Episode Details

Agile was always at its best in small places. Startups, disruptors, the five person team in the corner nobody was watching. Somewhere along the way we dragged it into the office tower. We forgot where it came from, and what it was good at.

When I met Eric Wu and Andrew Don of Catalyst Impact Studio, I wanted to know what it looks like when you take Agile back home. They work with nonprofits in Chicago, which means small teams, small budgets and a world that’s turned upside down every other week.

Andrew was an engineer in enterprise SaaS when his whole team got Scrum certified back in 2012. He was also sitting on the board of a youth nonprofit at the time, and he couldn’t unsee the gap between those wrolds. Eric spent 15 years in consulting and corporate strategy before he got fed up with chasing profit for its own sake. They met through Chicago’s AAPI philanthropy community and kept having the same conversation for years until they finally did something about it.

Why Catalyst Impact Studio works with nonprofits

Eric and Andrew know why the resistance hits harder in a nonprofit. Funding gets pulled or tied up in court, inflation and tariffs raise the cost of every service, and nobody knows what AI is going to do next. A big company can eat a failed project and move on, but a nonprofit with that kind of margin can’t.

How Catalyst Impact Studio makes Agile stick

Here’s what surprised Andrew. The people who fought him hardest were the most overwhelmed and burned out people in the room. They had nothing left in the tank for one more change, even when the way they were working was grinding them into the ground.

So he doesn’t lead with the framework. He sits down, listens and figures out what their day actually looks like. Then he shows them something useful right away. You’ll hear the story of the first daily scrum he ran with a nonprofit team, and how in ten minutes you could see eyes go wide because for the first time everybody knew what everybody else was working on. After that they wanted more.

We talk about active listening all the time in our world, but most of us think it means taking good notes when someone hands us a requirement. Andrew’s version starts way earlier, with making people feel seen and heard before you ask them to change a thing.

What Catalyst Impact Studio removed from Scrum

Andrew tried story points and velocity with one of his first nonprofit teams and it went nowhere. When one person’s doing finance, another’s fundraising and someone else is running programs, nobody can agree on what a “3 point task” even is. So he tossed it. What’s left is sprint planning, the daily scrum, retros and a board everyone can see. If something doesn’t pay for itself, it’s gone.

Where to start on Monday

I asked them what someone coming out of a big bank (with a rulebook and a center of excellence propping them up) should do on day one in a small shop with no guardrails. Both said the same thing. Work in short cycles. Eric is an endurance runner and he calls it sprinting a marathon. Worry about the first mile, because you have no clue what mile 18 is going to throw at you. Andrew adds a question almost no team asks in planning, which is how much capacity they really have.

The work didn’t go anywhere

For years you could say “I’m an agile coach” and people knew what you brought to the table. That’s over. A lot of good people are shrinking into jobs the