Scrum.org Community Podcast

Why are forecasts so often late, or short of what was planned? In this live Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer session, Professional Scrum Trainer Ludwig Harsch answers audience questions on estimation and planning for Scrum Teams. He draws on his training and consulting work to explain why estimation should be tested and adapted to each team's context, not treated as a universal rule.

Ludwig explains how teams can move from unreliable hour estimates to relative sizing. He discusses when Planning Poker is worth the effort and when a lighter approach fits better. He also covers how to forecast when support work, context switching, and external dependencies eat into capacity. He makes the case for giving stakeholders projected dates with probabilities rather than fixed promises, and explains how Monte Carlo simulations can support that conversation.

In this episode:
Moving from hours to relative sizing, and what "size" should mean
Using Planning Poker and facilitation to build shared understanding
Knowing when to stop estimating
Using AI in estimation without losing team discussion
Choosing a planning horizon, including for regulated products
Handling support work, dependencies, and shifting priorities
Comparing velocity, throughput, and capacity-adjusted metrics
Why Scrum Teams commit to the Sprint Goal, not a fixed number of backlog items
Advice for newly formed teams still collecting data
Tune in for some great insights on Estimation and Planning in Scrum.

Matthew Hodgson, founder of Zen X Machina, joins Dave West to unpack the Raptors project, an experiment that started by accident during digital transformation work and grew into a working model for agentic teams. Hodgson explains how he built a cross-functional AI team, complete with a Scrum Master agent named Al, and what it took to get the agents to self-organize, adapt sprint by sprint, and catch their own mistakes. The conversation digs into why explicit governance files matter more with agents than with humans, where agents still need human oversight, and why traditional governance models move too slowly for agentic AI. Hodgson also previews ideas from his book, Evolve, on adaptive governance for modern product operating models.

Access the whitepapers that cover the experiment and learnings.

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West sits down with product leadership expert and Author of Untrapping Product Teams, David Pereira, to explore how AI is transforming product delivery. David shares why the shift from estimates to investment matters more than ever, why having the capability to build something doesn't mean you should and how product managers can evolve into true context setters and strategic decision makers. T

he conversation covers the difference between problem space and solution space, why shaky organizational foundations doom AI initiatives the same way they doomed past Agile transformations, and why human judgment, critical thinking, and imagination remain irreplaceable in a world of increasingly capable AI tools. David also discusses his experience training teams, his book and why he believes it's time to bring back the crazy ideas that usually get left on the whiteboard.
Learn more about what David has been thinking about on the Untrapping Product Teams Substack and Podcast!

AI is joining teams faster than most organizations have frameworks to support it and that's actually an exciting opportunity, if you approach it thoughtfully. In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Scrum.org COO Eric Naiburg and executive advisor Darrell Fernandes pick up where their popular webinar Managing Your AI Teammate left off, tackling the audience questions that didn't make it into the live session.

The conversation draws smart parallels between AI adoption and the cloud journey most organizations have already navigated, explores how to set your team up for secure and effective AI collaboration, and unpacks what it really means to treat AI as a strategic partner rather than just a tool. Eric and Darrell also take on a forward-looking question most teams haven't gotten to yet: how do we use AI efficiently and responsibly, not just effectively?

If your team is starting to work alongside AI (and it almost certainly is), this episode will give you practical language and frameworks to do it with confidence.

A conversation with Stephan Scholten and Cesario Ramos on transparent salaries, self-organized teams, peer-driven assessment, and what it really takes to design an HR function around people rather than processes.
Most organizations claim to put people first. Their HR systems tell a different story. In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West speaks with Stephan Scholten, Director of People and Organization at Visma Roxit and Cesario Ramos, creator of Creating Agile Organizations, about what happens when you actually redesign HR from the ground up with agile principles at its core.
Stephan and Cesario discuss the radical steps Visma Roxit has taken: eliminating team leaders in favor of self-organization, opening up salary structures for collective input, and running peer-driven assessment processes that give employees genuine ownership over how their roles and compensation are defined. They explore the Theory X versus Theory Y tension that surfaces in nearly every organization attempting this kind of change, the slow and deliberate trust-building required before transparency can work, and how the arrival of AI fits into a system already designed around human interdependence and collective performance.
Whether you are an HR professional, an agile coach, or a leader looking for a real-world example of empowerment done seriously, this conversation offers both inspiration and practical starting points.
You can learn more about this story in the whitepaper titled Designing HR for Agile Organizations.