The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

The Heart That Outlived Time - The Story of Valentines Imagine ancient Rome, nearly two thousand years ago. Streets echo with the clang of armor, the scent of incense, and the whispers of love forbidden. There lived a humble priest named  Valentinus . He wasn’t a rebel or a warrior—just a man who believed deeply in love. At that time, Emperor Claudius II had outlawed marriage for young soldiers, c...

How To Deal With Difficult People In A Group? I can only + 💯 this. Expecting a difficult group often creates one. Your body language, attitude, and language signal what you expect. Participants pick up on that quickly and start protecting themselves. Those signals then reinforce each other, making the group harder to work with. On a sidenote. What is a “difficult person” anyway? Someone asking ma...

How To Provide a Release Plan Without Losing Agility - Mike Cohn Stakeholders want to know what will be delivered, and when.  Your team wants to stay agile.  So how do you create a roadmap ( aka release plan or milestone plan ) without locking down every detail?   I’m about to start on a road trip between Idaho and Colorado: a 16-hour drive. I know where I’m going, and my general route, but I don’...

5 Habits to Keep Your Team Motivated Managing a team is never easy, and one of the biggest challenges is keeping everyone motivated. Motivation doesn’t come from long meetings or fancy speeches. It comes from small, everyday habits that keep energy, focus, and inspiration alive. Things like starting the day with open communication, recognizing effort right away, or giving quick feedback may seem s...

Rebuilding Psychological Safety If people feel unsafe, they do the minimum and pray no one notices. If the bar is too low, everyone’s happy… until the customer sees the work. The sweet spot? High safety  and  high standards. People speak up, try things, and still hit the mark. Think: honest kitchen with a strict head chef, and nobody burns the risotto, but jokes are allowed. How to connect with Ag...

The Man Who Proved Meaning Is Stronger Than Suffering In the darkest chapter of human history, when hope seemed like a luxury few could afford, one man discovered a truth so powerful that it would outlive the horrors around him. His name was Viktor Frankl . Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. In 1942, he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Over the next sev...

Agile Is Not a Process. It’s How Smart Teams Think. Most people think agile is Jira boards, sprints, standups, and sticky notes. Here’s the thing. Those are just tools. Agile is a mindset about how work *should* move in a world that refuses to stay predictable. If you’ve ever worked on a project where requirements changed, deadlines shifted, or priorities flipped overnight, you already know why tr...

Why Soft Skills Outlast Technical Skills on Product Teams - Mike Cohn Anyone who has worked in product development for more than a few years has seen the same pattern repeat itself. The technical skills that once felt essential gradually—or sometimes suddenly—become obsolete. Tools change. Frameworks fall out of favor. Architectures that once seemed modern start to look dated. This isn’t new, but...

What Is Scope Churn? Businesses naturally want predictability from their software organizations. Promises have been made to customers, and there are business objectives to deliver as well. Often, those things have little to no wiggle room. The head of Marketing says “This must be completed on time, because we have a trade show on March 1st, and we have committed to present there.” The head of Prod...

Agile Failed Us After 18 Months - Here we go... On month eighteen, our average lead time crossed  27 days . Production defects doubled. A supposedly minor release missed its window by three weeks. Nothing had “broken.” Velocity charts still looked healthy. Every ceremony was running on time. But releases slowed, confidence eroded, and engineers stopped believing what the board said. This hurt beca...

Ernest Shackleton and Leadership When Everything Falls Apart In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out on what was supposed to be one of the greatest expeditions in history: the first land crossing of Antarctica. His ship, the Endurance , carried 27 men into one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. What happened next is the part that matters. The ship never reached Antarctica. Instead, it becam...

5 Daily Habits To Keep Your Team Motivated and Inspired Managing a team is never easy, and one of the biggest challenges is keeping everyone motivated. Motivation doesn’t come from long meetings or fancy speeches. It comes from small, everyday habits that keep energy, focus, and inspiration alive. Things like starting the day with open communication, recognizing effort right away, or giving quick...

Using AI to Go From User Insight to Better Backlogs - Mike Cohn AI is rapidly changing how product teams work—but the biggest opportunity isn’t replacing product thinking. It’s reducing the friction between understanding users and turning those insights into high-quality backlog items. To make the ideas concrete, I use a consistent example throughout: a team building software for valet-attended pa...

Story Point Estimations are failing your Team! - Here We Go Again... Story Pointing wasn’t a completely novel idea. It evolved out of the Delphi method — a research technique that helped drive consensus and forecasting built on collective wisdom. In 1950s,  RAND Corporation  began using it as a way to forecast the effect of technology on warfare. So, it wasn’t just an idea dreamed up by someone in...

What Makes a Great Scrum Master? When people ask me, “What does it take to be a great Scrum Master?” my first response is always — In what kind of organization? It’s not a dodge. It’s the most honest answer I can give. We talk about Scrum Masters as if the role is universal — a fixed job description that applies equally everywhere. But the reality? The Scrum Master navigating a twenty — person sta...

The 7 Two-Minute Habits That Make People Actually Want to Follow You 1) Active Listen Burst Here’s the move: give someone 60 seconds of your full attention, then paraphrase what they said and ask one clarifying question. The moment someone starts speaking, resist the urge to formulate your response. Instead, just listen. Then say: “So what I’m hearing is ____. Did I miss anything?” This works beca...

Why Most Agile Teams Build Features Instead of Value and How To Flip the Script For a long time, I believed that the number of features we shipped was a sign of a healthy product team. New capabilities meant progress. More releases meant momentum. A packed roadmap meant ambition. And during sprint reviews, when we showcased everything we had delivered, I felt proud as if quantity itself was proof...

Start The Year With a Clean Backlog - Mike Cohn Think outside the box. Do you hate that phrase as much as I do? It’s become another overused business cliché, and it bothers me for another reason: Creativity often comes from thinking inside the box. This is especially true in agile story-writing workshops.   The difference between a successful story-writing workshop and one that fails to deliver of...

The OKR Illusion, Why Structure Without Direction Is Just Noise OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)  have gained significant traction over the past decade, especially after being widely adopted and championed by companies like Google. Originally developed at Intel, OKRs are a simple yet powerful framework for setting and tracking goals. At their core, OKRs are about defining  what  you want to achie...

Celebrating Dr Martin Luther King Jr Understanding Civil Rights Day and what we can do today to make a difference. 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/

Celebrating Episode 1500 - Special Edition With Bob Hartman Join us for this once in a lifetime ONE HOUR edition of The Agile Daily Standup Podcast as we celebrate episode 1500 together! 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.link...

Agile in 2026 Looks Nothing Like Scrum That delay cost us 42,000 failed checkout attempts and a week of executive explanations. Nothing was broken in the code. The failure was procedural. The fix was ready. The sprint boundary said no. That was the moment we stopped pretending Scrum was helping us ship. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://...

AI Doesn’t Eliminate Agile Teams — It Increases the Need for Great Ones - Mike Cohn Everyone today seems eager to talk about how AI is accelerating software development. Teams are shipping faster. Individuals are more productive. Entire backlogs can be written in minutes. Estimates are a click away. Code that once took days now materializes in minutes. With all this newfound speed, it’s understand...

Scrum Is NOT Dead... It’s Obsolete? (Did someone actually Go here?) AAAAAAAhhhhhhhh! Stand-ups are still happening. Sprint planning still blocks calendars every few weeks. Retrospectives still end with “we should communicate better.” Jira boards are still very busy. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠ - [fac...

I made a VERY controversial Podcast Episode on January 1st and I think people may have completely missed it! There will be 3 CRAZY-BIG changes happening on the Agile Landscape in 2026: 🚀 Prediction One: The Shift from Product Ownership to Product Management Broader Lifecycle Focus : Product managers will oversee the entire product lifecycle, from ideation to release. AI Integration : AI tools wil...