Focusing Where We Can Have the Most Impact

For more than two decades, public training has been central to Mountain Goat Software. In May 2003, I co-trained the first Certified ScrumMaster course with Ken Schwaber. I co-trained the first Certified Scrum Product Owner course with him too. Since then, public classes have been one of the main ways I've tried to help people learn Scrum, agile, user stories, estimating, planning, and everything else I've written and taught about over the years.

Those classes mattered — and they helped spread agile knowledge at a time when many people were hearing these ideas for the first time.

But the place where I believe we can have the greatest impact now has shifted.

We're ending our public classes and focusing Mountain Goat Software's training and coaching work on private client engagements: private courses, practical workshops, and follow-through support for teams and organizations that want help applying agile and Scrum more effectively.

Why This Shift Makes Sense Now

A lot of individuals understand Scrum and agile quite well.

But while training can give individuals a solid understanding, that alone does not help a team work better together.

Teams have to make decisions about their own backlog, planning, collaboration, and stakeholder expectations. Those are difficult to solve one person at a time.

That's where private client work becomes so valuable. When we work with a company directly, we can focus on the team's actual challenges — the product backlog they really use, the planning problems they're actually trying to solve, the leadership dynamics that are quietly making things harder.

That deeper work is where I'm most excited to spend my time.

What Changes When the Work Is Private

Private training lets teams work on the backlog items, planning decisions, and delivery problems they already need to solve. In Mastering User Stories, for instance, teams work with their own backlog items and user stories — improving the actual work they need to refine, split, estimate, and deliver.

That changes the nature of the class. A team can see where its current stories are too large, too vague, or too focused on output instead of value. Product owners, Scrum Masters, developers, testers, and leaders build a shared understanding of what good stories need to do in their context — not in some hypothetical scenario.

The same principle applies across all our private offerings:

Working on a Scrum Team helps a team build a stronger, shared way of applying Scrum together.
Agile for Leaders helps leaders see how their behavior affects the teams they're trying to support.
Accurate Agile Planning helps teams and leaders make better decisions about dates, scope, forecasts, and uncertainty.

And in all of these, we can add coaching and follow-through support so the learning doesn't end when the class does. A course can create insight. Real change takes repeated application, adjustment, and support over time.

A Recent Engagement That Made This Clear

Last year, we trained roughly 550 people at one organization through a series of classes and follow-through coaching sessions. Their biggest needs centered on backlog health, cross-team collaboration, and leadership alignment.

Those three things were connected. The backlog problems were making collaboration harder. The collaboration gaps were feeding leadership misalignment. Working across all of them — together, over time — produced changes that a two-day public course never could have.

That engagement reinforced something I've believed for a long time: agile improvement is most effective when teams and leaders work on it together, with support that follows them into the real work.

How We Shape Private Engagements

We start by understanding what the client is trying to improve and where teams are getting stuck.

That might mean looking at their backlog, planning approach, team structure, agile leadership expectations, or a particular delivery problem. We then shape the course, workshop, or follow-through support around that need.

Sometimes the right answer is a focused workshop: improving backlog quality, splitting stories, estimating, or preparing for a release-planning conversation. Sometimes it's a private course for one or more teams. Sometimes it includes coaching after the course so teams can apply what they learned with support alongside them.

The format depends on the need. The goal is always the same: help the client make meaningful, lasting progress with agile.

What Stays the Same

I'll continue writing blog posts, sending email tips, and creating YouTube videos. I've been doing that for decades, and I still think it's helpful. There will always be people who find Mountain Goat Software through an article, a tip, a book, or something a colleague forwards to them.

We're also rebuilding the Mountain Goat Software website around this new direction and reorganizing 500+ blog posts into ten topic-based agile guides — covering Scrum, user stories, product backlog, agile planning, leadership, and more. The goal is to make it easier to find the most useful material, whether you're a private client or an individual reader.

What's changing is where we focus our training and coaching work.

If Your Organization Wants Help

The goal hasn't changed: helping people and teams succeed with agile.

If your organization wants help with private training, a practical workshop, or follow-through coaching — whether that means improving user stories and backlog refinement, helping Scrum teams build a stronger shared approach, or helping leaders understand how to support agile teams more effectively — I'd welcome a conversation.

Get in touch here