Scrum Facilitators Community podcast

Influence, Product Ownership and unblocking the team - Fredrik Wendt

• Fredrik Wendt • Season 2 • Episode 4

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In the renewed Scrum Facilitators community podcast we talk about Scrum with practitioners in the community.

In this episode Sjoerd Kranendonk talks to Fredrik Wendt. Fredrik is a fellow Professional Scrum Trainer, coach & consultant working with ProAgile.se. We discuss the importance of knowing how to influence and invite change, as well as its relation to Product Ownership and how Product Owners should never walk alone.

Do you have a story to share? Or maybe a great Scrum question or dilemma you're currently struggling with? Get in touch with us at podcast@scrumfacilitators.com and feel free to reach out to any Scrum Facilitator if you want to join our slack community.

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Steve Trapps:

Welcome to the scrum facilitators community podcast, the place for real conversations around Scrum.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Hi, and welcome at the scrum facilitators community Podcast. I'm very happy today to be here with Fredrik Wendt for this episode. And we're going to be chatting about all kinds of interesting stuff. And if the time is good for us, we'll also make a little bonus snack that we'll release separately. But before going into all the good stuff, of course, I hear you asking who is Fredrik Wendt? So Fredrik, it's good to have you here. Welcome. Thank you. And yeah, the best way to introduce is actually to introduce yourself. And for that, I have two main questions. And the first one is, how would friends describe you in two sentences?

Fredrik Wendt:

I mean, I think they would describe me as a friendly person who likes to laugh, likes to be in the centre, but doesn't have to, you know, dictate what we're doing, you know, a facilitator type of person.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Nice, nice. So and does that also help you with your professional job? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's,

Fredrik Wendt:

I think a lot of the, you know, the analogy with software developers and musicians, you know, if you want to play in a band, you need to learn how to play in a band, you know, you can't just be very good at your own instrument. It surely helps, right? But you need to learn to play as as a member of the band, and that's really who I am. I I've been a captain for football and soccer teams. And but, you know, it's that joint effort of the full team. That's what makes me going and keeps me happy and really energises me. So

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

yeah. And now of course, everybody's wondering, what is your job? Exactly. So what do you do? Exactly for a job? And what do you love most about it? So I had a shift two years ago, until two years ago, when Corona hit us, and we moved back to my hometown, I have been working 80% of my time, with clients sitting in teams as a, as a

Fredrik Wendt:

software developer, that's my trade back. But for the past, perhaps 10 years, I've been moving more and more towards product ownership and helping teams you know, get together, but I still have some technical no house. So I, I don't mind sitting at the keyboard and really, you know, doing away at the mob programming, but for the past few years that has switched. So instead of doing 80% on site and 20% teaching and stuff, it's been reversed. So I'm mostly doing trainings and teaching and workshops at clients. And then I do smaller stuff, you know, individual coaching with lots of product owners.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Cool. And what aspect of that do you love most?

Fredrik Wendt:

So what I love right most right now is that I actually see people using the stuff I'm teaching and see how it helps them. So I get the real feedback, you know, a couple of months later now and you know, they come back, Hey, I've tried this, I've done this now. I want the next step, you know. So that's really great to see how it impacts people.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah, that's, that's really nice. And of course, we know each other, because we're both professional scrum trainers. And yeah, we were also a bit of Scrum nerd sometimes. But we promised to keep it practical for this, this podcast, although we might have some discriminatory we'll be in the separate five minutes thing. We'll try to do that.

Fredrik Wendt:

practicals grammar nerdery Yeah, I'm fine with that. Yeah,

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

exactly. Well, that's the thing, right, if you know the theory, and we really try to comprehend the theory, we can also better apply it in practical situations. So I think it strengthens both ends. But that's really what I like about, about our conversations and why I'm excited to have you on the podcast, because I think you have to say mindset of having a sharp eye on what are the concepts? What are other concepts out there that are useful? And how can we put this to practice and as you say, what you love most about your job is seeing it being applied, seeing people learning with it, benefiting from it. So I'm hopeful that people will benefit from this podcast too. So let's see what we get. So in our Yes, yeah, sure. So is there anything before we move from the introduction else that you want to add about? Who Frederic Fuentes or what people should know before we start?

Fredrik Wendt:

I live in Sweden?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yes. So if you wonder about that accent, no, I am Dutch. Fredrik is Swedish. That's the difference. And yeah, we're both pretty good at English, but sometimes still mess up. That happens. Anyway. So let's, let's dig in. So in our podcast, we normally have a structure that we follow because it's easier for ourselves and for the guests and hopefully also for you listeners. And in the end of the podcast, normally we ask this, like this chain question. So we have a previous guests proposing a question. And we will ask at the end of the podcast , to you Fredrik as well to submit a question for the next guest. And normally we do that at the end of the podcast, but it's maybe nice as an experiment, see what happens if we do it now upfront? So the previous question by Wim van Baaren, if you haven't heard that podcast, go check it out, it's out there is, what is the most important decision you ever made? And why?

Fredrik Wendt:

Well, nice question. So I think I've made two really important decisions in my life. And it's all related to books, actually, there are two books that really, you know, helped me get my head straight. So the first one was, I don't know exactly what it was, but I read the Phoenix Project. It is a great story of you know why most IT organisations where you separate IT and business, why they struggle so much, and what you can do about it. So it's a normal story, you know, it's not a boring, effective little book, but it's really a great story, and that you can follow and see how they changed how to change a couple of things in the culture and how they did things, and how it really improved. So that's the first one. And the second one is about nonviolent communication. I spent three hours on a YouTube clip. It's not a clip, when it's three hours, right. But it's a great workshop recorded by with Marshall Rosenberg. And that has really changed my life.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Ooh, and what are the most important changes from these two experiences?

Fredrik Wendt:

The first one is about it doesn't matter what goals you have, if you're not on, if you don't have the same goal, you're not on the team, right? You're not going to help out. There are other incentives. So that's the first one. The second one is about recognising that emotions is not bad. Emotions come from met or unmet desires or needs, right. So when we feel that our needs are met, we get happy emotions, right. And that's a good thing. But also when we feel like our needs are not met, we get sad emotions, or those kinds of things. And, so listening into your emotions and the emotions

of others is a way to see:

are people happy in life. You know, and when they're not, don't be afraid of the emotions, but really try to understand what are the needs that are not being met, etc? And what are the observations around you that led to, you know, the feelings? And then you can start digging into making actionable requests. But this is not a nonviolent communication session. So let's press move on. Yeah.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah, it's valuable to have a bit more detail around the, the why it helps, you know, so, actually, this, this topic comes up, has come up before in the podcast. So it's actually becoming almost a red thread through the podcast, you know, but maybe we'll do something in the future, specifically on that, it will be nice, because I think it is, it is already a known concept, N.V.C. But it's really hard to apply it well. And you have to really be really conscious to, to work with it. So it can never do harm to keep reiterating that it's out there and that people can benefit from it. So

Fredrik Wendt:

I shall say that, I want to say that you can actually use nonviolent communication violently. So you should be cautious about using it too aggressively, because you might actually end up being violent in your usage of it. So yeah, it's a nice tool. Another really good decision I made what's likely to read the Influencer book. I think we're going to mention that as we move on.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah. So we'll close off with some book recommendations. And we already have some under our belt now. So that's nice. So yeah. Maybe related to this. So what was the biggest challenge in your role? And how did you overcome it? Or are you currently working on it? Maybe Maybe it's an actual challenge, currently.

Fredrik Wendt:

So one of the biggest challenges I've had in recent years was to try to influence a big organisation on how they did, essentially how did they do day to day work and how they developed software as a product.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

So the the challenge I was facing was So, well I was asked by the r&d executive of the head of r&d at a company to hey, we think you have a nice picture of how to do continuous delivery. Can you help us do it? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I might, you know, but there's like a 200 people 250 people involved. And so that's going to be a real challenge. You know, the other person said, yeah, we've tried a couple of times, and we haven't had much success, we're so we're happy to see you fail this time. We had a really open conversation about you know, I can't guarantee anything, but I have a picture and I'd be happy to give it a go. Right. So that's really one of the biggest challenges I've worked with, in recent years, and really tried to change, you know, how people collaborate and how they think about, you know, their responsibility for the software they're producing. Yeah. So, so that actually ties us back into, you know, this third book, or this third one of very good decisions I made in my life. And that was to read this book called Influencer, or its its subtitle is "the new science of leading change". So it's nothing about YouTubers or stuff like that, it's really about how can you be more successful with change. And so in this work I did with this company, there was something like 25, different software teams, even 30 if you count some adjacent to those, but but the main focus for this change was about 15 teams working on, you know, the next generation of their software. And so, I got this chance at, uh, every 6 weeks or 12 weeks or something like that, we had all hands big town meeting, you know. So I got 10 minutes every time, you know, where I could, you know, talk to the big audience. So I went up there, and I said, Hey, so I've been invited here, to try to change how we do continuous integration, essentially, we're going to make every team, well we suggest that every team take full responsibility from the code on their machine out all the way to the customer, in the hands of the customer. You know, what I can see people start turning in their seats, because wow, this man is crazy. This is really, you know, there's so many people of us and you know, the people that are building the software right now. They're called a configuration management team, the CM team, and, you know, they have a build that works roughly every three weeks at best. How on earth are we going to, you know, take responsibility all the way out to the customer? So, I'm not going to talk for too long about that journey. But what really took us... Well, I stood up, I had a picture, I pointed out, and I said, I'm going to be wrong 50% of the time, and I'm not going to force anyone. So if you want this change, it's going to be completely voluntary. And I know most of you don't like this change right now. So the Influencer book is really about two big concepts. Of course, you need to be clear about what the goal is, and what you want to achieve. So people can relate to it, and that they can understand what the change would mean. And once you have set that kind of level, you need to ask them, Do you want this? And can you do this? Because if you want sustainable change, it always comes from the inside, right? So if people don't want it, or if they feel like they can't do you know, the change, the shift, the transformation, whatever it is, it's not going to happen, it's not going to be sustainable. So having read that book, you know about how they eradicate really bad diseases in countries where it's been hard to get away from because of bad water and whatever it is, you know, we applied the same thing here. So we set up a small workshop, we asked all the team facilitators or Scrum Master to you know, hey, go out, just do this 15 minute thing with every team. And the first question was, if on Monday, you were forced to do this, what would you feel about it? Why wouldn't you like it? And you know, people just started raging and raving and in the end, the scrum master just recorded, recorded, recorded know, everything they said, and just wrote it down and said, thank you. And then we handled this and we collected all of this. And we also met everybody, but But essentially, we created our own backlog, you know, everything that they listed. That was stuff we needed to fix.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah, yeah. Nice.

Fredrik Wendt:

So we started doing that and we were very open about this and we collected and showed everybody like, whoa, you know, all of these things. We cannot do it. We don't know the new tools, we don't have access to logs at clients. We don't have the skills. We don't have the time, all of these things. We said like, yeah, we realise that until we've solved this, that change, we're suggesting, you're not, you're not going to want it. And we get that. So our work here is to make your life better, right? And if we can't succeed in that, this change is not going to happen.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

So having that mindset really shifted, you know, how this organisation talked about how we work things and how we introduce change. So it took us about 18 months or something to that, to really have, you know, the majority of all teams be ready and beyond the new way of doing things. But I'm really happy with how we did it. And the people themselves are really happy as well, you know, because it's stuck after I left.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

That's, that's really a nice example. And, actually, it is already a pretty practical example of a theory that you recently applied for full success, which would normally be my follow up question. What I'm very curious about, what I really like about our conversations outside of this podcast, also, is that we tend to be interested, maybe even more in the product management and value creation part. And you mentioned yourself that you're more coaching product owners and stuff like that for recent years. So I can imagine that this book, the influencer, and maybe also some NVC techniques, can also be really helpful in a product owner role. So because the product owners also sometimes a change manager, right?

Fredrik Wendt:

Absolutely.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

The example you gave, it's about culture, change, about technology change about a whole lot of stuff. But for a product owner, this can also be applicable. Do you have any examples or tips or tricks for product owners that might be listening?

Fredrik Wendt:

Well, yes, and I mean, this is, this is one example of being a product owner, right? I had a version of the product, which was, you know, the old way of working with all the tools and the support and all the, you know, processes around that. So that was actually a, you know, a product that was used by a lot of people, 250 people internally in this somewhat small organisation, but still it was used, right, and lots of people's lives depended on it. You know, if we can't get our stuff out, we can, you know, eventually we will run, the business won't run anymore. So this was a real change, you know, I was introducing something else; a new product. And the first initial response to that product was Whoa, are you crazy, you know? So this is a way to start listening to your, to your market, right, and your customers? And what are the pain points? You know, what are the gains? You know, if you think about jobs to be done from Strategyzer people, you know, what are they looking for? What are they trying to achieve? And what are new, what's painful about current situations, what could be painful in the future and those kinds of things. So we mapped those. And so that's why we use the Influencer book, the model in the Influencer book, it really helped us understand and connect with real users, right? So that idea, you know, is universal. I mean, if you're talking about, there's another interesting person called Alberto Savoia. He is what do you call it? Serial entrepreneur? So, Alberto, he has a nice, he has a website called pretotyping.org. Or that, yeah, it's dot org, where he has his book, but also a short 30 minute video. And one of the main things he talked about, if you want to be successful with building the right thing, is to get your own data. You know, don't rely on other people's surveys don't rely on what other people might have told you and etc. But they will get go out there and get your own data. And this is an example of that, right? We sent it out, we said, This is what we're going to do. And then we started collecting data. Then we went on to figure out what's the first team that might be able to approach this, one of the first customers, and we made sure that we supported them, and as soon as we did that, they started spreading the word, etc. But um, yeah, so I have another tip I want to share, that most of my, that most of our product owners try to embrace and that is to never walk alone. You know, there's so many product owners out there who are on the brink of being burnt out, or very close to that, right.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah, it can be a tough job right?

Fredrik Wendt:

Because you're expected to maximise the value of everything you know, and you're the person that is supposed to balance all of these millions of values, and you need to be everywhere, et cetera, depending on how you play the role, right? So the most practical tip I start out with

is:

don't walk alone. Whenever you go to a meeting, make sure you have someone with it, you don't have to bring the full team, you don't have to bring the same people every time. Just so you know, I tried to start every week, by listing for my team, these are the meetings I'm going to these are the people I'm meeting these is, this is why we're meeting this is what I'm hoping to get out. And then lastly, who joins me, more or less just on a whiteboard, just write it up on a mural board, whatever you're doing, you know, who's going to join me for each of these meetings. So then it means not, I don't have to transfer all the knowledge about the client, right? I'm not the single point of failure. And so we can also, you know, I get some feedback. Because I'm not perfect, I misinterpret you know, the person, I'm talking to in a meeting. So having someone else from the team join me has been a really good practical tip. I try to remind myself every now and then.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

That's really interesting. It's like pair programming, but for product management, right?

Fredrik Wendt:

Yeah, absolutely. You know,

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

for stakeholder management, yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

It's really it is a strategy to avoid being burnt out, right? Because if you are the only one that went to that meeting, everything depends on you, you know?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah, that's true

Fredrik Wendt:

It constitutes a single point of failure and that bottleneck of the whole organisation. So

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

yeah, when you have this practice in place, it's also easier to go on a holiday, and not cram all your meetings before and after, but just have them running without you. So that's a that's a good tip.

Fredrik Wendt:

Yeah,

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

I think that's, that's something that many product owners struggle with. And tend to forget that Scrum or product management is actually a team sport, that we approach this product development, product management, the development part, we totally understand this team sport, where like, we have all these specialisms that need to collaborate to create a done product, right? A valuable product, a usable product. And then we look at this product owner role, and the product management part and say: Oh, this is just one person.

Fredrik Wendt:

Yes.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

If you say it out loud, like that, it's already crazy. But still, we try to make that work. And that's like, why? Yeah,

Fredrik Wendt:

Yeah, that's so I mean, I see the point in Scrum, of having you know, that one person being the decision maker, the final, the person that has the final decision making authority if needed, right. But it doesn't say you should make all decisions by yourself. That's really a poor way to scale your product development as well. Right? If you're the only one making decisions, well, did you set your up for being slow? You know?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah,

Fredrik Wendt:

I always try to go for, you know, 90% of the decisions I hope my team is making, I mean, they should make a lot of decisions on their own. And I hope that I agree with 90%. And for the other 10%, I'm fine with that.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Exactly, and you can always walk stuff back or change it later. If it's just 10 percent, and that's doable. I mean, I mean, 30%, or more of the decisions in total will be wrong anyway. So yeah,

Fredrik Wendt:

let's, let's, let's not try to drag out for them for as long as possible. But while they're, you know, make decisions quickly learn from it.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Awesome. Yeah, cool. So I want to mention one thing, because this don't walk alone thing is also what I really like about some of the course offerings that we both teach. So we're not going to advertise all the courses here. But if you look into scrum.org courses, this will be one place where consistently not just me and Fredrik, but also other trainers will hopefully I don't visit every training that's scheduled, of course, we'll put forward this message about product ownership, and Scrum as team sport. So it's really important to look at the way you work. When you want to use Scrum as a team sport or any other way of working. That's not Scrum. But you try to build a complex product with a team. Use that team for stuff, not just the technical stuff. That's right. That's the tip.

Fredrik Wendt:

I like to point out that, you know, your team is your biggest assets, your biggest asset, right?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Right. Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

So my coaching question for product owner is, you know, so how are you limiting your team, your biggest asset this week? Exactly. You know, how

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Get out of the way sometimes?

Fredrik Wendt:

Exactly, right?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

yes, yes. Cool. So I think I think we hammered that point home. And I think I think so, before we move on to the next point, we will probably talk in the future more. So we will also go into other topics and other things, but you have one more concrete tip that you really want to share on this topic of product ownership and from your own experience. So let's put that in there and see what happens. So,

Fredrik Wendt:

So okay. So the final one, I should keep it go ahead. brief, I think, but there is a great book from a person called Gary Hamel. Gary looks at many things. But he cares about innovation. You know, he says, if you're not innovating, if you're not bringing new things to the market, eventually someone else is going to do that. Right. So innovation is absolutely key to be sustainable to have a sustainable business.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yes.

Fredrik Wendt:

In most organ organisations are set up. So you know, but so he looks at what do we get innovation from? What is the absolutely necessity in order to have innovation? And his answer to that is, you know, partly at least, engagement. If your people are not engaged in the work they're doing, you're not going to get innovation, you're just going to get complacency and you know, following orders or being obedient. You know, people just"Yes, boss Yes, boss, we're gonna do this. Yes, boss, yes, boss." But if you want to have innovation, people feel need to feel that they're engaged in what they're doing. So here has this ladder of, a ladder of motivation or engagement, really, where it starts with, you know, being obedient, and then, polite, you know, being trained to do your job in a good way. And then you become an expert; you're specialising. But then something happens, you know, in the next step, you go up to innovation. And that is where you get creativity and taking initiative. And, you know, really, you know, your passion and zeal, the things you really, you get you on fire, right? Those levels of engagement is something you cannot force. No, no, I can't force you hard right now to say, hey, come up with a new job, be graded gone out, you know, that's not how things work, right? You do it because you want to you because you feel like you want to add those kind of things. So his idea is, you know, if you really want to get high levels of innovation, you need to invite people to this space, yes to being creative taking initiative and those kind of things, you cannot force them, but you can invite them. And however the problem and here's where it comes back to product ownership, you can limit them, you can reject, and you can keep people out from that those levels. So what I mean by that, so I'll give my classical example of what you can, what you might end up or find in a product backlog. So here's the here's one version, version A. The version A is Hi people, please, I want you to build me, you know, change this button over here. So when we click the button, we get this PDF report and I want the top five rows to be in red. Can you fix it? Yeah. Okay, let's go ahead and do it.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

So a straight Product backlog item, right? It's very clear,

Fredrik Wendt:

Clear, it's actionable, you know when you're done, but then there's version B. So, Hi team, you know, our store managers, they don't know what products are going out of line, which need to be sold fairly quickly, right, because they're not going to get supported, they're going to get restocked those kind of things, and they should go out. I have this idea that we should highlight that in, you know, in their weekly sales report, which I get when they click here over here, you know, but the problem is really, they don't know what products they need to focus on. So can we help, can you help me you know, help them, realise this? So this is the difference right? In the version A, I've done all of the thinking. I think about the problem and the solution. I've emphasised with, empathise with the customer. And then I'm just asking my team, go do work, but just don't think, you know, just do the mechanical stuff. Versus...

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

So you walked alone, right, you walked alone, and you did all the thinking work? Yes.

Fredrik Wendt:

Yes, yeah. So this is... But that also meant I'm not letting them into empathy, empathising with the customer, or taking responsibility of the outcome of the work. I only invited them to be really good at you know, writing buttons and making lines red in the PDF report. But then I've not invited them to understand why we're doing things

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

So why would they take any initiatives other than, you know, I need to write better C sharp code, or we need to make these a better red colour. But yeah, but why? You know?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

So that's a real key thing to really think about. What do I have in my product backlog? Am I inviting people to take initiative to be creative taking ownership of the outcomes? Or am I just asking them to output output, output, output, output?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

That's awesome.

Fredrik Wendt:

But that's something I think a lot about: what do I keep in my product backlog? How do I talk to my teams?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah. So I my actions and the tools that you use and ways of communicating, how's the process that you, consciously or unconsciously sometimes use, influencing this engagement and the innovation room that the team can pick up by themselves? And I think the don't walk alone thing is really powerful in this respect. Because back in the day, I read this book, and I will put it in there also, like the the wisdom of the crowds, right. And there's all this research about how if you guess, or estimate stuff, or work on problems, how groups of people, even for very unknowable complex questions, make better shots in the dark then than individuals, right. So why would we keep on doing that as product owners? Right? Taking the worst possible approach in making decisions? By doing it alone? Yeah, so anyway,

Fredrik Wendt:

So. But that's something I reflect on and ask, you know, the people I've coached. So how are you talking to your teams? What do you put in your backlog? Are you inviting people to take ownership of outcomes and really empathising with customers? Or are you just dumbing your people down to output output output?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

And you're just technical excellence. There's nothing wrong with that, right? But if that's the only thing you're getting from your team, again, you're setting yourself up, set yourself up to you know, being burned out being that Yeah, exactly. And also, just to add this, it will make it easier bottleneck. to set sprint goals to really make some powerful tools in scrum work instead of a struggle, right? So there's multiple levels where the benefit is, so for time, and because you already dropped so many useful tips, I think we should go into the rounding off part. And as I said, Well, I'm happy to talk later on other topics more, so I don't mind you becoming a regular guest on the podcast. We'll see about that. So for closing, let's, let's look at some stuff. So you have some books already mentioned. So we always ask or what book do you recommend? Do you also have like a recent publication that you're fond off, or looking forward to read? Maybe because you've already mentioned so many books that are already out there? Oh, I haven't. I haven't read Alberto's Pretotyping book. You know, I really liked those ideas. So that's something I would like to read more.I guess

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

That's cool. That's nice. And we had the question of the previous guest, the question that Wim van Baaren asked. So, of course, you might also have a question for the next guests. So I'm wondering, what would you ask?

Fredrik Wendt:

So I would like to hear from the next person, you know, when was the last time that you felt humbled? And from what?

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Oh, I'm so so curious what the answer will be and who will get this question, because sometimes we don't know yet. So, yeah, that's, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that. Or maybe I would, but anyway, it's going to be fun. I Yeah.

Fredrik Wendt:

Yeah. I think we're in a challenging time. Right. So being humble and yeah. Realising Yeah, I'm grateful and feeling humbled. It makes the world a bit less polarised, I think, and perhaps being able to appreciate the good things we do have.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

I think so too. And also I see another connection to the don't walk alone as a product owner thing but yeah. Don't try to be the single strong person don't be the hero, have a bit of humility that you don't know everything and not have to know everything. Anyway, so let's not spoil it too much for the next guests. I really like it. Thank you. So then the last most important thing may be if other people are like me, and they enjoy your thoughts and ideas and want to learn more, what is the best way to learn more about you maybe connect with you, see or hear live or recorded talks or presentations by you, I don't know what do you have?

Fredrik Wendt:

So I think the best way is to start connecting over LinkedIn, I have quite a lot of conversations with people individully over there, well it starts there, and they move it to a more richer. So so I'm very open to that just, you know, send a "hi, I heard something and I'd like to talk to you". So that's the one way, and the other way is to join our our meetup, which we have about one once a month. And it's called Agile Goteborg or Gothenburg, or, you know, the city I used, I've been working a lot in. But as you know, things have changed. We're doing it digital. So all remotely. So every, at least every second month, we have an online meeting. And you know, it's an open space format. So anyone can come with any topic. And you know, it's people trying to improve the ways of working, and life in general. So that's, that's a way to also connect with me and actually hear me speak and talk about something.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Cool, very cool. And I think that if in your LinkedIn profile, there will also be some publications and more things to dig deeper, right if people want. So that's a nice way to start. And really nice to have this this online. version of meetup, so people don't have to travel to... Can you pronounce it once again in Sweden. Goteborg.

Fredrik Wendt:

Goteborg(Joteborj)? Yeah, exactly.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Joteborj, Joteborj. Oh, man, that's, oh

Fredrik Wendt:

It's fine. But you can find it online. If you that's hard. go to meetups and search for Agile in Sweden, you will find this. There's not a lot of them actually. And we have people from you know, the Netherlands and Germany and Oslo and Fins sometimes joining as well. So it's not just

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

A nice way to meet. Meet people outside of your country, right? To have it online. Cool. Thanks.

Fredrik Wendt:

yeah, absolutely. You're welcome.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

For now, I want to really thank you for your time. We've had a hard time scheduling this. I'm very happy that we've made it work. It was humbling to get it to work. Yeah. So thank you very much for your time for your insights for sharing openly being on this journey with us.

Fredrik Wendt:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here. And thank you for having me.

Sjoerd Kranendonk:

Great. So for our listeners, you can find some links and stuff in the show notes and we'll hope to meet you again in the next podcast. Have a nice day.

Steve Trapps:

Thank you for listening to the scrum facilitators community podcast, the place for real conversations around Scrum. Do you have a story to share in this podcast? Get in touch with us at podcast at scrum facilitators.com