Lindsay Velecina: 0:00

Music. 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.

Dave West: 0:20

Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West CEO, here@scrum.org today's podcast is focused on of our professional scrum trainers and the journey that they took to get to where they are today. In this podcast, we'll be discussing when they first discovered Scrum, what their experiences, they've had with Scrum, and how scrum has changed their life. Also, we're going to have an opportunity to talk a little bit about the future, which is always interesting, because one of the great things about our community of professional scrum trainers. PSTs is they, they're in, you know, 50 or so countries, so it's always good to get some insights about the future from their their perspective. These podcasts are often deeply personal, insightful, so I always enjoy listening to them. So I'm excited to welcome to the podcast. Leticia Balotelli from from France. Welcome to the podcast, Leticia

Laetitia Baratelli: 1:19

Bonjour. Hi. Hi.

Dave West: 1:22

Sorry. I instantly feel more intelligent and more European when, when I'm talking to talking to you, I guess that little bit of French always, always sounds good. So before we start that, I do have a question that's, you know, personal to you. You know, many people listen to this podcast know that I'm a big soccer fan, or football if we're in in Europe. So you're not related to the French goalkeeper. Are you there was a French goalkeeper with the Balotelli 70s?

Laetitia Baratelli: 1:52

Not at all. He's very famous, but sorry, I'm not fond of his. Oh,

Dave West: 1:57

you. You. So could have lied then and made me love you even more, if that was possible, but he was, he was a great goalkeeper and and I grew up watching England occasionally put goals by him which was which was always good. All right, so let's kick it off. So tell us a little bit about where you're talking to us from, and maybe sprinkle in an interesting fact for our listeners, about you? Yes,

Laetitia Baratelli: 2:24

sure. So as you mentioned, Dave, I'm French, so I'm calling you from France. I live in France. Actually, I live very close to the border between France and Luxembourg. So I work in Luxembourg. I am a product owner for a data product in the bank, and so I cross the border every day. And yeah, a fun fact, I've been playing, we were talking about soccer. I've been playing table tennis for 20 years, when I was a child and a teenager, I was a high level player, which gave me the opportunity to travel around the world and discover new countries, new cultures, and that really gave me the taste for adventure, Discovery, learning, and this has probably contributed to the fact that today I am a very people oriented person and trainer, and I love collaborating with people all over the globe. And maybe another thing I would add about table tennis through sport, I got into the mindset of continuous improvement at a very young age. I mean, you know, you train very hard to be good, and then after each competition, you inspect and you adapt. Why did I win? Why did I lose? What I could improve to play even better in the next competition. So, yeah, that would be by my fun fact, table tennis. So

Dave West: 4:08

I just made sure in my head never to play you, because you'll probably make me feel very embarrassed and run me around the room. Discipline as well. Sport often provides a really important education in discipline. And obviously, discipline is a key element of Scrum and professional Scrum, because you know, when you're working in those small chunks of you have to be very disciplined. You have to ensure that you know done is done, etc, which is many things we could probably lean into. Alright. So, okay, so got a little bit of a background, living working in Luxembourg, living in in France, excellent table tennis player. Don't want to, don't want to mess with that. So tell me a little bit about your background before you just. Of a scrum. You know you obviously you were doing table tennis, but you know that, I don't sure what professional table tennis is, is like in the world, but I assume that you were doing other things as well. So tell us a little about your background. Leticia, yes,

Laetitia Baratelli: 5:14

so regarding my background, so I started my career as an IT developer, before transitioning to various roles such as I've been a traditional project manager, an IT team lead. And in 2018 the organization I was working for transition to Agile and Scrum. And as part of this transformation, I became a product owner. So the good thing is that with my experience in both traditional and agile environments, gives me a unique perspective on how to support my students in their learning and also being myself today, a scrum practitioner, I always have new stories to share in my classes to illustrate the concepts that I teach. And this is what just students really like to hear stories,

Dave West: 6:15

yeah, and that is something that, you know, our professional scrum trainers definitely have lots of and I love the fact that you're a product owner every day. It's a hard job, though, isn't it? Yes,

Laetitia Baratelli: 6:29

I really love being a product owner again, compared to a traditional project manager, because it's not the same mindset as a project manager, you focus on delivering, on time, on scope, on budget, you have more an output mindset. Being a product owner, you really focus on the outcome, on the value that you are delivering to your customers. And you really want to change the life of people delivering value. And do you

Dave West: 7:05

think that there's a lot of challenges in being a product owner in an organization that you know has lots of conflicting priorities, probably has lots of of challenges. Can we talk a little bit about your your experience, about the challenges in your day to day job as a product owner.

Laetitia Baratelli: 7:23

Yeah, so I wouldn't say it's a challenge. I would say this is the accountability of the product owner. This is what you are here for. You are expected to maximize the value of the product. You order your product backlog, and you ensure that the most, the more value is delivered first, so you really focus on the value, maximizing the value.

Dave West: 7:48

And do you find that you have challenges with stakeholders determining and managing that value order based on everybody? Anything else that's happening?

Laetitia Baratelli: 7:58

Yeah, of course. And the good thing with the scrum framework is that you can use events to deal with this. You meet with your stakeholders at least once at the end of each sprint, during the sprint review, this is where you collaborate. This is where you decide you collaborate on what to do next. So it's a great I like the framework for this.

Dave West: 8:23

So tell me when you first discovered Scrum. You know, in whenever it was 2018 Did you say something like that? 2000 did why did you fall in love with it so much? Yeah, yeah.

Laetitia Baratelli: 8:40

So first I discovered the scrum. I discovered scrum as a different way, a new way of working. And I've been practicing scrum for many years, and I could witness the benefit. So to give you a few examples, early and frequent value delivery on customer satisfaction, Scrum team happiness. Scrum teams are super happy. We have more space for creativity and innovation. You have much more flexibility compared to a traditional project management and yeah. The list of advantages is is endless. And again, since I was able to compare a waterfall approach or a traditional approach with Scrum, for me, advantages are endless, yes,

Dave West: 9:35

and maybe some of that sport, that table tennis, history, your people, centricity, the discipline, those things kind of like are quite different to traditional project management. Traditional project management really isn't like sport as much as you know, often they use that analogy, whereas Scrum is probably a lot more like like sport, which is, which is something that you obviously come. From, yeah,

Laetitia Baratelli: 10:01

exactly. And the analogy I like to share with my students, you know, in English, it's called waterfall, and once the water is down, the water can't go up anymore. And this is where we are lacking this flexibility. With a traditional approach, with Scrum, you don't have this waterfall environment. That

Dave West: 10:23

is true. You, you, you really, you really don't. The idea is that you incrementally Make, make little course corrections towards this destination. That is the goal, which is, which is fantastic. I just like in sport, the fact that you, you're never perfect, you can always get better, unfortunately. And you know, I think that that's a good, good metaphor. So why do you become a PST, though professional scrum trainer seems to be, you know, your product owning, which is a full time job and often very challenging in in traditional organizations like financial services companies like the one you work at, so you had a full time job. Why did you become a professional scrum trainer as well? Yeah,

Laetitia Baratelli: 11:07

so helping others learn and grow has always been my my passion. Prior being a PST, I trained and coached some table tennis players, some horse riders with my daughters. I taught mathematics to kids, PHP programming language at university. It has always been part of my life. You know, teaching, coaching, mentoring, and I have now quite some professional experience. And a few years ago, I don't know, somehow I felt the need to to share that knowledge and experience, to give it back. And since I had fallen in love with Scrum and Agile a few years before, I decided, Okay, let's try to combine both, and let's teach Scrum. And I started my my PST, journey in that way.

Dave West: 12:09

Wow. I think that the desire to teach, the desire to share these ideas, I think, is it, it's a consistent theme in our professional scrum community, that everybody wants to share these ideas and draw and there's a level of passion that sometimes can be a little challenging, but there's certainly a level of passion about it, and which is, which is, which is good. And what did your colleagues think when you said, I'm going to become a professional scrum trainer? Did they like go? What

Laetitia Baratelli: 12:45

they were not so surprised, because actually during my professional life, I was also teaching, mentoring, coaching, so it was not a surprise that I wanted to do that, and I'm still supporting my colleagues at work again, teaching, sharing experience, supporting their their learning, some of them are preparing those scrum assessments. And so it's not, it's not PST on one side and product owner on the other side. It's really a combination of both, and it's my life every day. I

Dave West: 13:25

really, really love that there's, there's a certain time in your career. I think when giving back is more important than giving if that's a that's probably a bad analogy. But you know what I mean, it becomes, I think that the experiences that that we've had, and we've been able to share those with others and for them to learn from it quickly and easily. You know, we there's no such thing as a self made person. You know, we're all part of a community, and often we forget that when we're doing these and So training is just training, mentoring, coaching, sharing, stories, whatever you call it doesn't really matter, is such an important part, I think, in the modern world, and something that I think often we forget. We're so focused on processes and automation and tools, and when really being able to tell somebody a story that they take some learning from is incredibly powerful,

Laetitia Baratelli: 14:23

yes, and also, you know, today I'm teaching and training in organizations, the future scrum practitioners, the future production so I share my passion for Scrum, but as a trainer, recently, I was thinking, how could I promote scrum even more, you know, and I remembered a story in my professional life so many years ago. At that time, there was a clear lack of women in technology and organizations. They. Were struggling to attract more women because no woman applied to the IT position that they offered. And to address this challenge I had, I had the chance to participate to an initiative with a few female colleagues. We started to visit schools, and we gave kids talks and presentations, I shared my my experience, my insight, my story, my mission was really to inspire and motivate young girls to consider entering the field of technology, and that worked pretty well. So guess what? I decided to do exactly the same today with Scrum. So I've now started to work and to collaborate a lot with universities and business schools. And yeah, I'm teaching scrum so students in universities today, they aren't taught about the traditional project management approach. So I believe if they are taught about Scrum as well, hopefully tomorrow, they will be capable to choose most appropriate approach to their context when they enter the business world. So I'm very happy to support and help organizations. But for me, it's even more important to to act one step earlier, starting with schools and kids and and this is what I really like to do. So I was lucky to to meet and spend some time with people like Alistair Coburn, co writer of the Agile Manifesto, and James copian, he wrote the scrum pattern books. And those guys are considered, as you know, the founders of agile, and for me, playing this role of a bridge between those founders, so between the past and the students, meaning the future, the generation of tomorrow. It's so rewarding and fulfilling. I really feel invest with a mission, and I enjoy it.

Dave West: 17:19

Oh, you obviously do, and that that's great I do, does it? Does it land? Well, this Scrum, because I remember when I was a student, gosh, it's a long time ago. Now I I'm you'll hear some, you know, Gears whirring. But when I was a student, we never got taught how to work together. We got given these team projects, you know, and there was all, it's all, every team project was the same. I did most of the work. There was a guy that was really good at, like, graphics and making things look pretty at the end, he did the final presentation. And there was a couple of people that used to go out and get the cans of Coke and buy the pizza and and we just sort of, like, made it up as we went along, and we weren't very effective. We were never taught how to work together, how to deliver value. Does is by by helping young people do that. Do you feel that and does do they look for they're like, Yeah, this is awesome. Does it land with them? Yeah.

Laetitia Baratelli: 18:20

So I can share a story. The first time I interacted with students from university, I gave a conference just for one hour, explaining Agile and Scrum. And I was a bit worried, for the same reason, will they like what I'm sharing? Will they be interested, and so on. And after one hour, they stand up, and they clapped like that, and I was I could not believe. And they asked many questions. They were super interested. And this is how I started my journey with universities. I offered the APS, the APS applying professional scrum class to university. So for students to really experiment scrum for two days to build a real product from today's they are acting as a scrum teams. And it's really, really, really good. Students like it. They experiment. Results are good, very good feedback and and again tomorrow, when they face a complex situation, they will be capable to to use Scrum or to work with a scrum team. And if they face a simple environment, they could still use a traditional approach, but that is, they will be equipped, and they will have the option between both approach. So this is what I'm trying to to do, equip them with both approach.

Dave West: 19:53

So the future is going to be okay, that what you're you're telling me,

Laetitia Baratelli: 19:59

for me. We can't work as we used to work 30 years ago. The world is changing too fast. Technology is evolving very fast. Customer needs aren't changing very fast. We need to. Organizations need to inspect and adapt quickly to be successful, but also to survive. So for me, there is, I can't see any other way today than agile or scrum to cope with this complexity, to cope with those unknowns. So yeah, for me, Agile and Scrum are the future definitely, and

Dave West: 20:37

the people that are using it are the next generation. So it's exciting, exciting to hear that. So we could talk all day about your journey, and we could talk about some of your adventures, but this is only an introduction, almost. We only have 1520 minutes to do it. So, so unfortunately, we've come to the end of the podcast. So I guess final words, if you were stuck in an elevator with with somebody, what would be the message that you'd like them to take away from this podcast?

Laetitia Baratelli: 21:11

I would say, you know, today, we are hearing a lot about artificial intelligence and because of the covid pandemic, we were teaching and training remotely with videos today, I believe something very important is a human being side, so to spend some time together, to teach in person when it's possible, and for human beings, really, to share their stories, their experience, and help the future generations to make the right decisions and to use the right approach in the way they work.

Dave West: 21:55

I think that's a really, really good message. It's an awesome message, and it's actually reminds me of my grandmother. I was brought up my by my grandparents, and my grandma used to say to me when I came home from school, not what have you done, but who have you helped? And and that message that, you know, I think she was a be, you know, a deep thinker. Maybe I don't know if she was a deep thinker, but she made me realize that the it's so important. It's about humans, and it's about humans working together, learning from each other and supporting each other, and AI, remote, zoom, all this stuff is great. It's awesome, but we have to remember that we're human beings, and the best learning and the best experiences and the best development and ultimately, the best outcomes are about human beings working together that that's awesome and kind of deep love it Well, thank you for spending the time. Leticia Beretta baratelli,

Laetitia Baratelli: 22:52

yes,

Dave West: 22:54

who's not related to the 1970s French goalkeeper, but you know, but for the not sure, many people know that particular goalkeeper, apart from maybe some French people that are listening to the to the podcast. Thank you for spending the

Laetitia Baratelli: 23:09

time. Thank you very much, Dave. Talk to you soon.

Dave West: 23:12

Bye. Definitely, we will. And thank you for listening to today's scrum.org, community podcast. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share of your friends, and, of course, come back and listen to some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests. You know, we were talking today about about the importance of training, the importance of humanity today on our podcast, but we have lots of guests talking about lots of everything in the area of professional Scrum, product thinking and, of course, agility. Thank you for listening today and Scrum on you.