The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Sprint Planning or Sprint Guessing?

Welcome to sprint planning — that magical 90-minute meeting (that always becomes 3 hours) where:

• Developers turn into psychics
• Product managers become game show hosts
• Product owners stare into a backlog like it’s a crystal ball

Sound familiar?

For many Agile teams, sprint planning isn’t the crisp, focused ritual described in books. It’s often more ambiguous, chaotic, and filled with guessing t...

The Light on Maple Street — A Holiday Story About Small Acts That Become Everything

It started with one string of lights.

Maple Street was the kind of block where porches still had rocking chairs and everyone knew which mailboxes belonged to which dog. In late November, between the first frost and the rush of the season, the Wilsons put up a single strand of blue bulbs across their porch. They’d just lost a little money that month — ...

So, what does a Project Manager actually do?

Ah, the eternal question. What does a PM actually do?

Well, most people think it’s the easiest job in the world — after all, you just tell everyone else what to do, right?

Sure, if you also enjoy being the middle child in a family of stress-addicted workaholics with a taste for crises.

In the last decade or so, I’ve worked in everything from Fortune 500 companies (you know, those lovely corp...

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...

Is Scrum Slowly Taking Away Your Will To Live?

On the surface, it sounds innocent, doesn’t it? Cheerful even. Like something British schoolchildren might play on a muddy field before promptly breaking an ankle. But no. In reality, Scrum is a framework for managing work in software development, and it is somehow both wildly popular and completely misunderstood by… well, almost everyone.

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Project Manager vs Product Manager vs Business Analyst

You’ve probably heard the terms project manager, product manager, and business analyst tossed around like interchangeable buzzwords.

But let’s be honest — most posts explaining these roles either put you to sleep or leave you more confused than before.

So let’s break it down properly.

No jargon. No textbook talk. Just real, human language.

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The Black Friday That Bought a Neighborhood Back

The Bell & Book was a tiny independent bookstore wedged between a dry cleaner and a pawnshop on a corner that hadn’t seen much sparkle in years. Its owner, Marta, had run it for twenty years: poetry nights, school field-trip discounts, repair-your-soul advice between the biographies. Two months before Thanksgiving, a national big-box retailer announced a shiny new superstore three...

The Thanksgiving Sprint — an AgileDad story

It started two years ago in a neighborhood I know well — a mix of veterans, young families, recent transplants, and folks who’d been in the same house so long they remembered when the stoplight at the corner was just a tree. Someone on the block said aloud what people often think but don’t say: “We’ve got plenty, but a lot of us are missing the parts that make Thanksgiving feel like Thanks...

Can teams pull in more work during a sprint? - Mike Cohn

“Can we bring in more work if we’re ahead in a sprint?"
It’s one of the most common questions I get from Scrum teams — and honestly, for a long time, I couldn’t understand why. The answer felt obvious.
Of course you can bring in more work if you're ahead and clearly going to finish everything you committed to do. Just like you can drop work if you're behind....

Most Backlog Management Is Just Organized Procrastination

We’ve been told the backlog is how we steer.

How we prioritise.

How we plan.

So we invest hours, maybe days, maintaining it:

• Refinement sessions
• Estimation rituals (battles?)
• Prioritisation debates
• Acceptance criteria roulette

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What Makes a Great Product Manager?

When I first stepped into product management, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I thought it was about building cool features, running a few sprints, and celebrating launch days with cake and confetti. What I didn’t expect? The emotional rollercoaster of stakeholder battles, last-minute pivots, and the constant juggling between what’s ideal and what’s possible.

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A Home That Rebuilt a Life” — the story of Army veteran Sean Karpf

After stepping on an IED in Afghanistan, Army Sergeant Sean Karpf faced years of surgeries, rehab, and the long, slow work of rebuilding a life altered by injury. What changed everything was not a single miracle but a community-backed act of care: Homes For Our Troops (HFOT) built and donated a specially adapted, mortgage-free home designed around Sean’s needs — roll...

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...