take5IRL Podcast

Everyone wants stakeholder input. But what happens when everyone becomes the decision-maker? In this episode of Take Five IRL , Jeff Lee, Mike Studeman, and Pat Campbell discuss one of the most common causes of slow product development: too many competing priorities and unclear decision ownership. When every stakeholder can change direction, teams spend more time context switching than delivering...

Is estimation actually helping your team, or just creating the illusion of predictability? In this episode of Take Five IRL , Mike Studeman and Pat Campbell challenge one of the most common assumptions in Agile and product development: that better estimates lead to better outcomes. The reality? Estimation techniques like story points aren't the real problem. The biggest obstacles to predictabl...

💄🐷 You can't put lipstick on a pig and call it transformation. That's the hard truth behind most agile transformations. Organizations invest in training, rename roles, and add new ceremonies—but if leadership doesn't change the underlying system, nothing really changes. In this week's Take 5 IRL podcast, Mike Studeman and Pat Campbell discuss why agile transformations fail and wh...

Most Agile transformations focus on teams, ceremonies, frameworks, and tools. Yet one of the biggest barriers to agility often sits somewhere else entirely: the way work gets funded. Organizations spend years trying to improve delivery while still operating under project funding models that reward predictability, lock in scope early, and make adaptation feel like failure. The result? Teams are ask...

You don't have a Scrum problem. You have a pipeline problem. Many organizations struggling with delivery assume they need more Agile process, more planning, or more ceremonies. But what if the real bottleneck isn't Agile at all? In this episode of Take Five IRL, Mike Studeman, Jeff Lee, and Pat Campbell explore one of the most overlooked drivers of flow: engineering practices. The conversa...

Can Agile really work in FDA-regulated medical device environments? In this episode of Take Five IRL, Mike Stuedemann and Jeff Lee reflect on their experience at DeviceTalks Boston—one of the largest medical device conferences in the U.S.—and unpack what they heard from medtech leaders about innovation, agility, AI, quality systems, and the future of product development in regulated environments....

🚨 Your teams are delivering faster… but are they building the *right* thing? Too many enterprise organizations treat product discovery like a phase — something completed at the beginning before teams disappear for months building solutions based on assumptions. That’s a problem. In this episode of the Take Five IRL Podcast, Mike Studema and Jeff Lee break down why continuous discovery is essentia...

🚨 Flow metrics won’t save your product. Cycle time is improving. Throughput is up. Your dashboards are green. But what if your team is just getting better at building the wrong thing? In this episode of the Take5IRL Podcast, agilityIRL partners Mike Stuedemann and Jeff Lee unpack one of the biggest misconceptions in Agile delivery: the belief that improving flow metrics automatically leads to bet...

🎙️ On this episode of the Take5IRL Podcast, all three co-hosts—@Mike, @Jeff, and @Pat—tackle a big one: Agile Failure. Why does it happen… and more importantly, how do you fix it? The conversation gets real fast. Most Agile transformations don’t fail at the team level—they fail at the executive and system level. When organizations try to layer Agile on top of project-based thinking and legacy stru...

🎙️ On this episode of the Take5IRL Podcast, @Mike and @Jeff dive into a real-world case from the medical device space where a traditionally hardware-focused organization began shifting toward software-driven product development. With teams coming from different backgrounds, they needed a new way to frame work, align mindsets, and actually function as a cohesive unit. Mike and Jeff share how they g...

🎙️ On this episode of the Take5IRL Podcast, all three co-hosts—@Mike, @Jeff, and @Pat—continue the series S*** We Hate About Agile: Velocity! Pat brings this one to the table as they come full circle in the series. He shares how he started his career loving velocity… but after years of real-world experience, his perspective has completely changed. And yes—he’s got a few things to get off his chest...

🎙️ On this episode of the Take5IRL Podcast, all three co-hosts—@Mike, @Jeff, and @Pat continuing the series of S*** We Hate About Agile: Story Point Edition! Mike opens with a hot take: while he appreciates the theory behind story points, the real-world application often falls apart. In his words… SUCKS! He even floats the idea of replacing them entirely with hours. Jeff pushes the conversation de...

🎙️ On the first episode of Take5IRL Podcast, all three of our co-hosts, @Mike, @Jeff, and @Pat start a new series, S*** We Hate About Agile. Jeff Lee kicks things off by calling out one of his biggest frustrations—those all-too-familiar “Agile is dead” posts flooding LinkedIn. Sparked by the latest wave of hot takes, Jeff challenges the narrative that bad practices equal a broken framework. Is Agi...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike wrap up their series on flow metrics with a deep dive into Little’s Law—a foundational concept for understanding how work really flows through a system. Little’s Law—Work in Progress = Throughput × Cycle Time—shows why delivery slows down even when your team is working non-stop. It’s a law, not just a guideline, and it applies whethe...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike dig into another critical flow metric: wait time—often overlooked, but deeply impactful. Wait time is waste time. Whether it's handoffs, approvals, or stalled work, every pause in your process delays value delivery. And since wait time is part of cycle time, the longer it stretches, the more your delivery slows—and the more frust...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike explore another essential flow metric: throughput—the number of work items completed over a given period of time. They break down how throughput differs from velocity, emphasizing that throughput is an empirical, outcome-based measure, while velocity often reflects planned effort. You’ll also hear why keeping work items small is key...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike explore another key flow metric: cycle time. Cycle time measures the duration from one point in your workflow to another—making it one of the most honest and revealing Agile metrics for productivity. While it needs consistency to be reliable, it also reflects the unique rhythm of each team. They discuss why baselining your current cy...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike dive into one of the most critical—and misunderstood—flow metrics in Agile: Work in Process (WIP). WIP can be a powerful indicator of a team’s progress, but it’s also one of the toughest metrics to define and manage. Without clarity around what constitutes “work,” when it starts, and when it ends, teams risk hiding delays and compoun...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike dig into common fallacies around work processes that often get in the way of effective delivery. Their discussion leads to a deeper look at flow metrics—what they are, why they matter, and how they help organizations move value sustainably through teams. They break down how each of them defines “flow,” what it means for a system to d...

🎙️In this episode of the take5IRL podcast, hosts @Pat and @Mike dive into what it truly means to be an Advanced SAFe Practice Consultant (ASPC)—one of the highest distinctions in the SAFe community. Pat, one of the original 30 trainers worldwide to earn this certification, shares his perspective on how the ASPC designation represents years of hands-on experience, deep practical knowledge, and a pr...

In this episode of Take5IRL, hosts @Pat and @Mike unpack insights from the recent SAFe Agile Summit. Pat shares his key takeaways from the event, including updates to the SAFe “Big Picture” and a growing emphasis on customizing SAFe to fit an organization’s unique needs. This shift aligns perfectly with Pat’s core belief: “Agile is not a straitjacket—it’s a framework.” The conversation covers how...

🎙️ In this episode of Take5IRL, hosts @Jeff and @Mike introduce agilityIRL’s newest course offering: the Certified Agile Regulatory Specialist (CARS) for Teams. This one-day course is a streamlined, developer-focused version of the original CARS training we’ve offered to product leadership teams. It's designed to equip development teams with the knowledge they need to build better products, st...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Jeff and @Pat continue their deep dive into Agile in the medical device industry—this time exploring a new engagement with Client C. After conducting an initial assessment, the team uncovered a familiar challenge: a long tail of QMS (Quality Management System) processes that were slowing down delivery and decision-making. Much like Clients A and B...

In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, hosts @Jeff and @Mike share their experiences working with two different medical device companies—each navigating agile transformation in its own way. They reflect on the key differences between the two clients, including how they approached sprint durations, testing cycles, and approval processes. The conversation highlights what made each engagement succe...

🎙️ In this episode of the Take5IRL podcast, host @Mike sits down with @Gijs Valbracht, Agile coach and former global leader at ING Bank. This episode dives into the organizational shifts that followed ING’s successful Agile pilot. Gijs shares how leadership addressed challenges across the enterprise—reshaping teams, flattening hierarchies, and creating a culture ready for continuous improvement. L...