies that you use to improve the communication, either on an individual level or maybe even at a team level.

Speaker 2: 17:07

Yeah, One thing that we deal with a lot as Scrum Masters is complaints. I love complaints and I'll tell you why. It sounds silly, right, but as a Scrum Master, if people are complaining, they're talking, they're sharing information, and that is half the battle, right? So if someone's sharing information, what I want to do is I want to let them feel comfortable sharing it. However, they need to start sharing it, and then I want to guide them through to something that can be helpful.

Speaker 2: 17:43

This was years ago when I was working in the lab and research and I was working with someone who complained all the time, and I had just learned this in my group and team dynamics class in my master's program. This was before the book came out, when it was just a pamphlet like a worksheet. This was before the book came out, when it was just a pamphlet like a worksheet, and I was learning how to code conversations and was so excited to use this new information. And you know I can'll tell you what the, the what to do with complaints. So someone complains this was a friend of mine who's still a friend of mine, really great friend and you say, okay, well, what would you like to see happen? And the first reaction you just let them have, because it's usually a little extreme well, people shouldn't do this, or why do we even deal with X? And you just let them go for a while. And you go, okay, but tangibly or in reality, or what would you really like to see happen? That sounds great. We'd all love that, but, given what we are working with, what would you like to see happen?

Speaker 2: 19:03

And then get a little bit of thought. You give them time for their thought and this is one of the things about coaching. You need to be very comfortable with silence while people think through things. You don't want to push them and they'll tell you what their true goal is, what they really want to get to. True goal is what they really want to get to. And then you can say, okay, how do we make that happen? And the conversation goes on to is that within our control or is it within our persuasion? Can we persuade someone else to help us with that? And you get to either a solution or you get to the point where you say it's 100% outside of our control. There's no way for us to do anything about it. What can we focus on? To help make things better and to take a complaint and to get someone to a place where they feel so much better about it. Either way is just magical.

Speaker 1: 19:54

That's a great word for it Magical. Yeah, yes, thank you for sharing.

Speaker 2: 19:58

Yeah, yeah, yes, thank you for sharing.

Speaker 1: 20:00

Yeah, all right, kat. So we've talked about the business. We've talked about knowing the product. We've talked about knowing the people, how to relate to people. When we started, you were talking about things like Dora metrics. What about the technical side of the house? What?

Speaker 2: 20:23

does scrum masters need to do to prepare for that, or do they? Yeah, I think one thing is to understand tech at the level of goals and functioning and processes. So, even if you can't code, even if your hands aren't in it, you should know the systems. What is the purpose of each system? What do they bring to the team? What do they bring to the company? How do they interact with each other? How do we measure how helpful they are?

Speaker 2: 20:53

This is already usually known. You'll go into the team and the team already knows if something's good or bad. All right, well, let's get some data behind that and make different choices. Maybe you need different tech, maybe you need to do it in a different way, maybe you need to do it even just in a different sequence, but you won't know that until you start really diving in. So I think tech you handle, like a lot of other things. You observe, you collect your data, you analyze it, you talk to the team about it.

Speaker 2: 21:21

So that's in Scrum Master, being a Scrum Master.

Speaker 2: 21:24

That's the thing is that you have to know your team and trust your team and trust what you know about your team and let them help you get to these decisions. So if you know the tech at the level you need to know the tech at which is not down in the code tech at the level you need to know the tech at which is not down in the code but up in the purpose, and you trust your team, then you can have these good conversations and you can get to better work days, more success for your team and you can show the data that you use to get there. And I think that's again. I go back to data, but I think it's so important and I think you know, as scrum masters, we sometimes forget and we go okay, well, we did this many points and this much of the sprint were defects and you know that data we're used to, but to say these processes aren't helpful or this tech is problematic and this is how we know have data behind all of your questions and suggestions is really helpful.

Speaker 1: 22:22

We had a recent or a previous episode with Daria Bagina and she talked about being technical enough because her opinion had changed, where she didn't come from a technical background and she didn't feel that she needed to have it. But over time she saw where it really did help her empathize with the rest of the team to be technical enough to understand their struggles and to feel the pain that they're feeling. Okay, so we've talked about business, we've talked about product, we've talked about people, we've talked about technical skills. What else is there, kat?

Speaker 2: 23:00

people. We've talked about technical skills. What else is there, kat? I think there's.

Speaker 2: 23:07

I'll say it's my Achilles heel managing up, you know, and advocating to the C-suite. It's easy when you first come on board and you're listening to them and their goals and their visions and you're saying this is how we're going to get there. It's different to make sure that you are holding them accountable for what they need to give to the teams and making sure that you're communicating what Agile brings to the teams. So we need to show that Agile has made a difference. The team focus on the team what they're doing, how they're doing it, how it's changed, how they're growing, how it's changed, how they're growing and knowing at the beginning how that affects the business. Knowing that you've saved time, that you've increased what your output, you're finishing more projects or more pieces of work. Knowing what you're bringing to the company. You're making customers happier, you're making them stick around, you're giving them features that bring in new customers. Knowing what you're doing for the business and communicating it is very important and I think that's something that also can get lost when you're in the day to day.

Speaker 1: 24:11

Members of the C-suite are often extremely busy. There's virtually no time to be able to put on their calendars. How do you build that relationship and how do you just get started with sharing some of these concerns that you're seeing and getting buy-in from the C-suite?

Speaker 2: 24:26

First of all, we'll start with the sprint reviews. Whenever you're inviting C-suite or stakeholders that are very busy to things like a sprint review, doing so in a really thoughtful way is important. They are busy. If you can block out a portion of the meeting and tell them this is the meeting and we'll be discussing what's important to you between this time and that time, they're going to be really glad that you did that. They'll know that. You know that they're busy and that's really important for talking with the C-suite and building that trust with them. So when you're building their trust with a team, it's that you're giving the team your time and you're listening and what they say is important and heard. And when you're working with the C-suite, it's that you know that they're busy, you know that their time is important and you are going to summarize for them and you are going to give them what they need without really taking up too much of their time. So that's just the beginning to make sure anytime, and having them in the sprint review is really helpful. This is what we did here. It is Show it off.

Speaker 2: 25:26

But all of the meetings aside, I find it's very helpful to have dashboards that are very easy to read, and that's where, at the beginning, I was saying you have to design your tools for sharing success. Like a web designer, you have to think about the C-suite as another customer. You don't want to add to their mental load. You want them to be able to click a few buttons and check in on how things are going and see, with some really nice graphics, that the team's doing well or not doing well or needs their help. And dashboards don't work for everyone. Again, you need to know your people right, so some of them might prefer reports or links where they can dive down more deeply past your dashboard. So really, that's why understanding information graphics is really important. There's a great book by the Wall Street Journal it's Guide to Information Graphics, so that one's very helpful. It's important to be impactful with.

Speaker 2: 26:20

When you're sharing information to the C-suite it and you've given them ways to get the information on their own as often as you can, then you need to start making sure you're communicating the team's needs very clearly to them and when they tell you that something's going to happen, you don't just say, okay, we treat it. We should treat it just like we would a team goal. Okay when you want to know when something's expected to happen. So a CEO says, oh, I'm going to take care of that. I'm going to talk to the manager.

Speaker 2: 26:58

Okay, great, when should I check back in to make sure that you don't need anything else from me? Put a time on it, just like you would anything else, and then, if it doesn't happen, reach back out? How's this going? When you get a moment, I love the statement. When you carve out a moment, let me know this thing that you told me you were going to do. Can I help with it? So it's really, really important to hold them accountable in a way that's respectful and to respect their time and to give them what they need to make their decisions as well.

Speaker 1: 27:28

All right. So what else in preparing Scrum Masters for success? Kat?

Speaker 2: 27:33

To go back to the two-day training idea that I'm out there and I'm looking at jobs right now and I think so many of them have turned back to making sure that the person is already a developer, because I think there's so many people out there who got their scrum master certification and they haven't had good training and coaching or business analysis or graphics and dashboarding and all these things that have to come together to make a really powerful scrum master and they said well, you know, we need to narrow the field somehow and I think it's easy to fall back on making sure that they're technical and I think maybe we need a better way to certify people to say they do have all of these things. They don't just know the ceremonies and the roles, the baseline things that you need to know to just know what a scrum master is, but they can coach, they can handle data, they can map processes and improve them, they can create dashboards to share information. There's so much about the Scrum Master job. That's soft, or soft skills, which I know a lot of people don't like that term and that's the pull. That is the pull right To be a Scrum Master.

Speaker 2: 28:46

Those soft skills are so fulfilling. We can't forget about the rest. There are analytical skills that are absolutely needed, that we need to show off and we need to say scrum masters and agile in general can do so much for the team and can feel like a magic bullet. And here is the example and here is the data, and here's my beautiful graphic that's just going to make you so happy. That ties everything to what the business goal is and what the money that the business is making. And keep making sure that you have a scrum master for your teams, or an agile coach, as they're often called.

Speaker 1: 29:28

So, as we start coming to a close here, kat, it seems like there's one thing that we're missing, that you've alluded to, but we haven't said that we need to prepare scrum masters for success, and that's being a lover of books.

Speaker 2: 29:43

Yes, oh, yes, I've alluded to maybe a few times.

Speaker 1: 29:51

You know I say that in Jess, but I think the two-day courses have their place. I think that they're good, foundational. It's like getting a driver's license you take a written test and you take a driver's test and then all of a sudden, you're able to drive now. And for those of you who don't have children, who have gone through that stage as parents, that's a very frightful thing. To know that your child now has a driver's license and can drive on the road on the interstate Doesn't mean they're experienced. So scrum masters do require some level of experience and it's not an entry-level position. The part about being a lover of books you really do have to commit to being truly being a lifelong learner. If you're the type person that just wants to tell me what I need to do and that's my job, and now I know my job I just need to continue crafting it. That's not the role of a scrum master. You continually are looking for new ways to energize yourself, the team, the business, wouldn't you say? Kat?

Speaker 2: 30:58

Yeah, and I'll add to that, mark, and I'll say podcasts too.

Speaker 1: 31:03

Ah, there you go, okay, yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:06

I mean, agile podcasts are great. This podcast has been great. Finding this after the Agile Online Summit was fantastic. And for newer Scrum Masters man, what a resource. Right, you can come in and listen to these stories and learn from people who've been in the battlefield for so long. But also business podcasts. You know HBR has quite a few that are great. You know the Harvard Business Review. They have one that's specifically about executive coaching. That's really good. There are business analysis podcasts out there. You know books podcasts, like you said, lifelong learning and I think that people who are really drawn to being a Scrum Master that's who they are. I think you love the soft skills, you love the learning and you want to share the learning. You want to gobble it all up and you want everyone else to do the same, you know so All right, I'll know you after the show.

Speaker 1: 31:58

So thank you for the spot. Yeah, all right, kat. Well, if our listeners want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 2: 32:09

Just on LinkedIn. I'll share the link, but it's Kat Buckwalter and that's mostly what I have right now. I'll be working on more in the future, but it's Kat Buckwalter and that's mostly what I have right now. I'll be working on more in the future, but everything in time.

Speaker 1: 32:20

All right, great Well, we'll fill up those show notes. Also, put Kat's LinkedIn profile there for you to reach out to her. I'm sure she will be more than willing to engage with you, to connect with you there. So, it's been a great episode. So, kat, thank you for being a guest. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 32:38

Thank you, mark, it's been great.

Speaker 1: 32:40

All right. So this has been another episode of the agile within. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the agile within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.