#129: 2025: The Year Agile Meets AI and Hyper-Personalization with Lance Dacy

Curious about the future of Agile in 2025? Join Brian and Lance Dacy as they dive into the rise of AI, hyper-personalization, and how teams can balance innovation with customer focus. Plus, discover actionable insights to navigate a rapidly evolving landscape—don’t miss this forward-looking discussion!

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian and Lance set their sights on 2025, exploring how AI is transforming Agile practices and reshaping customer engagement.

They discuss the shift from output to outcome metrics, the expansion of Agile beyond IT, and the critical role of leadership agility. With practical takeaways on fostering continuous learning and delivering real value, this episode equips teams and leaders to stay ahead in a fast-changing world.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Lance Dacy
Accurate Agile Planning
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Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Happy New Year's Agile Mentors. We are back and a very happy New Year's to everyone who's listening. Welcome back for another episode and another new year of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner, and we have our friend of the show for our annual kind of tradition now. We have Mr. Lance Dacey back with us. Welcome in, Lance.

Lance Dacy (00:23)
Thank you, Brian. Happy New Year to all of y'all. Happy to be setting this tradition. think it's two times now, so we'll just call it a tradition, but I love it. Thank you for having me.

Brian (00:32)
Very glad to have you here. The tradition we're referring to is that we like to take the first episode of the new year and just take a pause and kind of look ahead a little bit. What do we see coming up? What do we think this new year is going to be like? Obviously, it's a year of change. Here in the US, we'll have a new president that comes in. I'm not going to get into whether you like that or not, but it's new. It's going to be a change. There's going to be differences that take place. And I know there's a lot of differences and changes going on just in the way businesses operate and how things are run and lots of new technologies, lots of new trends. So we just thought we'd take a pause and kind of scan the horizon and maybe give you our take at least on what we're hearing and what we're seeing. And you can see if you agree with these or not. We'd love to hear from you in our discussion forum on the Agile Mentors Community afterwards if you have other thoughts or opinions on this. let's get into it. Let's start to talk about this. So Lance, I guess I'll start. I'll just turn it over to you and ask you that generalized question. Give me one point or one thing that you've been reading or seeing recently that you think is going to be a really important thing for us to kind of be prepared for or look out for here in 2025.

Lance Dacy (01:44)
Great question, Brian. There's so many things out there, and I thought we could start by looking back a little bit. if we're okay with that, just let's summarize, you what did we see happen in 2024? You mentioned, you know, 2025 is a year of change, absolutely, but 2024 was definitely a different kind of year as far as my experience is concerned and seeing a lot of industry trends that are just popping up out of nowhere. Now we are fans of agility, which means we embrace quick, efficient changes, but there's things going on in 2024 I never predicted

Brian (01:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Lance Dacy (02:19)
fast. And so I think we've got to reshape the way that we're thinking about these things. I think the topic of mind, one of the biggest shifts that I saw in 2024 that I think will continue in 2025 is AI. So that artificial intelligence is a big word that we keep lumping into a lot of things. And I just wanted to take a pause a little bit and say, I know everybody's got a little bit different experience about AI, but in particular, as it relates to product development and agile delivery, which is what this show is basically focused on, I thought we could look at some insights of what happened in 2024 with that. And so I think I call us babies at it right now. And I know that may be a bad term, but I have a lot of experience with AI and machine learning and things like that. But as far as the use of it, I feel like we're all a little bit more of babies on how to use it in the day-to-day work that we're trying to accomplish. And I think that comes with learning something. I embrace that. I don't mean that as a downplay, by the way, but that we're all babies. I'm just saying we're less mature about it. We're experimenting with a lot of things. And I don't think that some of the AI is all good. I I embrace it as a thing that's going to help us later on, but... I thought we could just share our experiences of how we've seen this thing manifest itself. I think tools like AI driven, I'm going to use the bad word JIRA, but in place of that, just use any product backlog management tool that you see. And I've seen a lot of organizations not just talk the game of, we use AI for our backlog management, but I'm talking about backlog prioritization, sprint planning capacity. And I believe what's happening is it frees teams up to do more of the... value driven work that we're going to see a lot more of in 2025. So what I mean by that is when we got automated testing and development, if you remember those days, it freed the developers up or the testers, should say, from doing less of the does this thing work to more of how does it feel using it as a human being, you know, automating that. So I've seen things like JIRA, with AI with JIRA and GitHub co-pilots, you know, reshaping the value creation in the teams and eliminating the need of having to do very low level tasks. So what is your thoughts on that and do you have any experiences of that as well?

Brian (04:36)
Yeah, for sure. There's a couple of things I've found that just kind of some stats I found from some different places. you know, listeners know I'm kind of like a data geek here. want to know where the data comes from and want to make sure it's a, yeah. Yeah. You want to make sure it's a solid source and it's not some questionable, you know, sketchy kind of, well, I asked 10 of my friends and here's the answer, you Right, right. Exactly.

Lance Dacy (04:48)
Good hand. I love that. or a FBI.

Brian (05:02)
But so there's a couple of things that came back. One was, I think Forrester is probably a pretty good source of information. They have some pretty good rigor to their process. And they have a thing that they put out every year. This one's just called the Developer Survey. And this is the one that they put out for 2024 that I'm quoting here. But a couple of stats from that that I found interesting. One was, 49 % of developers are expecting to use or are already using general AI assistance in their coding phase of software development, which, you know, maybe higher than most people might think. But it doesn't surprise me too much. I think that's probably kind of what I'm used to it. Understand saying, you know, an assistant co-pilot, that kind of thing. They're not saying 49 % have been replaced. They're saying 49 % are being assisted. by that and that seems about right. Maybe again, maybe a little higher than some might expect, but that seems like not too big of a shocker.

Lance Dacy (06:04)
Well, the animation too. So when you talk about assistance versus letting it run it, I saw a gentleman on LinkedIn, which is also a good. I wish we could interact more with our users on this call, because I'd love to hear their perspective. But I heard somebody say, let AI write my code. No, thank you. Code is like poetry. It has to be refined over time. It has humanistic qualities. And I was like, man, that's a really good point. But when I try to show my kids how t