Agility
The Scrum Events Running on Autopilot (And How to Restart Them)
A Scrum Master I worked with kept a beautiful calendar. Every event color-coded, every invite on time, the board green by Friday. When I asked which of those events...
Agility
Working Sessions, Not Meetings: How to Audit Your Agile Calendar
Open your calendar for next week and count the recurring meeting blocks. Then ask one honest question about each one: does this produce a decision, a learning, or a next...
Responsible AI
Using AI to Cut Sprint Review Prep (Without Compromising the Meeting)
A Scrum Master I coach blocks two hours every other Tuesday afternoon to prep for sprint review. She calls it her "translation time." The team just shipped a backend query...
Leadership + Organization
Why Stakeholders Stop Engaging With Sprint Reviews (And What Brings Them Back)
A Scrum Master messaged me last month with a question that summarized the whole problem. "Our two main stakeholders stopped coming to sprint review three months ago. They told...
Agility
Sprint Review vs. Demo: How to Run a Review That Actually Decides Something
Here's a quick experiment. Ask your stakeholders, on a scale of one to ten, how valuable is your sprint review? I bet they'll say four. Now go ask your team...
Product
Your Product Is Good. Adoption Is Still Stuck.
A product team I worked with shipped something genuinely good last spring. They had built an AI assistant right into their support tool that drafted a first-pass reply to every...
Responsible AI
The 10 AI Code Anti-Patterns Every Product Leader Should Know
A product leader sits in a sprint review on a Thursday afternoon. The demo is clean, the feature works, the team looks happy, and the AI-assisted code that built it...
Agility
Talking to Computers Is Getting Easier; Talking to Humans... Still Hard
Sit in on a requirements meeting sometime and watch for the moment it happens. You ask the person who knows the process best, the one who has done the job...
Responsible AI
Who Owns AI-Generated Code When It Ships? Building a Chain of Human Accountability
An AI agent writes a feature. It passes the automated test. The pull request gets approved in a one-minute review. And off it goes, deployed to production. A week later...
Responsible AI
When AI Says X and Your Gut Says Y: The Three-Question Test
A Product Owner sits in her sprint planning meeting on a Wednesday morning. The new AI prioritization tool the team has been piloting tells her to push the data export...
Leadership + Organization
The Difference Between Governance That Protects and Governance That Just Slows You Down
A VP of Engineering sits in a leadership meeting on a Tuesday afternoon. The CTO has just finished walking through last quarter's incident report. Someone, maybe the head of risk...
Leadership + Organization
Why "No Process" Agile Is Failing Your Teams: The Case for Minimum Viable Bureaucracy
Every Agile coach has a story like this one. I started working with a product organization about two months ago, and the first thing they told me — almost proudly...