The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

AI Didn’t Speed Up My Discovery

There is a thing that happens in domain conversations. We talk about something, agree we understand it, and proceed. Then I show a sketch and the client says, “No, that is not what I meant.” The talking did not catch the gap. The visual did.

AI lets me put a draft visual in front of a power user in the time it takes to have a conversation about it. Half-formed. Sometimes wrong on purp...

Psychology of High-Performing Teams

The most critical psychological factor in team performance is psychological safety. This concept describes a shared belief held by members of a team that the group is a safe place for interpersonal risk-taking. In environments with high psychological safety, team members feel confident that they will not be embarrassed, rejected, or punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mist...

Traditional Product Management Is Ending in 2026

For years, product management followed a familiar playbook.

Gather requirements. Write PRDs. Prioritise backlog. Run sprint rituals. Coordinate across teams. Ship features.

That model worked in a world where building software was slow, expensive, and engineering bandwidth was the biggest constraint.

But in 2026, that world is changing fast.

AI is reducing execution time. Prototypes can be...

What Cinco de Mayo Can Teach Us About Agile - Mike Cohn

Today seems like a good day to celebrate Cinco de Agile.
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla, when a smaller, less-equipped Mexican force defeated a larger French army.
There’s an agile lesson in that.
The side with the bigger plan, more resources, and more confidence doesn’t always win.
Sometimes the winner is the side that can adapt faster....

The Hole in Your Product Team That Keeps Swallowing UsersA new employee engagement platform launched its pilot with a perfect customer. Warm relationship at the CEO level. Company-wide mandate. Strong early results from the users who engaged. One problem: most of the company never touched it. Despite the mandate. Despite the results sitting right there in the data.

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What Servant Leadership Actually Means

When I first heard the term “servant leader,” I pictured someone endlessly helpful. Always available. Always saying yes. Smoothing every edge, softening every message, making sure nobody was ever uncomfortable.

I was wrong. And for a while, that misunderstanding made me a less effective Scrum Master.

Here’s the truth I had to learn the hard way: Servant leadership isn&rsquo...

A Plan is Not a Commitment - Mike Cohn

One of the fastest ways leaders create overcommitment is by treating a plan like a guarantee.
An agile team builds its plan from what it knows at the time: assumptions, estimates, priorities, and constraints. That means every plan is probabilistic. It has some chance of coming true, but that chance is not 100%.
That is why I coach teams to aim for about 80% success.
Aim much higher tha...

Your Retrospective Never Actually Fixes the Alignment Problem

The retrospective is one of the most protected ceremonies in agile. Scrum teams hold it every sprint. SAFe bakes it into every iteration. Coaches run workshops on how to run better ones. And yet, the same misalignment issues resurface sprint after sprint.

This isn’t a facilitation problem. It isn’t a psychological safety problem. It is a structural mismatch: te...

Memorial Day Special Episode

By late morning, the small town square was already filling with folding chairs, fluttering flags, and families dressed in red, white, and blue. The air smelled faintly of fresh grass and hot pavement, and the sound of a high school band warming up drifted across the park like a promise. People did not speak loudly. They smiled, hugged one another, and found their places with the kind of quiet respect tha...

What Does a Delivery Manager Do and Do I Even Need One?

A Delivery Manager is a client-facing, Agile project manager who acts as a servant-leader to ensure high-quality products are delivered in a predictable way. As the main point of contact between founders and Developers, the Delivery Manager keeps everyone connected and informed. They own the plan, align the product strategy and scope with founders and the team, and w...

When The Work Wont Fit, Make It a Shared Problem - Mike Cohn

When a team says, “We can’t do all of that by then,” many leaders make the same mistake: 
They push harder.
They restate the deadline. They repeat the importance. They ask for more effort, more creativity, or more commitment.
But once the team has told you the work will not fit, pressure is usually the wrong next move.
Your job at that po...

The 5 Whys and What We are Missing

Most managers are excellent problem solvers. The problem is they’re solving the presenting problem, the one on the surface, not the real one underneath. And that’s exactly why the same situations keep triggering the same reactions, the same frustration, the same exhaustion.

The Five Whys technique was originally developed in manufacturing to trace defects back to their root cause. But it...

Adjusting the Leadership Lens

A senior leader said something to me recently that stayed.

“My role has grown faster than the way I think about decisions.”

It wasn’t a lack of capability orambition.

It was the quieter realisation that leadership scale demands a different lens.

In my work with leaders stepping into broader organisational roles, I often hear this moment. One leader described it this way:

“I used to so...

Project World | Business Analyst World - Day 3-4 Review

Day 3 - Agile Fundamentals - One of the most common points of Agile adoption failure comes with the incremental on-boarding of Agile teams throughout an organization while not having everyone starting with the same foundational Agile knowledge. This workshop session is designed to help everyone on the team learn the fundamental principles behind what makes Agile work, an...