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During a job interview for an Agile Coach role, the main buzzword was “transformation”. When I asked what exactly was to be transformed, the repeated answer was simply: “Transformation.”
After I started, it turned out that this supposed “transformation” was mainly about restructuring teams to get better control over whether everyone was billing 40 hours a week. A transformation? To me, that was nothing more than micromanagement wrapped in fancy language.
To truly make a difference, I decided to invite colleagues for one-on-one interviews. This approach is a core part of the “What is” phase in Design Thinking, a methodology I learned during a specialization course from Virginia University. The goal is to build empathy and truly understand the user’s perspective. My Scrum Master was initially shocked and skeptical: “That’s 40 interviews! How are we going to analyze all of them?” This was at a time when the first large language models had just been released.
My idea was to consolidate the interview results into a single prompt and ask ChatGPT to analyze them and suggest measures for improvement. My supposedly “agile” Scrum Master was visibly shocked, also because of data protection concerns. I reassured him that I had saved the results without names on individual Confluence pages, titled “Interview One,” “Interview Two,” etc.
Despite his skepticism, the AI did an excellent job, even though it was still in its early days. This anecdote shows how important it is to question buzzwords. True transformation begins with empathy and listening, which is exactly the point of Design Thinking. At the same time, this story demonstrates how early I adopted AI as a tool to scale human-centered approaches. Anonymized data and a clear problem statement allowed me to quickly gain valuable insights from a large volume of unstructured data.
