NoEstimates Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Mirco Gerling: The Supermarket Team That Self-Destructed Trying to Help Everyone

“They tried to help, and finally, it… it self-destructed the team.” – Mirco Gerling

The team was the supermarket of the organization. Cloud systems, versioning, developer machines, hardware — if another team needed infrastructure, this team built it. And when other teams asked, the answer was always the same: “We will try, we will try.”

Mirco watched what happened next play out in slow motion. The team escalated their overload to management. Management responded the way management often responds — sent in temporary help. The reinforcements solved problems quickly and left. But every system they built became permanent maintenance work for the original team. The pile grew. The team shrank.

People left for other teams, or left the organization entirely. The escalation that was supposed to save them became the signal that broke them. As Mirco puts it: running to the higher level “sends a signal that self-organization or self-management does not work.” Sometimes the help is the harm.

In this segment, we refer to the dynamic of team self-organization and how it can break down under pressure.

Self-reflection Question: When your team is overwhelmed, what does the act of escalating tell management about your ability to self-manage — and is that the signal you want to send?

Featured Book of the Week: The Kanban Maturity Model

In this episode, Mirco also recommends two books that shaped his thinking on process and estimation. The first is #NoEstimates by Vasco Duarte, which inspired Mirco to drop story-point estimation in some teams and simply count completed tickets per sprint. The second is the Kanban Maturity Model — a book Mirco uses to run workshops where teams discover their current level of process maturity. “The highest level says that you have a standardized process, and the result is always the same for the same type of work,” he explains. Most teams start at level zero, but that’s the point: knowing where you stand is the precondition for knowing where to go next.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Mirco Gerling

Mirco is an experienced Scrum Master in the public sector. With a strong IT background, he has spent 25 years developing software and driving agile transformations. Passionate about innovation and teamwork, Mirco brings expertise and dedication to every project.

You can link with Mirco Gerling on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Hard Hats and Standups — Why the Construction Industry Is Going Agile at GAS26

Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is one of the co-hosts of the Agile in Construction track at the Global Agile Summit 2026. In this preview episode, he and Vasco talk about why Agile belongs on the construction site, what the track’s speakers discovered when they stopped following the plan, and why software people should pay close attention to an industry that builds hospitals, not apps.

Construction Is 20 Years Behind — And That’s the Opportunity

“People don’t realize that those ideas absolutely work in other industries. Agile’s been successfully applied everywhere, and I think where it gets the least amount of publicity is in the construction sector.”

When most people hear “Agile,” they think standups in a tech office, not concrete and rebar. Felipe wants to change that. Construction, he says, is always about 20 years behind whatever process or technology the rest of the world adopts — a “very safe stock of keeping tradition.” That gap is exactly what makes this track valuable. Agile is alive and growing in construction, and the translation turns out to be simpler than you’d expect. Most of what needs to change isn’t the framework — it’s the vocabulary. The sessions in this track show how practitioners made that jump with surprisingly small tweaks.

The Speakers Don’t Know How Good They Are

“Half the speakers that I asked were like, ‘what, me? Do I have a story to share?’ I was like, yeah, you have this really amazing… people just don’t realize how awesome they are.” Continue reading BONUS: Hard Hats and Standups — Why the Construction Industry Is Going Agile at GAS26

BONUS: Why Your Plan Is Lying to You — #NoEstimates, Throughput, and the Superstition of Project Management

This episode is a cross-post from The EBFC Show, Felipe Engineer-Manriquez’s podcast exploring Lean and Agile in construction. In this conversation, Felipe interviews Vasco about the #NoEstimates movement, throughput-based planning, and why traditional project management is still stuck in the middle ages of managing creative work.

The Human Side of Scrum That the Scrum Guide Doesn’t Cover

“When you go into a daily meeting and you start looking at the people in that room, maybe they are the exact same people that were there yesterday, but the team is totally different. Somebody might have had a bad night’s sleep, somebody might have had an argument with their spouse. These are human beings. These are not machines that you can just distribute work to.”

Vasco’s path to agile coaching started with a realization that most practitioners eventually reach: the problems in software development aren’t technological. They’re about people — getting agreements, sharing information at the right time, making the collective brain of a team actually function.

The Scrum Guide gives you organizing principles — how many meetings, who’s in them — but it says almost nothing about the real-time feedback cycle between humans that makes or breaks a team. That’s why the Scrum Master role exists: to be the lubricant for human interactions, to break down complex ideas into items the collective mind can process. It’s the piece that makes Scrum work, and it’s the piece that’s hardest to teach.

From Project Manager to #NoEstimates — The Bet That Changed Everything

“The PM wanted 15 items per sprint, and the team said ‘yeah, we can do 15.’ I said, this is not gonna happen. The team had been delivering between five and eight items per sprint. I said, I’m gonna be positive — I’m gonna say seven. And no surprise, by the end of the sprint, they delivered seven.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Your Plan Is Lying to You — #NoEstimates, Throughput, and the Superstition of Project Management