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...
Responsible AI
Your AI Works in the Demo. It Dies in the Workflow.
A VP of Operations at a B2B software company called me a few weeks ago. Three months earlier, her team had rolled out an AI ticket summarizer for the support...
Product
What the PM Job Looks Like When Engineers Ship in Hours, Not Weeks
A product manager I coach pulled up her calendar last Friday and pointed at something she had circled in red. Eleven hours of refinement, estimation, and backlog grooming. Three hours...
Responsible AI
The Role Blur: How Product, Engineering, and Design Roles Are Merging in 2026
A year ago, if somebody walked into your engineering organization and proposed that you should hire two product managers for every one engineer, you would have laughed them out of...
Business Transformation
Your Team Has AI Tools. They Don't Have AI Skills.
A Scrum Master I coach sent me a screenshot last week from a sprint retrospective. Half her team had been using ChatGPT all sprint for stand-up summaries, acceptance criteria, and...
Responsible AI
Measuring AI's Real Impact on Your Delivery Flow
A director of engineering pulled up two dashboards in front of me a few weeks ago. The first showed output: pull requests merged, commits per developer, story points completed...
Responsible AI
The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Your Team Might Be Getting Slower With AI
Would you be willing to say this? Experienced developers, working in repos they already know, using the AI tools that everybody keeps telling them to use, are 19% slower than...
Responsible AI
Your People Are Using AI Without You. Now What?
A VP of Engineering talked to me a few weeks ago, half-laughing, half-serious. Legal had run a quiet audit of customer support transcripts and found that one of their senior...
Leadership + Organization
What Organizations Actually Lose When They Eliminate the Scrum Master Role
It is a Tuesday afternoon in a quarterly planning meeting. The CFO has the headcount sheet open. Someone in the room, maybe the VP of engineering, says, "We've got eight...
Leadership + Organization
Why the Scrum Master Role Is Being Cut (And What's Actually Replacing It)
In January 2023, Capital One eliminated 1,100 roles in what it called its "agile job family." In the bank's own words, and I'm going to quote them directly:"The agile role...