The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Feeling The World Cup - A Sons Blind Journey

In Iran, a father named Ardashir Babajani found a deeply creative way to share one of his favorite joys with his nine-year-old son, Alireza, who was born blind. Like millions of families around the world, they love soccer, and especially the World Cup. But for Alireza, watching the game on a screen wasn’t enough to make the action come alive.

So his father built something simple, but...

How To Develop People Skills?

Developing people skills, often referred to as soft skills or interpersonal intelligence, is less about innate charisma and more about the consistent application of specific psychological frameworks.

For a professional looking to manage teams or influence stakeholders, these skills are the primary lever for organizational efficiency.

Here is a strategic guide to developing high-level people skills.

How to ...

Scrum Needs Leadership Support - Mike Cohn

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is treating Scrum or agile as something isolated to the teams.
The teams will be agile.
The teams will do Scrum.
The teams will hold the meetings.
The teams will become faster.
But the surrounding organization remains largely unchanged.
That is not sustainable.
Scrum asks teams to focus, collaborate, inspect, adapt, and deliver v...

What Do Product Managers Do All Day?

If you read a typical product manager job description, the role sounds very polished.

Define vision.
Own the roadmap.
Drive strategy.
Work cross-functionally.
Deliver impact.

It all sounds important, structured, and clear.

And to be fair, none of it is wrong.
But it also doesn’t quite capture what the role actually feels like day to day.
So let me take you through a day in my...

Lagging Behind? Metrics and Reporting Matter

Ask any team what metrics they track, and you’ll get some version of the same list…
Velocity.
Story points completed.
Burndown.
Sprint goal hit rate.
Maybe defect counts if someone’s been paying attention.

These numbers feel solid. They’re concrete, they’re consistent, and they show up reliably at the end of every sprint.
I get why teams hol...

Happy Pioneer Day!

Pioneer Day is a July 24th holiday that commemorates the arrival of the first group of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and it matters to American history because it captures both the courage of frontier migration and the complicated story of westward expansion, religious freedom, and colonization in the American West.

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7 Principles on Building Trust From Ted Lasso

A few weeks ago, I found myself watching Ted Lasso, and what started as entertainment became something else entirely: a masterclass on what makes teams actually work, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was witnessing, this peculiar alchemy where incompetence somehow creates excellence.

What struck me wasn’t the humor, though there’s plenty of it, but rather the ce...

Focus Requires Saying Not Yet ~ Mike Cohn

Many Scrum problems are really focus problems.
Organizations try to do too many things at once. They have too many initiatives, too many urgent requests, too many stakeholders, too many priorities, and too little willingness to say “not yet.”
Scrum makes this visible.
A sprint creates a short planning horizon for deciding what the team can accomplish next. A sprint goal ...

How to Give Clear Direction as a Leader, Without Micromanaging

Giving clear direction is difficult. Honestly, we prefer that the people we talk to “just get it.” We go a step further, convincing ourselves that if they were smart enough, we shouldn’t have to speak too much before they “run with it.”

If you give an instruction to a team member but only discover they weren’t aligned when the task is c...

The Most Important Leadership Skill No One Talks About

When you perform improv, you step on stage without knowing how long the scene will last. You build a situation in real time. You react. You escalate. You try things. Sometimes it’s brilliant. Sometimes it’s chaotic. Often it’s both.

What most people don’t realize is that the actors don’t decide when the scene ends.

There’s someone in the lightin...

If Your ScrumMaster Only Runs Meetings... You're Wasting Your Best Leader

Ask ten people what a ScrumMaster does, and you're likely to hear ten different answers.

"They run the Daily Stand-up."

"They schedule Sprint Planning."

"They update Jira."

"They remove impediments."

"They're the Agile coach."

"They're the team's project manager."

Some of those answers are partially correct.

Most of them are incomplete.

And that's becoming one of the b...

AI Can Write User Stories... So What Does the Product Owner Do Now?

If artificial intelligence can write user stories...

What exactly is the Product Owner supposed to do?

It's a fair question.

Over the past year, we've watched AI tools generate acceptance criteria, organize backlogs, summarize stakeholder interviews, identify duplicate requirements, estimate effort, draft release notes, and even suggest Sprint Goals.

Tasks that once req...

WAgile Isn't a Compromise... It's the Future of Modern Project Delivery

"If Agile works so well... why are so many organizations mixing it with traditional project management?"

For years, the conversation has been framed as a battle.

Agile versus Waterfall.

Scrum versus Project Management.

Innovation versus governance.

Speed versus predictability.

Choose a side.

Defend your methodology.

Convince everyone else they're wrong.

But something int...

Freedom, Fireworks, and the Power of Together

Today is one of those days that brings out something special in all of us.

The flags come out.

The grills get fired up.

The music gets louder.

The kids run around with sparklers.

And for a moment, we all slow down long enough to remember what this day is really about.

Yes, it is about fireworks.

Yes, it is about food, fun, and family.

But more than anything, it is about freedom.

It is about the c...

Bad Agile Is Dying... And That's the Best News Agile Has Had in Years

Agile isn't dying.

Bad Agile is.

And honestly...

that's fantastic news.

For nearly two decades, organizations around the world raced to become "Agile."

Some invested heavily in coaching.

Others purchased new software.

Many reorganized entire departments.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the journey, a surprising number of organizations confused Agile with process.

Stand-ups ...

AI Won't Replace ScrumMasters... Or Will It?

Will artificial intelligence replace the ScrumMaster?

It's a headline that keeps resurfacing. Social media is full of bold predictions. Industry blogs continue debating it. Conference sessions are packed with people looking for answers. And if you've spent any time on LinkedIn recently, you've probably seen more than a few posts claiming that AI is either the greatest thing to happen to Ag...

Thinking Leader vs Talking Leader

Many leaders confuse constant talking with teams as real progress, but having discussions is not real progress, nor clear thinking.

The reality is that leadership runs on two types of work: Thinking and talking.

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Agile Estimation and Story Points

Story points are a way of estimating the effort required to complete a user story or any other piece of work in agile software development. A user story is a short description of a feature or functionality that the customer wants from the product.

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