Career Coaching Secrets

The Yoda of Scrum: Mark Levison on How to Solve Your Own Problems

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen interviews Mark Levison, a certified Scrum trainer and agile coach. Known as the "Yoda of Scrum," Mark shares his journey from a software engineer to a coach focused on helping clients solve their own problems.

He discusses the challenges of modern marketing in the age of AI, choosing to focus on authentic, human-first content instead of chasing SEO trends. His ultimate advice for coaches is to "shoot for the moon" and solve bigger problems, rather than just trying to double their current efforts.

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Mark Levison:

Shoot for the moon. Aim big. If all you do is aim for twice what you're doing this year, next year, you will struggle because you're trying to just double up and you'll probably fall into the same patterns you're already in. If you acknowledge that you are trying to build something new and different, then you can't fall back into the same patterns. You can't just scale up by just doubling the number of hours. You actually have to solve a different problem. It'll be harder to get to, but along the way, you're likely to learn something.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven- and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, You'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coach Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Regin, and today's guest is Mark Levison, a certified Scrum trainer, agile coach, and founder of Agile Pain Relief Consulting, known by many as the Yoda of Scrum. With over two decades of experience and more than 8,000 professionals trained, Mark has helped organizations around the world adopt agile Scrum and Kanban practices that actually stick. From his early work introducing Scrum at Cognos to now training leaders across industries, Mark blends deep technical knowledge with a human-first coaching approach. He's coached across functional teams, mentored leadership, and championed agile, not just in engineering, but across operations, sales, and marketing too. Whether he's guiding teams through test-driven development, helping leaders rethink their systems, or speaking at major agile conferences, Mark brings clarity, wisdom, and practical tools to every conversation. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Levison:

Thank you very much. It's a kind welcome.

Rexhen Doda:

It's a pleasure for me to have you here. So Mark, I want to know how everything got started. What inspired you to become a coach, and then put so much work into Scrum and Agile?

Mark Levison:

Yeah, so about probably 20 years ago now, I was working at a company called Cognos, and somewhere along the way, I realized I was being asked to build the same system for the third time. And I kind of got bored. So instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing, I started coaching the teams around me to be more effective because it seemed a hell of a lot more fun to help the teams around me be more effective than to actually do what I was allegedly being paid to do. And so that worked for a while. And then along the way, one day my boss said, you know, I'm really getting value out of the coaching work you're doing. Unfortunately, your official title is a consulting engineer, and I need you to be a consulting engineer again in writing code. And I said, well, I'm bored. 15, 16 years ago now, I decided that instead of actually returning to my alleged job, it might be a lot more fun to become independent. And so here I am, independent, helping organizations with this agile

Rexhen Doda:

stuff. So it's been almost 20 years since you started it?

Mark Levison:

Well, formally first inside an organization 20 years ago, and then 15, 15 and a half years ago, self-employment.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. So it's been a while. Throughout these years of working, which part of your coaching journey do you find the most rewarding since you started doing this for 15 years now?

Mark Levison:

So the fun part is when you see something click for someone. You're helping them work through a problem. So lots of people come to me with problems and they want solutions. And the Yoda of Scrum thing that you mentioned comes because I rarely actually solve your problem for you. Most of the time what I do is I help you figure out that you already actually knew how to solve your own problem. All you needed was a little bit of a nudge and maybe... some help seeing your problem from a different angle than you were already looking. So really what I'm doing is I'm helping you see your problem from a different angle. And once you see it from a different angle, you can usually go off and actually solve your own problem. So I get a lot of joy when I see a light bulb go off for you because all of a sudden, well, that isn't really a problem anymore. I know how to solve that problem. Boom. And off to the races.

Rexhen Doda:

And when it comes to the line of work you do, you're generally always working with a group of people, right? It's almost not Never 101. How does that work?

Mark Levison:

Well, no, it's even funnier than that. So in my world, there are people in the scrum world will come. They have an odd label or an odd title. I kind of wish it hadn't been invented, but they are called scrum masters. Okay. It's an odd title. Really a scrum master is a team's coach and facilitator, somebody coaching and facilitating without power. So I deal a lot in organizations with the scrum masters. So I'm really coaching the internal coaches. That's group one. Group two in a lot of organizations, there are also people whose label is product owner. So if a scrum master is focused primarily on understanding what makes a great team, a product owner is focused on building product. I do some coaching of product owners. And then the third audience is leaders. Because if I'm making this change and this change is going well, all of a sudden we're partway into the change and boom, you discover that the leaders are actually stuck. And you've done great work at the team level and the product level, but now the problem in the system is no longer the team and no longer the product It's now that the leadership needs to make some changes to the system. Otherwise, the system will get bogged down.

Rexhen Doda:

Is it generally that Scrum is utilized in the software development industry, or is it also in other industries as well?

Mark Levison:

So the Scrum stuff started in the software industry. And so 20 years ago, if you'd said, is it only in software? I'd say, oh, hell yeah. But after it's been, Scrum has been... People have been doing Scrum for, I think, 30-some years now. And we're going to look around now. If you're familiar with a little company in Sweden you might have heard of called Saab, the people at Saab who build fighter jets, the Gripen fighter jet, they're using Scrum to iterate on building hardware. Okay? So that's not software. And I can find you examples of people using Scrum in sales, Scrum in marketing. I can find Scrum in HR. So lots of places use Scrum.

Rexhen Doda:

I'm actually a little bit familiar with Scrum because... My earlier career was focused on, I've actually studied computer science, and then I was focused on software development, moved to web development, didn't like it as much, and then moved on to digital marketing. But yeah, I'm actually familiar with it. It's just been a long time ago that I had to study it. But yeah, I'm familiar with the terms scrum master. And so you're technically working with a scrum master instead of working with their actual team or let's say with the developers themselves.

Mark Levison:

Right. So I'm interested in having leverage. I'm in my... It's my goal by the end of the time on my planet, on the planet, I would like to have helped 100,000 people. I'm not going to, if I try to coach one at a time, the odds of my having leverage at helping 100,000 people is approximately zero. So you have to find, you have to go to the place of leverage. So right now you work with the scrum masters and the product owners. Eventually I have to find a way to scale up again, move up a food chain level so that the people I'm helping have greater impact. Or work in another way where I help more individual people, but the people get much of their own, maybe a reverse classroom or flip model, where the learning happens independently, and then they return to the center or the coach, the official coach, for the supportive to go figure out how to make all the little bits come together.

Rexhen Doda:

And for anyone who's listening and wants to learn more about how the program works, is... Is there a specific length that they need to work with you in order for them to fully be operational with the Scrum? Or is there a certain... How would you describe the program, basically, for someone that wants to work with you?

Mark Levison:

Well, yeah, there are a bunch of ways it happens. So first of all, there's some people who will take a two-day course, and at the end of a two-day course, they're blazing full steam ahead. And wow, just... watch miracles happen in their presence. And while I love to make money, I'm also overjoyed. If somebody actually takes a two-day course and learns everything they need and their team rocks afterwards, good for them. That's amazing. Okay. But a larger chunk of people actually need some additional supplementary help. And so I work, I don't work on a push basis. I've never liked telling people you should come and pay me for something. If you're in pain and you need supplementary help, well, We'll offer supplementary coaching help. How much do you need? Well, I mean, realistically, if you've got a team that's struggling, going from struggling to high performance, if everything works well and smoothly, you might get from struggling to high performance in six months. And for some groups, it's going to take a year. And for some groups at the end of the year, you might not be in a good place, but probably at that stage, we should go reflect on what's going on. And if you actually want to continue. So I'm, but again, I've met people who can at the end of a two-day workshop. They have enough information. Good for them. Let's not sell people what they don't need. Let's help them. Maybe they'll come back on their journey at a later date for greater depth. But if they get enough out of two days and they do a lot of reading on their own, that's awesome.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And how do you go about finding people to work with you or you work with them in terms of marketing specifically? What marketing channel is working best for you right now?

Mark Levison:

Well, right now, I mean, you know, thank you, ChatGPT and all of this other stuff. All previous marketing channels have blown up. So we're working on figuring out what it is that works. It used to be good old-fashioned content marketing where you actually wrote words and the words became blog posts and those worked. And they still work to a degree. LinkedIn, social media, that sort of stuff, Mastodon, that's okay. But even there, you can see an overwhelming volume of stuff that isn't really authored by people anymore. So my medium term bet is that we're about to, we're going through a phase and there's going to be a phase of disillusionment where people get really sick and tired of the stuff that gets pumped out that's inauthentic content, where somebody, instead of actually writing something or creating their own video or creating actual meaningful content, presses a writes a prompt, hits the go button on the prompt, and then takes the stuff that the AI spat out for them and copy and pastes it everywhere. So my bet is that in the medium term, we're going to do well with other people when we stick to our authentic humanity and actually show that there are real humans out there still and real humans do real work. Absolutely. How that's going to be received? Well... This is yet to be discovered.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And what is right now, you did mention that you wanted to help 100,000 people, but looking at it from a short, like on the short term future, what are some, are there any specific goals you're working towards for the next just one to three years?

Mark Levison:

Okay. So in summer in the next year, I have a new program we're attempting to launch and we're trying to figure out what it is the world wants out of this program. Because I'm opinionated. I've spent some years helping organizations and teams. I can see what works and doesn't work. But the problem is if I try to sell you a solution to what you're doing at the moment that's ineffective, if I package that poorly, I'm going to have a brilliant product that sells to nobody. So what we're running experiments on at the moment is what resonates for people. And for better or for worse, I mean, people probably should buy something called resilience, as in people should be focusing on building organizations that are able to survive when... We've got climate change problems. We've got tariff problems. We've got governments grumpy with one another problems. What other problems? There are about 600 other problems out there in our lives. Okay. Organizations could probably use resilience under those circumstances. But if you talk about resilience on LinkedIn and all of these other places, the number of people who respond to you is approximately zero. If you talk about AI and what's going on with AI and what effects it's having, sometimes you get a reaction. So, My job is going to be how do I find what people are willing to respond to and tie it back into some of what they need so that you sell them a little bit of what they want along with a medium-sized dose of what they actually need underneath what they want. How do we sprinkle, I don't know, a little bit of sugar on top of their cod liver oil?

Rexhen Doda:

That is interesting. I

Mark Levison:

suppose I haven't figured out the right solution yet. Call me in six months, see if I figured it out.

Rexhen Doda:

You bring an interesting point that what... What they want and what they need could be different. And just like I said, if we're talking about resilience, we might not get a lot of reaction. But if you're talking about something that is a little bit more shinier, such as you talk about chat GPT, you'd get some more reaction. That's quite interesting that you'd have to navigate that for the line of work that you do. And you do a very specific type of coaching. Yeah. It's a very specific type of coaching. So right now, when it comes to investments, I also want to know what are some good investments and bad investments, if any, that you've done in your coaching business? Let's say when it comes to good investments, they could be investments in yourself, investments in coaching business that you feel like, actually, it was a good investment. I got quite a little bit of ROI on it. And when it comes to bad investments, there are investments that just like were not good, even when it comes to your use of time.

Mark Levison:

So some bad investments. I can immediately come up with two in the past few years. I won't name the organizations, but I'll give you a sense of the mechanics. So one organization promised to help me massively improve my mailing list work and grow my mailing list and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we put in a lot of time with their coach and created a new offering. And then the offering generated one to two new signups on our mailing list a week. And we already have a 5,000 person mailing list. That's irrelevant. What if, realistically, if you get one of these people a week, well, one in 10 of those people is ever going to sign up for even a $50 product, and one in 100 will sign up for a $1,000 product. So I spent a considerable sum of money and a considerable amount of time to get negative results. Okay, that's one example. I fell from there, and I fell into a trap of my own making. Then somebody... I got convinced that because our web traffic was sliding, and we've done so well for so many years on web traffic to articles I write, that all we needed to do was work on SEO. So I found an SEO company and boy, they did a good job to a point. But their SEO was all about building a tower. You need a certain number of articles. We'll call them baby articles. And the baby articles fed the bigger articles. And the bigger articles were then linking to the things that mattered. And yeah. They did actually do some of what they promised. Our rankings did jump for a few things, and a few more searches happened. But somewhere along the way, I was realizing that all they wanted me to do was write. They wanted to generate all the copy with AI, and that isn't really who I am. And the copy they wanted was written around subjects that didn't really make me... It's like, if you found this copy and you associated it with my name, would I be proud that you found that copy? And I'm like, no, not really. I'm not very proud at that moment. So then we parted ways with them and they also forecast doom and gloom and they forecast that our world would come to an end. Now, one thing we have done that has paid off, but maybe not in the way that's useful to most coaches. I was finding that writing new articles for our website was a bit of a pain because our website was hosted in WordPress. And I do all of my writing in plain text format called Markdown. And then my operations manager does some editing work for me. And then she would translate it all. And then I would find a bunch of small changes I wanted to make. But now it was over on the silly WordPress thing. I'm hyper-technical. My operations manager can just about get along with me and just about stomach me. So I migrated my entire website to a model, an approach called in Markdown, something called Astro. Our entire website is now rendered in Markdown, where I simply do my writing in Markdown, I feed it to my operations manager who edits my Markdown, and then we hit the publish button on the website and it goes live. So that's streamlined our writing process, and now I can write a lot more freely and a lot more rapidly. Is that a massive marketing win? I'm not sure. Or is it a massive psychological win for me, reducing the amount of effort, I feel, making it easier for me to get engaged with my own writing again? Probably more of the psychological win for me, the human. Probably not convinced that it's the super-duper marketing win, because sadly, as we both know, I think in the short term, at least, content is not currently winning the world over.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we're more in an era of asking the right questions, versus getting or having the answers. Yes. Because it's easy to get the answer. It's hard to know what the problem is sometimes. There's a lot of places where you can get the answer, but asking the right question is more challenging. Yes. So when it comes to challenges since we're here what is a challenge that right now in your business you're trying to solve for next in the short term

Mark Levison:

well let's sit back to the question of what is it people will actually engage in what are they actually interested in so again my hypothesis is that people need more resilience in their organizations okay or or to be more effective i don't know if resilience is going to be the right word but something along the line of being more effective What is it that they're actually willing to engage with? What is it they might actually be willing to pay for? So I need to be running experiments to validate or invalidate what are people interested in. Now, curiously, speaking of conferences at the moment, the stuff that people are willing to accept for conferences, I can get sessions accepted for conferences. I try proposing stuff from resilience. Reaction is meh. I propose a session for you on how AI used poorly may destroy your business. People are very interested in that. So clearly there's an angle there. And if you think about it, how AI may destroy your business if used poorly is merely flipping the resilience question but flipping it up to a different angle. So I'm interested in how can I reframe things until we find what we solve the problem that people need while actually reaching them on a channel or in a way that they're open to hearing. Because if I'm not careful and I sell them lots of AI stuff, I may actually make their lives worse. I may make my money today. Pretend I had some AI fairy dust and I promised to sprinkle it on your business. And this fairy dust didn't actually do what I promised. I'd make my money on the first time through, but you wouldn't trust me again after that. So I need to find a way of selling people what they need, focus on effectiveness and resilience, while actually wrapping it in a coding that they're willing to buy.

Rexhen Doda:

Interesting. So repositioning and redefining your offer is what you're trying to focus on mostly.

Mark Levison:

Right.

Rexhen Doda:

And yeah, that is a valid challenge. And it's one of those things that if you get that right, it starts to get easier after that. So if you get a very good offer upfront, then marketing it becomes easier from my perspective, at least. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And this is the final question. What advice would you like to give to other coaches who are looking to scale their impact? And by impact, I mean, just like you mentioned, you want to reach to 100,000 people. What advice would you give to people who are trying to the same.

Mark Levison:

Shoot for the moon. Aim big. If all you do is aim for twice what you're doing this year, next year, you will struggle because you're trying to just double up and you'll probably fall into the same patterns you're already in. If you acknowledge that you are trying to build something new and different, then you can't fall back into the same patterns. You can't just scale up by just doubling the number of hours. You actually have to solve a different problem. It'll be harder to get to, but along the way, you're likely to learn something. I think in the long run, all of us are going to be better. I think we win in the long run. I think the win in the long run comes from... our ability to adapt and our ability to figure out what's actually going on underneath the surface of any problem or any system we're dealing with and come up with a better way of solving the problem than we previously had.

Rexhen Doda:

For anyone who's listening and wants to find you or connect with you, they can go into LinkedIn and search Mark Levison. They'll be able to find you there. They can go into your website, agilepainrelief.com. They'll be able to find you there as well. Is there any other way that people can connect with you and find you?

Mark Levison:

Those are the two best ones. I also participate on a funny little thing called Mastodon, if you've heard of Mastodon. I am Mark. Actually, it's funny. I'm mleveson at agilealliance.social. But if you haven't heard of Mastodon, don't worry. I'm not going to. Mastodon is like Twitter, except decentralized Twitter. It's Twitter for the people who came to the conclusion that Twitter hadn't become a place they could stomach being. Mastodon is the anti-corporate version of Twitter.

Rexhen Doda:

Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing that.

Mark Levison:

If you think decentralized things are cool, Mastodon is a cool place. If you think the idea of decentralized social media is a bit weird, don't go there.

Rexhen Doda:

I don't think anyone... likes the centralized centralized version of it so yeah everything that's decentralized i think is generally better

Mark Levison:

Well, given my work as an agile coach, I prefer decentralization because the moment we have central control of a system, the system bottlenecks on the ability of the person at the center to do their job. So I prefer decentralized systems. But it's not just philosophical. I also prefer it because the quality of the conversation over there tends to be better. I don't need to reach the largest number of people in the world. I'm interested in talking to people who are actually engaged and thoughtful and caring.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that, Mark. And thank you for coming to the podcast. This was a lovely conversation. Thank you so much.

Mark Levison:

Thank you. It

Davis Nguyen:

was

Mark Levison:

fun.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.