Lindsay Velecina: 0:03

Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Sabrina Love: 0:20

Hello, welcome to the scrum better community podcast. My name is Sabrina love I'm stepping in as a guest host for a really exciting success story focused around the benefits of immersion training. For those of you who don't know, immersion training is an alternative class format offered by scrum.org, where the class is broken up into short training sessions over several weeks. The training also extends a learning experience beyond the classroom. By leading students to apply what they have learned in their real life jobs. This format is enhanced by incorporating facilitated reflections for improvement, making the learning experience highly effective and practical. So today, we have two guests with us really excited to talk to venac jeglicher. And Ravi Verma. venac is a the founder and CEO of resi, Max and RACV is a PSD for scrum.org. So welcome, guys. Thank you.

Vinayak Joglekar: 1:17

Thank you for having me here.

Sabrina Love: 1:19

I'm excited to talk to you both. Is there anything that you wanted to share with our listeners about yourselves before we dive in, aside from your a PSD and then are like your CEO and founder,

Ravi Verma: 1:33

I think the one thing that I wanted to share with everyone is what I love about Scrum, and Ken Schweber is the focus on evidence based management of outcomes. And that calls to mean in the context of delivering valuable solutions. And I feel it calls to me in the delivery of valuable learning solutions as well. So what I want to explore in this podcast is, how can we eat our own dog food? How can we practice what we preach and apply the same principles and practices to the delivery of learning that we advocate that our students and clients apply to the delivery of software products or any product for that matter?

Vinayak Joglekar: 2:19

And what I would like to share, in addition to being the CEO of resume access, I have been training and nurturing talent, possibly for four decades now. And this is something where I found something that is new, that is refreshing. And had I known this technique earlier, I would have been much better off. But it's never too late to learn as they say. So it was a good experience for me. And going forward, I think I would increasingly use immersion learning in my journey going forward. Awesome.

Sabrina Love: 3:09

Well, I can't wait to hear more details behind that story. But that's why we're here. And hopefully our listeners are here to learn that also. Just to set a little bit of context for everybody visiting IKEA company, resin, Max, you employ Robbie, to help you and your company learn through immersion training. Can you tell us a little bit about your company, what you do maybe the size of your company? What products you're, you're helping?

Vinayak Joglekar: 3:41

Yeah, so we are a startup. And we are building a gig work marketplace, wherein gig workers primarily from India are entering into smart contracts with employers from the United States. So that's the nature of our business. So now, the reason why we engaged with Ravi was we were having a problem. And that problem was that we were not able to get our development team to understand the requirements that were handed down to them well enough, either because there was a problem of capturing the requirements in the appropriate document or appropriate form. Or there was a problem with the process of communicating those requirements to the development team. And overall, there was a bit of slowness in the cycles due to that. So that was the brief background our company is about. We are about 50 people based out of India and we have two here in the US.

Sabrina Love: 4:56

Yeah, it sounds like a problem that I hear a lot of companies have So, so something hopefully our listeners can relate to. And just for one more question I think about about your company and your context. Are you using Scrum or agile? And how long have you been?

Vinayak Joglekar: 5:13

Yes. So I have been an avid journalist and a big believer in the Agile Manifesto. So we have been practicing agile for close to more than a decade, or even more, I think, including this company in my previous company. And we use all the we use all the tools, and we practice all the processes and ceremonies. Not that perfect, but

Sabrina Love: 5:48

I mean, that's the best we can do. Right? Yes.

Vinayak Joglekar: 5:51

Yeah. So we, we try? Yeah. So as they say, We are more agile than what we were last year. And next year, we will be more agile than what we are today. Beautiful.

Sabrina Love: 6:03

And that's how did you meet Robbie?

Vinayak Joglekar: 6:06

Oh, that's what you did back? Back, right? I mean, rubbish is there circles 2000 2004, my company was just about starting, and that is my previous company, or was my previous to previous company, so and Robbie was working with our prospects. And we were hoping that this prospect will be our first customer. And we kind of quit from our previous company. Believing believing that Robbie is

Ravi Verma: 6:47

my boss, my boss, and I and my boss would sign the contract.

Vinayak Joglekar: 6:53

And then we took off from one end to land at the other end. But then Robbie's boss decided, so, you know, the carpet was taken

Ravi Verma: 7:11

out from under their feet. So my boss, maybe in the beginning, he had second thoughts for some reason, which we will not go into. But But yeah, so then so the

Vinayak Joglekar: 7:21

day, you know, that was the time when we got to know Ravi, and then we have been keeping up. We met in the AGL conference in Dallas. And then last year, we had a good meeting, because he was one of my customers in my previous companies, where he didn't have a good experience with my company. So in a way I paid back. So we are now you know, all squared up.

Sabrina Love: 7:53

So there's, it sounds like there's a lot of history between you two, which I do have questions about coming later. But I'm also curious if, since we're talking about Binayak, you're yours and your teams and your company's experience with this immersion training format that Robbie provided for you guys. Does, were there any other training formats that you had considered or any other training providers that you had considered? Maybe we don't need to go into names specifically, but is there? How did you land on immersion training with Robbie? Computer?

Vinayak Joglekar: 8:28

So we have been training our people for like, more than two decades on various training programs? And the the way it started was initially it was like pure pedagogy where you have no, it was primarily lectures and all that. That's the way training used to be for you. Yeah, well, fine, kind of present a

Sabrina Love: 9:00

classroom and be present. Yeah,

Vinayak Joglekar: 9:02

that was a format in which it started. And then you know, it evolved. And the last one we experimented with was format called workstations. So this was during COVID that we used to take the team out at a scenic location, and put them up there and have them spend some days with the trainer. And maybe two days, not very long, maybe two days with an overnight stay. And then it would be a very informal kind of atmosphere where learning would happen through playing games. So there are a lot of these games and particularly agile games where with stuff like paper and you know you have LEGO sets and all that. That used to be one and we also have had a, you know, some games which were based on computer programs and hackathon kind of games. So overall, those workstations were fun. But they were expensive. And they were good only they lasted only in the COVID times for schoolwork. It we didn't really spend much time doing. So that was the last thing in between we had several variations of this, like, we had the traditional, what you call as steam building kind of exercises, which involve, again, playing games of various types or doing things with your own hands. Yeah, so these are the various formats we had tried before immersion learning. I'm curious.

Sabrina Love: 10:59

There. So the way that we describe an immersion training is, you know, an extended learning format, with some in between classroom assignments and some facilitated reflections. And that's just kind of the general framework, I guess, for immersion training. I'm curious to understand, very briefly, like at a very high level, like what was the format of immersion training that you two had agreed upon? And was it? You know, was there classroom sessions over multiple months or weeks or assignments in between? Kind of at a very high level? What was it that you had to get upon? So

Vinayak Joglekar: 11:40

I would tell what my understanding was, is that we can chime in. So my understanding of what we did was lasting for more than two and a half or three months rolling here. And we used to have a weekly, one and a half hour session, which included sometimes some homework. So if we had half an hour of homework, then the classroom session would be a one hour. And if the homework took all of one and a half hours, we would skip this classroom session for that week. So we spent no more than so we kind of budgeted one and a half hours per week.

Sabrina Love: 12:17

And either classroom or assignment or Yes, yeah. Or both

Vinayak Joglekar: 12:21

or, either. Right. So we did that. And to answer your second question, there was yes, in between classes, there were exercises so we could we had time to. So it was gamified. So we had kind of tournament with four teams competing for a price by doing their homework.

Sabrina Love: 12:47

Yeah, we know that works. Yeah.

Vinayak Joglekar: 12:51

So that was the format in which this homework was done. And maybe you can add, if I miss something.

Ravi Verma: 12:57

Yeah. Yeah. So you know, when we started designing this experience, I met with Vinaya, and the chief of HR, the chief people and learning officer, the CTO, who was the boss of all of the learners, and the product owner and myself. And together, we started co creating, what is the goal of this learning program begin with the end in mind? And then I asked Vinayak, what is the budget, weekly budget, and there, there were like, most of our listeners will relate, there were major releases, which had business implications. So we had to strike a balance between learning a more effective way to build product, while not consuming all the time, that is needed to build the product. So when Eric was very clear, he said, Look, I can give you 90 minutes per week, either in class learning or homework. And then we also on the roadmap Vinayak said, Well, you know what, we were coming to the US, which is why we are having this podcast now. And so there are some major releases. And so we said well, you know what we want the team to be ready for let's say q2 delivery. So what do we need to do in q1 to help them get more context and more skillful in backlog refinement, such that when they start implementing this for q2 release, we can reduce time to market and minimize waste. So those were the parameters. The weekly allocation is now defined. The duration is kind of defined it was three months training program. And then we started identifying okay, what are the prerequisites? So the prerequisites were some high level product goal product vision, so we started working with a product owner to create the artifacts, which would be inputs 123. So we put a lot of puzzle pieces in place before we even started the first class. those puzzle

Sabrina Love: 14:50

pieces sound kind of familiar, though. Yes. You're talking about goal or goal boundary. Yes. Working agreement budgets. Do time boxes, lots of similar things to what we talked about? Scroll? Yes. So learning is a first class citizen for you. Yes, in the same way that, you know, next to product delivery or Yeah, setting specific budgeted time aside, it's hands on learning and reaching a goal. Yeah. And

Ravi Verma: 15:17

this was very unusual. So, you know, I advocate the same principles to all of my clients. And Vinayak has been the first client who actually gave me the time to do this planning, because most other clients have been very transactional, hey, just go and deliver a PSM one course. And we'll be transformed. Yeah, I was very, I was both happy and confused. Why is he in? Yeah, why is he so unique? So I asked him, Why are you spending? So first of all, thank you? Why are you helping me? Take care of your money? He said, Because it's my money, because he's the CEO of the company. And perhaps I don't know if that is one of the differentiators because other clients are probably playing with somebody else's money. And maybe they there is not as much skin in the game? Or who knows, but refreshing.

Sabrina Love: 16:06

Yeah, there is actually coming back, I alluded to earlier, I was going to come back to this, there's there's quite a bit of history between you two. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily a requirement or a necessity to have that, that amount of history between, between you and between both of you and setting up a training experience like this. But I think what's important about that relationship is I'm, I'm assuming that you all have a amount of trust between YouTube and the ability to be candid with each other. Maybe that's, that might be really important to setting up I think you had told me once, Robert, you, you had mentioned that it's kind of like a, like an alliance between you two and how you have set up this learning experience together very intentionally together, where you have skin in the game binary arc and, and Robbie, it's the the trust factor of reaching a goal together. So I

Vinayak Joglekar: 17:02

have one more ulterior motive, make sure that my people will really benefit from the training in which I'm investing. Yeah. If I don't have a buyer, in the end, if I don't demonstrate that my team would not do what they did. Right. So that's why I was like, interested. And I made sure that I participated in the four way alliances that we built, in fact, five airlines that we built with me, my CTO, my CHRO, my product owner, and where we

Sabrina Love: 17:44

end the learners, yeah, demonstrating your buy into the learners.

Vinayak Joglekar: 17:51

It matters because finally, they want to see if there is a buy in at the topmost level.

Sabrina Love: 17:58

Not just writing a check.

Ravi Verma: 18:00

And you know, as our listeners are listening to this, and trying to figure out is the context in which I want to create a deliver an immersion learning program, is this context, a good fit? Some criteria, some there are some ground conditions, which might be compatible or conducive to maximizing ROI. One thing that I saw in Vinayak, which I haven't seen in many of my other clients is openness to change. So he was skeptical because he had some concerns. I don't know if this is gonna work. But I think he gave me space to say, Well, who knows, maybe it will work. And we created some accountability checkpoints to say, look, we don't know if it's going to work or not. But we will stay in touch. And ultimately, we have to our true north is to be good stewards of precious time and money. And this is what we are starting with, but we will know things that we cannot know right now. And if new wisdom emerges, we'll adjust if needed. We landed. Did

Sabrina Love: 19:02

you have a dedicated time throughout your this arrangement where you came back to retrospect on how the learning experience itself was going?

Ravi Verma: 19:11

Originally in the design? I was hoping to have my intent was a monthly retrospective, but unfortunately, I could not do that. So we had our first

Vinayak Joglekar: 19:22

read it were three I think we had three retrospectives in the total span of three months. Were in we had the the same set of initial four people. Yeah. Who were a part of the Alliance. Yeah. We used to meet periodically and give feedback as to how we were doing. So I would say that anything more frequent than I really needed. Yeah.

Sabrina Love: 19:55

Is your retrospective every maybe six hours of investment. Yeah, I do. Not every six

Ravi Verma: 20:00

hours. Yeah. And they were seeing patterns. So we created a channel called Learning stewards, which I stole from.org You can see it was been hired CTO, that product of product owner and chief HR officer. And then they would, because they saw things on the ground that I didn't see in Pune. So then they will talk to each other, they would give me feedback. One of the examples of the adjustment we made as part of the retrospective was like, I think it was jobs to be done, right, we want to have can we integrate jobs to be done so people can associate features, with personas and personas jobs, we don't. So we made adjustments to both the content. And also, we created a road map. So we made lots of changes, because they were blind spots, which were illuminated through the retros. I don't want

Sabrina Love: 20:54

to dive into this a little bit, because I don't want it to seem like a learning experience like this is very easy for people. It's not I think meant to be easy. It's a it takes a lot of commitment from everybody to make something like this useful and valuable for everybody. But just for if we can touch on for a second, some of the challenges that you both faced or your teams face, because what I think I just heard was that the teams are mostly based in Pune Pune unit. And, Ravi, you're based in Dallas, Texas. So how does? How was that? How was that experience for you both being not co located together? Yeah. So

Vinayak Joglekar: 21:35

see, we had an upfront agreement with the team. Even before we got started, I think one full session was spent on getting that agreement from the team, that they would follow certain rules or certain code of conduct, one of which was, if they were not willing to undergo the training, they would drop off right away. So that was the first one. And we got the commitment from all of them that they were willing to spend one and a half hours every week for the next few weeks. The second one was they would keep the video on.

Sabrina Love: 22:14

So that's a tough one. Yeah, yeah.

Vinayak Joglekar: 22:17

But then all of them agreed, and they stuck to it. And the third one was that they would do the homework that has given to them. And all of them did that with some effort in terms of making it gamifying it which we will talk about. Yeah. So he has a way to make people incentivize people to do what they're supposed to do. So it, I would not say it was difficult. I mean, at least it didn't. To me, it didn't seem difficult. I don't know about Robbie with it. He knows better. You

Ravi Verma: 22:57

know, one of the choices I had given to a Vinayak was we have PSDs, near Pune. And I also hoped we could have a PSD who will come to your office and have face to face training in your timezone. Nobody has to stay late. But when I got my recollection you can correct me is one of the things when I said was, he wanted a trainer who has the organizational context and the relationships with the learners. So I had just come back from Pune last year, and I had gotten to know the learners one on one, I knew their hobbies, I knew which part of the country they had grown up in. And I knew what example I could use, or what kind of a joke I could crack you connect with which person? Yeah. So how this is might be related, or relevant to our listeners is psychological safety is necessary for learning. And doesn't matter how great a trainer is, if people can't feel don't feel safe, they don't feel have the freedom to be vulnerable. There may be a ceiling to the learning that's going to happen. So putting an emphasis on that human connection between the learner and the teacher. That is an important parameter that people should consider when designing the immersion learning program and who delivers it. Yeah. Yeah. So that was one of the factors that helped us reduce what might otherwise have been difficult where the trainer is in Dallas, Texas. Yeah. And all the learners are in India and they're staying up late away from family. Right when maybe it's dinner time. Sure. So pick your

Sabrina Love: 24:40

trade offs. Yeah,

Ravi Verma: 24:41

we had to pick the poison. Yeah. This was the least of all evils that we picked. Yeah. Was

Sabrina Love: 24:46

that was that maybe your most difficult challenge in this whole experience?

Ravi Verma: 24:53

The most the biggest challenge, I would say is the Indian culture and two challenges one What is the Indian culture? We are a hierarchical culture. And in our culture we have been it has been drilled into our head, at least in my generation, that you don't talk back or you don't challenge someone who is elder to you, or like there is a authority system. And it's only in America that I realized, it's okay to challenge your boss, it need not mean a sign. It is not a sign of disrespect. It's not mutinous. And it doesn't mean it's negative conflict. I had to unlearn decades of training in India, were challenging people was a sign of disrespect. So that was one challenge. The second biggest challenge was a lot of technical people like me are introverted developers, I make sure as you know, I am extremely socially awkward. I love people. I don't want to interact with people, but I just don't have the maybe right talent forever. So

Sabrina Love: 26:00

to get along. So

Ravi Verma: 26:03

when I became a trainer, and I would ask a question, nobody would say anything, because they're not socially awkward people. So one of the things I learned in scrum.org is okay, you give them the anonymously of breakout session, where they free up because there's no authority figure, it's all a bunch of peers, they speak up. So creating psychological safety, where people can come up with ideas without feeling exposed, and also giving a technique where they can provide feedback without feeling it's disrespectful. So I the second, most of the training techniques I used in this training were learn from scrum.org. So I use the perfection game, which I learned from Ralph Ralph Jochem. So perfection game, I felt provided someone with an Indian culture to provide constructive feedback, without feeling concerned that it's going to be looked at as critical or destructive. So these are the cultural challenge was the biggest one for me. Yeah,

Vinayak Joglekar: 27:04

so one of the things that are people, they're naturally against a laconic or the India they say that the deeper is your thought process. And the deeper is your level of knowledge, the more silent you are. And, you know, so you will speak less and do more kind of thing is the culture right? Now, in an environment where you're supposed to give feedback and open up. It's, it doesn't work, right? I mean, you need to speak up unless you speak up, you won't be understood. So this was a challenge, as Robbie said. And there were a few people who couldn't overcome this challenge initially. But as we said in they did open up eventually in the breakout sessions. Yeah, the other thing that made it easy was the language. So English is the second language for most of us. And we made it openly clear that they could speak in any language. So that made the difference, because some of them were not able to communicate as well in English as in the local language. So when that avenue was opened up, even those people who had challenge with speaking English, they also opened up. Awesome. Yeah.

Ravi Verma: 28:40

I think the common thread is psychological safety. Yeah, people have great ideas. But if they're scared, there are so many barriers that they have to jump through. Will someone make fun of me? Will I not come across as an articulate person? Will they tank will they think I went to a not very expensive school, right? Will my boss or tech lead feel that I am disrespectful because I shared an idea which was contradictory, right? So so many, and very few ideas will survive all of the attacks have all of these hurdles? So as a designer of a learning experience, I had to look back at all the mistakes I made, and I had to remove these hurdles, and then the magic happened.

Sabrina Love: 29:25

So speaking of magic, let's pivot because I feel like we've talked about challenges a lot but I would love to hear from both of you. Like if there was one shining moment that you remember that just kind of is like ingrained in your brain when you think about this experience. What is it

Vinayak Joglekar: 29:43

Yeah, so for me the shining moment was there was a person was a junior most person right? And even hear it spoken a word, since I haven't never. I don't even know what he sound is like, right. Yeah, he never spoke even a word, right. And then there were these breakout sessions and where we used to ask one person from each group to come back and summarize what was discussed in their breakout. And one day this person was I won't say the name, but he just said that. Okay, I'll summarize and he just did a good job of it. And, yeah, so that was the shining moment of this entire journey for us. Yeah.

Sabrina Love: 30:34

Yeah. That's awesome. You'll see some paper like that in real life as it's happening, and you recognize it. Yeah. Yeah.

Ravi Verma: 30:41

And, you know, for me, the shining moment was, again, for confidential, I won't give the name. But there was this one lady joins Firebird five or 10 minutes before camera is on honoring all of the agreements. And when I give an exercise, one of the things I learned from Sharon Bowman's training from the back of the room is before you send people off for an exercise, check for understanding. So I would say, Okay, who might be able to how many of you got it thumbs up, thumbs down? Who might be willing to recap what the exercise is. But over time, they became so comfortable that they started, you know, she started challenging me. I'm sorry, this doesn't make sense. Or, you know, can you please explain? When people started challenging me in a blunt way? I felt so happy. Because that for me, that means the gears are turning. They don't have to massage what they are trying to say. It doesn't have to clear four levels of add it they just stop. Because she spoke she verbalized the concern that many other people were having. And I think people were probably watching, how does he behave when someone talks to him? Yeah. And when they saw that I was encouraging them more people, the first penguin jumps. When they talk to me directly bluntly, I don't understand. Can you please explain? Yeah, I feel so happy. Yeah.

Sabrina Love: 32:04

Yeah, it's 1000 times better than some than them wasting time pretending. Yeah, yeah. I think I understood this.

Ravi Verma: 32:13

comeback? And then the exercise? No, this is not what? That was happy. That makes me so happy.

Sabrina Love: 32:18

Yeah, that's awesome. So what would you to say is your biggest learning from this experience? If you had to do it over again, either with, you know, with each other or with somebody else? If you're going to recommend this learning experience to somebody else, maybe maybe that's a better question. If you're going to recommend this learning experience to somebody else, what would you say is, you know, the biggest thing that you've learned from this type of learning, maybe not from the content of the learning itself, but this, this experience in this learning format?

Vinayak Joglekar: 32:52

Yeah, so doing, instead of listening and sitting in one place, makes all the difference is what I think is the difference between immersion learning and other ways of learning. So we found that people were doing something with their hands, they were constantly so there was not a dull moment, as I would say. So constantly, people were doing something or they were either preparing for the breakout or they had come back. And they were summarizing what happened in the breakout. So I think that was something which was unique as an experience in this emergent learning. And

Ravi Verma: 33:37

maybe I can, I can add my perspective, if I gonna do over. So here's one, one challenge we found people would say, so I would, let's imagine we we taught them product vision, or we taught them wildly important goal. Measurable product gold. Then we taught them personas and empathy map and so on. Some people were saying, me, I don't understand how this connects to my daily job. If I got to do over, what I would say is, every time they applied a technique, which was high level, so here, if you look at the agile planning onion, the daily work is being done at the innermost layer of the onion, which is the day to day tasks. And the second layer, which is the PBI. And the third layer, which is the sprint goal. The curriculum was such that we were starting at the outermost layer of the onion. We started with product vision product goal, and there was a chasm. Yeah. So if I got to do over, what I would do is, every time I taught them a technique, and they applied it, then I would give them homework to say, Now, who can which of the teams can connect the dots between the innermost layers of the onion and the outermost, and I would gamified it because I'm a slow learner. It took me like, two months to finally hear them and come up with a technique. So I gamified it the last session that we did I gave them the fill in the blank section in Confluence, where I told them to fill out all the layers of the onion from the daily tasks to the PBI, sprint goal, release goal and so on. And then I said, whichever team and you should be able to relate this in 90 seconds, and whichever team does the most compelling job, they they win the award. That's when I think it started connecting were the knowledge which they they had acquired, suddenly, they started connecting it to their day to day job. So that's a doer.

Sabrina Love: 35:32

That's actually what I what I would like to ask him, I think, wrap up question, maybe, as we kind of come to a close. What have you noticed generic in the difference in your team's behavior? Since they have gone through immersion training? Like how has the immersion training experience affected their product delivery or their ability to work together? Yeah,

Vinayak Joglekar: 36:00

so first of all, we have started using emergent training internally, it without really planning for it, because now when we have meetings, in that, we have breakout sessions, and we do have people coming back and summarizing. So the method itself of emergent training, we may not be as perfect as Robbie is, but inadvertently, we have started doing it. Right. So this is one of the biggest benefits that I think it has led to us. Also there were techniques which rarely used during the training. So there was one technique called a perfection game. So in this training, we used it quite often. But even outside the training, I see people playing the perfection game on many things. It's so

Sabrina Love: 36:59

easy to remember I the first thing I think of so I guess for for our listeners who don't know what the perfection game is maybe like a to set like really quick rabbit, would you give a really quick? What is it?

Ravi Verma: 37:11

So whenever someone asks you for feedback, you start by saying what do you love about it. And then you rate, whatever artifact you're giving feedback on on a scale of zero to 10 Based on the extent to which you can perfect or improve that idea. So you see, you're in a sprint review, you see a demo, you rate that particular increment on a scale of zero to 10. If you rate it as a six out of 10, then you tell the team, here are some concrete improvements you could make that will bump up my score from a six out of 10 to a 10 out of 10. So it starts with appreciation. Hey, here's what I love about your sprint review. And you can't be a seagull who flies in craps on everything. You have to give something constructive. Yeah. So it gives people an opportunity to feel appreciated and also get constructive improved. Do

Sabrina Love: 38:04

you play it as if I rated a six out of 10 than I owe you for constructive feedback? Points? No. No,

Ravi Verma: 38:11

it can be one go. All right. That's a mistake I made. And then Mark Norman taught me that's a misinterpretation making that mistake? Yeah, I made a mistake. Yeah. Okay. Mark taught me that. No, it can be one improvement. Okay, the number of improvements doesn't matter. And if if, if someone looks at an artifact, and they don't, they don't think it's a 10 out of 10. But they don't have an ability to give a constructive suggestion to make it a 10 out of 10. You either got to say 10 out of 10 Or you just got a pass? Yeah.

Sabrina Love: 38:43

Yeah, it's um, so aside from the I've been mistaking the the number of feedback points to give it's, it is a really simple, easy to remember technique that I it's like second nature. Now let's use it everywhere for everything. And

Ravi Verma: 38:57

if our listeners are interested, Raj Jochem has a scrum.org webinar scrum pulse webinar on core protocols in Scrum. So I would recommend you watch that. And it's got three techniques. Really good. Definitely.

Sabrina Love: 39:10

Yeah, coming back to, to Binayak story. And yours RACV. About Reza Max. Is there a noticeable difference that you've seen in the in the quality of the products that your teams are delivering? Since immersion training?

Vinayak Joglekar: 39:27

It's hard to say, because for measuring the before and after period, they didn't exactly coincide with releases or sprints. So if you had asked me this question about how did this release go as compared to the previous release? Or how did this sprint go with respect to the previous sprint? I can answer that question. Yeah, let's go with that. Yeah. So you know, every sprint we are in proving the quality. And as the program was progressing, we saw that we made some changes, right? I mean, to change to the processes that we had, based on the discussions we had internally, again, using the techniques that we just discussed. Yeah. And those changes paid off. And now we are having certain other backlog items or certain other bottlenecks, which we'll improve upon. But we are not having the same problem again. Yeah. So here's what I would say. The problem is that we have prior order problems, there are no higher order problems. And euro as our experienced is, you will always have some water leak. There's always room for improvement. Yeah, always room for improvement. So there, I think I have seen positive improvement. That has definitely happened in terms of quality, and participation, collaboration. And overall, what you can say the wipes that I get from the team are good. Yeah, it will improve it will result into different improvements in terms of the outcomes. That remains to be seen.

Ravi Verma: 41:27

And, you know, one story I just remembered, so one of the exercises was creating a proto persona, which I learned in PSU. And I think there was one which about empathy map, which I learned in PSM two. So we asked the team, there were four teams, we gamified it, we build for cross functional teams. And we said, go and create a proto persona for an important person who you need to serve through your product, then go and talk to at least one human being and validate your assumption. So of the four teams, there was one team who actually went and spoke to a recruiter, I think they actually I think, took a video of that conversation came back, they refine their persona based on the conversation, and they posted their video on confluence, so our team so everybody could learn from it. For me, we improve the quality of individuals and interactions. Because now people saw how you can diligently apply what is taught in class to improve your business knowledge and tied back to product delivery. And that one person did more good to the company than I ever did, because now people can follow in his footsteps. And we rewarded that. So the carrot was lunch with Vinayak. Yeah. So my hope is that that team wins the award for that game. And they get to have lunch with the CEO, and they get to brag to everybody else. But that's how culture has changed. Because now many years later, people will say, hey, remember that guy did this. And he got to his team got to have lunch with Vinay. That's what we need to do.

Sabrina Love: 43:07

So for me that you don't tell people to change, you open to change.

Ravi Verma: 43:10

Yeah, they follow the role models, the best teacher is the peer. So our job is just to get the heck out of the way. Yeah.

Sabrina Love: 43:19

Actually, parting words, I guess, as as we wrap up. And last question. I think I said last question, two questions ago. And I feel like we can talk about this for like four more hours and couple more drinks. We're not drinking, by the way. Not yet. But last parting words, anything that you want to make sure that you let our listeners know about if they're considering a learning experience like

Vinayak Joglekar: 43:44

this, I would say, this is not something that you experiment with, as a one time thing and then stop doing it. It's an ongoing thing. So it needs to be inculcated. And you need to absorb it and make it a part of your company's culture. It's not something that you learn, and you implement and use it occasionally. It the image of the learning has to happen continually. And it's not something that should be restricted to a classroom session. It should be something that becomes a part and parcel of day to day interactions.

Ravi Verma: 44:31

I think what I would say is, you know, you said something beautifully. You said learning is a first class citizen. I feel that in our industry, one of the reasons that the Agile industry has lost the respect of business people is that we saw we expect a trainer to come in and change. Not only human habits, but organizational habits, which have been in place for decades. Yeah. Over one or two days. Yeah. Find your train fly out. And that shows such massive hubris and just a profound misunderstanding of human behavior and organizational behavior. So this approach is only going to work in companies that understand how much caring has to be put in caring and feeding has to be put in to change human and organizational behavior. If someone has a transactional view of training that you flying, deliver PSM one fly out, and the whole company is transformed. This format is not a good fit for that kind of client. It is only good for a client who understands that changing human behavior or enabling change in human behavior takes a lot of caring and feeding. Who has humility and curiosity and willing to try despite skepticism. So this is not I don't think this is a mass market product. This is a niche product for a very specific kind of buyer. Those are my closing thoughts.

Sabrina Love: 46:11

But it's fascinating story. I mean, I'm very close to it. I I love hearing stories about immersion training. And I will keep asking you all for for more. It's it's been really awesome to talk to you guys and hear your experiences and I hope to hear more about in the coming months, how it's been going. So thank you the nyac and Robbie. Thank you. It's been awesome to have you guys and I hope our listeners will tune back in for more stories in the future. Thank you, everyone.