The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Why Our Family Is "Different"

My hunch is that if you know us, you are already aware of this development...

How to connect with AgileDad:

MVP is Dead!! We Should Focus on MLP Instead!

MVPs sound great in theory, but too often, they result in forgettable, uninspiring products. Instead of focusing on minimum viability, focus on minimum loveability – because a product that people love will always win.

So, the next time someone tells you to build an MVP, ask them:

“Would you rather date someone who’s ‘viable’ or someone who’s lovable?”

How to connect with AgileDad:

Remove From Your Process as Often as You Add To It - Mike Cohn

Can you imagine being so angry about a team doing something wrong that you institute a rule for them to follow for the next 100 years? Literally 100 years.
Queen Victoria was that angry.
One day in 1894, the Queen went to the Horse Guards building expecting her Household Cavalry to be ready to escort her back to Buckingham Palace. She instead found the guards either asleep, drunk, or gambling.
Infuriated, she commanded that an inspection of the Guards be held at 4:00 p.m. every day for the next 100 years.
I’m guessing the Guards got the message to stop sleeping, drinking, and gambling on duty long before 100 years. The 4:00 p.m. inspection could have stopped after perhaps a year or two. Maybe sooner.
Things that become part of a team’s process sometimes stay there too long, like that inspection of the Queen’s Horse Guards.
This happened in a company that had a large database that was shared by multiple applications. When one team changed the database, they screwed up the change and left other teams scrambling to quickly change their code in production.
They held a multi-team retrospective and agreed that each team would produce a Database Impact Report every sprint. The report would describe how a team’s work would affect the database.
This doesn’t sound horrible yet, except it was rare for most teams to do any work at all in a sprint that would affect the database.
These teams were still expected to complete a Database Impact Report each sprint that basically said:
 

• No impact
• No impact
• No impact

These no-impact Impact Reports were emailed to all other teams.
After opening a PDF every two weeks that said “no impact,” recipients stopped bothering to even read the reports that were still being generated.
Stop. Just stop.
These reports were probably useful for a period. They may have helped identify a risk. They certainly made people more aware of the impact a database change could have on other teams.
But after a while, they should have been removed from the teams’ process, especially once the teams who actually did routinely alter the database had found better ways of communicating potential impacts.
In retrospectives, it’s always tempting to look for new things to add (“Let’s start using AI to inspect our code!”).
But make sure you also reserve time in retrospectives to look for things to remove.
Unless your team members are all drunk, gambling, or asleep at 4:00 p.m., you can probably find something to remove from your process.
A barely sufficient process with unnecessary actions and rules removed will help you succeed with agile

 How to connect with AgileDad:

Advice From a Tech CEO - Learn Skills Outside of Tech

AI is going to work best in niche technical applications, not general purpose FOMO applications. So the more niche Mike focuses his tech team, the more efficiently they can integrate AI, and reject what they don’t need — those wild goose chases — as AI grows and evolves around them.

How to connect with AgileDad:

STOP Creating a Sense of Urgency. START Fostering a Sense of Purpose

Let’s retire sense of urgency and instead look for sense of purpose. A sense of purpose is a deep understanding of the reasons behind our efforts and a desire to pour in time and energy because that purpose resonates with the impact we’d like to make on the world.

How to connect with AgileDad:

18 Cheat Codes to Life, to Put You 10 Years Ahead of Other People

1. Master Your Sleep First
2. Build Your Minimum Viable Day (MVD)
3. Dopamine Detox Every Sunday
4. Ruthlessly Protect Your Morning Focus
5. Follow the Energy - NOT the Money
6. Curate Your Inputs
7. Build a Personal Board of Directors
8. The Rule of 100
9. Automate the Unimportant
10. Become Addicted to Closing Loops
11. Build a Temple For Focus
12. Ask Better Questions
13. Create a Weekly Review System
14. Master Assertive Communication
15. Build a Silent Hour Every Day
16. Walk 10000 Steps Every Day
17. Default to Action
18. Build a Vision - Then Reverse Engineer It

How to connect with AgileDad:

How To Defeat The 3 Most Common Arguments Against Technical Debt

I once worked on a project where we weren’t able to think about technical debt until five years in.

Like many startups, we had to hustle to get off the ground. In those initial years, we didn’t have much time or capacity to even think about addressing the debt we accumulated.

And did it ever accumulate.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Agile Is Broken, So What Should Startups and Tech Companies Do Instead?

Are Story Points Helping Your Team?

Story Points have been around for a couple decades now. There are countless articles and videos demonstrating their usage. Many organizations mandate their usage and teaching them are part of the standard approach for consulting organizations.

For as long as I’ve known about Story Points (SP) and the associated velocity there continue to be far too many teams that have constant incomplete work Sprint after Sprint. Teams spend endless hours haggling over point estimation and still get it wrong so much of the time. There is elaborate theater in many teams at the end of the Sprint, renegotiating SP estimates for work that was harder than anticipated. Or splitting incomplete work and then attempting to determine where to place the Story Points.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Scrum Masters Are Useless — Product Managers Should Run Their Own Scrum

We’ve all been there. It’s 10:00 AM. You’re in a standup, sipping your third coffee, while the Scrum Master dutifully asks each developer, “What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Any blockers?”

Someone mumbles something about JIRA tickets. Another person reports, “Same as yesterday.”

Meanwhile, the Product Manager (PM) is frantically jotting notes, trying to connect the dots between what was promised and what’s actually happening.

And the Scrum Master? They nod, write things down, and move on.

Here’s the controversial take: Do we really need a dedicated Scrum Master for this? Or should Product Managers just run their own scrums?

How to connect with AgileDad:

The Time For You to Grow

How to connect with AgileDad:

The Job Market Rebound is Going to Catch Everyone Off Guard

I’ve got good news about the job market.

And some bad news.

Five Things You Should Know as a Leader Implementing AI

1. There is no playbook... Yet
2. Do NOT be afraid to experiment
3. AI technology advances quickly
4. AI will NOT solve everything
5. Be a responsible leader when implementing AI

BONUS - Find the right coach / trainer when implementing AI. Do not go at it alone. You will waste too much time learning outdated materials.

How to connect with AgileDad:

3 Key Lessons From My First Product Role

My first product role shaped how I lead. I learned about true ownership, deep business impact, and competition that goes beyond features. Working with a visionary CEO in a product-led company taught me lessons that still guide me. PMs, are you embracing these to drive real impact?

How to connect with AgileDad:

A few years ago, I was in a business review meeting with my team, looking at charts and reports that showed how our business was doing. The numbers didn’t look good, and as everyone around the table shared their thoughts, it became clear that no one agreed on what to do next. There were a lot of ideas, worries, and quick fixes — but not much clarity.

I realized then that my job wasn’t just about making decisions; it was about seeing the bigger picture, noticing patterns others might miss, and guiding the team through the confusion. That’s when I understood what makes a leader truly strategic.

Being a strategic leader isn’t just about having a vision or setting goals. It’s about building a set of skills that help you see changes before they happen, connect the dots, and lead your team through uncertain times.

How to connect with AgileDad:

How Firm a Foundation...

How to connect with AgileDad:

Three Ways to Handle Unfinished Work - Mike Cohn

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been sending you tips about spillover on agile teams. We’ve talked in depth about the problem of habitual spillover—when a team routinely rolls unfinished work forward from sprint to sprint.
This week, I want to share 3 ways to handle the unfinished work that will occasionally be left over by even a great agile team.
 

1. If You Want a Guarantee, Buy a Toaster

My first bit of advice for how to handle unfinished work is to remember that even the best agile teams sometimes miss their goals. That’s OK and even desirable to a certain extent.
Sprint goals are not guarantees. (As Clint Eastwood’s character Nick Pulovski says in The Rookie, “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster!”) Leaders, stakeholders, and even the team themselves might need an occasional reminder about this.
A team’s commitment to a sprint goal is a promise to do its best to achieve that goal. If team members are perpetually forced instead to make a guarantee, they will guarantee less in order to be safe.
Sometimes a team needs to make a guarantee. There might be times when a client or customer needs a capability by a certain date. The finance group may need to run year-end reports in early January, for example.
In general, though, we don’t want to force a team into a guarantee. We ask a team to commit to something reasonable and then we’re understanding if they miss it. Falling short on the occasional commitment is not a failure-–it’s usually a sign of bad luck or a team that’s striving to do too much.
 

2. Don’t Roll Work Forward Automatically

Is the Party Over For Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches?

Over the past decade, agile adoption in organizations has seen an upswing. Large enterprises—banks, insurance companies, automakers, and many others—have all been at the forefront of launching agile transformations to achieve business agility—the elusive elixir. The promise of increased flexibility, faster delivery, and enhanced collaboration across teams is almost impossible to resist in today’s competitive world, where markets change rapidly, bringing risks and opportunities.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Five Most Forgotten Parts From The Scrum Guide

Scrum. Love it or hate it. There doesn’t appear to be much in between. I like the framework, although I don’t think it is perfect. At the same time, I understand the developers who hate it from the bottom of their hearts. Strangely enough though, they have different problems with Scrum than I have. And zooming in, their problems often are not about Scrum in the first place. They shed light on how Scrum can be misapplied in many ways.

Today I will list the 5 most forgotten, misunderstood or misapplied parts of the Scrum Guide. I will also tell how they are misapplied and their actual intention.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Dependencies Destroy Agility and Predictability

Why do organizations desire Agile?

Two of the most common items I hear organizations and executives identify as reasons for adopting Agile methods and practices are to increase their delivery speed and to become more predicable. When will X be done? There are valid financial reasons for these goals such as: when can we expect to book revenue for product X?

How to connect with AgileDad:

7 Tips To Read Someone’s Personality in 10 Seconds

People think it takes ages to really figure out what someone’s about, like you need to sit with them through a few heartbreaks, swap childhood trauma stories, maybe even get caught in a road trip disaster together.

Nah.

Give it ten seconds, maybe even less if they’re the loud, obvious type, and you’ll get everything you need to know.

And this isn’t about “vibes” or whatever people say when they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. This is straight-up psychology. Well, mostly. Some of it is just paying attention and comment sense.

How to connect with AgileDad:

6 Daily Habits of Highly Effective Scrum Masters

1. Start Each Day With a Quick Review
2. Lead Effective Daily Scrums
3. Make Time For One-on-Ones
4. Keep Communication Open With Stakeholders
5. Dedicate Time For Continual Learning
6. Reflect and Plan For Tomorrow

How to connect with AgileDad:

Scrum Fails When Product Owners Think They Are The Boss

I’m afraid that everyone interprets it differently, and that’s the source of problems. For me, the word owner is misleading. As a Product Owner, you own nothing, though you may think you do.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Why Your Scrum Teams Are Failing - The Hard Truth

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.

Waterfall was declared a relic of the past — outdated, painfully inefficient, and completely incapable of keeping up with the demands of modern projects.

The question wasn’t which approach was better, but rather why teams were failing to embrace the very solutions meant to propel them forward.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Product Owners vs. Product Managers vs. Project Managers

While you are knee-deep looking for your next role, I’ve seen endless variations of “product” roles. Specifically, the terms Product Owner (PO), Product Manager (PM), and Project Manager (PjM) seem to be used interchangeably, or even used to describe the same person. Yet, some teams have all three within each individual squad.

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

How to connect with AgileDad:

The 5-Second Conversation Hack

Learn how to become better in conversation with this 5-second hack!

How to connect with AgileDad:

The Great Agile Reset

1. Framework Fatigue Is Real

How to Break the Spillover Habit - Mike Cohn

For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the problem of habitual spillover—when a team routinely rolls over unfinished work from sprint to sprint.
So far, we’ve talked about why spillover happens, and why it’s a problem, plus I’ve given steps to start a reduction in your team’s spillovers.
This week, I want to share two ways to break your team’s rollover habit.
 

Sometimes teams miss their goals. That’s OK. Sometimes teams miss when they aim high and fall a little short. Don’t try to fix those teams—celebrate their effort.
Other times teams miss because they just hit a run of bad luck for a handful of sprints. Again, no need to intervene there. (Next week, I’ll share what to do with the unfinished work that results from either of these first two scenarios.)
Most often, though, teams miss because they are overly optimistic about what they can achieve. They plan each sprint to be a best-case scenario.
If you think that could be your team, in your next sprint planning meetings try asking questions like these:
 

• What could go wrong that could cause the team to miss its goal?
• What has to go right to achieve this goal? These questions can help a team see any risky assumptions they’re making about how easy the planned work will be.

As most of us who made New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of 2025 have re-discovered by now, old habits die hard. Sometimes you have to take drastic action to realize lasting results, and to succeed with agile.

Curb Their Enthusiasm   Drastically Under-commitIf these kinds of questions don’t help the team make more realistic guesses about what they can accomplish, you might have to resort to drastically reducing what the team commits to achieving.
At the next sprint planning, encourage your team to truly under-commit. I’m not talking about cutting the sprint goal by some small amount, like 10–20%. I’m saying you limit team members to committing to only 50% of what they believe they can accomplish.
The team may push back on this. They are used to filling up their sprint and will be optimistic that they can get a lot more done than the items they’ve chosen. Don’t give in.
When team members push back, remind them that if they run out of work to do, they can always bring more in. But hold firm that no work will come in until the sprint goal is achieved and all the work planned into the sprint is complete.
(You’ll likely need to have a talk with the product owner prior to sprint planning so they too can be prepared to hear that the team is bringing only a few items into the sprint.)
The goal in under-committing is to let the team feel what it’s like to add work into a sprint rather than always needing to drop work.
After they feel this, they’ll likely want to feel it again.
Encourage them to plan a bit more work into the next few sprints until they get close to missing their goals and rolling over again. Incorporate the enthusiasm-curbing questions as needed.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Grow Your Product Management Skills

Managing a product through the product life cycle is hard. It is even more difficult to grow as a product owner in these challenging times. Product ownership is a very complex and multifaceted challenge. And because of the complexity of the topic, there is no single linear approach to mastering product ownership. That’s why we need agile and lean approaches and a wide range of knowledge and skills.
You can study product management for years at university. This shows how profound and demanding the entire discipline is. It also shows how long it takes to build the skills required to be successful in this field.

To succeed, you need the right skills and the right approaches. Only if you are aware of the complexity and know what you are doing will your product be successful throughout the entire product life cycle.

How to connect with AgileDad:

5 Things a Manager Should NEVER Do...

1. Skip-Level Feedback
2. Take on Individual Contributor Work
3. Add More Work to the Team
4. Take Sides in Personal Disagreements
5. Make All the Important Decisions

How to connect with AgileDad:

From Dreary to Dazzling - 1 Young Man Makes a Difference

Can one young man truly make a difference in his community? Indeed he can!

How to connect with AgileDad:

Effective Storytelling in Product Management

If you’re not careful, product management can get really, really boring. Slide deck after slide deck, the details start to blur together, and the audience starts to disengage.

If you’re throwing stats, facts, and bullets at your audience without constructing a narrative, your point isn’t getting across. Your audience will be quick to tune it out and, even if they do listen, they’ll struggle to turn the information into something memorable and useful.

Product storytelling is a great way to add context and excitement to any product document or presentation. By sharing our data, insights, and strategies in a story-driven way, product managers can get more done with more impactful communication.

How to connect with AgileDad:

3 Ways To Improve Team Morale

Team morale indicates how willing members are to push on in the face of difficulties. Teams with high morale find their work meaningful and feel motivated to work together. High morale is a buffer against inevitable setbacks and burnout, and a great indicator of the atmosphere in a team.

So what can you do when team morale is low? In this blog post, we share three short formats that easily fit inside a Sprint Retrospective. Their purpose is to start a dialogue in your team and begin improvement. The formats are based on the Liberating Structures “Conversation Cafe”, “Troika Consulting”, and “Discovery & Action Dialogue”. So pick the one that you think will work best and take it away!

How to connect with AgileDad:

Just watch the video already...

How to connect with AgileDad:

Transitioning from a Product Manager to a Product Lead

Ever since I started my new role as product lead a few weeks back, I felt that there was a huge difference in the work and responsibilities I perform as compared to my PM roles back in Crypto.com and Alibaba.

And I am not entirely sure if this is because of the role, or perhaps the nature of the company where the startup environment requires me to always be scrappy. But I am definitely loving every moment of it and I am constantly learning to be a better version of myself in this new role.

With that being said, I wanted to share my experience and highlight some of the main changes I have identified to better prepare any first-time product leads out there.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Shake Off The Winter Blues, Spring Is Here!

Don't let the depression of winter shut you down! Look forward to Spring and make small changes to prepare.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Start With No... Why Most People Should NOT Be Managers

 Leading talented humans requires inspiring them, partnering with them in understanding the problem, designing the solution, and motivating them.

Now, if you can’t influence people as their peers, that might be frustrating, but you can still usually do your job, and no harm is done. However, if you are the formal manager of the team, and you can’t influence them to do what the company needs, now you are failing in your primary job.

Most of the companies I worked for took a “promote from the rear” approach, which meant that people should be promoted for roles they already demonstrated they could do. In this case, if you showcase that you can lead and do 70–80% of the manager role, then you will get that desired promotion.

How to connect with AgileDad:

The 2025 Product Manager - Winning Playbook

1. Finding Your Why
2. The rise of The Product Specialist
3. Strategy vs. Execution
4. Crafting Winning Product Documents
5. Say NO To Boring and YES To Automation
6. Ride The Creator Economy

How to connect with AgileDad:

The 2-Minute Meeting Hack

How It Works

Set the stage: Inform your team about the new format beforehand. No team likes surprises.

The 2-minute rule: Each team member gets exactly 2 minutes to speak.

The magic formula: In those 2 minutes, they must cover:

• One success since the last meeting
• One challenge they’re facing
• One specific ask for help or resources

Then it’s your chance as the boss to shine.

You get 30 seconds to respond with:

• A note of praise for the success
• A clarifying question about the challenge
• A commitment to address the ask (or delegate it)

How to connect with AgileDad:

The Top 3 Weekly Meetings That Will Help You Be the Best Leader!

1. Open Office Hour
2. Work Status Meeting
3. Work Productivity Meeting

How to connect with AgileDad:

Welcome Home Anthony Henson!

My son is FINALLY home! Please join me in welcoming him back!

How to connect with AgileDad:

Lead an Agile Team With Context and Control

You can only get so far by attempting to manage the performance of people through control. It is far better to lead or manage people by defining the context of their work.
I was fortunate to learn this lesson early on when I worked in...a fast food restaurant. My manager, Jim, trained me that each burger was to be dressed with:
 

• 2 leaves of lettuce
• 2 tomatoes
• 3 slices of onion
• 3 pickles

• defining the wildly important goal (WIG) the team is working toward
• helping people deeply understand and empathize with users
• guiding a team in defining its igniting purpose, an intrinsic motivation that inspires exceptional performance
• understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products

He didn’t drill this into my head. He didn’t inspect my burgers. He didn’t pop-quiz me.
Instead, he explained the context, the reason why our burgers should be dressed exactly that way.
He told me to imagine a customer who orders a burger with extra pickles and a cook who loves pickles and puts five on each burger by default. When asked for extra pickles, that cook puts on seven.
That’s too many for the customer who, on a return visit, asks for “light pickles.” That burger is made by a different cook who would normally put on three pickles and so puts just one on when asked for light pickles.
My boss gave me a vision of hapless customers alternately ordering extra or light pickles and never getting what they want due to the preferences of the cooks.
I remember the context he defined 40+ years later. How long would pimply-faced me have remembered these amounts if my boss had merely presented them as rules?
My manager defined the context of my customer—a hungry person seeking consistency. And that was enough.
Leading through context can involve of mix of things such as:
 
Leading an agile team—whether as a manager, executive, Scrum Master, product owner, team lead or other leader—is different. It requires new skills.
A self-organizing team resists rules and thrives on creativity and freedom. Leading such a team by providing context can also cause it to excel,

How to connect with AgileDad:

The First Principles of Product Management

Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles. A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”.

An example of one that we use for our developer platform team are that “all platform features should be like Lego blocks”, meaning that developers should be able to use any combination of features when building an app. Features should be interoperable, just like Legos.

First principle thinking helps PMs because as companies scale, communicating the rationale behind historical, current, and future decisions can be simplified in a way that their team and stakeholders can rally around. This enables people around the PM to move quickly in the same direction, decouple, and make smart trade offs without their presence.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Agile is NOT Dead... It is Just in a New Era!

The New Agile Principles

1) Own The Problem & The Solution

Agile addresses complexity, where uncertainty reigns. There simply is no clear-cut solution to your problems. What is worse, the moment you apply a solution without understanding it, you surrender control and become a spectator.

The first principle is to understand and fully accept that the only person who can decide what the solution might be is the person who is closest to the problem — you. Embrace this responsibility.

2) Be a Learner

Effective problem-solving requires knowledge. The only way to take responsibility for your problems is by having the necessary knowledge at hand. And the only way you can do this is by becoming a scholar. Continuously learning.

Knowledge is power. The more you know, the better you can understand your problem and the more solutions you will be able to come up with. The better you will be able to spar with others. The better you can take responsibility for your problems.

Innovation rests on the shoulders of those who came before you.

3) Be Critical

Knowledge is merely information. To wield knowledge effectively you need wisdom.

Wisdom comes from scepticism, from asking questions, being aware of assumptions, deep analysis, seeking diverse perspectives and engaging in thoughtful discussion. Strive to understand the context and the limitations of the knowledge you have. Strive to discover the gaps in your knowledge.

Being critical is the only way to discern what the value and applicability is of any knowledge.

4) Be Creative

Complexity means continuously facing novel problems that demand original solutions. That can only happen with creativity. Experimentation.

Accept that! Realize that that is the job!

Again, you may stand on the shoulders of geniuses and most of what you create may be derivative, but in the context of your particular problem, the solution will always be an act of creation, something unique.

5) Be Humble

Wielding the previous principles effectively will do awesome things for your self-confidence. Solving problems will become a game you love to play.

But beware! Arrogance is fatal. The only way to remain effective is by embracing humility and always accepting that whatever you come up with may and probably will fail, and can always be improved.

Humility is the foundation of continuous improvement. It leads to the need to experiment and validate, a need to second-guess yourself, a quest to make absolutely sure your solutions truly work.

6) Be a Teacher

Last of all, be a teacher. This may sound weird, but the truth is that teaching solidifies understanding. Teaching, whether through your teams, through writing, presentations, or mentorship, forces you to articulate your thoughts clearly, and forces you to structure your knowledge and identify gaps in your understanding.

This is the true sign of mastery of your profession.

How to connect with AgileDad:

Bring Out Your Stagnation!

In the bustling village of Progressia, every Tuesday morning, the town crier—an overworked man in a tattered robe named Nigel—pushed his old wooden cart through the cobbled streets, shouting:

"Bring out your stagnation! Bring out your stagnation!"

It was a longstanding tradition. Villagers would shuffle out of their homes, dragging out bad ideas, outdated habits, and half-baked projects, dumping them onto the cart so they could be disposed of properly.

One day, old farmer Reginald hobbled out, dragging something heavy behind him.

“Here’s my career,” he grumbled. “It hasn’t moved in years.”

Nigel peered down at the heap of dusty resignation letters, ignored training courses, and a suspiciously untouched LinkedIn profile. He poked it with a stick.

“Oh no, that’s not quite dead,” Nigel said. “It just needs a bit of effort!”

“Nonsense,” said Reginald. “I’m stuck, out of ideas, and might as well give up.”

Suddenly, the heap of career mistakes coughed and sat up. “I’m feeling much better,” it croaked. “I think I’ll take a course on Agile leadership and try networking again.”

Reginald frowned. “Look, can we just throw it on the cart? Makes things simpler.”

But Nigel shook his head. “You see, mate, the problem isn’t that your career is dead. It’s that you stopped improving. If you’re still breathing, you can still grow.”

A murmur of agreement spread through the crowd. People began dragging out their own half-forgotten goals—neglected gym memberships, dusty musical instruments, and an entire sack labeled "New Year’s Resolutions (2009-2024)".

Nigel grinned. “See? You don’t need to get rid of your past—you need to upgrade it! Continual improvement, people! That’s how you avoid ending up on the cart.”

From that day forward, Progressia changed. Every Tuesday, instead of throwing away their “stagnation,” people took their old ideas and revitalized them—learning new skills, trying new methods, and embracing a growth mindset.

And as for Reginald? Well, he got himself a Scrum Master certification and became quite the success. (Though he still grumbled about it.)

Moral of the story: Don’t throw yourself on the cart too soon. If you’re still breathing, you can still grow!

How to connect with AgileDad:

The Top 5 Daily Rituals of Highly Effective Leaders

1. Start The Day With Clarity
2. Connect With Your Team
3. Focus on Learning
4. Celebrate Small Wins
5. Practice Reflection

How to connect with AgileDad:

Why a Spillover Habit Is So Harmful - Mike Cohn

Welcome to the second email in the spillover series. We’re talking today about why habitual spillover—the phenomenon of unfinished work piling up and carrying forward sprint after sprint—is so harmful to teams.

As a reminder, 

• Last week, I explained why spillover happens
• This week, I’ll describe why habitual spillover is a problem
• Next week, I’ll give you some ideas for how to break your team’s rollover habit
• Finally, I’ll talk about what to do with unfinished work when spillover happens

Why is Habitual Spillover a Problem?

As we talked about last week, teams will sometimes miss their sprint goal, especially when that team is ambitious and aiming high. And that’s OK.

But teams that develop a consistent pattern of overcommitting and then carrying work forward cause problems for themselves and for the organization as a whole.

Teams That Deliver Routinely Are Predictably Dependable

The main problem with habitual spillover is Lack of Predictability / Dependability.

Every organization benefits from some level of predictability. I worked with a company once that was preparing for its IPO.

Despite the tremendous pressure to meet revenue goals prior to going public, the CEO told me he’d happily trade some revenue for greater predictability. Being predictable is that important.

Predictability shouldn’t be the primary goal for an agile team, but it should be a goal.

It’s the same in sports. Basketball players strive to make every free throw. But a player who sinks the ball in the basket about 80% of the time is considered a high performer. That player can be reliably counted on to make most of their free throws.

Baseball players also strive to get a hit every time they’re at bat. And believe it or not, they are considered great, highly predictable hitters, if they manage a hit about 35% of the time—reflected in their .350 batting average.

Like those sports players, agile teams are expected to try to deliver everything they think they can, every time. But realistically, if an agile team achieves its goal 60–80% of the time, they are providing a high level of predictability.

Teams That Demonstrate Frequent Progress Are Happier & More Creative

Did We Fail Agile? Shame On Us!!

For decades, developers were trapped. They couldn’t bare the situation any longer. Following requirements that resulted in features customers didn’t use demotivated everyone, and a revolution was necessary.

At the beginning of the 2000s, we finally realized that we could not predict everything upfront. A plan would fool everyone and yield pointless results. It was time to break silos and boost collaboration. Move from features to results, from plans to goals, from fragmented responsibilities to autonomous teams.

How to connect with AgileDad:

How To Prioritize Risk As a Product Manager

The conventional approach to product development, the build-measure-learn cycle, has been the bedrock for many product teams. This methodology emphasizes building quickly, measuring results, and then learning from those outcomes to iterate and improve. While it encourages speed and adaptability, it also comes with significant downsides, especially when it comes to resource efficiency. Too often, product teams find themselves pouring time and energy into features that ultimately fail, resulting in wasted resources, lost opportunities, and often a shift in product strategy.

How to connect with AgileDad: