The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

We’re doing Scrum. Why does everything take so long to finish? For many teams, delivery bogs down because of the way individuals approach the work itself. Most teams are still working in a sequence: one person finishes their part, hands it off, and then the next person begins. Designers wait for analysis to finish. Developers wait for designs. Testers wait for the code to be done. Everyone’s optim...

4 Steps to Building a Product Strategy This is the process I use and have taken dozens of product leaders and founders through to build their product strategy. It’s deliberately designed to be lightweight, flexible but not a checklist. This means there’s a lot of work that you still need to do. Rather than trying to ask you to fill-in-the-blanks like “what’s your unique value prop” or “target cust...

Sprint Planning or Sprint Guessing? Welcome to  sprint planning  — that magical 90-minute meeting (that always becomes 3 hours) where: Developers turn into psychics Product managers become game show hosts Product owners stare into a backlog like it’s a crystal ball Sound familiar? For many Agile teams, sprint planning isn’t the crisp, focused ritual described in books. It’s often more ambiguous, c...

The Light on Maple Street — A Holiday Story About Small Acts That Become Everything It started with one string of lights. Maple Street was the kind of block where porches still had rocking chairs and everyone knew which mailboxes belonged to which dog. In late November, between the first frost and the rush of the season, the Wilsons put up a single strand of blue bulbs across their porch. They’d j...

So, what does a Project Manager actually do? Ah, the eternal question. What does a PM actually do? Well, most people think it’s the easiest job in the world — after all, you just tell everyone else what to do, right? Sure, if you also enjoy being the middle child in a family of stress-addicted workaholics with a taste for crises. In the last decade or so, I’ve worked in everything from Fortune 500...

Are You Protecting Your Team Against the Right Thing? - Mike Cohn A lot has been written and said about the responsibility of a Scrum Master to protect the team. Examples of protecting the team typically involve running interference with well-meaning but overzealous product owners, stakeholders, and managers. Teams run into trouble all the time from people who want it all now or who keep adding mo...

Is Scrum Slowly Taking Away Your Will To Live? On the surface, it sounds innocent, doesn’t it? Cheerful even. Like something British schoolchildren might play on a muddy field before promptly breaking an ankle. But no. In reality, Scrum is a  framework  for managing work in software development, and it is somehow both  wildly popular  and  completely misunderstood  by… well, almost everyone. How t...

Project Manager vs Product Manager vs Business Analyst You’ve probably heard the terms  project manager ,  product manager , and  business analyst  tossed around like interchangeable buzzwords. But let’s be honest — most posts explaining these roles either put you to sleep or leave you more confused than before. So let’s break it down properly. No jargon. No textbook talk. Just real, human languag...

The Black Friday That Bought a Neighborhood Back The Bell & Book was a tiny independent bookstore wedged between a dry cleaner and a pawnshop on a corner that hadn’t seen much sparkle in years. Its owner, Marta, had run it for twenty years: poetry nights, school field-trip discounts, repair-your-soul advice between the biographies. Two months before Thanksgiving, a national big-box retailer an...

The Thanksgiving Sprint — an AgileDad story It started two years ago in a neighborhood I know well — a mix of veterans, young families, recent transplants, and folks who’d been in the same house so long they remembered when the stoplight at the corner was just a tree. Someone on the block said aloud what people often think but don’t say: “We’ve got plenty, but a lot of us are missing the parts tha...

Can teams pull in more work during a sprint? - Mike Cohn “Can we bring in more work if we’re ahead in a sprint?" It’s one of the most common questions I get from Scrum teams — and honestly, for a long time, I couldn’t understand why. The answer felt obvious. Of course you can bring in more work if you're ahead and clearly going to finish everything you committed to do. Just like you can d...

Most Backlog Management Is Just Organized Procrastination We’ve been told the backlog is how we steer. How we prioritise. How we plan. So we invest hours, maybe days, maintaining it: Refinement sessions Estimation rituals (battles?) Prioritisation debates Acceptance criteria roulette How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/ag...

What Makes a Great Product Manager? When I first stepped into product management, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I thought it was about building cool features, running a few sprints, and celebrating launch days with cake and confetti. What I didn’t expect? The emotional rollercoaster of stakeholder battles, last-minute pivots, and the constant juggling between what’s ideal and what’s pos...

A Home That Rebuilt a Life” — the story of Army veteran Sean Karpf After stepping on an IED in Afghanistan, Army Sergeant Sean Karpf faced years of surgeries, rehab, and the long, slow work of rebuilding a life altered by injury. What changed everything was not a single miracle but a community-backed act of care: Homes For Our Troops (HFOT) built and donated a specially adapted, mortgage-free home...

5 Essential Skills Every Scrum Master Needs Being a Scrum Master isn’t just about booking meetings and quoting the Scrum Guide. It’s about showing up every day as a change agent — the one who helps people work better together, face complexity with courage, and actually deliver value. It’s easy to forget that Scrum is fundamentally about people. Your job as a Scrum Master is to unlock that potentia...

10 Mistakes Enterprises Make When Scaling Agile — and How to Avoid Them When I walk into a Fortune 500 boardroom and hear, “We’ve adopted Agile,” I brace myself. Usually, what follows is a whirlwind of rebranded status meetings, overwhelmed middle managers, and teams confused about whether they’re sprinting or slowly marching in circles. Enterprise Agile transformations are rarely short on ambitio...

If You Want Better Stories, Stop Writing Them All Yourself I’ve talked to a lot of product owners who are drowning in tickets, trying to “get ahead” by writing every single user story themselves. I used to be one of them. And every sprint, we’d slip. Morale tanked. The team blamed the process, and I blamed myself. But after one conversation — and one uncomfortable realization — I found a single th...

Velocity = The Most Abused Agile Metric Ever Welcome to the dark side of velocity — the number that started as a planning aid and ended up as a weaponized performance metric, often wielded by people who’ve never touched a user story in their lives. In this episode, we’ll break down: What velocity is  supposed  to do How it gets misunderstood and misused Why chasing it kills team health And how to...

A Make-A-Wish That Turned Into a Gift for Others When Karina’s Make-A-Wish moment arrived, she didn’t ask for a trip or a celebrity meet-and-greet. Instead she asked to create a day for other sick kids — a place where they could forget hospitals and treatments for a while. Make-A-Wish marked Karina’s request as their historic 500,000th wish and worked with partners to turn it into a virtual “camp”...

The Heart of New Leadership is Curiosity Most of us are drawn to rules and limits. They give us a sense of safety. Structure and predictability offer comfort: we know what to expect, and what’s expected of us. For a while, this feels like stability. But in truth, it often leads to stagnation. The artist doesn’t value safety and smallness. The artist values discovery. To create something new, you h...

Is your team moving in sync—or spinning in circles? - Mike Cohn Ever feel like your agile team  should  be working smoothly—but something’s just a bit off? Handoffs feel clunky. Meetings drag. Even small changes spark big debates. It’s not that your team isn’t skilled—it’s that you’re not quite in sync. Rowers have a word for the alignment you’re seeking: swing. What is swing? In crew rowing, swin...

Today we remember Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry - Happy Veterans Day On May 26, 2008, in Paktya Province, Afghanistan, Army Ranger Leroy A. Petry and his team were ambushed. During the firefight an enemy grenade landed near Petry and several fellow Rangers. Without hesitation Petry grabbed the grenade and attempted to throw it away from the group. The grenade detonated as he was throwing it; Petry su...

How To Align Your Team Before Year-End - 5 Things You Must Do NOW! 1. Call Out the Elephant in the Room 2. Don’t Let the Momentum Stall 3. Run an Assets & Liabilities Exercise 4. Revisit Your Purpose Statement 5. Consider a Design Sprint How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook]  https://www.facebook....

The Hand Written Letter of Gratitude In a classroom study, students were asked to write a heartfelt letter of thanks to someone who had helped them and then read that letter aloud to the person in a surprise face-to-face meeting. The scene that followed — the surprised, emotional reactions from the recipients and the visible pride and relief on the students’ faces — was unforgettable. Beyond the m...

How Do we GROW? - Getting People on The Same Page! Do you know the Acronym GROW? G = Goals R = Reality O = Options, Opportunities, and Obstacles W = What We Will Commit to do First... How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook]  https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin]  https://www.linkedin.com/i...