Coding Chats Episode 82 - John talks with Dave Westgarth, head of delivery at a Databricks consultancy. Dave shares his path from a psychology degree and McDonald's into tech, and they discuss why the Scrum Master role is so misunderstood, how it differs from a delivery manager, and whether either needs to be technical.They also look at how AI is changing delivery work. Faster code just moves the bottleneck upstream, John argues there's no AI-specific skill you can't learn in a day, and engineering fundamentals are what make AI useful.
Chapters
00:00 Journey to Technology: A Personal Story
10:33 The Role of a Scrum Master: Misunderstandings and Realities16:52 The Impact of AI on Scrum Master Roles
24:41 Hiring and Empowering the Right People
26:01 Scrum Master vs. Delivery Manager: Understanding the Roles
26:06 Technical Skills: Should Scrum Masters Be Technical?
32:19 The Value of Certifications in Professional Development
38:48 AI's Role in Delivery Management
47:13 Connecting with Dave Westgarth
Dave's Links:
https://www.technicalscrum.orghttps://
www.linkedin.com/in/dave-westgarth/
John's Links:
John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett/
John’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johncrickett
John's Twitter: https://x.com/johncrickett
John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
Check out John's software engineering related newsletters: Coding Challenges: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ which shares real-world project ideas that you can use to level up your coding skills.
Developing Skills: https://read.developingskills.fyi/ covering everything from system design to soft skills, helping them progress their career from junior to staff+ or for those that want onto a management track.
Takeaways
Scrum Masters who just move Jira tickets and run ceremonies are the ones AI can replace.
Be loyal to agile's values, not the mechanics of the framework.
If AI makes code ten times faster, stakeholders and approvals need to keep up, or the bottleneck just moves.
In retrospectives, pick one small change instead of trying to fix everything.
Regular delivery cuts down the demand for status reports.
Technical skills help managers only if they don't take over the work and stop developing their people.
There's no AI-specific skill you can't learn in a day, but using AI well takes software engineering fundamentals.
Writing code is a small part of software engineering.
Tutorials show the perfect path, but the real learning happens when you get stuck.
Certifications work best as forced learning, not just CV decoration.
