🎧 Scrums.com: AI Software Factory with Matt Robertshaw
Welcome to Scrums.com’s Engineering Arena! A podcast dedicated to leaders who want to stay ahead in the fast-evolving software engineering industry. In each 30-minute episode, we uncover actionable insights and strategies from top innovators in the world of finance and technology.
🎙 Episode Guest
Matt Robertshaw – Group Head of Product Management at Scrums.com
- Host: Chase Le Roux
- Roles: Product leadership, delivery management, client alignment
- Expertise: Software delivery, stakeholder management, managed teams, AI-augmented delivery
- Background: Matt has a decade of complex delivery work across banking, fintech, retail, e-commerce, and more. This includes an agricultural fintech build in South Africa.
About Scrums.com
Scrums.com is the enterprise AI Software Engineering Orchestration Platform (SEOP): mission control for engineering and product leaders. It lets them deploy AI agents, talent, teams, tools, infrastructure and delivery operations instantly from one platform, with live engineering intelligence, unified reporting and predictable software delivery. One platform. One SLA. One deploy.
Software Engineering. Sorted.™
🌟 Key Topics Covered
| Topic | Summary |
|---|---|
| When Speed, Quality, Cost, and Control Collide | Software delivery breaks when these four forces pull in different directions. Every project has many stakeholders and requirements that depend on each other. “Software delivery is actually super complicated. You’ve got multitudes of stakeholders, you’ve got requirements that have dependencies.” |
| Stakeholder Alignment Decides Success | Matt describes an agricultural fintech build in South Africa where the project sponsor and the product owner were not aligned, and how this disrupted delivery. His lesson is to get alignment at the start, before work begins. |
| Where Fixed-Fee and Hourly Models Fall Short | Hourly rates and fixed-fee contracts both add a price for unknown risk. Matt explains how this makes projects cost more, makes outcomes harder to predict, and causes projects to stall. |
| The Delivery Plan: Ownership, Managed Teams, and AI | Scrums.com’s delivery plan combines delivery ownership, managed teams, and AI augmentation. It gives predictable cost for predictable outcomes. Matt explains what “unlimited requests” means in practice, and how queueing, scoping, and prioritization keep quality high. |
| AI Agents That Support Engineers, Not Replace Them | AI agents support code reviews, testing, and workflows. Engineers stay in control of the work. Matt also explains why clean data matters when you build with AI. |
| Control and IP Ownership Stay With the Client | Faster delivery must not cost transparency, accountability, or ownership. Matt explains how clients keep control of their work and ownership of their intellectual property. |
| What Clients Actually Want | Clients do not come to Scrums.com only for more people. They want results they can see and understand. “They’re looking for understanding predictable cost for predictable outcomes with shipped deliverables.” |
🚀 Key Lessons for Technology Leaders
✅ Align Early: Get the sponsor and the product owner on the same page before work starts.
✅ Price for Outcomes: Hourly and fixed-fee models charge you for unknowns. Look for models that give a predictable cost.
✅ Queue and Prioritise: Unlimited requests work when a clear queue, scope, and priority control the flow.
✅ Augment, Don’t Replace: Use AI agents to support engineers in reviews, testing, and workflows.
✅ Own Your IP: Speed must never cost you control or ownership of your code.
🎯 Actionable Takeaways
- Map all stakeholders and their dependencies at the start of each project.
- Examine your current pricing model and identify the cost of risk it adds.
- Put your requests in a queue, scope each one, and deliver them in order of priority.
- Clean your data before you build with AI.
- Make sure your contracts state who owns the intellectual property.
📖 Matt’s Delivery Insight: “Predictable cost for predictable outcomes with shipped deliverables.”
🔗 Ship better software, with less risk. If you lead product, engineering, or transformation at a bank, fintech, or enterprise company, this conversation shows how experience, process, and AI can work together to improve software delivery. Visit Scrums.com to learn more.
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