The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

What To Do When Your Team Says They Do Not Need The Daily Scrum? When your team pushes back against the daily stand-up, responding with thoughtfulness and adaptability is essential. The daily collaboration meeting, whether you call it a stand-up or something else, plays a crucial role in Agile success. However, it’s not just about keeping the meeting-it’s about ensuring it serves its true purpose...

Lessons From Barbie for When a Project Absolutely MUST Succeed - Mike Cohn I finally watched  Barbie . I enjoyed it, which doesn’t surprise me. It had to be good. Barbie was a must-succeed project. If the movie had flopped, it would probably be a decade before anyone could try again to make a Barbie movie. But a successful movie would serve as a platform for sequels. While watching  Barbie  (and s...

What Does a Project Manager Do? People Management Requirements Management Expectation Management Task Management Commitment Management Risk Management Communication Management Change Management Resource Management Dependency Management Contract Management Supplier Management How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ -...

How Do We Do Better Capacity Planning & Forecasting? Quarterly planning always seems to creep up on us. It’s a busy time, and teams are usually scrambling to get their projects scoped. I used to feel the same pressure — like no matter how much effort I put into planning, something always slipped through the cracks. One challenge for engineering managers is  planning capacity  while balancing c...

Top 4 Product Manager SuperPowers Execution Sense:  This is all about making things happen. It’s one thing to have a plan, but bringing it to life? That’s where execution sense comes in. You ensure that not only do tasks get completed on time, but they’re done brilliantly. ⏱️✨ Analytical Sense:  This superpower focuses on your ability to think critically, use data to make informed decisions, and...

Just Focus on Yourself.. Nobody Really Cares What You Do.. We thought that people were watching us. I don’t want to say that we are narcissistic, because I’m not going to talk about that. I’m just saying that it is normal to feel like that. Feeling that people might be judging us or watching us. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagr...

Top 10 Principles For Effective Team Leaders The role of a leader is to build the business and grow the team…at the same time. Appreciation is the most valuable currency your team wants and needs. Praise in public, coach in private You aren’t just the team leader…you are the head talent scout and training coach . As team leader, EQ and CQ are more important than IQ. Teach your team to bring you so...

Simple Practices To Prevent Wasteful Meetings Before each session, we need to clarify: 1️⃣ Required participants 👨‍⚖️ 👩‍⚖️ 2️⃣ Purpose 🤔 3️⃣ Desired outcome 🎯 4️⃣ How to prepare 🤔 5️⃣ Agenda 🗓 It’s super simple and offers some great advantages: ✅ If any of these parts are unclear, ask the organizer for clarification. ✅ If parts remain unclear, don’t join the session! ✅ Meetings are often s...

Celebrate Failure? Why Not? Teams are more effective when they operate in environments that allow members to take interpersonal risks, such as admitting they don’t know something, offering feedback and support, asking for help, or sharing their mistakes and failures. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebo...

How To Be a Great Entrepreneur The other night, I had dinner with a group of 40-ish young entrepreneurs on my university’s campus. As you’d expect, I spoke with lots of enthusiastic founders and heard lots of pitches about the projects they’re working on. But one student, in particular, stood out. He was clearly passionate about entrepreneurship and the startup he was building. He shared how he ha...

How to Make the Best Decision Under the Worst Circumstances When making decisions under suboptimal conditions — the situation is not in our favour, we have incomplete details, or there’s an issue that requires urgent attention — most of us tend to screw up. We overreact, hurry, and let our biases prevent us from making good decisions. We assume that, given the conditions and constraints under whic...

How Can an Agile Coach Build Self-Efficacy of The Team? What is Self-efficacy? “Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s confidence in their ability to complete a task or achieve a goal. This concept was originally developed by psychologist Albert Bandura” 1. One way is to create a blameless postmortem, rather than pointing fingers on each-other for the mistake which is already committed, explore a...

Psychological Safety In The Agile Community Summary of Key Results We define the Agile community as a global knowledge-sharing community with many smaller subcommunities. Research has shown that psychological safety is an essential predictor of members’ intent to continue contributing to virtual communities. For in-person interactions, most participants (N=160) experience a moderate to high level...

Why Is Customer Loyalty So Important? For those who don’t know, UX principles are guidelines used to create products that provide the right kinds of experiences to users. They focus on usability, functionality, and how users feel and respond. Here’s a quick rundown of those principles: Discoverability:   Users should easily find the features they need. Feedback:   Users should get immediate and un...

Five Factors to Consider when Prioritizing - Mike Cohn Not only do you need to build the right features, you have to build them in the right order. I want to share five key factors you should consider when prioritizing a product backlog.  Value Naturally, you need to consider how valuable a feature will be,  value  is a nebulous term. Most work a team will pursue will be valuable to users. But oth...

Driving a 16 Foot FULLY LOADED Box Truck 2349 Miles in 2.5 Days Across The USA... Just listen to this special episode where I detail the top 3 things I learned making this drive for the third time. 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....

What is Product Strategy Discovery? What is product strategy discovery? In a nutshell, it’s about finding a problem worth solving. More precisely, it is the process of developing a  product strategy  whose implementation will likely create the desired value and impact. It applies to a brand-new product as well as an existing one whose current strategy is no longer valid, for example, as market con...

Product Discovery is an exciting part of any Design Project, and it may be a Designer’s first exposure to working with executives. During a Project Kickoff, CEOs and other executives may come to discuss their grand vision of the project or help establish its overall goals. Unfortunately, as a result, many Designers stay silent and wait for other voices to speak up and finish talking. However, that...

Connect Teams to Customers and Avoid the Mistake of Backlog Fixation Product team members couldn’t care less about the customer. Product teams need to stay focused on the work. Only the product manager should perform discovery with the customer. The product team can’t connect from a different time zone. Product team members are incapable. There are too many customers for the team to cover. This wi...

Does Every User Story Have To Be Small? Small user stories are essential to success with agile. When it’s time to bring stories into an iteration, I always want them to be small. But larger stories have their place as well–especially for something you're not going to work on imminently. Suppose you have just begun work on a new product that will include a set of reports. Because this is a new...

Anti-Agile: The Agile Industrial Complex Daniel Mezick says: “It is that web of Agile institutions, Agile thought leaders and Agile consulting firms that implicitly collude to make normal the very harmful and disrespectful imposition of Agile practices on teams without consent. The Agile space is now a “no-innovation zone.” It tolerates and in fact perpetuates a highly weaponized version of Agile....

The Power of Baby Steps - Atomic Habits Have you ever watched a baby learn to walk? For the past month and a half, she’s been carefully moving with her little walker, taking wobbly steps, testing her balance, and building her confidence. Now, she’s starting to take her first steps without it—unsteady, unsure, but determined. What amazes me most is her persistence. Every time she falls, she doesn’t...

How Much Should You Pay a ScrumMaster? OR Do You Even Need One? So how much does a Scrum Master cost? Let’s chat about it, I think the answer might just surprise you. Now I think this is an interesting question, we tend to think of this in terms of how much an organisation will have to pay to employ a Scrum Master or how much the Scrum Master thinks they’re worth, but there’s a different way of lo...

September 11th - Peace, Politics, and Remembrance - You Can Make a Difference! Join V. Lee Henson, President and Founder of AgileDad as we explore remembering 9/11 and how politics does not need to divide us as a people. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook]  https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [...

The Importance of Using the Word No.. Prioritization Matters! “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” — Steve Jobs How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram]  https://www.instagram.com/agile_co...