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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last month a Scrum Master I coach facilitated an AI adoption canvas exercise with her team. The goal was straightforward: map out where AI tools could reduce toil in their...
You're sitting in a PI planning event. It is day two. The room has been at it for twelve hours across two days, and the teams are negotiating dependencies on...
There's something I keep hearing in coaching conversations that I don't believe anybody's saying on a bigger stage yet. Organizations that spent three years implementing some kind of scaling framework...
A director of product analytics at a logistics company told me this story a few weeks ago. Her team spent four months building a demand forecasting model. The algorithm was...
Your team's velocity is the highest it has ever been. Features are shipping faster than the roadmap can absorb them. And somewhere around month three, everything is going to slow...