Roasting Marshmallows
63 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 years ago -🧠Are you looking to expand your mind?
🤺Do you like to challenge and be challenged?
🤝Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally?
You're in the right place! Welcome to Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows where we talk about just about anything that interests us. Join us in our journey for continuous improvement of ourselves, our company, our lives, our jobs and you!
For more great content and to stay up to date, visit https://www.fourscouts.nl, and on twitter @fourscouts.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Are you suffering from imposter syndrome?
March 29, 2022 11:19 - 47 minutes - 44.3 MBAre you very sensitive to even constructive criticism? Do you agonize over even the smallest mistakes or flaws in your work? Do you downplay your own expertise, even in areas where you are genuinely more skilled than others? The game “Among Us” is all about finding the imposter and throwing it out of the spaceship. When you play as imposter, your job is to sabotage the ship and kill the crew mates. Playing as either role is pretty fun, but it is always a little bit more exciting when you...
The power of the pair
March 15, 2022 10:00 - 51 minutes - 47.3 MBWay back in episode 13, we discussed mobbing, or ensemble programming, with Woody Zuill. While we think this topic deserves more widespread recognition and adoption, there’s no denying that pair programming is more well known, and is being done more. Of course, pairing is not limited to just programming. For example, studies have shown that kindergarteners sharing an iPad enables them to learn more and score better on certain tests, most likely due to forcing them to collaborate, which in t...
Working on stuff that matters
February 22, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBNowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals. Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spen...
The journey of a startup with Alex Cojocaru
February 16, 2022 07:51 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBIs your startup interesting enough to find investors? What kind of effort does it take to have a startup? Start ups are usually considered pretty sexy. They bring about cool new apps that your friends insist you just have to get. They disrupt the market with innovative new goods and services. They display their awesome company culture in such a way that working there becomes a goal in itself. But what about the Business to Business startup? You don't hear a lot about those being the next...
Offshoring to the kitchen table with Rini van Solingen
January 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBHow to stay engaged while working remote? What can offshoring teach us when working remote? What are Rini's laws? We are, when recording this podcast, in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The omikron variant is running rampant, so this means most of us are working from the kitchen table, or if you have the room, the home office again. So, entire teams are working remote again, not physically meeting each other for an extended period of time. How do you make sure everything keeps r...
The struggle of public speaking with Thierry de Pauw
January 18, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutes - 54.1 MBDoes the thought of doing a presentation make your stomach churn? Are you comfortable speaking up in front of a group of people? How do you deal with being the center of attention? Fear. We all know the feeling from a terrifying experience at some point in our lives. However, 75% of the people get fearful when having to speak in front of a group of people. Even the idea of doing it is sometimes enough for many people to get fearful. Yes, most of us — even those at the top — struggle wit...
Permission to Feel with Marc Brackett
December 28, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 57.2 MBWhy is it that anxiety disorders are so prevalent? Why is it that depression is now the  leading cause of disability? Why is that bullying is still really prevalent? Most people don’t grow up learning very much about their emotions — what they are, how they work, or how to manage them well. This means there are a lot of people out there with perfectly normal levels of academic or social intelligence, but surprisingly low emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence means the capacit...
Positive, Productive Change with Esther Derby
December 21, 2021 09:00 - 56 minutes - 52.4 MBAre you imposing change by decree? Is "the next big change" going to solve everything? Do your people see what is valuable about the future you propose? Even though the world around us is changing faster and faster, it proves challenging for companies and individuals to adapt to these changes. For these, change sometimes comes much slower and more painful than hoped. Changing, or adapting to change, is not simple on any level. Often, there is no right answer, and responding requires tria...
Making sense of complexity with Dave Snowden
December 14, 2021 10:33 - 1 hour - 63.3 MBDifferent problems need different solutions. An approach that aids in decision making is The Cynefin framework, which was created in 1999 by Dave Snowden and was born with principles related to theories of how we perceive things. Cynefin (pronounced “kuh-nev-in”) is a word of Welsh origin that means habitat or place of many belongings. Cynefin is a model that can be used in different sectors, at different levels in an organization and in different contexts, in fact context is the key word f...
Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn
December 07, 2021 09:00 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBIs the nobel peace prize actually a bad thing? What about that cum laude degree? Did your grades ruin you for the rest of your life? Do awards motivate people? Yes. They motivate people to get rewards. You can pretty much bribe anyone to make them do what you want them to. Consequently, the quality of the work or the learning suffers for it. This goes for children, students, but also in the work place, where reward structures might be in place that incentivize destructive behavior. T...
Beyond Budgeting with Bjarte Bogsnes
November 30, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutes - 55 MBDoes financial incentives promote commitment and motivation? Is your company really doing well when you make the budgeted revenue? Is your decision-making on hold while the numbers for the budgets are being negotiated? Creating a budget is one way to stay on top of your expenses. Most companies spend a lot of time analyzing past performance to come up with budgets for the next year, trying to stick to them as close as possible. However, due to todays rapid changing markets, traditional b...
Can I elect my Boss? Sociocracy with John Buck
November 23, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 56.9 MBWhat if you could elect your boss? Why aren't companies run as countries? How does sociocracy fit in with agile? In the age of liberated companies, there are different models of governance where individuals are responsible to undertake actions on behalf of their company. With a participatory decision making process and distributed leadership at its core, sociocratic governance is at odds with the traditional vertical management system. A sociocratic organization allows the individual t...
Presidential product development with Jason Voiovich
November 16, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutes - 51.1 MBWhat did John F. Kennedy and Steve Jobs have in common? Would George Washington be a successful founder of a startup? Would we remember Herbert Hoover as the Jeff Bezos of his time had he been elected eight years earlier? The president of the United States is usually considered the most powerful person on the planet. Indeed, the US has the biggest economy, the most powerful military, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and NASA. How did America become such a powerhouse? With a little...
Escaping legacy and overcoming writer's block with Wouter Lagerweij
November 09, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBIs it hard to write a book? Do product owners need to be aware of software development practices like Behavior Driven Development? How do you cope with writer's block? On the show, we have talked a lot about books, and we have even had a few guests that wrote one. It has crossed our minds to write a book of our own a few times as well. Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter is currently in the process of writing a book called: "A Product Owner's Guide to Esca...
Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand
November 02, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutes - 51.6 MBHow do you deal with team compositions during times of explosive growth? Are you looking to spread knowledge across teams? What metrics are out there to track team performance? Ever since the dawn of humanity people had to work together and form teams in order to achieve a common goal. These goals could be something as vital as survival, but also, as civilizations were growing to build great structures, or in modern times, building awesome apps on your phone! Like the times teams can an...
Fearless Change with Linda Rising
October 26, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 66.8 MBHave you ever had an opportunity to make a change, but you chose not to take it? Did you maybe respond with "What if it doesn't work?" Or maybe with "Are you sure that's a good idea?" Fear of change is subtle. It operates in your subconscious, convincing you that it's there to protect you. It will keep you safe. Or does it? Embracing change can help bring growth, and with that, fulfillment and ultimately success. Both for individuals, but also for organizations. Today we are roastin...
Klarna organizational model with Mite Mitreski
October 19, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutes - 54.1 MBAre all your teams dependent on a few key persons calling the shots? Is your organization as transparent as it can be to both employees and customers? When serving millions of customers all over the world, a classic, top-down approach to decision making is not very scalable. This was the realization that the company our guest today works at made, and has since then reversed the chain of decision making to enable the teams to make the day to day decisions by themselves. For the last few y...
Leadership is a language with L. David Marquet
October 12, 2021 08:00 - 32 minutes - 30.4 MBIs your organization relying on the decision making of one person? What kind of leadership model dos your organization use? Do you need someone else to empower you? Imagine being on a submarine with your colleagues, heading out to open waters, potentially being together in a cramped space for several months. If morale and performance amongst you and your fellow colleagues is low, you would probably be reluctant to go. Our guest today had to deal with this, being assigned command of the ...
Mastering Modern Marketing with Ruth Plater
October 05, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutes - 49 MBWhen should you start selling your product? Is there a difference between Sales and Marketing? How do you stand out amongst the competition? Ask someone what marketing is, and they will often tell you "Advertisements and catchy slogans", and maybe they continue describing a scene they've recently seen on Mad Men. The truth is, the internet has changed how people look at the impact of interruption type marketing, like for example ads or a cold call. When we receive anything that looks l...
Heuristics for effective software development with Allen Holub
September 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 73.9 MBWhat if we said that there's a list that will help you with software development, or even with your company in general? It's called Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organisations: A continuously evolving list, and it contains as of this episode 27 nuggets of wisdom for your benefit. It started out as a way to present the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto in a clearer and more contemporary way, although the author, Allen Holub, has added a few things. Who is Allen H...
OpenSpace Agility with Daniel Mezick
September 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBAre your employees engaged? Can your organization keep up with the rapid changing world? Would you like to know more about the power of OpenSpace Agility? There’s a crisis in most workplaces. The pace of change, driven by technology, is accelerating. Change is happening more frequently. And the impact of these changes is often big. The workforce also brings with them their distinct values, biases and opinions. And nowhere are these distinctions more striking than in the way they view le...
LeSS is More with Viktor Grgic
September 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBWhat is Large-Scale Scrum, aka LeSS? Which rules does LeSS require you to follow? Why should you adopt LeSS rather than plain old scrum for your teams? After an earlier episode about SAFe, we felt it is only fair to put LeSS in the spotlight! While you cannot really compare the two, much like apples and oranges, they both promise to bring agility to the enterprise. Being a certified LeSS instructor, Viktor will show us how and why LeSS works for his clients. Viktor is a Software develop...
Retrospective on retrospectives: do you even need retros?
August 31, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutes - 51.7 MBWhat if your team would address issues immediately instead of waiting for a retro? How effective is it to identify action points that end up not being chased? When do you celebrate success? The old saying "hindsight is 20/20" is usually used when someone should've known better. It has a pretty negative or condescending tone to it, but for agile software development, it can be valuable to apply some hindsight when preparing for the next iteration of your product. Indeed, reflecting on pa...
The right company for you
August 24, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutes - 51.3 MBAre you able to do your best work? Do you feel proud being an employee of your company? Are you enjoying the work you do? Do you feel like you fit in with the people? Are you expecting to work their for a long time? These might sound like a lot of different questions, but they all boil down to the same: are you happy at your work? Today we are roasting marshmallows about our company history: why did we choose to leave our previous companies, and why did we choose to stay at FourScou...
When personal life influences work
August 17, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBIs your work / life balance in a state of equilibrium? Do you keep your personal issues from spilling over into work? Are you able to talk about your problems with your colleagues? Everyone deals with their personal issues in a different way. At some point, your personal issues could affect your work: your concentration is affected, you might lash out at co-workers, or even worse, customers. Today, we are sharing our stories about how our personal life affected us at work, and how we d...
When your personal life can influence work
August 17, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBIs your work / life balance in a state of equilibrium? Do you keep your personal issues from spilling over into work? Are you able to talk about your problems with your colleagues? Everyone deals with their personal issues in a different way. At some point, your personal issues could affect your work: your concentration is affected, you might lash out at co-workers, or even worse, customers. Today, we are sharing our stories about how our personal life affected us at work, and how we d...
Managing while being technical with Phil Calçado
August 10, 2021 07:58 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBThe legend says that when you promote a Senior Developer into a Manager, you end up with a subpar Manager and you lose a great Engineer. We have heard these stories of lose-lose outcomes over and over again. Then once in a blue moon we find that perfect blend of a skilled engineer who is competent, can clearly voice their ideas, understand the business domain, are tuned to the needs of the management as well as to the needs of the developers and can rally people towards a mutual goal. Then, ...
Starting a start-up is a dumb idea with Erwin van der Koogh
August 03, 2021 20:00 - 1 hour - 62.5 MBAre you prepared to sink your time, money and effort into something you believe in? How many features you think you need before you can start promoting your product? What strategy should you employ to find customers? Do you recognize your most important feature(s) and are you willing to kill other features? On this podcast we have talked about start-ups before, but the mystic qualities that get attributed to them are by no means rooted in reality. You have to work hard, recognize opport...
Achieve company wide agility by becoming a BOSSA Nova, with Jutta Eckstein
July 27, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutes - 56.3 MBDoes copying agile practices of other successful companies work for your company? Are your teams doing a daily standup and calling themselves agile? Is your company flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change? A book that can help companies achieve true agility is "Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy". Today around the campfire we have one of the authors: Jutta Eckstein. Jutta Eckstein, works as an independent coach, consultant, trainer,...
Three software engineering coaches get coached by GeePaw Hill
July 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 62.7 MBHow much are you able to learn on your own? For some people, reading books, articles, and going to certain training courses are all they need to keep steadily growing their skillset. For teams however, things are a bit more challenging. Retrospectives are indeed a great help, but these are still from the team's own perspective. Sending a team to training could help as well, but how do you know what training to pick? Sometimes external help, in the form coaching, can be beneficial for you an...
Women in tech with Maike Visschedijk and Ankita Sahni
July 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 61.9 MBWhy is it that it seems like there is a smaller presence of women in tech than men? What female role models are out there for the tech industry? Is there a gender stereotype that suggests that "boys are better with computers"? What difficulties do women face in tech focused teams? Can we attract more women to become engineers? As a first today on roasting marshmallows, we have two guests! Ankita Sahni and Maike Visschedijk, who are both software engineers, and they will share with you ...
Continuous Discovery Habits with Teresa Torres
July 06, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutes - 52.5 MBAre you wondering how to take your product to the next level? Do you want to seize the opportunities that are out there? Are you aware of what your customers really want? The days of gathering requirements from business stakeholders and documenting them in long product requirements documents are vanishing. Instead, high-performant teams are experimenting towards solutions that will lead to the outcomes they desire. Helping us doing just this is Teresa Torres. She recently published Con...
Do You (Really) Want Bleeding-Edge Technology?
June 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 58.8 MBWill switching to the latest version of your libraries *really* make your development go faster? Is it worth investing a lot of time in research while there is a tried-and-true, production hardened solution readily available? How do new shiny things for developers help your product gain a competitive advantage? To be fair, even e-mail was considered bleeding edge at one point, which has of course become a staple in our means of communication. Some people would even argue that e-mail is ol...
Have you heard of Systems Thinking? With Gerard Janssen
June 22, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutes - 53.9 MBWhen dealing with a big challenge, is it always good to break it up into small chunks? What if you cannot solve a problem by finding it's root cause? How can you get, and, more importantly: understand the bigger picture? W. Edwards Deming has said that 95% of variation in the performance of a system is caused by the system itself and only 5% is caused by the people. Organizations can be considered systems, so in a way it is amazing that a lot of time and effort is spent in improving indi...
Ready to finally Work the System? with Niels Pflaeging
June 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 79.2 MBDo you want to work in the system or work the system? Can you have leadership without leaders? Do you need annual plannings, budgets and individual bonuses? Are you ready to break the chains of command and control? There are two kinds of work. One is to Work in the System: you are a cog in the machine. Which is necessary, of course, but by itself not enough to sustain organizations in an ever-changing world. To make organizations fit for the present and the future, we must also Work the...
What does the future of education look like? With Darjan Radenkovic
June 08, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBWhat does the future of education look like? Are students taught the right skillset to be able to make an impact on the job market? Some universities literally date back to the middle ages, such as Oxford university which has been teaching as far back as 1096. Naturally this means, in general, education is quite classic and slow to change. On contrary, especially in IT, things do change fairly rapidly and companies are looking for specific skillsets that might not match the educations on of...
Why is it so hard to get basic functionality right? With Niels Talens
June 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 57 MBWhy do teams always want to build the next best thing without focusing on the fundamentals like a simple address change or login page? Should you implement blockchain in your product or should you just improve the user experience? Are Product Owners managing a team, or are they part of the team? These questions and more are the focus of this episode of Roasting Marshmallows. Our guest is Niels Talens, Chief Product Owner at Simply Deliver A.I., and he will share his views, frustrations ...
You're invited to a Big Tech company interview! Now what? With Jordan Phillips
May 25, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 60.5 MBHow do you get hired by right company? More importantly, how do you prepare for such an interview? What about negotiations? And what do these companies have to do to reel you in? On this episode, a senior technical recruiter from a Big Tech company is willing to give up all secrets, tips and tricks for engineers and companies alike! His name is Jordan Philips, and he has spent 7 years working across larger big tech like Google, but also startups like Wayve autonomous driving. At Google, he...
From developer to CTO to having your own startup with Allard Buijze
May 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 69.2 MBHow do you develop a side project and transform it into your own startup? It is the dream of many software engineers to develop something, maybe as a side project, and then see that project gain traction. It gets adopted, downloaded a bunch of times, and maybe you even get to speak on it during conventions. For our guest today this has happened, and many more things since then as well. He built a framework which enables teams to develop applications using Domain Driven Design, Event Sourci...
From a fired teacher to a Product Owner with Clayton Dewey
May 12, 2021 12:34 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBChange is good, but transitioning can be arduous. What do you do when you feel stuck at your current job? You have been trying to grow and develop but you get nowhere? Â Your job is not fulfilling? You know you can do better, and you know you can earn more. You are in a career that is not a good match or you have outgrown it? Or maybe, you have been fired and are forced to make a transition. Today we are talking with Clayton Dewey about his transitioning into IT. More often we see people fro...
It is never the problem
May 04, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBDoes your IT-department not deliver? Are there always new bugs introduced with each release? Have you missed opportunities because your software is too old to support new features? If this sounds familiar, you are probably looking to fix your IT-department. Maybe you're looking to hire an extra manager to ensure all processes are being followed. Before you do that though, listen to this episode of scoutcast, where we discuss the pain points described above, and how to tackle those! Hint: ...
Is it safe to use SAFe? with Jesse Wierenga
April 27, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 63.3 MBAre you feeling SAFe? What riches can you find when you crack the combination of SAFe? SAFe is a framework that empowers complex organizations to scale up agile practices across the enterprise. SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework, and it's being used by hundreds of the world’s largest organizations. It promises to sustain and drive faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity and quality, and improvement in employee engagement. The experience we as FourScouts have with SAFe h...
Successful Off-/Nearshoring: industry secrets revealed
April 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 57.6 MBFor the longest time, more cost effective labor in other countries has always attracted companies to try and manufacture their products there for a more economic way of doing things. This is no different for software development. However, especially among developers, there was and still is some resistance with hiring outside help. But currently, due to corona, everyone is working remotely, so what does it matter if you are situated in a different country? And this is what we are talking ab...
Finding value in discomfort
April 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 61.4 MBDo you feel satisfied with your accomplishments in life? Are you where you want to be? A surprising amount of people will say “no” to these questions — and you might be one of them. People who haven’t made satisfactory progress in life often fail to reach their goals — because they’re stuck inside their comfort zones. What are the good and bad things about being in the comfort zone? On this episode of roasting marshmallows, we will talk about how we sometimes find ourselves stuck in th...
What does modern software development look like?
April 07, 2021 07:26 - 1 hour - 56.7 MBMany teams that develop a product nowadays feel like it's a bit like building a space ship only for it to be launched in a black hole. All this work is done to build something awesome, but they never really know if it is of value to the customer. Are they building The Right Thing, and are they building it Right? What does a modern software development company look like and what do they do? Spoiler alert: it's not about the programming language, tabs versus spaces, or Subversion versus gi...
What does modern development look like?
April 07, 2021 07:26 - 1 hour - 56.7 MBMany teams that develop a product nowadays feel like it's a bit like building a space ship only for it to be launched in a black hole. All this work is done to build something awesome, but they never really know if it is of value to the customer. Are they building The Right Thing, and are they building it Right? What does a modern software development company look like and what do they do? Spoiler alert: it's not about the programming language, tabs versus spaces, or Subversion versus gi...
Navigating the organizational clutter with Michiel Toes
March 29, 2021 07:32 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBDo your people know what business your company really is into? What is it that you do? And who does what exactly? The answers might scare you. There are a lot of things that can (and frequently do) go wrong inside of a business. Sales fall through, products don't work, team members get frustrated, and clients get upset. Often, these things happen due to a single reason: lack of organizational clarity.In this episode of Roasting Marshmallows, we are navigating the organizational clutter...
Building a dream team: getting naked with eachother
March 23, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 59 MBEveryone wants their team to be high performant. The idea of one cohesive unit, working in harmony with one another, that are highly focused on their goals and deliver superior business value is of course very appealing. But what does it take to cultivate a high-performance team? One of the foundations is trust and respect. Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we will share with you our experiences in building this trust and respect with you. We do this, among other things, by getting naked wi...
Mob Programming with Woody Zuill
March 09, 2021 08:34 - 1 hour - 159 MBHave you ever wondered why your team is taking so long delivering new features? They are all behind their screen, headphones on, wired in, focused, programming. Why are they taking so long? Turns out, parallelising the work that needs to be done might not be so productive at all. Enter mob programming: a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we are sitting ...
My culture is better than yours
March 02, 2021 11:47 - 57 minutes - 53.4 MBWhat do you get when you put a Brazilian, Macedonian, Indian and Dutch person together and let them have a conversation about their cultures for an hour? Culture shock, culture clash but also melting pot material! Which culture is the best? Is there even such a thing? Surely one culture must have the best food!? At FourScouts we already have a diverse representation of different cultures, but for todays episode we have invited someone from India, currently living in Amsterdam. Anikta Sahni...