The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

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 required hours can now be completed in minutes.

Some see that as a threat.

I see it as an opportunity.<...

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 interesting has happened over the past several years.

Organizations have largely stopped arguing.

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.

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 became status meetings.

Sprint Planning became project planning.

Retrospectives became...

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 Agile—or the beginning of the end.

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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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The Three Rules

Join us for this episode where you learn the three most important rules to bring you love light and happiness in your personal and professional life.

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The Return of In-Person Private Training

The return of AgileDad's private in-person training reflects a growing realization that while virtual learning is excellent for knowledge transfer, face-to-face experiences remain one of the most effective ways to build trust, strengthen collaboration, and create lasting organizational change.

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WAgile - Is Hybrid Project Management Finally Real?

WAgile is a hybrid project management approach that uses traditional governance and planning to establish direction while using Agile practices to continuously adapt execution based on learning and feedback.

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AgileDad & AI For Product Managers, Project Managers, and Leadership

The real value of AI is not just that it helps us move faster. It is that it helps us slow down in the right places so we can move better in the places that matter most.

That is the shift.

AI should not just help us produce more. It should help us think more clearly before we produce anything at all.

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AgileDad and Agile Leadership

Agile is not a magic word. It is not a sticker you put on a broken system and suddenly expect better outcomes. Agile leadership training should do one thing above all else: help leaders create real change that people can feel in the work, in the culture, and in the results.

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Finding Your Happy Place and What That Means To You

Do you have a happy place? What sparks great joy for you?

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The Difference Between Leading & Facilitating

Leadership often asks you to do two hard things at once: move the organization forward and lead in a collaborative way.

On their own, each of these roles is challenging. Together, they can create a tension that strains your ability to be effective at either.

It has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the fact that decision-maker and facilitator are two different roles. Two different mindsets.

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5 Hidden Costs of Sprint Planning And the Agile Approach That Actually Works

Hidden cost 1 — Meeting time multiplied by shallow decisions

Hidden cost 2 - Inflated estimates driven by groupthinkHidden cost 3 — Hidden work and untracked dependenciesHidden cost 4 — The false economy of large batch planningHidden cost 5 — Overcommitment as a culture problem

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Agile is Dead. Welcome to the Era of “Agent-Driven” Development

Agile was invented for humans — biological entities that need coffee, sleep, and two weeks to understand a complex requirement. But we are no longer just building software with humans. We are building it with agents. Agents that don’t sleep, don’t need standups, and can iterate in seconds, not days.

Welcome to Agent-Driven Development (ADD). The era of the 2-week sprint is over. The era of the Continuous Loop is here.

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Simplicity in Agile: The Art of Maximizing Work Not Done

Simplicity is preached in Agile, yet somehow, we are tangled up in complex system processes and frameworks. And if you’ve worked with Agile at scale, you’ve probably seen it: what started as a powerful mechanism for flexibility and speed now seems more like a convoluted system of frameworks, metrics, and reports, ironically complicating the very agility it sought to enhance..

This paradox isn’t just a minor hiccup. It’s a core problem in the way Agile is scaled today. The idea of simplify...

Levity, Trolling, and Balance

Do you have the correct balance in your life? Can you work and have fun all at the same time?

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Jira Turned Agile Into a Micromanagement ToolThere was a time when Agile felt liberating. Teams owned their work, conversations mattered more than documentation, and progress was measured by outcomes, not activity. Then somewhere along the way, tools stepped in to “support” the process. What followed in many organizations was not support but substitution. Jira did not break Agile by design. It became the easiest place for organizations to quietly reintroduce control, visibility, and ultimately micromanagement under the label of transparency.

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The Cost of Rework No One Talks About

Here’s a number that stopped me cold when I first saw it: 30 to 50 percent of all effort on software projects is spent on rework.

Not building. Not shipping. Redoing work that was already done.

That stat comes from software measurement research that’s been replicated across multiple studies — and yet somehow, it doesn’t come up in sprint planning, or project retrospectives, or any of the conversations where teams talk about why things are taking longer than expected.

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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 purpose. The draft becomes the thing we discuss. The client, who is the actual expert, valida...

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 mistakes.

When a team lacks this foundation, members enter a state of self-protection. This cognitive load diverts energy away from problem-solving and toward managing one’s own reputation. Google’s extensive “Projec...

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

We all have a LOT to learn from Fred Rogers! His kindness and willingness to serve has not gone unnoticed!

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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 built in hours. Research can be synthesized in minutes. Code generation is accelerating delivery. Design iterations are faster than ever.

Which means something important is ha...

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.
That’s one of the biggest differences between agile and waterfall.
Waterfall assumes that if we plan thorou...

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’t about making everyone comfortable. It’s about making everyone capable.

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Be Quick NOT To Judge

Are we quick to form opinions about others? We should not be...

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AI Breaks the Agile Sweet Spot For Team Size

How big should your Agile taem be? Does Agentic AI change everything? Lets listen and explore how team sizes may EXPLODE!

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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 than that, and teams will often bring too little into the plan. Aim much lower, and others in the...

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: teams are applying a periodic, backward-looking review to a continuous, structural problem.

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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 that feels different from an ordinary holiday.

At the edge of the crowd stood an older woman named Evelyn with her...

Losing Yourself In The Service of Others

How do you serve others?

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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 work closely with founders on priorities as well as future requirements and team changes.

Delivery Managers lead all Agile ceremonies (such as meetings and workshops) an...

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 point is not to force a better answer.
Your job is to help find a better solutio...

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 works just as well on human behavior, including your own.

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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 solve problems. Now I spend most of my time shaping how others see them.”

That shift chan...

The ART of Communication - How to Be Better Engaged

Are you a great communicator? Listen today and find out!

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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, and allows them to participate in several real world exercises. This structure allows everyone on the team to learn the ‘Why’ behind the ‘How’, and gives everyone a chance to leave with the...

Project World | Business Analyst World - Day 2 Review

Beyond Delivery - Project success is too often measured at delivery. On time, on scope, on budget, yet real value is frequently lost after the work is “done.” In today’s evolving project and product environments, leaders are being asked to think beyond execution and focus on outcomes, adoption, and lasting impact. This session reframes project leadership through four enduring phases of successful work: Initiate (clarity and alignment), Discover (learning and risk reduction), Deliver (execution with feedback), and Release (adoption and value realization). While often associated with Agile thinking, these...