KatAnu Connect Podcast

Our 200th episode! Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith dig into one of the common problems Kate sees with clients: capable teams sitting still, waiting for work to be handed out. They start with what a genuine self-managing team looks like: it understands the goal, evaluates requests instead of passively accepting them, owns the product, and swarms to get work over the line. Then they get into why teams don...

Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith unpack the return to office push from both sides of the badge reader.  Kate has just been on site with a hybrid client where nobody was mandated in, and the office had real energy.  Ryan is four days a week in a big, branded office where most of the people he works with are somewhere else. They dig into Gallup’s latest numbers: most remote-capable US workers want hybrid,...

Great teams don’t happen by accident. So what separates a great team from a group of people who happen to report to the same manager? Back to Basics turns to the team itself. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith build a list of 10 characteristics of great teams, starting with people who are invested, not just showing up. With Gallup putting US engagement at 31%, they talk about why it keeps slipping: return-...

Back to Basics turns from frameworks to accountabilities, starting with the Scrum Master. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith explain why the Scrum Guide’s switch from roles to accountabilities matters: if you do the work, you are the Scrum Master, whatever your badge says. Many org charts give the Scrum Master two lines, while the Scrum Guide gives it the longest list of the three. The hosts c...

We have done Scrum. We have done Kanban. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith take on everything else, starting from one question: did anything else survive the evolutionary process? Plenty did, depending on where in the world you work and what you build. The list runs from XP and Lean to Crystal, DSDM and Scrumban. Next comes DevOps, and why two week Sprints with six week deployments...

Last week was Scrum. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith turn to Kanban, the framework most teams think they already know because they have a board. They trace it back to Toyota and just in time manufacturing, then walk through the part that usually gets skipped: the three change principles, the three service delivery principles, and the six general practices behind the board. Ryan ex...

Last week was frameworks for agility in general. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith put the best known one under the microscope. They walk through where Scrum came from, why Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland waited fifteen years to write it down, and what the new Simple Guide to Scrum from Bob Hartman and Tobias Mayer changes. Kate makes the case for the 2020 switch from roles to acco...

The last three weeks were the mindset: the Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith move on to the frameworks that help you live it.  Anu starts with the difference between a mindset, a framework and a methodology, and a picture frame analogy that does a lot of work for the rest of the conversation: change the picture as often as you like, but saw a s...

Last time it was the WHO: customers, businesspeople, face to face.  This time it is the HOW.  @Kate Megaw, @Anu Smalley and @Ryan Smith finish the Back-to-Basics run through the 12 Agile Principles with numbers 7 through 12, asking the same question of each: what wording would keep someone in legal, marketing, or finance reading?  Working software becomes delivered value in about ninety seconds, n...

The 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto are the most skipped page in agile. Plenty of people can quote the four values.  Far fewer know there are 12 principles sitting underneath, and fewer still could name one. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith continue the Back-to-Basics series by working through the first six, one at a time, asking the same question of each: what wording would make th...

Many Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches have been cut loose, organizations are changing how they deliver products and services, and AI has landed on top of both. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith open a new Back to Basics series with the document that started all of it, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. They start with the obvious question. If it was written for software, what word b...

Every month when we teach the Certified Agile Leader class it opens with the same question: what is your biggest challenge right now? In 2025 the answer was “leading multi generational teams”. This year it is “doing more with less”, and Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith take it apart. They cover what the phrase really means, from layoffs and canceled tool licenses to the quiet blurring of the...

Earlier this year the PMI and Agile Alliance introduced the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility.  Then came the harder question: why do organizations with great strategies still struggle to execute them?  Their answer is a report called Closing the Change Readiness Gap, and in this episode Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith dig into what it found.  Executives are confident their purpose is clear,...

This year's Agile 2026 theme was “shaping the future with agility,” and that is exactly where Kate Megaw and Anu Smalley found the industry: mid-shift, still deciding what comes next. Back from the conference, they sit down with Ryan Smith for an honest field report. The partnership between PMI and the Agile Alliance has solidified, so the room was no longer split into project managers on one...

You schedule the meeting, you ask for input, and the room goes quiet. Then the real conversation happens in the hallway afterward. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith dig into why people stay silent, and what facilitators can actually do about it. Silence is rarely about a disengaged team. It is fear of looking foolish, internal processors who need time to think, a leader who anchors the room before anyone...

The Scrum Master role has quietly evolved, and the industry has not caught up. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith unpack how the role calcified into a person who runs the events and works through a checklist, when the real job was always to be a change agent and an organizational catalyst. Look at the job market and you see the shift already happening. Scrum Master, Project Manager, Technical Project Manag...

Velocity feels like proof.  Fifty story points done, a bigger number than last sprint, a box checked.  But velocity measures how busy a team is, not whether anything valuable reached the customer.  Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith take apart the metric everyone loves to report and rebuild the case for measuring what matters.  Velocity, they argue, was never a metric at all. It is an internal planning too...

There is “Big A” Agility, the frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe, and there is “little a” agility, the plain human ability to change direction when the world shifts under your feet. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith make the case that the second one matters most, and that it belongs in every company's core values, not just its delivery teams. Recorded ahead of Agile 2026 in Washington DC, whose...

Communication used to be filed away as a soft skill.  Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith make the case that it has become central to everything we do.  In a VUCA environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, communication is the anchor that keeps teams steady, and a recent Wiley survey found that 64 percent of people call it the single most important leadership skill. Kate and Ryan dig i...

Kate and Ryan come at agility from opposite ends of the org chart. Kate arrived through training, operations, and project management on the leadership side. Ryan started as a front-end developer who built a Kanban board before he knew it had a name.  In this episode they trace Ryan's path from coder to Scrum Master, and dig into the questions every agile practitioner eventually asks.  Does a...

“We have twelve scrum masters. Why is nothing working?” If you have ever asked some version of that question, this episode is for you. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith dig into the challenge they hear in almost every class they teach, a real lack of role clarity. Companies send a strong project manager to a two day course, hand them a new title, and then wonder why nothing changes. The hones...

Everything is a fire. Everything is priority number one.  And by tomorrow, the number one priority has changed again. Sound familiar? In this episode, Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley, and Ryan Smith dig into the challenge they hear at almost every client and leadership class: a real lack of prioritization.  Not just inside the sprint, but across the whole organization, where teams get handed a brand new t...

AI can generate an answer in seconds. The harder question is whether it is the right answer to the right question, and what you actually do with it. In this episode, Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley, and Ryan Smith dig into what “human in the loop” really means, and why so many AI transformations are failing. Forbes puts enterprise generative AI failure near 95%, and RAND says more than 80% of AI projects...

Leaders say their teams are empowered. The teams won't make a decision. Somewhere between those two sentences sits the real problem. This episode tackles the gap between the rhetoric of empowerment and the reality of approval-bottlenecked, micromanaged teams. Kate is joined from the Scottish Highlands by Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith for an honest look at why so many "empowered" teams...

event. Kate and Anu just wrapped a wild month on the road, and the message from both conferences was loud and clear: AI is no longer a bolt-on, it's the operating system! Fresh off Global Scrum Gathering Vancouver and Canvas 26 (Miro's user conference in San Francisco), Kate Megaw and Anu Smalley sit down with Ryan Smith to unpack two completely different conferences that delivered the e...