The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Last week a client mentioned they were using feedback they’d received on an MVP to make “course corrections.”
My ears bristle whenever someone talks about correcting course on an agile project.
There’s no such thing as course correcting in agile.
Am I crazy? After all, a fundamental part of agile is acting on feedback to improve a product.
My problem with the concept of course corrections is the way it presupposes there is one correct course and that it’s possible to know it in advance.
That’s not the case.
Sure, many products begin with a product backlog that describes what the product owner thinks will be the right combination of features to achieve the desired outcomes.
But on any non-trivial product, this recipe cannot be fully known in advance.
Successful products are created by iteratively homing in on the right combination of features. And that set of features can only be discovered through trial and error.
No matter how much research a team does before developing a feature, they never know how users will respond to the new feature.
Will they love it? Will they hate it? Will they use it? Will they use it as intended?
So a product owner or manager places a sequence of bets. The result of each bet guides the product owner in placing the next bet.
Course-correcting means there was a single, correct course. It implies that development has somehow deviated from this correct course and must be brought back in line.
Instead of talking about course corrections, I talk about course adjustments. As a team learns more, it adjusts course—which is the way to succeed with agile,

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Someone wrote....

In 2017, Agile was presented to me as the ultimate project management approach — promising productivity, transparency, and value delivery in short bursts. However, many teams struggled to effectively implement and scale Scrum, missing the mark on its potential.

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So, what’s the difference between these three roles? And why do we need all three in the first place?

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The World's Most Expensive Lamb - Bring Tissues...

All I can say is WOW!! This is a story about the world record for highest price per pound for any lamb ever sold. 100% of the proceeds went to a VERY worthy cause.

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1. Acting as the team’s manager

2. Stay outside of the team

3. Suffocate Developers with meticulously crafted Product Backlog items

4. Determine the technology to be used

5. Push the scope of the Sprint

6. Ignore the team’s capacity

7. Lead the Daily Scrum

8. Enforce skipping parts of the DoD

9. Ignore the purpose of the Sprint Review

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In today’s fast-paced business world, one of the most common struggles organizations face is how to deliver products faster while still maintaining high quality. Many teams feel bogged down by delays, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks.

This is where value stream management comes in — a method to not only accelerate product delivery but to maximize the value delivered to your customers.

The way you manage your team’s workflows could significantly reduce wasted efforts while increasing the value you provide.

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Happy Halloween! What do you like best about the holiday: the candy, the costumes, or the scariness?
The scariness wins for me, although a fun-size Snickers is hard to resist.
But there’s good scary and bad. I’ve seen that adopting an agile approach to product development can be as scary as a good Halloween movie or ghost story. One thing that can be scary to some is the assumption that agile is more stressful.
And if true, that would suck—no one wants more stress in their life. But let’s take a closer look at those practices or aspects of agile that seem like they could increase stress.
For example, collaborating with others more frequently and intensely could take away the quiet, recharging time needed by some, especially introverts.
This can be frightening and a good Scrum Master or coach should assess whether team members are getting enough time for solo work. Designated hours for this can go a long way.
Similarly, having to report daily on yesterday’s progress and today’s plan can feel like nonstop pressure, which would be frightening.
A good Scrum Master or coach can address this, too: by ensuring that daily meetings are for team members to synchronize their work rather than allowing the creepy impression that everyone is checking up on them.
Sometimes this message needs to be shared with those outside the team; other times, team members themselves need to be reminded that the purpose is merely to synchronize and coordinate effort.
One of the more frightening stresses of agile is that deadlines are never more than a few weeks away.
However, because of their frequency, these deadlines are generally less important than the one big deadline of a traditionally managed project.
I sometimes think about the differences in these deadlines in terms of running on a treadmill.
A traditionally managed, or waterfall, project with its one big deadline is like running a hill profile. It’s nice and easy for a while until a big hill starts and then it’s extremely difficult and stressful.
And then the pattern repeats: pretty low stress for a long time and then really stressful at the end when the team tries to get the project over the big hill.
In contrast, agile is like setting the treadmill at a 2% incline and leaving it there for the duration of your run. It’s moderately stressful but never excessively so.
As team members become accustomed to the smaller deadlines that conclude each iteration, these become far less frightening.

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Happy Veterans Day!

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Uplifting Message of Helping Hands

What can you do to make a difference in the lives of others? How can you impact how others think and feel? What can you do to be a beacon of light love and hope?

Join V. Lee Henson as we explore how happiness leads the way.

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Pumpkin Spice Season - Mike Cohn

Pumpkin spice season is upon us.
It seems every company jumps on the pumpkin spice bandwagon. I enjoy the humorous memes such as for pumpkin spice tacos and even a pumpkin spice muffler for your car.
I think pumpkin spice is so popular because it can be added to so many things. (But please keep it off my tacos.)
In that way, pumpkin spice is like agile. A little agility can be added to many things.
That’s why we’ve seen agile move beyond its initial application in software development. Agile moved quickly to all forms of product development. Today, we see agile in education, marketing, construction, law firms, and more.
A few years ago, a bank called itself “your agile bank.” I’m not sure I want my bank to be agile. Teams at the bank can be agile, but I want money at my bank to mostly just sit there sedately earning interest with no need for agility.
We even see agile for managing our personal and family lives. I hear regularly about family backlogs. One former course participant contacted me to say he’d become engaged after he and his girlfriend began holding a relationship retrospective every Friday.
Agile, like pumpkin spice, is everywhere. Many human endeavors benefit from less rigid planning, from emphasizing the human component of success, responding to change, iterating, continuously improving, and more.
Like pumpkin spice, these bits of agile can be mixed into many things we do.
Perhaps, too, like pumpkin spice, they can be overdone. A little pumpkin spice goes a long way. In some endeavors, so may a little agility.
If you haven’t already, try adding a little agility to your non-development or even non-work activities.
It’s worth a try. Just like I guess those pumpkin spice tacos may be,

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Praise Is Your Products Worst Enemy

When I talk to customers, I absolutely love negativity. I thrive on being told that I got it wrong, that I made a poor product decision or assumption, that I missed the mark, that I could have and should have done better.

Call me a masochist, but the thing is this: I know that those lumps I receive are going to help me build a better product. Positivity, on the other hand? That’s useless to me.

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Facts About Election Day

Election Day in the United States is a cornerstone of democracy, representing the fundamental right of citizens to have a voice in their government. It is the day when millions of Americans head to the polls to choose leaders at all levels, from local offices to the presidency, helping to shape the direction of the nation for years to come. This day is not just about individual candidates or political parties; it is about the democratic process itself and the principles of freedom, equality, and representation that the country was built upon.

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How Product Discovery Should Work...

By collaborating through continuous discovery, and making our thinking visible through the opportunity space, we can bring our overarching strategy to life.

It will require leadership to no longer pretend they have all the answers, but to see that teams are clear on the strategic context and effective in bringing clients into the process of collaboration and discovery while sharing what they learn along the way.

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Return To The Office Is NOT working... Or Is It?

In this Friday Episode, we explore whether or not returnong to the office is even an option?

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Count Stories NOT Points.. It will NEVER Work

October 31st is scary enough without having someone argue that it would be so much better if we just counted the number of stories completed each Sprint. I had to go back and look at the date on this article and make certain it was not April 1....

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Velocity & Throughput Are Full of Crap - I Think NOT...

Join V. Lee Henson as we review an article that was written to rebuff the way that I treat story points and velocity without them making an effort to understand why I have success with this approach.

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Making Estimation Less Mysterious

Does estimation always have to be so complicated? Why are we always under the impression that the only way to figure things out is if we revert back to time-based estimates? Is there a better way?

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The Slow Painful Death of Agile - Round 3

How many times is someone going to send me the most recent Agile is DEAD article? This will be round three and it in my opinion is the most frustrating article I have reviewed in a while...

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Do NOT Search For a Job - The Job WILL Find You - 2024

The traditional approach to applying for jobs no longer works. The world has evolved, and so must you.

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Top 3 Essential Skills of The Product Owner

1. Domain Knowledge

2. Exceptional Communication

3. Product Backlog Management

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Converting Story Points to Money - Mike Cohn

It’s often worthless to tell a boss, client, or customer that a project will be done in, say, 142 story points.
Even if stakeholders fully understand what a story point is, telling them how many points a project will take or cost isn’t awfully helpful to them.
These stakeholders are accustomed to hearing how much time and money a project will take. And it’s important that teams and their leaders communicate with stakeholders in the terms those stakeholders prefer.
Fortunately, it is quite straightforward to convert an estimate of points into money. Here’s how.
 From Points to Dollars
To start, gather data on how much the team has been paid over a period of time. Ideally this should be at least a few months, but you could start with as little as one sprint.
Next, divide total team compensation by the number of story points delivered by the team in that period. This gives you a cost per point.
For example, suppose a team has been paid $100,000 over some period. During the same period, the team delivered 100 story points. Dividing $100,000 by 100 gives a cost per point of $1,000.
This can then be multiplied by the total expected size of the project to give an estimate of the total financial cost.
 Getting Fancy (If You Want)
You can get fancy with this calculation, if you’d like. Instead of using compensation as I did in this example, you might want to use fully loaded labor cost. As its name implies, this includes compensation as well as other costs such as benefits, overhead, and payroll expenses (taxes, Social Security in the U.S., etc.).
A company controller can easily (and usually immediately) provide this as a percentage. It will typically be in the range of 25–40% added to compensation.
You can get fancy by trying to adjust for seasonality or team size changes. However, that’s usually not worth the effort: it shouldn’t significantly impact the cost per point.
Keep it simple.
Clearly communicating expected costs with your stakeholders will improve your relationship with them. Everyone appreciates being communicated with in terms they understand.

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The #1 Most Common Mistake With User Stories

Output is a fixation we can’t seem to shake in the product space.

We continue to think we know the right product to build before we build it. This often shows up in the way we treat user stories as requirements.

Even though many product teams and managers think user stories are requirements, they aren’t. 

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Product Vision & Scrum Events

A product vision is a succinct, inspiring articulation of where your product is heading. It embodies the essence of your product — the core values it upholds, the core needs it fulfils, or the core problems it solves.

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5 Ideas Fix Your Work Life Balance

Focus only on your part of the pyramid Manage your energy levels, not hours Prioritize based on importance (and energy again) Rely on others when needed Say no and yes

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The Surprising Cost of Bad Estimates - Mike Cohn

Bad plans lead to many well-known problems. Teams deliver later than expected. Or the budget is blown by adding people in the hope that will help.

Sometimes a deadline is met but by dropping important features. Or the deadline is met by team members working overtime, causing burnout, frustration, and usually introducing bugs.

Inaccurate plans frustrate both team members and stakeholders.

But one of the worst, and perhaps most overlooked, impacts of a poor project plan is that the team loses credibility with its stakeholders.

As an example of how poor planning affects credibility, I’ve got a friend whom I’ll occasionally meet for lunch. He’s always 5 to 10 minutes late. If he emails me today and suggests meeting at noon, I’m going to arrive 5 minutes late myself.

I no longer trust him to be on time. His plans just aren't reliable. And that's OK because it’s just lunch.

But the credibility gap caused by unreliable plans is much worse on projects.

Consider a team that is either consistently late or always has to drop scope to meet a deadline. The project stakeholders ask this team if they can deliver a new project in 3 months. Team members think about it and decide they can’t deliver it in 3 months, but could do it in 4 months.

When the team members tell the stakeholders they need an extra month, the stakeholders don’t believe them. Why should they? The team has been consistently wrong on all prior projects.

At this point, stakeholders may tell the team to do it in 3 months anyway. And why not?

If a team never meets its stated deadlines, stakeholders may reason that they’ll stick with the 3-month deadline to apply some pressure, which has limited effectiveness. (And like me with my friend, they might also quietly expect it to be done later, in perhaps 4 months.)

Here's the bottom line: stakeholders will not treat a team as an equal partner if the team consistently provides bad plans and inaccurate estimates. Credibility is such an important factor that I include it as the first of four reasons agile teams estimate product backlog items in the first place!

Consider how things may have played out differently if the team instead had established a track record of providing decent plans. Note I said decent. Plans don't have to be perfect to be reliable.

When a consistently decent team tells stakeholders a project will take an extra month, stakeholders are likely to engage in a conversation about options to meet the desired, earlier deadline:

When a team has a track record of presenting reasonably accurate plans, they will be treated as equal partners by the rest of the organization.

Many teams try to solve the problem of inaccurate plans by padding their next plans. This usually makes things worse as the team now has two things to estimate:

When stakeholders call the team on padding the plan, the padding is often removed unless team members can present solid logic and evidence for the size of the padding.

A better solution would be for team members to assess why their plans have consistently been wrong.

Sometimes the problem is due to poor agile estimation. If that’s the case, there are many things team members can do to improve estimates of story size.

I’ll share just one technique now that's especially helpful for teams who chronically underestimate the amount of work involved in a particular product backlog item. It’s called unpacking.

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Happy Boss's Day - A Message From Kim

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4 Reliable Traits of Genuinely High Performing Leaders

Self-belief paired with humility Decisiveness A bias for action Thinking like a gymnast, not a sumo wrestler

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How Relevant Are The Agile Principles Today?

2001 is the official birth year of Agile. It took the world by storm. Millions of professionals have found new ways of creating software (and other products) using the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (or Agile Manifesto).

At the height of Agile, people saw it as a panacea for all software-related, even all product-related problems. Nowadays, Agile is a commodity. “Everyone” works Agile these days. Some proclaim we are in the post-Agile era. Others say Agile is Dead.

Is Agile Really Dead?

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Why Can't You Enjoy Life?

Living used to be colorful, and now it’s like I don’t even want to fight anymore. I don’t want to become ‘successful’. I don’t want to wake up and go to work, day after day. I don’t want to learn and I don’t want to read. I don’t want to explore the world. I don’t even want to entertain myself. What’s this?!

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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 of fostering alignment, communication, and collaboration.

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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 singing along to “I’m Just Ken”) I was struck by a few important lessons that apply to any must-succeed project.

The first tip for successful project management is to solicit and act on as much fast feedback as you can get on preliminary versions of your product.

For Barbie, the filmmakers ran test screenings in multiple cities, analyzed feedback, and ran more test screenings. In our words, they iterated toward making a great movie.

The second tip for managing projects successfully? Leave things out. Not every scene that’s filmed makes it to the final movie.

During test screenings of Barbie, the filmmakers performed what product development teams call A/B testing. Different versions of the movie were shown to different audiences to see which were best received.

They used this feedback to remove scenes or shots that weren’t necessary to the flow or humor of the film.

Not every feature a team builds should remain in the product. The sunk cost fallacy often clouds our judgment—when we spend time building that feature, we think we might as well leave it in just in case someone wants it.

But no. Unneeded and rarely used features clutter the user interface just as unneeded scenes can ruin a movie.

Third, have a visionary who keeps the project focused but engage others for increased creativity. Greta Gerwig was that visionary for Barbie. She directed the movie and co-wrote the script. Her vision drove what we experience when watching the film.

Agile projects have product owners who should act as visionaries for their products. They should see the future and guide others toward it.

But no visionary, even an auteur filmmaker such as Gerwig, does it alone. The best welcome creativity from others on the project (including stakeholders and developers).

During the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, director Stanley Kubrick used a novel idea from his team.

It was critical that HAL, the spaceship’s onboard computer, overhear that crew members Poole and Bowman were going to disconnect him.

Kubrick brainstormed ideas of how HAL could overhear those private conversations but could find no good solution.

The solution came from his associate producer, Victor Lyndon, whose job had mostly been filing insurance paperwork for the film. Lyndon casually suggested that HAL can read lips.

The vision for the film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's story remained very much Kubrick’s, but he knew to use great ideas without regard for their origin.

Finally, if you are working on a project that absolutely must succeed, include Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie as team members.

OK, their coding, design, and database skills are probably lacking, but they were perfect as Ken and Barbie.

Project Success Tip 1: Solicit Feedback as Early as PossibleProject Success Tip 2: Leave Some Features OutProject Success Tip 3: Have a Visionary But Find Good Ideas AnywhereProject Success Tip 4: Have the Right Team

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What Does a Project Manager Do?

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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 competing priorities like new projects, tech debt, and time off.

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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 solve complex problems. 🧠📊 Product Sense: Ever just ‘know’ what’s going to work? That’s product sense. Understanding what your users need and delivering products that meet these needs effectively. It’s about foreseeing what will work before it’s fully designed. It’s an almost instinctual understanding of what users want before they even ask for it. 🎯  Adaptability (New addition): The only constant is change, right? Being adaptable means staying flexible and responsive to whatever new challenges, technologies or market trends come your way. 🔄

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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.

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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 solutions, not just problems. Ensure your team understands and commits to the “disagree and commit” principle. If you love drama, go to the theater because drama at work can ruin your business. Make sure you and your team members “stay in your lane.” Sometimes, a team member must find their “happy place” somewhere else.

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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 scheduled way ahead of time, so it serves as a friendly reminder of the meeting.
✅ Defining all these topics up front allows everyone to provide feedback before the session to ensure it becomes even more valuable. For example, “What if we make … the purpose of the session?” or “What if we include agenda item X as well?”
✅ As a meeting organizer, you can expect all the participants to come prepared. If all parts are completed, nobody can use the excuse of not knowing how to prepare.

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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.

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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 had spent the summer in a corporate internship he didn’t enjoy, but, as soon as his workday ended, he would meet with his co-founders and they’d work on their startup until late into the evening.

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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 which we operate, this is the best we can do.

However, most of the time, our best is not good enough because we blame it on our circumstances and fail to learn from our mistakes instead of taking responsibility for our actions.

This creates a vicious cycle of stress and anxiety every time we are faced with a difficult situation — negative emotions from past failures, fear of not meeting expectations again and not knowing how to make a better decision, this time leading to bad choices with terrible results.

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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 all contributing factors to the incident, factors can be technical/non-technical, process failure or the human error, irrespective of who is in-charge of each of these activities, Agile coach can help the team to focusing on the issues and bring them back on track, let’s say if the team is oversimplifying the root cause and if they are concluding that the issues is caused by a single factor or individual, then you have to step-in and pull them back.

How can an Agile coach help to boost self-efficacy?

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Psychological Safety In The Agile Community

Summary of Key Results

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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 understandable responses to their actions. Consistency: Design elements and behaviors should be uniform throughout the interface. Simplicity: Keep things simple and free from unnecessary elements. Affordance: Design elements should indicate how an object can be used (like buttons that look clickable). Accessibility: Ensure that all users, including those with disabilities, can use the product. Efficiency: Users should be able to complete tasks quickly and easily. Error Prevention: Minimize errors and make it easy to recover when mistakes happen. Flexibility and Customization: Allow users to customize their experience or choose how tasks are performed. Visual Hierarchy: Guide users to the most important information with clear visual cues. User Control and Freedom: Users should feel in control of the system and not get trapped in unwanted states. Emotional Design: Evoke positive emotional responses for a memorable and satisfying experience.

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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 other work may be valuable just to the team. Still other work may be valuable to both users and team members.
For example, consider refactoring: improving the structure but not the behavior of code. Because this makes code more maintainable or easier to change, developers value refactoring and often request time for it.
Still, the cost of refactoring is usually justified by the way it benefits users, too. If code is more maintainable, users should experience fewer bugs. Similarly, improved code means that users should receive new features in that area of the product a bit more quickly.
 Learning
When prioritizing a product backlog, consider how much the team will learn by developing each backlog item.
For example, when a team develops a preliminary version of a feature, team members get feedback on whether users like it and how they’re using it. If users love a feature, enhance the feature or consider other things like it.
Other learning is about how to build the product. This might occur when a team uses a new technology for the first time. They might learn if the tech works as promised, or they can develop as quickly with it as they thought, or whether it might be useful elsewhere in the product.
Learning about what to build and how to build it are both valuable.
 Cost
The third thing to consider when prioritizing is the cost. The largest cost is usually the team’s effort to develop a feature. Most teams estimate the effort product backlog items in story points but some estimate in person-days, ideal time, or other similar units.
In some cases there may be additional costs that should be considered. A current common consideration is the ongoing cost of delivering features that rely on various AI products. These products often include small per-use fees but those can certainly add up at scale.
Regardless of the unit in which a team estimates their product backlog items, and that cost to develop and support a feature should factor into an item’s priority. For example, an item a team estimates as 5 should be prioritized higher than a feature estimated at 20 if all else is equal. This is true whether these are story points, person days, person hours, ideal time, or any other unit.
 Risk
The fourth factor to consider when prioritizing is the risk inherent in developing the product backlog item. If something is risky and you need to do it, do it early. You want to know whether that risk is going to materialize.
On the other hand, if a feature is risky and you may not need to develop it, delay working on it until it becomes clear you need to do it.
 Dependencies
The final factor you should consider when prioritizing is dependencies between product backlog items. Some items may not be high priority on their own, but they’re necessary for delivering other items. When that’s the case, the enabling but lower-priority item needs to be moved higher on the backlog in order to be done before the item dependent on it.
 How to Combine These Factors
While all five factors are important, I don’t recommend combining them through some fancy formula.
The value of a feature and its cost–our first and second factors–are the most important.
I recommend continuing to prioritize based on these but then using the other three factors to adjust priorities and resolve conflicts.
For example, suppose a product owner or product manager has prioritized an item such that it won’t be done for another three or four iterations based on its value and risk.

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.

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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 conditions change. This means that strategy discovery is crucial not only to developing an initial offering (MVP) but also to achieving product-market fit and sustaining growth.

Unlike product discovery, it is not primarily concerned with determining the right solution, finding the right features, and creating the right user experience. Instead, strategy discovery focuses on the problem space. It explores if a large enough group of people has a big enough problem that can and should be addressed. Strategy discovery therefore sets the scene for product discovery

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 approach may cost you a lot of time and effort. Decisions you make during the Discovery process can often significantly impact the final product, and asking three specific questions during this process can help you do that.

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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 will bother customers. The backlog is much easier to follow than a customer’s whims.

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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 product, there is nothing to be gained by writing a bunch of small user stories around each one of those reports at this point, especially since you don't yet even know all of the reports that will be needed.
At this stage of the project, having one big reporting story rather than a bunch of little ones keeps the size of the backlog more manageable. You'll have one entry in your tool instead of 15 or 20. That's much easier to manage.
Further, if you do write all the small user stories, one per report, it gives the impression that you've thought of everything. Early in a project, that's probably not true. New reports will be identified and some that are asked for initially may not be necessary.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking every story needs to be small from the beginning. They don’t. Instead, plan for stories to shrink in size and grow in detail as they move closer to being brought into a sprint. For most teams, this will happen during the product backlog refinement meeting one or two sprints before the iteration planning where they’ll be considered.
Letting timing dictate story size will help you succeed with user stories and with agile,

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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. Coercion, command-and-control, force, and the routine mandating of specific practices are how this game is played. The Agile Industrial Complex perpetuates and then monetizes a culture of coercion and force. The result is a worldwide pandemic of highly prescriptive, enterprise-wide Agile “trance formations.”

Could this be true?

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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 get upset. She just gets up, laughs, and tries again. She’s not in a rush; she’s focused on those tiny steps forward, enjoying the process along the way.

It’s a powerful reminder of the importance of baby steps.

In business, it’s easy to feel like we need to make giant leaps or do everything at once. But those giant leaps can leave us overwhelmed, off balance, and scrambling to keep up. The truth is, lasting success is built on steady progress—small steps that move you closer to your goals, one day at a time.

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed or stuck, remember this: baby steps matter. They add up. And they’re often the surest path to success.

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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 looking at this. The cost to the organization and the team by employing the wrong person.

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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.

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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

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What is Self-Management in Agile Teams?

Self-managing teams are one of the foundational principles of Scrum. As Scrum Masters, we are trained to strive towards that idea. It embodies the first value in the Agile Manifesto: We put the individuals and the interactions first by giving the team autonomy on how to organise themselves to achieve the Sprint Goal. Only then do we give them tools and processes to support that specific way of organising themselves.

Self-management is critical to succeeding as a Scrum Team because it leads to ownership and empowers the team. And it creates intrinsic motivation, which is such a powerful driver of team effectiveness.

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A Random Act of Kindness

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Is The ScrumMaster Role Obsolete?

In the dynamic world of Agile methodologies, the role of the Scrum Master is often misunderstood and undervalued. Many organizations mistakenly view the Scrum Master as merely a facilitator, applicable only in the early stages of a team’s development. Many organizations divide the responsibility for a person, being a half-time Scrum Master and a half-time value developer. And many organizations believe the Scrum Master role is obsolete when the team has understood how agile works and how all ceremonies should be performed.

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I just had groceries delivered. One of the items I ordered was a four-pack of square tissues. The store must have been out of those because they substituted an eight-pack of small travel tissues.
You might say the store delivered less value than I expected.
And I’m only a bit disappointed, but imagine how disappointed stakeholders are when teams deliver less value than they should. That’s more frustrating because what our teams deliver is nothing to sneeze at.
One reason teams deliver less value than they could is that they don’t have a medium-term goal to guide their efforts.
A long-term goal is great. It can provide excitement to spur a team to greater creativity, novel solutions, and breakthrough products.
But it’s hard to feel progress against a long-term goal that won’t be achieved for maybe two, three, or more years.
And short-term goals, such as sprint goals, are great at gauging daily progress and keeping everyone focused.
It’s the medium-term goal, perhaps two or three months into the future, that I often find missing. And that I find the most compelling.
This is why I was excited in 2020 when the product goal became an official part of Scrum. The Scrum Guide is silent on how far out a product goal should be, simply calling it a “long-term objective.”
Two problems arise without a goal a few months into the future:
1) Each sprint is prioritized anew. The product owner considers whatever is urgent—that is, whatever stakeholders are yelling about at the moment—and sets the team to work on that.
The urgent is not always that important. My email has been dinging while I write this. I probably need to at least read my new messages today, so they’re urgent. But they’re not as important as writing this email is to me.
Without a medium-term goal to weigh against whatever stakeholders are asking for this red-hot moment, those urgent items will always win.
When a team works on what’s urgent rather than on what’s important, they don’t deliver as much value as they could.
2) Without a medium-term goal to guide it, a team will often bounce from one top priority to the next. Teams, and especially their product owners, can succumb to shiny-object syndrome.
An agile team should absolutely shift away from its current top priority capability once the next work on that item is of lower value than work on some other capability. A product goal achievable in a few months helps a team decide when that’s the case.
As the team begins each new iteration, everyone should be open to abandoning or altering the medium-term goal.
Using a medium-term goal to guide rather than dictate its priorities will help your team succeed with agile.

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Together with the rest of the team, the Product Owner is accountable for ensuring the product’s success, usually in a dynamic business environment.

They link the customer’s needs and desires and the team’s work, aligning the product with market demands. For this, they need the ability to order the backlog based on priorities, risk, and value, to communicate effectively, and to keep the direction steady towards the product vision while taking care of all the details that may emerge.

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Observed the first Monday in September, Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers. The holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being.

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We all dwell on unresolved personal conflicts from time to time. Who hasn’t ruminated on a hurtful comment or unintentional harm we might have caused someone? Feeling bad about something you did, or something done to you, is human. Congratulations on not being a psychopath!

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The Top 3 Reasons Why Big Tech Layoffs Does NOT Mean That Agile is Dead... It is Refocused!

Behold... Agile is STILL NOT DEAD!! Join V. Lee Henson for what he promises WILL be the MOST VIRAL episode of 2024 as he telly you the REAL reason organizations are doing layoffs and what you can do to be protected.

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The Top 3 Ways to Prevent Developer Burnout

Eliminate Pointless Meetings Manage Developer Stress The Constantly Changing Technology Landscape

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Study Finds 268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects - DEBUNKED

This study is deeply rooted and focused SOLELY on Agile Delivery. After reading the study if 600 participants... And digging deep into what smelled about the report, I came up with a few things that led me to believe that the creator if the study was merely trying to sell a competing product..

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What Are the Three Biggest Factors if Great Leadership? - Richard Branson

Lead From the Front Prioritize Your People Get REALLY Good at Making Decisions

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3 Questions to Help Overcome Your Biggest Fear

Question #1 Why do you even care?

Question #2 What is your fear like?

Question #3 What are you willing to feel?

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Making Remote Work Work.. - Is The Honeymoon Over?

I will never take an in-office job again”, words I and most of my team live by now that we’ve gotten to work on a team that gets how to do remote work right.

Our team has always been remote. My boss is located on the east coast and we have team members on both coasts of the United States.

I’ve been leading 100% remote teams for over ten years now and while most people on my teams have sworn off in-office jobs for life, building and maintaining a remote team has some unique challenges.

We’ve wrestled with these challenges ourselves and today I want to walk you through how we’ve solved for them in the hopes it can help your team build a better working life and group culture.

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How ScrumMasters Go Astray by Committing to Plans - I Don't Think So...

Imagine your success gets measured on your ability to predict the unpredictable.

Sounds ridiculous, huh? Yet, this is how many default to measuring Scrum Masters and their team’s performance. It’s the rampant, default behavior in organizations today.

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Simple Rules To Build Complex Things

Customer Communications Planning Product Architecture Process Risk

Go-To-Market Strategies For New Products and Services

In short, a GTM is a comprehensive plan for introducing a new product or service to the market. A GTM differs from a marketing strategy which is a long-term strategy (could ideally be years in the future) that outlines a business’s overall marketing objectives. A GTM is aimed at a specific shorter-term timeframe and asset (product or service).

Businesses prepare GTM strategies to optimize potential success and minimize risk when introducing a new product or service to market. 

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Sage Advice For My Son Justin on His Wedding Day

This is a rather personal episode... But I did it in hopes that at least one of you can also benefit from this advice.

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Being Too Precise Hurts Your Plans - Mike Cohn

I need a new backup drive. I don’t need a 40 TB drive but the site I buy from listed one available. I thought I might as well click on it to see the price.
The price seemed reasonable for that much storage, but what caught my attention is that the drive ships in 205 days.
Seriously, what are they thinking? How can they possibly know the drive will ship in 205 days, not 204 or 206?
This website fell into what I call the precision trap, which is applying a false level of precision to some estimate or plan. We often fall into the precision trap because of the math involved in planning.
Let me clarify this with an example. Suppose a team has estimated that it needs to deliver 100 story points of work to achieve some objective. They’ve already calculated their velocity to be 15. Someone on the team does the simple math of 100 divided by 15 and gets 6.66. Team members then proclaim that they will be done in 6.66 sprints. Or hopefully someone decides to round that up and say it will take 7 sprints.
But math like this leads to the precision trap. You can see from this how the website decided the drive would ship in 205 days.The precision trap persists because we seem wired to like precision. It feels good to say we’ll be done in 6.66 sprints. We must be really smart to know that.
But we need to favor being accurate over being precise. Accuracy is about being right. The easiest way to be right is to be less precise.
For example, that website could have told me the drive would ship in “about 7 or 8 months.” That would have been enough precision for me to decide whether to buy it.
When math tells a team they can deliver in 6.66 sprints, that is very precise. But it’s probably not very accurate. Just like the ship date of the hard drive, that estimate should be conveyed as a range. Instead of 6.66 sprints, maybe it’s 6 to 9 sprints or even 7 to 10 sprints.
Avoid falling into the precision trap if you want to succeed with agile

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Are You a CT-NO?

A CEO once told me it felt like the CTO misheard and thought his title was CT- N O. “Can we do that? No. Is that feasible? No.” After wiping myself from having spilled my coffee laughing, I realized that’s such a common stance tech executives take that I’m surprised I hadn’t heard the term earlier. Let’s discuss why so many people have this issue and how you can become a force-multiplying CTO instead of a backlog gatekeeper.

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What happens POST Agile Coaching?

In future, the agile coach becomes a delivery leader, moving from cheering at the sidelines to playing an active role in execution, with delivery accountability.

The idea that a Scrum team can be self-organizing and act in a silo is long-dead. The World is too complex for that. No single team knows everything about the business, the customer, the regulatory environment and the technology environment in which they work. It’s why we have all the departments we do in organizations. The best teams know how to navigate necessary complexity and produce results together.

This ability to navigate is where the future of the agile coach lies.

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How to Better Leverage Assumptions and Thwart Risk

In product management, most of our ideas are not going to work.

It’s essential to test our assumptions before the implementation.

But you can’t test everything. And you can’t test what you’re unaware of.

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Nine Simple Hacks That Make Life So Much Easier!

1. Be a ‘top-level asker.’

2. Presuppose greatness.

3. Simplify daily.

4. Prioritize uncomfortable conversations.

5. Be aggressively countercultural.

6. Choose bigger problems.
7. Create mystery.

8. Commit to becoming elite in one thing.

9. Biased to what’s working.

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The Art of Asking the Right Questions - Becoming the ScrumMaster

Asking the right questions is a crucial skill for any Scrum Master. Mastering this ability can yield numerous benefits in various situations, especially when engaging in conversations or working within an agile context. Here's why it matters:

Ask Questions to Know More About Your Team
Ask Follow-up Questions After You Listen

Ask Questions to Clarify Your Role

Ask Questions About the Company & Product
Ask Questions About Expectations

Short Answers To BIG Questions About Agile Leaders

What Is an Agile Leader?

Three qualities define an agile leader.

First, agile leaders are comfortable with uncertainty. They’re willing to hear and say, “I don’t know.” They understand not everything can be stated with certainty. This means they can accept it when a team says they’ll be done in five or six months.

Second, agile leaders guide; they don’t command. An agile leader does not tell people the specific steps to take to achieve a goal. Instead, the agile leader creates a culture of teamwork, transparency, and continuous improvement. This environment empowers team members to achieve great things.

Third, agile leaders do less but accomplish more. Agile leaders are rarely a flurry of activity. Instead, they motivate and inspire others to do more of the right things.

Jazz great Thelonious Monk was known for leaving silence between the notes he played. He said, “What you don't play can be more important than what you do.”

Like Monk, an agile leader knows that what they don’t do–where they leave space–can be more important than what they do.

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Crafting the PERFECT Offer...

You’ve made the cold calls. Sent the emails. Built the landing page. Ran the ads. You’ve generated significant interest. Yet, people are still not buying.

Why?

Probably because your offer sucks. And it’s not your fault. Understand this: A great offer makes business easy. Once you’re able to craft and articulate an offer that people can’t refuse, you get to play business on easy mode.

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Maximizing Stakeholder Buy-in

The most amazing product strategy and product roadmap are ineffective if the stakeholders don’t support them. Without their buy-in, you’ll struggle to execute the strategy and find it hard to deliver the roadmap. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This article shares my tips to help you secure strong stakeholder buy-in to strategic product decisions, align people, and achieve product success together.

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How Much Control Do We Need?

Do you ever wonder what the correct threshold for being in control is? Is there ever a time where it is better to NOT have control? Join V. Lee Henson as we explore what control is and when it is healthy.

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How Your Agile Team Could Compete In The Olympics - Mike Cohn

Let the games begin! Are you and your team ready for the Olympics? I hope so, since the games start tomorrow.
I want to share a few Olympic events at which I think agile teams would excel.
First are the speed events: swimming, sprint canoeing, the marathon, and the shorter running events. The emphasis agile teams place on going faster and seeking continuous improvement will serve them well in competing in these.
Some of these events, such as the swimming and running relays, require handoffs. Good agile teams become adept at small, frequent handoffs (such as from programmer to tester). This skill will serve an agile team well when participating in Olympic relays.
Good agile teams are cross functional. That is, individuals with different but complementary skills collaborate. Cross-functional agile teams would excel at the many sports that require different types of players such as football, hockey, cricket, volleyball, and water polo (my personal favorite).
These sports include experts who are highly skilled in one dimension. But these single-function aces need to be balanced with the skills of other team members.
While a cross-functional Olympic team can include specialist experts, the team will benefit from multi-skilled members. These pi- or m-shaped people are proficient at two, three, or more skills needed by the team. Sign these folks up for the triathlon, pentathlon, heptathlon, or decathlon!
The best agile teams collaborate and synchronize their work. We see this when testers create test plans while programmers are still coding rather than waiting for the programmers to finish. Agile teams who have mastered collaboration and synchronization could look for Olympic success in events such as rowing or artistic (synchronized) swimming.
A team’s Scrum Master would do well running the hurdles. Who better to clear obstacles?
And good agile teams excel in delivering the outcomes expected of them in the time frames desired. Teams who hit the bull’s eye should give archery a try.
Finally, I have to add that I’d like all agile teams to compete in the Olympic trampoline event. Shouldn’t work be a bit more fun? And what’s more fun than bouncing on a trampoline and winning a gold medal at agile,

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Ditch the Crystal Ball: A Simple Way to Prioritize Your Team’s Work - Justin Hawkins

We have over 200 ideas in our backlog across our suite of applications. Each of those ideas represents anywhere from 3 days to 3 months of work for our product and development teams to fully define, build, and release.

All said and done, we could keep our teams busy for 5 years with only the things we already know about and there are more ideas coming in every day. So how do we possibly prioritize this giant pile of possibilities?

Here’s our dirty secret. We don’t.

https://productcoalition.com/ditch-the-crystal-ball-a-simple-way-to-prioritize-your-teams-work-a5f547ed7c88

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ScrumMasters NEED to Rethink Their Role or Become Extinct...

1) Help the team learn to self-organize in different ways

2) Listen for impediments out of the teams control and work quickly to get those removed

3) Anticipate problems and help the team avoid them.

4) Become equipped to radiate information about the teams work.

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Strategy To LAND Your Next Product Manager Role

How can you find your next job in this economy? It is actually MUCH easier than you imagine! Join V. Lee Henson as he explores what you need to do TODAY to land that ideal role.

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The Untold Story Behind The Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore

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T-Shaped Personas

Key Concepts

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Stop Doing So Many Spikes - Mike Cohn

One of the more common mistakes I see teams make is relying too much on spikes. A spike is an activity a team performs to get smarter about something. With a spike, a team isn’t trying to immediately deliver a new capability; instead, they are building the knowledge that will allow them to deliver the new capability later.
Spikes are a great tool, and I’d expect every team to use them...but not on everything they work on.
The best use of a spike is to reduce excess uncertainty. This could be uncertainty about how a feature should work or about how it will be built.
A team may opt, for example, to spike the user interface for a particular feature. Or it may use a spike to determine if a technical approach is feasible or will perform at the required level.
Each of these can be a good use of a spike. The problem comes when a team wants to use a spike on everything. Spikes should be used only in cases of extreme or excessive amounts of uncertainty. Spikes should not be used to reduce the typical, garden-variety uncertainty that exists in all work.
Further, spikes should not be used to eliminate uncertainty. Teams need to be comfortable bringing work into their sprints or iterations with open issues remaining.
Is your team reluctant to allow work into a sprint with any remaining uncertainty? That’s sometimes the result of team members feeling excessive pressure to estimate perfectly, to always achieve the sprint goal, or to always deliver everything that they brought into a sprint.
If that is happening, a Scrum Master or coach needs to work with outside stakeholders or whomever is creating these unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it’s even the team members putting this pressure on themselves.
But what’s the problem with frequent spikes anyway? It’s that overuse of spikes extends your time to value. This is especially true when the spike is done in one iteration and the rest of the work in a subsequent iteration.
Overuse of spikes also reduces the extent to which teams overlap work. This can increase the burden on testers.
For example, consider the case of a programmer who uses a spike to reduce the uncertainty of a backlog item. If that item is brought into the next sprint, the programmer’s work has been made simpler by the spike, but the tester’s has not.
If your testers are struggling to keep current with the programmers, consider whether the team is doing too many spikes. It’s a good question to ask yourself even when the testers don’t seem overburdened, if you want to succeed with agile.

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6 Micro-Habits of Highly Effective Leaders

Great managers follow simple habits and practices to stay highly effective. They reframe fear as a sign to evaluate multiple options, ask questions, or reconsider assumptions instead of letting fear get in the way of making decisions or taking action. Instead of giving power to naysayers by allowing them to influence their thinking or how they make decisions, highly effective managers stay away from them. By working on things within their control instead of wasting time on things outside their control, highly effective managers expand their circle of influence. Maximizing their team’s potential is their primary focus. By highlighting each individual’s strengths and combining them with the right opportunities, highly effective managers build high-performance teams. Effective managers are highly self-aware of the limitations of their minds. They don’t let cognitive biases get in the way of how they think or make decisions. They use their peak productivity period to do some of their best work. Matching energy to the cognitive demand of their work makes them highly effective.

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The BEST way to Improve Company Culture Is To KILL It First...

You’re working long hours, for low pay, either in an open office environment that nobody likes or working remotely and feeling like you’re going to wake up tomorrow to one of those dreaded HR meeting invites.

There doesn’t seem to be any kind of work-life balance anymore, because the gap between the two has disintegrated, and life is so expensive right now that you’re perpetually working in larger chunks to salvage smaller slivers of life.

You’re not happy. I get that. And if we’re here to be honest, I’ll tell you I’m not happy either. All respect, but I’m not here to listen to a bunch of complaining or to resolve interpersonal issues all day. I’m in the same boat as you, only I don’t have anyone to complain to.

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The Art of Getting a Good Nights Sleep

Is it really possible to get a good nights sleep? Join V. Lee Henson as he reveals tips and tricks to help you get the rest that you need.

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The 9 Zones of A Product Backlog

Ideally, I have some work placed in all nine zones. This indicates that product development is progressing, while still being able to develop the product strategy and make it operational.

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The 5 Deadliest Strategy Myths

1) A List of Initiatives is a Strategy

2) You can Prove that your Strategy is Correct

3) Analytically Strong People are Better Strategists

4) Strategy is a Zero-Sum Game

5) Strategy is Formulated at the Top & then Executed Below

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Why Is Strategy So Hard To Define?

If you’re a reflective type and you’ve ever considered how difficult it is to truly define strategy, you’re not alone.

And I blame the abusers of the term. Those who use it with wild abandon, who insert it in pedestrian comms, repeatedly and deliberately. People who believe that activity becomes strategic, simply by labelling it so. It is those offenders that make the idea of strategy complex and nebulous.

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What to Do Before Adding Items to the Backlog - Mike Cohn

Have you seen “The Princess Bride” movie?
I love it. (And the book is even better.)
The film tells the love story of Buttercup and Westley. Westley works on Buttercup’s family’s farm and any time she asks him to do something, he responds, “As you wish.”
This is *not* how a team should respond when a product owner asks a team to do something.
Before doing what their product owner requests, team members should ask questions. This ensures they understand what’s needed, but also confirms the product owner has thought through the request sufficiently.
I’ve seen many situations in which product owners ultimately realize they never really wanted the thing they initially asked for.
I think team members should even go so far as to push back slightly if they have doubts about the benefit of something a product owner has requested.
Product owners are meant to be the authority on their products, the wise and most knowledgeable voice. But team members’ opinions should not be discounted.
Team members are valuable stakeholders who may have unique insights into how a product works. If they have concerns about a request, they deserve to be heard. And product owners owe it to users to listen.
Ideally, a product owner asks a team to achieve some goal rather than simply perform a simple task.
“Fetch that” may have worked for Buttercup telling Westley what to do. And a simple task like that may warrant an “As you wish” response.
On an agile project, however, asking questions before possibly telling the product owner, “As you wish” is the way to succeed with agile.

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Top 6 Lessons You Can Learn ONLY If You Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone

The comfort zone. What a beautiful place to be in. But have you ever stepped out of your comfort zone? Have you ever thought of venturing outside to see what lies in the great beyond? Have you ever wondered what lessons about life you can learn outside your comfort zone? One thing’s for sure: you’ll be surprised by what you find at the edge of your comfort zone.

Change is great. Challenge equals a mental workout. Pushing yourself helps you grow. Happiness cannot be found in complacency. You are better than you think you are. Life is a beautiful journey.

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The Future of Agile Coaching

Agile delivery has conquered the world. Agile is everywhere. The industry dinosaurs have introduced Agile over the years. Public organizations have Scrum teams. It’s omnipresent.

Many active in the Agile space have discussed we have reached a saturation point. “Everyone” is doing it, so we should expect a decline in demand to introduce people to Agile.

That doesn’t mean Agile Coaching will become less relevant. On the contrary, introducing Agile is only one step towards effectiveness in creating value.

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5 Things I Wish I Would Have Known About Agile Sooner!!

When I started as a Scrum Master/Agile coach, I didn’t take a mentor but studied by myself, leading consecutive failures of Agile transformation in projects. It was a hard, shameful, and embarrassing experience, as I even got fired from several projects.

However, these experiences made me stronger as well. I decided to take advantage of these failures to introspect, study harder, and brush up on my Agile skills. After that, I was able to succeed in Agile implementation in many projects. Mistakes and failures were stepping stones for my Agile journey.

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Should Product Managers Write Problem Statements? - YES!

A problem statement is a concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be improved upon. It identifies the gap between the current (problem) state and desired (goal) state of a process or product. The first condition of solving a problem is understanding the problem, which can be done by way of a problem statement.

A good problem statement:

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