Product on a Podcast - Agile Therapy Workshops 🧠

I used to do a product on a page monthly on my blog. It was a exercise. I wanted to try to keep being creative, coming up with ideas so solutions but thoughts and maybe solving some problems. It died off. I think I got out of the routine, forgot about the regular reminder in my to do app tick Tick and I decided to get my creative juices flowing a bit more recently. So I want to try and revive it but in a different form. It's going to be product in a podcast, so a pop or a pip. Anyway, explain to my creative juices and my typical workflow and how I like to make things. I'm going to try this out and maybe do it on a more regular basis, more random, ad hoc basis. We'll see where it goes. But I will record these and put them out on my side Jobling podcast feed. Let's see where it goes. So in the interest of kicking things off, I have recently been going through some therapy with a local psychologist, psychotherapist, sorry. And it's been quite eye opening for my personal reasons, but also from a thought process as well. I've realized there's a lot of correlations to how we try to do agile software delivery. So the product pitch is Agile therapy. Bear with this might already exist, I don't know. This is just our brain going through the thought process. So ultimately when you are going through therapy, you have an end goal in mind. You want to address some demons, you want to feel better, you want to resolve some ongoing issues and generally quite valuable personally challenges, but even massive, massive problems normally and take a lot of deep diving and conversations, stuff like that. So you've almost got an end goal which again, coming back to software, you've got a general mission or a solution, an end goal you want to deliver. To get there, you need to speak to people. Again, we talk about people over process in Agile. We talk about having conversations, not documenting everything. We talk about, you know, collaboration and getting feedback and that sort of thing. So you're almost doing this on a regular basis anyway as you have a therapist session. Depending on your commitments, you should be having probably weekly, maybe fortnightly or monthly therapy sessions with a qualified therapist. You're exploring your deep inner thoughts with someone else. You bounce some ideas off each other, you're validating them, you're getting faster feedback and you're normally working towards these sort of regular iterations, like weekly, fortnightly, monthly sessions to talk these things through. From each section you pose a problem or you maybe suggest a specific story. You want to Dive into. Again, a user story is very much this. You are surfacing a challenge, proposing a solution and exploring how we're going to solve it. And no one's got the answers yet. Well, they might not have all the answers anyway. You bring a user story to your therapy session, you talk through the situation, the scenarios, and you work out a solution together. The solution might not be immediate, it might be a spite, which is what we use in software engineering to try to understand an area better. And as part of that spike, you want some outcomes, you want some areas to focus on. You want to time box this, you want to maybe reach out to other people and resources to support that, and then you reflect as well. So after your first session, you normally set yourself a little action or a goal or a bit of takeaway, a bit of homework. Then you come back at the next session, talk about how it went. This is almost like a review and a retrospective, and then how you might want to adjust going forward. As I say, there's a lot of correlations here between good therapy, I'm not saying it's perfect, but good, and agile software. And I feel like there's an opportunity here to bring the language together and make therapy more reachable, more approachable. Shaking that stigma that people often fall into when it comes to mental health. I've recently been talking to people in a local men's mental health group and community about what they're doing. They create a podcast to talk about all their challenges. They're trying to shake the stigma. I've talked to them about using LinkedIn to, you know, promote what they're doing. So again, there's a lot of overlap here with tech software engineering and good counseling therapy, mental health sessions. So my proposal or product on a podcast is Agile Therapy Workshops. You use those two week boundaries, you talk about some problems, you identify some actions, and you reflect on them on a more regular basis. And you have sponsors to help you go through that as well. You reach out to friends and family and teammates and anyone else around you to coordinate that. But you document this as well, and you can see the measurable improvements over time in a more iterative manner towards the end goal that you have at the end of that massive delivery. And you should be able to feel the benefits. Obviously, this is personal, this is mental, this is huge. It's not just a piece of software. This is something that you can recognize, reward, and have a huge satisfaction for delivery. What do you think? Should we be thinking about therapy in a more agile way? Let me know your thoughts.