In a world changing faster than most teams can keep up with, standing still may be the biggest risk of all. Brian Milner sits down with Stavros Stavru to explore why experimentation is no longer optional and how teams can build a culture that adapts before disruption forces it to.
Overview
Many organizations say they value experimentation, but few create the conditions that make real experimentation possible. Too often, teams either stay trapped in familiar patterns or mistake random change for meaningful learning.
In this episode, Brian Milner talks with Stavros Stavru, author of Never Stop Experimenting, about what experimentation actually looks like in practice. Stavros shares how rapid advances in AI and constant disruption are forcing teams to rethink how they learn, adapt, and improve. Together, they discuss the difference between experimentation and “experimentation theater,” why small experiments matter, and how leaders can model the kind of curiosity and adaptability they want their teams to develop.
Stavros also shares practical examples from his book, including simple ways teams can test assumptions, gather more honest feedback, and create stronger learning loops in their day-to-day work.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Stavros Stavru
Never Stop Experimenting by Stavros Stavru, Ph.D.
#56: The Power of Experimentation
#118: The Secrets to Agile Success with Mike Cohn
When Do Agile Teams Make Time for Innovation? By Mike Cohn
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This episode’s presenters are:
Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast 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.
Stavros Stavru is an organizational transformation researcher and Agile practitioner whose work focuses on helping teams create lasting alignment instead of temporary improvement. After two decades working with thousands of professionals across 500+ organizations, he founded AhaPlay to turn strategy and behavioral science into measurable team alignment without relying on facilitators.
Auto-generated Transcript:
Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here pretty much always. My name is Brian Milner and today I am very fortunate to have the one and only Stavros Stavrou with us. Welcome into the show Stavros.
Stavros Stavru (00:17) Welcome, thank you very much for having me today with you, Brian. So yeah. ⁓
Brian Milner (00:23) Yeah, very, very glad to have Stavros with us. ⁓ If you're not familiar with Stavros, he has a book that ⁓ came out just at the end of last year. That's a really interesting book. It's called Never Stop Experimenting ⁓ that we wanted to have him on to talk about a little bit. ⁓ Just to dive into a little bit this whole conversation around experimenting. So I think that's probably where I'd want to start Stavros is to say,
in this day and age, you know, in this time period where there's seems to be so much focus from organizations, from teams on output and trying to just do as much work as we possibly can. Why should organizations, why should teams, ⁓ value this concept of experimenting and why should they take time for
Stavros Stavru (01:24) Well, think currently, if in the past, like one year or two years ago, experimentation is more like, know, let's say not nice to have, but definitely not a must for many organizations. I think this is changing right now and it becomes a must for everybody because it's, I mean,
AI actually made what we called, you know, constant change, uncertainty, all these dynamics that are actually happening all the time. I mean, now it's, we are like in a hurricane compared to the storm, let's say that we were an year ago and probably a nice sunny weather 15 years ago. So.
That's, I think the pressure that teams currently face in terms of adopting all these new technologies or these new AI tools or these new approaches of working, I mean, is enormous. So I think experimentation probably is the only... ⁓
way forward until disruption kind of you know completes if it will at all from what we see yeah so yeah i think it's even more it's even more urgent topic than it was
Brian Milner (03:14) Yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's an important aspect of a team is that they continue to experiment and it's kind of built into the DNA of the team. It's just a core of who they are. So let me kind of approach it this way. If we kind of said why it's important, what do you think is the cost?
Stavros Stavru (03:29) Yeah.
Brian Milner (03:46) for a team that doesn't experiment, that just kind of continues and does the thing and builds the stuff over and over again, what's the cost to a team that doesn't experiment?
Stavros Stavru (04:00) Yeah. Let me give you a very simple example from my, ⁓ as right now we are building a new product and we are launching and we are actually in that phase where we have to find our GTM go to market. ⁓ And how do you find that right now? I mean, you can follow the, you know, this traditional way of, of, you know, defining your
go to market or you can try and experiment all these new tools that are popping up every single day. And three weeks ago when we launched, okay, we said, okay, but probably the traditional ways are still there and we can quickly because we know them, we can quickly apply them and see what's going on.
And then we compared, I mean, we run a one week's marketing spring just to validate a few hypotheses. And what it turned out was that almost nothing worked. ⁓ And we find out that in one ⁓ week's spring, right now, two weeks later, we are not doing one week's sprints anymore. We are doing one day.
marketing sprints just to, define a hypothesis in the, in the morning. And at the end of the day, we want to know, okay, it might not be fully validated, but at least whether you have these initial signs that this might be working. And I said, I will give you a simple example. For example, we thought that if we write a comment under a post in LinkedIn, we will
kind of engage with the author, probably will, you know, engage with the other people who are commenting on that post, which is entirely focused on what we are building. So it's the perfect, we thought that this is the perfect, you know, target for us writing on that kind of posts. And there were something like 150 comments under the post, but we said, okay, let's see.
Let's take all these commands and ask Plot how many of them are AI generated. And it said, okay, I predict that 90 to 95 % are AI generated. yeah, mean, tell me how you will find all these things if you're not constantly trying checking kind of...
Brian Milner (06:40) Wow.
Stavros Stavru (06:55) arguing whether this is still working, whether... I mean, you need to be much more critical and actually challenge everything that you ⁓ compared, as I said, a few months or a year ago. So to be honest, I don't know anymore. So if you, for example, if you continue writing comments believing that you are...
talking to your target audience, you might be talking to agents or to bots or I don't know, not real people. yeah, just a very, very recent example that makes me think that you need to be much more creative and much more original. ⁓
Brian Milner (07:39) Yeah, wasting your time, yeah.
Stavros Stavru (07:55) Yeah, trying.
Brian Milner (07:57) Yeah, no, that's a great example. Yeah, no, that's okay. That's a great example.
Stavros Stavru (07:58) I don't know if I managed to answer your question, but I think that if
you continue doing what you're doing, you might become irrelevant, inefficient, and probably sooner than later, you will become obsolete.
Brian Milner (08:21) Yeah, that's great point. That's a very strong point. And I agree. ⁓ Maybe what we need to do here is kind of define this a little more for the listeners as they're going through this. I mean, we're talking about experimenting, but what do we actually mean by that? So if you were to define, if you were to say, here's what experimenting is, ⁓ how would you describe experimenting?
Stavros Stavru (08:47) Well, that's a very, very fundamental question, let's say, a question I have been exploring for quite a lot of time. Even in my book, this is how I start. It's the experimental dilemma that I call it. And it's two voices talking to each other. One voice is saying, ⁓ it's just good enough.
And the other voice says, but what if it could be better? And it's, there's that play of words. One was the devil and the other was the angel, but who is the devil and who is the angel? So that's pretty much my vision about experimentation. I mean, you can always be like, you know, it's like a paradox where you say, okay, I want to experiment so I can get better. But then, you know,
Brian Milner (09:27) Hahaha.
Stavros Stavru (09:44) When do you stop experimenting? mean, when actually it's better enough so you don't need to experiment anymore. So experimentation, if I have to define it in my words is you need to experiment until you want to make it better. in some, as we know in some industries, in some businesses, we don't have, I mean, if you don't have a...
let's say human in the equation, it's really an optimization problem, you can write the equation and it will give you the best answer, then I don't know, you might don't need experimentation because the answer is there. It's already, you know, but if you have, I don't know.
things that are more chaotic, like for example teams, social groups, things that you can't just explain with equations, you can always be better. And then if you have this urge to improve, then experimentation should be always on your list of things to do.
Brian Milner (11:06) Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. And I know that there's a lot of ⁓ maybe false experimentation that's going on out there where people, maybe it's experimentation theater, people kind of give lip service to it and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we think experimenting is important. So how would you differentiate ⁓
Stavros Stavru (11:24) Yeah.
Brian Milner (11:35) between that and really experimenting. What makes an experiment ⁓ a valid experiment?
Stavros Stavru (11:43) Well, first, I mean it's...
The agile movement, I think, has a great way to define what makes an experiment really a valuable experiment, an experiment worth running. And this is you have an informed decision. It's not just, you know, jumping in the dark.
you always have some hypothesis. This hypothesis is to some extent informed. It's based on some empirical data or empirical evidence or assumptions that are not based on astronomy or how you're feeling, or it's always based on some kind of data that you have collected and this data.
gives you some signs or some signals or some insights, but they're just rough and you need to further ⁓ run some tests and further validate your hypothesis. for me, I embrace that understanding that the whole agile community kind of is trying to promote. So it's not, you know.
Let's try that. read that book. It sounds great. Let's, let's jump in and do it. No, it's not like that. mean, yeah, you need to have the, it relevant, see your context, try to find others who are doing it and who has a similar situation with yours. So it's, yeah. And so on and so on. So experimentation requires preparation. It's not like,
Brian Milner (13:12) You
Yeah, that's a great point. There is a preparation that needs to go into this. Well, your book is great. I know there's a lot of practical ⁓ examples, a lot of practical ⁓ kind of walkthroughs that you give people of here's examples of the kinds of things you can do. I wonder if maybe you could just share, ⁓ pick a few of those that you can share with us. ⁓
you feel are particularly meaningful or might be particularly meaningful to those who are listening, agile leaders and scrum masters and product owners. What are some experiments that, practical kind of ways that ⁓ you recommend in your book to run an experiment?
Stavros Stavru (14:26) Yeah. Well, the book, it's interesting thing, particularly, I mean, this particular book, because in terms of content, you have 31 experiments that turned into practices that the teams I was working with during my consultancy, consulting and training and coaching ⁓ years.
I mean, it was like, okay, with the team, have like a challenge that we need to solve. We tried a few things, we changed some already existing tools or practices, and then we had something completely new, but it worked for that particular team. So in this book, you have these 31 experiments that we, I would say even stumble upon because they were not like, I will sit and...
create a new technique or a new practice, was like, okay, doing this, that, and finding a new way to address a certain challenge. So the book in terms of content is 31 such practices. Some of them are more on how we experiment and how we create a growth mindset kind of culture in our team. Another set of
practices are more focused on, okay, I'm a leader or I'm coaching these teams. How, what kind of things I could use to, to address certain aspects of these team dynamics. For example, how I can turn my team to be more resistant to all these changes or how I can address their feeling of lost with every experiment or with every feature we build, but we need to drop it because for example,
it doesn't prove to bring any value. yeah, if you work with engineers, they feel really bad when they have to throw their work. ⁓ I mean, it's more about coaches and leaders. Then you have a lot of personal tools like how I manage stress that again, working with in such an environment as we are currently with AI where
There's so many things, so many threads, so many, I mean, it's not like you can't focus on your, you know, on your task, but there are so many other things that are trying to stall your focus, how you're handling this. And so what I wanted to say, there is, it's more like a toolbox. It's, it's, it's for Scrum Masters, for product owners, for agile leaders, for teams who are part, but
Brian Milner (17:08) Okay.
Stavros Stavru (17:17) Actually, if I have to be honest, it will be for everybody who is trying to improve their personal efficiency or team efficiency or and why it was named never stop experimenting because it's kind of a manifestation of my, you know, this book is a manifestation of what happens if you never stop experimenting. Actually, you start building new things and finding unique.
ways of addressing different challenges. So it's enriching, enriching for everybody. I believe the more we experiment with is the more we create and enhance the knowledge and the wisdom, let's say, we all have in the community.
Brian Milner (17:47) Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, well,
with these 31 kind of experiments that you kind of highlight in the book, I wonder if you could just kind of give us a hint or a flavor of what that's like, maybe show us the depth of what one of these experiments is like. ⁓ there one that you can recall, one of your favorites there in the book that maybe you can ⁓ give us like one example of what it's like to...
Stavros Stavru (18:32) Yeah, okay.
Brian Milner (18:36) in your book for one of these experiments.
Stavros Stavru (18:38) Absolutely. have one that is actually very close to my heart because it and one that wasn't born while working with teams, but actually more personal one. was with my daughter, at the top in the mountains and there were, mean,
There was a snowfall and I wanted to go with her and spend a day together and We went there and we had a great time For a few hours and then when we are going back to home While driving she was next to me and I asked her did you like it? I mean Was it was it fun and she said yes, and then I said do you want to go again and she said no
And that was like a, you know, it was like a punch for me. And I thought, and it started making me thinking how we actually, what we do at work and when we work with teams and we run initiatives, how we assess, let's say, whether they were successful or whether they were, you know, and we're asking people, it's like Net Promoter Score, for example, would you recommend it to a colleague?
or things like that, but then I said, but isn't that wishful thinking? I mean, if I have spent two days in a training and somebody asked me, would you recommend it? If I say no, isn't that saying that that was two days lost, for example, would it be like, you know, brain games trying for me to somehow, I don't know, I was just thinking if you can get an honest.
Brian Milner (20:25) Yeah.
Stavros Stavru (20:33) answer if you ask somebody do you like it or would you recommend it to somebody and then working with that thinking about a trying different experimentation I came up to the replay check and now I'm using it quite a lot the replay checks is not asking you do you like it but with the knowledge that you have right now if you go back in time would you do it again okay so it's very simple you know it's very simple
practice, but for me and from my experience, it works much better and I get a lot more negative answers with it. So if you want to continue to get positive, know, yes, we'll recommend it or we like it or... But if you want to ⁓ face the truth more often, would you repeat it? ⁓
is a better check for me. But again, just a... ⁓ It's not universally... For sure, it's not universally applicable. Of course, Net Promoter Score was done for a completely different thing. It's about loyalty and whether you will... I mean, and whether your customers will recommend you, meaning that you will... to another and then you will have more customers and your revenue. it's...
Brian Milner (21:34) But yeah.
Stavros Stavru (22:02) Net promoter score is a metric for different purpose, not for assessing a training or something like that. But I'm stopping here. I don't want to say that that metric is bad metric.
Brian Milner (22:11) Yeah.
No, that's a fascinating way to approach it. I think that's a great question. know, like knowing what you know now, would you do this again? I think that's a great question to ask. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. That's really ⁓ interesting take on that. ⁓ So I know when you go through a process of writing a book like this, it's a big personal journey. It takes, you know, a big chunk of your life to
to do that and hours and research and all this stuff to put it together. So I always like to kind of ask this kind of question from the authors of these kind of books. What's something that surprised you or that you learned in the course of writing this book that maybe you didn't really know before you started to research this and really dive into it?
Stavros Stavru (23:10) Well, yeah, it's probably it's a little bit different with this particular book because I had another book, I mean, a series of book before that. And during my PhD, I learned to be patient and to do all this, you know, I mean, ⁓ I'm grateful for one thing. Having this PhD, it was like learning me to, you know, to go into in that depth and
go through each ⁓ small thing and et cetera. the big learning I had writing this particular book was how supportive the Agile community really. I mean, it was fascinating for me to have people like Mike Korn, like Jeff Sutherland, like Diana Larsen, ⁓ Jim Highsmith. I mean, so many people. ⁓
I'm missing quite a lot of them. They reviewed the book, gave me quite an invaluable feedback on what things I should change. Actually, I was about to publish the book a year and a half ⁓ from the date that it was actually published, but I had so much feedback that I had to incorporate.
And I said, OK, I need to do this if I want to. So it was the feedback. It was the encouragement that there is value in what I have to share. ⁓ It's the moments you are feeling that probably it's not worth it.
encourage you to continue. ⁓ that's a big learning for me. I didn't expect that the agile community so, I would say resourceful and open to, because who am I? I'm a trainer, consultant in Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria. mean, you know,
Brian Milner (25:19) Hahaha.
Stavros Stavru (25:27) Not a big name from the States or from Europe, from Scandinavia, for example, or the UK where we, I mean, the greatest minds in the agile world are most of them. So spending a few hours from somebody who had never been on your radar, I think it's, it's an example of, of having, ⁓
such a supportive.
We are a community.
Brian Milner (26:01) Yeah, yeah, I those are some great names you mentioned and I agree. I've had the pleasure of talking to most of those people before as well. And yeah, I agree. It's amazing how supportive and freely some of these people that are big names and have been around for a while, but how freely they'll give their time to support people who are on their way up. So yeah, I agree with that.
Stavros Stavru (26:24) Absolutely.
And
Brian Milner (26:31) we're getting near our time. I just want to ask you one other question here. And that is, if someone's listening to this and they're curious about it, we've piqued their curiosity a little bit about what experimentation and they want to double down. They want to reinvest in experimentation in their teams. ⁓ What's one thing that you would recommend they do to...
begin that journey to start to reinvest in experimentation in their team.
Stavros Stavru (27:03) Well, it's, I believe from my experience so far, it's becoming a role model. the, because you are in full control, let's say to some extent, of course, if you don't have quite a lot of freedom to experiment, then probably you will be limited in that. But for me, that's what has been working for me.
Even now with the startup we're running, with the engineers, they're laughing at me all the time that if I am not doing an experiment, they say, are you okay? mean, is it, I mean, is everything all right? So yeah, being a role model and starting with small experiments, demonstrating to your team that it's valuable. It helps you and your team.
small steps, small experiments until you can start with a, know, hey guys, let's jump from the, you know, I don't know. It's a process. I mean, it's not like you can do a magic, a magic stick and just, you know, touch your team and they somehow become open to experimentation. You need to work on this all the time and you should start with yourself.
Brian Milner (28:11) Yeah.
Yeah, no, I think that's a that's an amazing point. That's a that's a great point. Because ⁓ when you when you live it out yourself, when you are experimenting, you know, the example you gave is a great example, your team ⁓ almost holds you accountable. You know, like your team's spots it and says, like, what's wrong? Is anything wrong? Because you're I don't see you doing an experiment and you always do experiments. ⁓ You know, so I think that's a great
Stavros Stavru (28:55) Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Milner (29:01) great call ⁓ for the people listening is that when you start to make these part of your DNA, right, part of how you operate, then that's really the best way to start to try to get it, your team to consume that and become the same thing.
Stavros Stavru (29:10) Yeah.
Yeah, totally agree.
Brian Milner (29:24) Awesome. Well,
Stavros, I really appreciate this conversation. I think it's a really important conversation in today's world. And ⁓ your book, I think it's a great book, Never Stop Experimenting. So just I'll point people to that. You can find that on Amazon. You can find lots of places. ⁓ How can people find out more from you if they want to follow you and follow your work?
Stavros Stavru (29:46) Well, the easiest way is through LinkedIn or just going on never stop experimenting.com and contact me directly or subscribing for my newsletter. Now that I have experienced the generosity of the agile community, I have to give back. it's my turn if anyone wants to.
Brian Milner (30:10) Haha.
Stavros Stavru (30:16) to have a chat or to exchange any ideas or whatever, I'll be happy to have a chat.
Brian Milner (30:22) Awesome. Awesome.
Well, Stavros, I really appreciate your time. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for making time for us and coming on the show.
Stavros Stavru (30:30) Thank you, thank you, Beran, for having me today and all the success and never stop experimenting for everybody who is listening. ⁓