Every day, I hear more stories of agile coaches or Scrum Masters losing their jobs. Why? Several reasons:
- No manager cares about “agile” even if they care about agility. So, selling “agile” into the organization doesn't create any traction for change.
- Agile coaches and Scrum Masters are staff positions, not “line” jobs.
- Worse, many agile coaches and Scrum Masters do not add more value or realize the value they are supposed to deliver.
You might not like these ideas. But they are the reality of what my clients discuss with me.
If you want a new job that will allow you to support more agility in teams and organizations, I recommend you speak the language of the business. That means everyone needs to understand what managers care about and want: more net income.
What Managers Want: More Net Income
Let me start with a very simplified profit and loss discussion using the ideas of AARRR “Pirate Metrics” to describe what managers want. That's Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue.
Organizations exist to acquire another customer. (Marketing and word of mouth help with that Acquisition.) Once the customer buys something, that's activation. That act of buying means the company gets some revenue. When organizations retain customers, the lifetime value of a customer increases. And when the customers refer others to the product and the company, that customer value increases even more. All of this is about revenue, the top line in the balance sheet.
However gross revenue is never enough. Companies must manage their expenses so they can afford to stay in business. (Staying in business is an infinite game.)
Managing expenses means reducing the costs of supplying products and services to customers. All the costs: marketing costs to acquire customers, onboarding costs to activate customers, and product development costs for the product itself.
Top line (revenue) minus expenses leads to the bottom line, net income. (I'm not going to discuss cap-ex vs op-ex or tax breaks here. See Capitalizing Software During an Agile Transformation for some of those ideas.)
Net income matters more than anything else. That's what allows companies to play the infinite game of staying in business.
How have you helped with any of the Pirate Metrics or increasing net income? That's the value you offer to an organization.
Assess Your Past Value for Your Next Job
There are three elements of value everyone offers for their next position: tangible value, intangible value, and the peripheral benefits. See How to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence and Successful Independent Consulting: Relationships that Focus on Mutual Benefit for many more details.
Now, open a new document and put your most recent position at the top of the page. Write down every action you took that focused on any of: customer acquisition, activation, retention, referral, or revenue. In addition, write down every action you took that decreased the costs of product development. Consider the flow metrics, because they're the data that counts.
As you write down those actions, estimate the monetary value of each action using the ideas of tangible benefits. You can do this if you measured cycle time, not velocity. I hope you measured the team's or organization's throughput or the costs of defects. That's how you can articulate the value you can offer to the next employer.
But if you didn't use the flow metrics? I can hear you yelling at me, “But I made a better environment for the team! That has to count for something!”
It does. Those are the intangible or peripheral benefits. Companies don't know what they're missing until that's all gone. That's why companies still reward fire-fighters and rarely reward risk management. Even when I describe those intangible or peripheral benefits in my client proposals, clients are much more likely to focus on the tangible benefits. (That's why the flow metrics matter so much.)
The next post will discuss what you can do to increase your choices for your next job.
The Full Series
- Unemployed Agilists: How to Show Your Value to Support What Managers Want, Part 1
- Unemployed Agilists: How to Move from a Staff Role to a Line Job, Part 2
- Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3
- Unemployed Agilists: Review the Hype Cycle & Your Agility to Help You Manage Future Job Changes, Part 4