The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Like a Good Neighbor.. When Losing is WINNING! We spend a lot of our lives trying to gain something. More knowledge. More experience. More success. More confidence. More influence. But what if becoming your best self isn't always about what you add? What if it's about what you're finally willing to lose? In today’s episode of The Agile Daily Standup , we're talking about a very dif...

How to Handle Conflicting Stakeholder Priorities Marketing wants it faster . Finance wants it cheaper . IT wants it safer . Operations wants it stable . And the customer? They just want something that actually solves their problem. 😳 Welcome to stakeholder management. Conflicting priorities aren’t a sign that something has gone wrong. In most organizations, they’re completely normal. Different st...

What Consistent Teams do Differently What separates a team that occasionally does great work from a team that consistently delivers great results? It’s usually not talent. It’s not a perfect process. And it definitely isn’t working harder. It’s consistency. The best teams build small, repeatable behaviors that compound over time. They communicate openly. They stay aligned around a shared purpose....

Your Team Is Delivering. So, Why Does It Feel Off? The stories are getting completed. Velocity looks good. Releases are happening on time. Stakeholders seem happy. So why does something still feel... OFF? This is one of the most dangerous situations a leader can encounter because, on paper, everything looks successful. But delivery metrics don't always tell us the whole story. Behind those green d...

When Managers Solve Every Problem, the Organization Gets Weaker Great managers solve problems. Right? Maybe not. One of the easiest traps for a talented leader to fall into is becoming the person everyone depends on to make problems disappear. A team gets stuck? You fix it. A difficult decision needs to be made? You make it. Conflict emerges? You step in. Someone needs an answer? You've got on...

Remembering September 11th Some days pass into history. Others remain with us forever. September 11, 2001 was one of those days. In this special episode of The Agile Daily Standup , we're setting aside our normal conversation to pause, reflect, and remember. We remember the innocent lives lost. We honor the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, military members, first responders, and ordi...

The Better You Are at Delivery Management, The Less Visible You Become Here’s one of the strangest paradoxes of great leadership: The better you become at delivery management, the less people may notice you doing it. Why? Because when delivery is working well, there’s often less drama, fewer surprises, fewer escalations, and a whole lot less noise. Dependencies get handled. Risks are addressed ear...

ARE LEADERS KEEPINGPEOPLE IN THEIR LANES? YOU CAN'T DEMAND TEAMWORK WHILE REWARDING INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR. And perhaps a small visual callout: STAFFED AS INDIVIDUALS. MEASURED AS INDIVIDUALS. REWARDED AS INDIVIDUALS. EXPECTED TO ACT LIKE A TEAM. 🤔 That last sequence is the hook I'd especially want on the artwork. For the episode itself, I’d make sure we explicitly credit Mike Cohn for the s...

Is Transparency Really the Answer? Is Transparency Really the Answer? We hear it constantly in Agile: “We need more transparency.” But does transparency really mean sharing everything ? In Episode 1647 of The Agile Daily Standup , we explore an important leadership lesson: more information does NOT automatically create more understanding. Long status reports, endless project updates, detailed expl...

Celebrating and Understanding Labor Day Labor Day is more than the unofficial end of summer, a long weekend, or one last chance to fire up the grill. 🇺🇸 It’s an opportunity to recognize the people whose work, sacrifice, creativity, and determination help move our communities and organizations forward every single day. In Episode 1646 of The Agile Daily Standup , we take a quick look at what Labor...

The Importance of Recognition Today we celebrate being recognized as a TOP 3 Agile Coaching podcast on the internet! How important is recognition? VERY IMPORTANT!! 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/in/leehenson/

Agile Is Not Dead. AI Didn’t Kill It. And Waterfall Is Not Back A recent article claimed that Agile is dead, AI killed it, and Waterfall is back. It is a strong headline. It is also the kind of headline built to provoke a reaction. Yet beneath the noise lies a useful challenge that leaders should not dismiss too quickly. The article takes aim at ceremony-heavy Agile, vague user stories, weak deliv...

How to Do Hard Things When You Have Zero Motivation One of the biggest mistakes you can make if you want to be consistent is trying to “trick” your brain. We’ve all seen the advice: “Just do it for two minutes.” “Give yourself a reward.” When I was stuck  and wanted to change my life, I fell for it too. I remember watching a YouTube video more than 10 years ago about “proven hacks” and trying it....

Agile Practitioners and Future Jobs There are insights that only come to me after a good conversation. My earlier self would have said “too late, a missed opportunity, again less than perfect”. Right now I rather think “moving forward mentally, another opportunity will come, great”. Recently, in the breaks between the recording, we had chatted about how wrong and unattractive the idea of “Scrum Ma...

Why Every Software Project Needs Project Management When people think about software development, they often imagine developers writing code. However, building successful software involves much more than programming. Every software project requires planning, communication, teamwork and continuous monitoring. This is where Agile Project Management  becomes essential. As I continue learning about so...

Isn’t That My Manager’s Job? W hen I work with product leaders on product strategy, one of the most common responses I hear is, “Isn’t that my manager’s job?” Sometimes it comes as a complaint. Sometimes it’s a genuine question. Either way, it usually reflects the same belief: strategy belongs somewhere above them. On paper, they are not entirely wrong. It does sound like something a manager shoul...

Leadership as a Supporting Role Do you find yourself huffing and puffing as a tech leader? Not sure how to keep all of those plates spinning? You, my friend, need to let go of your main character syndrome. The answer to the overwhelming load many tech executives report is rarely to work harder. Rather than piling ever more things on your plate, it’s time to embrace the existence of your team. How...

Feeling The World Cup - A Sons Blind Journey In Iran, a father named Ardashir Babajani found a deeply creative way to share one of his favorite joys with his nine-year-old son, Alireza, who was born blind. Like millions of families around the world, they love soccer, and especially the World Cup. But for Alireza, watching the game on a screen wasn’t enough to make the action come alive. So his fat...

How To Develop People Skills? Developing people skills, often referred to as soft skills or interpersonal intelligence, is less about innate charisma and more about the consistent application of specific psychological frameworks. For a professional looking to manage teams or influence stakeholders, these skills are the primary lever for organizational efficiency. Here is a strategic guide to devel...

Scrum Needs Leadership Support - Mike Cohn One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is treating Scrum or agile as something isolated to the teams. The teams will be agile. The teams will do Scrum. The teams will hold the meetings. The teams will become faster. But the surrounding organization remains largely unchanged. That is not sustainable. Scrum asks teams to focus, collaborate, inspect, adapt...

What Do Product Managers Do All Day? If you read a typical product manager job description, the role sounds very polished. Define vision. Own the roadmap. Drive strategy. Work cross-functionally. Deliver impact. It all sounds important, structured, and clear. And to be fair, none of it is wrong. But it also doesn’t quite capture what the role actually feels like day to day. So let me take you thro...

Lagging Behind? Metrics and Reporting Matter Ask any team what metrics they track, and you’ll get some version of the same list… Velocity. Story points completed. Burndown. Sprint goal hit rate. Maybe defect counts if someone’s been paying attention. These numbers feel solid. They’re concrete, they’re consistent, and they show up reliably at the end of every sprint. I get why teams hold onto them....

Happy Pioneer Day! Pioneer Day is a July 24th holiday that commemorates the arrival of the first group of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and it matters to American history because it captures both the courage of frontier migration and the complicated story of westward expansion, religious freedom, and colonization in the American West. How to connect with Agi...

7 Principles on Building Trust From Ted Lasso A few weeks ago, I found myself watching Ted Lasso, and what started as entertainment became something else entirely: a masterclass on what makes teams actually work, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was witnessing, this peculiar alchemy where incompetence somehow creates excellence. What struck me wasn’t the humor, though there’s plenty of it...

Focus Requires Saying Not Yet ~ Mike Cohn Many Scrum problems are really focus problems. Organizations try to do too many things at once. They have too many initiatives, too many urgent requests, too many stakeholders, too many priorities, and too little willingness to say “not yet.” Scrum makes this visible. A sprint creates a short planning horizon for deciding what the team can accomplish next....