As the plane reached cruising altitude, I pulled out my laptop to review my slides one more time. I was heading to the Adobe Hamburg office to teach my first solo Scrum class, and I was feeling the pressure. I’d assisted other people teaching their classes, but never done it on my own before. My slides were polished and exercises ready, but I couldn’t shake the voice in my head: What if I can’t answer their questions? What if this doesn’t work for them?
The man next to me glanced over. “Scrum, huh?” he said with a smile. I nodded, distracted, but then it hit me—he looked familiar.
“Are you teaching?” he asked.
“Yeah, first time,” I admitted.
He extended a hand. “Mitch Lacey.”
My jaw nearly dropped. Mitch had co-taught my Scrum course with Ken Schwaber three years earlier. Now here he was, as if the universe knew I needed him.
“So,” Mitch said, “what’s your goal for this class?”
I hadn’t thought about it at such a fundamental level. “Uh…to show them how Scrum works?”
He grinned. “You’ll do fine. Just be ready to tell stories. Share what worked for you.”
That advice stayed with me as I walked into the training room overlooking the Elbe river. The class went okay—not great, not terrible. I told stories where I could, but some questions nagged at me. Even within Adobe, their context was different enough that I felt like I was making it up as I went. I flew home feeling like I’d passed the test, but barely.
And I don’t like to barely succeed. So, I became a student again seeking out trainers I admired: Mike Cohn, whose books had guided me early on, and Alistair Cockburn, whose writing and approach to Agile felt revolutionary. I watched how they taught and took endless notes. By the time I earned my CST and started teaching public classes, I felt confident. I got off-the-charts good ratings on every post-course survey question but one: “Can you apply what you learned to your job?”
That question always had lots of high marks and a few low ones. The low ones nagged at me. Were they just lazy? Or did my course need more improvements? After all, I took a similar two-day class, and it changed everything on my team. What was I missing?
The breakthrough came during a CSM class in San Diego. As we discussed the Product Owner role, someone asked, “Who actually fills the PO role at most companies?”
Before I could give my standard answer:
“That’s a different department at our company. We’re not allowed to talk to customers.”
“Our manager just tells us what stakeholder ticket to build next.”
“The Product Owner you describe sounds like a unicorn—we don’t have anyone like that.”
Suddenly, I saw it. At Adobe, we’d had Hart—a fantastic Product Manager who effortlessly stepped into the Product Owner role. And it wasn’t just Hart. Photoshop had John, Illustrator had Anubhav, Premiere Pro had Giles, After Effects had Michael. Every successful Scrum team at Adobe had an incredible Product Manager becoming the Product Owner.
As I ticked down the list of successful Scrum implementations at Adobe, I realized all of our successful Scrum teams had incredible Product Managers jumping into the Product Owner role.
I’d taken that for granted. But in class after class, I saw the reality—great Product Management was rare. Without it, teams couldn’t succeed, no matter how well they learned Scrum.
It wasn’t enough for me to teach people how Scrum works. I needed to create something that addressed the missing skills in Product Management. I set out to build a Product Owner course that was as effective as my Scrum course, and after a few years of iteration, input, and feedback, that course was delivering!
Around this time, Richard Lawrence, who would later become my co-founder at Humanizing Work, was on a similar journey. He’d started on the technical side and had coached teams so that they could deliver any feature at lightning speed. That’s when they discovered nobody actually wanted the features they were building. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Richard was also building out a CSPO course to solve that problem. These days, Richard teaches CSPO courses for Humanizing Work, which integrate the lessons we both learned. We co-teach our Advanced CSPO course, which builds on that foundation with the best practices we’ve developed together. Ok, back to my timeline.
While delivering my refined CSPO course at that same hotel a few years later, I asked what challenges people expected to encounter as they put new ideas to work:
“These tools are great, I hope I get to use them!”
“My boss will still swoop in and change priorities.”
“Especially the validation testing part. I doubt I’ll be allowed to do that—it’s not safe to experiment at our company.”
It hit me again. At Adobe, it was like we had a combination lock with two numbers already set: strong Product Management and empowering leadership. Leaders like Bill Hensler and Erica Schisler gave us space to experiment and trusted us to figure things out. They didn’t micromanage; they empowered. Without those two critical factors, even the best Product Owners couldn’t make Scrum thrive.
I set out to close the leadership gap by designing a new leadership training. Inspired by almost revolutionary examples in books like Maverick, Turn the Ship Around, and Reinventing Organizations, I identified key principles to equip leaders to help their teams and organizations thrive. This included creating clarity, building trust, and decentralizing decision-making.
Later, Richard and I collaborated to refine and expand these leadership programs. Combining our shared experiences and insights, we crafted actionable tools to empower leaders and drive meaningful change in their organizations.
It’s been a journey of realizations—from that first solo class in Hamburg to today. But how do we help teams and leaders unlock their potential?
What We Offer Today
Building Product Management Capability
Many teams struggle to prioritize between competing demands or understand customer needs. Great product management ensures teams stay aligned and focused on delivering what customers truly need. That’s why Richard and I refined Humanizing Work’s CSPO and A-CSPO programs to deliver practical, high-impact tools teams can apply immediately. Participants learn how to discover customer needs, identify what their business can build, and deliver value in small, incremental slices. One participant, Jordan, described it as: “This course goes beyond the base certification curriculum and dives deep on practical techniques, tools, and real cases from decades of experience working with Scrum and product teams. It’s the difference between studying for a test vs. practicing how to start applying it the next day.”
Building Leadership Capability
Leaders often face challenges in aligning their teams or building trust. Empowered teams thrive under strong, supportive leadership. Drawing from hundreds of organizations and transformative examples, Richard and I distilled key principles—like creating clarity, building trust, and decentralizing decisions—into actionable strategies leaders can implement right away. Our 3 Jobs model and Humanizing Work Leadership Intensive provide leaders with a clear roadmap to drive change. One executive, John, shared: “Our leadership team’s development work with Humanizing Work was purposeful and actionable. The knowledge, experience, and models shared weren’t presented just for philosophical contemplation.”
He added: “They helped us make sense of leadership challenges and gave us a structured way to act. Now, instead of expending energy seeking alignment, we’re effectively working toward a shared purpose and vision.”
Ready to transform your product management and leadership capabilities? Join one of our upcoming workshops to learn actionable tools and strategies that help teams align, adapt, and thrive.
Product Management
Story Splitting for Coaches
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) – Feb 2025 (Virtual)](https://www.humanizingwork.com/events/cspo-feb-2025/)Feb 11–13, 2025
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO) Program – Apr 2025 (Virtual)](https://www.humanizingwork.com/events/acspo-apr-2025/)Apr 4–May 9, 2025
Leadership
Delegation
[Humanizing Work’s Leadership Intensive – Feb Cohort 2025 (Virtual)](https://www.humanizingwork.com/events/hw-leadership-intensive-feb-2025/)Feb 27–Apr 18, 2025
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