The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

5 Essential Skills Every Scrum Master Needs

Being a Scrum Master isn’t just about booking meetings and quoting the Scrum Guide. It’s about showing up every day as a change agent — the one who helps people work better together, face complexity with courage, and actually deliver value.

It’s easy to forget that Scrum is fundamentally about people.

Your job as a Scrum Master is to unlock that potential — not by managing them, but by enabl...

10 Mistakes Enterprises Make When Scaling Agile — and How to Avoid Them

When I walk into a Fortune 500 boardroom and hear, “We’ve adopted Agile,” I brace myself. Usually, what follows is a whirlwind of rebranded status meetings, overwhelmed middle managers, and teams confused about whether they’re sprinting or slowly marching in circles.

Enterprise Agile transformations are rarely short on ambition. But too often, the reality is a mi...

If You Want Better Stories, Stop Writing Them All Yourself

I’ve talked to a lot of product owners who are drowning in tickets, trying to “get ahead” by writing every single user story themselves.
I used to be one of them. And every sprint, we’d slip. Morale tanked. The team blamed the process, and I blamed myself.

But after one conversation — and one uncomfortable realization — I found a single thread running through every success...

Velocity = The Most Abused Agile Metric Ever

Welcome to the dark side of velocity — the number that started as a planning aid and ended up as a weaponized performance metric, often wielded by people who’ve never touched a user story in their lives.

In this episode, we’ll break down:

• What velocity is supposed to do
• How it gets misunderstood and misused
• Why chasing it kills team health
• And how to bring it back from the dead

Let’s s...

A Make-A-Wish That Turned Into a Gift for Others

When Karina’s Make-A-Wish moment arrived, she didn’t ask for a trip or a celebrity meet-and-greet. Instead she asked to create a day for other sick kids — a place where they could forget hospitals and treatments for a while. Make-A-Wish marked Karina’s request as their historic 500,000th wish and worked with partners to turn it into a virtual “camp” experience so many children could p...

The Heart of New Leadership is Curiosity

Most of us are drawn to rules and limits. They give us a sense of safety. Structure and predictability offer comfort: we know what to expect, and what’s expected of us. For a while, this feels like stability. But in truth, it often leads to stagnation.

The artist doesn’t value safety and smallness. The artist values discovery. To create something new, you have to step beyond the known.

The same...

Is your team moving in sync—or spinning in circles? - Mike Cohn

Ever feel like your agile team should be working smoothly—but something’s just a bit off? Handoffs feel clunky. Meetings drag. Even small changes spark big debates.
It’s not that your team isn’t skilled—it’s that you’re not quite in sync.
Rowers have a word for the alignment you’re seeking: swing.
What is swing?
In crew rowing, swing is that near-magical mom...

Today we remember Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry - Happy Veterans Day

On May 26, 2008, in Paktya Province, Afghanistan, Army Ranger Leroy A. Petry and his team were ambushed. During the firefight an enemy grenade landed near Petry and several fellow Rangers. Without hesitation Petry grabbed the grenade and attempted to throw it away from the group. The grenade detonated as he was throwing it; Petry survived but lost his right hand. His ...

How To Align Your Team Before Year-End - 5 Things You Must Do NOW!

1. Call Out the Elephant in the Room

2. Don’t Let the Momentum Stall

3. Run an Assets & Liabilities Exercise

4. Revisit Your Purpose Statement

5. Consider a Design Sprint

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The Hand Written Letter of Gratitude

In a classroom study, students were asked to write a heartfelt letter of thanks to someone who had helped them and then read that letter aloud to the person in a surprise face-to-face meeting. The scene that followed — the surprised, emotional reactions from the recipients and the visible pride and relief on the students’ faces — was unforgettable. Beyond the moment, the students reported lasting...

Are You Protecting Your Team Against the Right Thing? - Mike Cohn

A lot has been written and said about the responsibility of a Scrum Master to protect the team.
Examples of protecting the team typically involve running interference with well-meaning but overzealous product owners, stakeholders, and managers. Teams run into trouble all the time from people who want it all now or who keep adding more work in the middle or a sprint...

No, Product Management Isn’t Useless — You’re Just Doing It Wrong

If you think PMs just write tickets and slow things down, you haven’t seen product management done right.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard some version of this:
“Do we even need product managers anymore?”

Usually, it comes after a failed launch, a bloated backlog, or a roadmap that reads like a Frankenstein wishlist stitched together by six depart...

The Scrum Master Role Is Disappearing - Or Is It?

The layoffs of 2023 told a story that few in the tech industry wanted to acknowledge. Among the 120,000+ tech workers who lost their jobs, Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches were disproportionately represented. But this wasn’t just about economic belt-tightening it was the culmination of a quiet revolution that’s been brewing for years.

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Trick-or-treaters Leave Their Halloween Candy For Child Battling Leukemia

A search for hope at the end of this very anxious week led me to this humble bundle.  Zoe, 3, is the proud product of TJ and Courtney Thomas of Atlanta, Georgia.

Back in February, Zoe was diagnosed with leukemia. And because her immune system is now compromised, she couldn't go trick-or-treating on Halloween with all the other kids. In fact, her parents eve...

Poltergeist Meetings — When Meetings Throw Things At You...

5 micro-rituals (practical)

1. Purpose line on invite — one sentence: “Decision needed / Sync / Info.”

2. Time-boxed agenda — 3 bullets with owner & minutes.

3. No Rotating facilitator — prevent single-person theater.

4. Two-minute rule — speakers over two minutes get a “parking lot” nudge.

5. Outcome artifact — one sentence note added to the meeting invite that records decisions.

   How...

The Phantom Sprint — Invisible Work That Steals Velocity

Your sprint looks healthy — until a phantom dependency eats your finish line. Here’s how to find the invisible work before the demo.

Detection & prevention tactics

• Dependency board: visible KANBAN lane for external asks with owners and ETA.

• Capacity buffer: protect 10–20% of sprint for unplanned but likely work.

• Pre-planning checkpoint: 5-min readout with ops/support to su...

The Haunted Backlog — When Old Stories Won’t Die

• Triage: Mark backlog items > 90 days old as “graveyard candidates.”

• Reframe: Turn vague epics into a one-sentence outcome + metric. If you can’t, bury it.

• Timebox an experiment: If still valuable, create a 1-week spike with a clear success metric.

• Assign ownership: No owner = forever ghost. Give it to someone accountable for outcome vs. activity.

• Retire ritual: Monthly “retire or r...