agile coaching Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Pankaj Kumar: Using Agile Prioritization to Handle Competing Roles

“Who am I going to deliver to, and how urgent is this task for them?” – Pankaj Kumar

Pankaj’s current challenge will sound familiar to many Scrum Masters and Product Owners: too many important demands, all arriving at once. He runs his consultancy, Test2Deploy, works with a startup, serves as a board member in Agile Finland, and is also building a healthcare app. The problem is not motivation.

The problem is deciding what deserves attention when everything looks valuable. Pankaj uses a simple prioritization matrix built around value and importance, then adds practical filters: deadline, effort, risk, impact, stakeholder, and the stage of the work. Is it still planning? Is it in execution? Can it be delegated? Can it be removed?

Vasco connects this personal challenge back to product work, because teams face the same question every sprint. Prioritization is not just a private calculation. The stakeholder matters because they understand urgency, tradeoffs, and business consequences. Pankaj’s approach gives Scrum Masters a useful coaching angle: help teams make the decision criteria visible before the pressure hits.

In this episode, we refer to prioritization, stakeholder management, and Product Ownership.

Self-reflection Question: What criteria does your team use when two pieces of work both look urgent?

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About Pankaj Kumar

Pankaj Kumar is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach with over 18 years in IT. He helps teams adopt Agile ways of working, improve collaboration, remove impediments, and deliver value consistently. He facilitates Scrum ceremonies, coaches teams and stakeholders, and supports Agile transformation across organizations.

You can link with Pankaj Kumar on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Why AI Is Agile’s Best Use Case With Melissa Reeve

AI is often framed as a technology rollout, but Melissa Reeve makes a different case: organizations that already know how to learn, adapt, and improve are better prepared for AI. In this BONUS episode, we connect Lean, Agile, DevOps, and AI-native work, and explore why Scrum Masters may be closer to the center of AI adoption than they think.

From Toyota Production System to AI-Native Work

“I didn’t really have words for what would later be my career. I didn’t know about systems thinking. I didn’t know about this thing called Agile.”

Melissa traces the through-line from studying the Toyota Production System in Tokyo, to early Agile marketing, to developing intellectual property at Scaled Agile, and finally to AI. Her point is that Lean, Agile, and AI-native work are not separate conversations. They all depend on sensing what is happening, shortening feedback loops, learning from reality, and improving the system instead of only optimizing individual tasks.

The DevOps Lesson for AI Adoption

“People go from doing the task to building, monitoring, and maintaining the automations that do the task.” Continue reading BONUS: Why AI Is Agile’s Best Use Case With Melissa Reeve

BONUS: The Real-Time Research Superpower, and Other Lessons for Change Leaders Using AI – With Ari-Pekka Skarp

AI is changing how Scrum Masters, Agile coaches, and change leaders make sense of organizations. In this BONUS episode, Ari-Pekka Skarp shares how he uses AI as a research assistant, a workspace partner, and a way to bring qualitative research into day-to-day change leadership.

From Curiosity to Research Assistant

“It felt like having a research assistant.”

Ari-Pekka’s first serious AI use did not start in his full-time change leadership role. It started with side projects, research, psychotherapy-related work, and watching his son build websites with Lovable. That curiosity became practical when Ari-Pekka began using AI to support his PhD research.

Instead of spending a full day scanning articles, he could find relevant sources, generate useful summaries, and decide where to go deeper in about half an hour. The key was not that AI replaced his judgment. Because he already knew the research area, he could evaluate the quality of what the AI returned and use it as a complement to his own expertise.

AI Expands the Research Surface

“With the help of AI, I could actually make a little more of these sidetracks.” Continue reading BONUS: The Real-Time Research Superpower, and Other Lessons for Change Leaders Using AI – With Ari-Pekka Skarp

BONUS: From AI Curiosity to Practical Project Tools With William Davis

AI becomes useful when it moves from generic answers into the daily work of solving real problems. In this BONUS episode, William Davis shares how he started building his own AI-assisted project management tools, what went wrong when the code grew too fast, and how Scrum Masters can use AI more carefully at individual, team, and project levels.

When AI Stops Being a Curiosity

“I really need to get a handle on how to productively use AI in my job.”

William’s shift started with a familiar problem: release plans are full of uncertainty, but stakeholders still need to understand what might happen and when. Instead of handcrafting uncertain delivery ranges in Excel, William used AI to build a desktop application that created probabilistic Gantt charts. In his work, these were not traditional command-and-control schedules. They were release plans that showed stakeholders a realistic range of possible delivery dates, making uncertainty visible instead of hiding it behind a false promise.

The Euphoria and the Crash

“Anybody can prompt an app into existence, but if you want an app that is actually enterprise-worthy, it does take a little bit of software engineering knowledge to know what questions to ask.” Continue reading BONUS: From AI Curiosity to Practical Project Tools With William Davis

BONUS: How Scrum Masters Can Use AI Without Losing the Human in the Loop with Mike Lyons and Greg Pfister

AI makes it easier than ever to build software, prototypes, courses, and coaching tools. In this BONUS episode, Mike Lyons and Greg Pfister share what that speed changes for Scrum Masters, why product judgment becomes more important, and how coaches can start using AI without outsourcing the conversations their teams still need.

The Moment AI Changed For Greg and Mike

“It’s not that the work is wrong or not needed, it is needed. That’s an important step. Retrospectives are critical.”

Greg’s first practical AI moment came while trying to build an “Ask Mike” capability for self-paced courses. After a frustrating outsourcing attempt, he started using ChatGPT to help him rebuild the tool himself, eventually moving into Cursor, Claude Code, and the Superpowers plugin for Claude Code. Mike’s moment was less technical: using AI inside Mural to affinity-map retrospective notes. The lesson for Scrum Masters is not that AI removes the work, but that it can remove enough friction to let facilitators spend more time on judgment, listening, and follow-through.

The Bottleneck Moves From Building Fast to Building the Right Thing

Continue reading BONUS: How Scrum Masters Can Use AI Without Losing the Human in the Loop with Mike Lyons and Greg Pfister