The Daily Standup

How Are You Today? I'm Fine, Thanks...Have you ever asked someone, how are you today? Did you really care when you asked? How do you truly handle acting with kindness? 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/leehenso...

The Five Dimensions of Real Scrum Mastery The Courage to Have Uncomfortable Conversations The Art of Knowing When to Step In (And When to Step Back) Creating a Space Where People Feel Safe to Be Human Teaching Teams to Fish (Instead of Giving Them Fish) Being the Change You Want to See How to connect with AgileDad:- [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/a...

Is Sprint Planning Quietly Hurting Teamwork? - Mike Cohn I hated group projects when I was in school. I didn’t want to rely on others for success. I wanted to be accountable for what I’d personally done. Teams that are new to agile often feel the same way. A developer will gladly take responsibility for their own code. But tell that same developer they’re also responsible for someone else’s code a...

The Lucky Green StringEvery year, St. Patrick’s Day turned the open floor into a sea of plastic shamrocks and forced cheer. There was a potluck, a “wear green or get pinched” joke that refused to die, and the inevitable moment when someone would nudge him and say, “C’mon, you’re Irish, right? Say something in Gaelic!” He wasn’t. His last name just sounded like it could be on a pub sign. By the tim...

Is Agile Coaching a Waste of Money? Around the world, software organizations are desperately trying to improve how their teams build and deliver software. Companies will hire herds of “wise sage” coaches to bring them out of the Dark Ages but are often disappointed when nothing extraordinary happens. Despite pouring loads of money into coaching efforts, their applications still fail to perform, th...

Celebrating PI Day! “I finally see where I belong” often starts quietly, almost by accident. A student wanders into a Pi Day event because there’s free pie, not because they think math has anything to do with them. They expect to feel like an outsider again—another room where the “real” math people will do the talking. But as they listen, they hear a guest speaker casually mention being the first...

Why I Switched to a Hybrid Approach and Tripled My Team’s Delivery RateAgile was supposed to be the answer. Stand-ups, sprints, retros, these rituals promised faster delivery, happier teams, and stakeholders who finally felt in sync with engineering. For a while, it worked. My team hit a rhythm, delivered features quickly, and felt engaged in the process. But over time, the cracks showed. Velocity...

AI Is Changing The Economics of Software Development - Mike Cohn

5 Ways High Performers Disrupt Team HarmonyHigh performers rarely disrupt teams on purpose. More often, disruption happens because they move faster than the systems, processes, or people around them. Their confidence, speed, and problem-solving ability can subtly change how work gets done and how others show up. The problem isn’t their performance. It’s their speed and capability that invisibly re...

Scrum The Toyota WayScrum is everywhere. Most Product Owners understand the framework well. We manage backlogs, prioritize items, attend ceremonies, and track progress sprint after sprint. And still, many products struggle. Value takes too long to reach customers. Teams deliver features that are rarely used. Defects appear late. Dependencies and waiting time quietly erode delivery speed. This is n...

A Single Act of Kindness..You know those days when you feel like you’re barely holding it together, but you still smile at the cashier, still help the person in front of you, still try to be kind—while secretly wondering if anyone even sees how hard you’re trying? This is a story about a mom like that… And a stranger who decided her quiet kindness was worth changing her life for. It’s an ordinary...

7 Strategies to Motivate and Retain EmployeesEmployee motivation and retention remain two of the most critical pillars of organizational success, yet they are among the hardest ones to sustain. Competitive salaries and benefits might open the door to top talent, but they’re no longer enough to keep people inspired and motivated. As workplaces evolve rapidly, employees want more than just a paychec...

The Most Underrated Advantage of Short Sprints - Mike CohnA recent Gallup survey found that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are engaged at work. For comparison, Gallup’s overall engagement numbers are often around 30%. That’s a striking gap. It suggests something many leaders overlook: performance may depend less on changing team structure and more on improving f...

Agile Anti-Patterns That Are Impacting Your VelocityVelocity is not vanity. It is feedback. When velocity stops reflecting reality, the team loses the ability to learn and improve. Velocity that lies is worse than no velocity at all. The goal here is clarity, speed, and humane work rhythms. How to connect with AgileDad:- [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://www.instagram....

Sprint Goals DON'T Work - Or Do They? Sprint Goals sound beautifully simple. Set a goal for the team, organize the work around it, track progress daily, and finish with success. Sounds easy enough. And that’s exactly why it’s so hard. Behind this deceptively simple concept hides one of the most difficult ideas in Agile. As the Scrum Guide says:“Scrum is lightweight, simple to understand, difficult...

The Moment Everything Changed - A Shoutout To HumanityIn late 2025, what began as an ordinary beach day at Bondi became a living, breathing argument for why humanity is still worth believing in.​Bondi Beach was crowded—families, tourists, locals all spread along the sand, kids playing at the shoreline while surfers watched the swells further out. The ocean looked deceptively calm, but beneath the...

Why are managers there at all? - The Agile MindsetJust recently my colleague and friend  Zoran Vujkov  has drawn my attention to the following  clip  discussing trends in adoption of agile in large companies. I recommend the clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgBhZIjgTw4&feature=youtu.be) for watching if you already haven’t. Among a lot of information about the speed of agile adoption and c...

What Curling Can Teach Us About Agile - Mike CohnWith the Olympics underway, I’ve been watching a few events I don’t normally pay much attention to—like curling. At first glance, curling looks almost comically simple. Someone slides a stone down the ice. A couple of teammates run alongside it frantically sweeping the ice with brooms. The stone glides… and somehow ends up exactly where they want it...

The Scrum That Actually WorkedIn 1996, Chrysler — a Fortune 500 company with resources to hire the best talent and buy the best tools — had spent two years and millions of dollars building payroll software. It hadn’t printed a single paycheck. The project was called C3: Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation. It was supposed to unify payroll for 87,000 employees across multiple divisions. It had exec...

The Concept of Scrum Fluid TeamsFluid Scrum Teams are a concept introduced by Willem-Jan Ageling, where a stable group of individuals (e.g., 20 members) self-organize into smaller, temporary teams each Sprint to address specific objectives. This approach allows for flexibility and adaptability, as team compositions change based on the current needs of the projects at hand. How to connect with Agil...

The February Blanket - A Story of MaeEvery February in the little mountain town of Silver Hollow, winter wrapped everything in silence. The trees stood bare, the sky hung gray, and people rushed from their cars to their front doors, shoulders hunched against the cold. But one February, a woman named Mae decided she was tired of waiting for spring to make things warm again. Her husband had passed a...

Are Agile Frameworks Really Agile? - A Blind Article ReviewHave you ever read an article before and just scratched your head and wondered to yourself... WHY? 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/

How Much Are Meetings Hurting You? - Mike CohnI’m emailing because we keep seeing the same issue surface in different organizations, even where teams are experienced and committed. If something isn’t working, it will usually show up in your meetings first. That’s because work habits show up in real meetings, under real pressure. If planning, reviews, retrospectives, and daily scrums aren’t working...

The Three Paths Scrum OpensI have watched teams celebrate their “perfect Sprint.” Every ceremony attended. Every artifact updated. Every role filled. And yet their product no closer to solving the user’s problem than it was three Sprints ago. They’d mistaken the map for the journey. How to connect with AgileDad:- [website]  ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ - [instagram]  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agil...

The Agile Manifesto - 2026 Please visit:https://agiledad.com/documents to download your very own copy! 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/