Are you afraid of user feedback?
While sprint reviews or system demos are meant to focus on feedback from users, so that you can deliver more value… …some PMs and POs are afraid that user feedback could c...
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Agile Compass
A growing collection of articles on agility, innovation, leadership, and product management. Practical insights to help you navigate change and build high-performing teams.
Have the damn guts to walk out on a meeting!
Take responsibility for your own productive time! Agility is about autonomy. Autonomy means you‘re responsible for your time. Sitting through meetings just because some...
Transparency is damn misunderstood by many!
? Transparency doesn’t mean that management can see everything the team does. Transparency means: ? The team can see everything management does. ? The team can see e...
A sprint review or system demo without stakeholders is useless.
How many times have you seen sprint reviews without stakeholders? I must admit, I have seen this far too often in my life. And it’s a waste of time! Why is it useless? ...
Leadership is a relationship ?
Leadership is not something one person does! It’s a relationship between leader and follower. A leader without a follower is not a leader. If you want to be a great leader...
Agility is NOT what many companies move towards with their transformation
The meme shows a typical evasive move commonly camouflaged as “Agile Transformation“. Sometimes it‘s a deliberate evasion technique, sometimes it‘s subconscious. What make...
The simple 7-step guide for awesome Retrospectives ?
Retrospectives often end up as “letting off steam” or “endlessly discussing problems” events. That’s not helpful. Retros should help a team continuously improve! They should ...
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed!
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed! Many delays in building products come from long decision-making processes. In this time and age, hardly an...
What makes or breaks an Agile Transformation?
Is it the framework you pick? Is it the tools you use? Is it how many teams dutifully exercise their sprints? I often see significant focus on choosing a scaling...
From Explosions To Success: How Some Leaders' Approach To Failure Fuels Innovation
I know many leaders who wouldn’t have congratulated their people on the explosion of a big project on launch day. The quality of good leadership is to recognize your role ...
Without a goal, Sprint Plannings are wasted time ?
Sprints need a goal! Just handing out unconnected stories to developers is NOT agile. Product Owners are not only responsible to create and have a product vision, they’re ...
Almost done – how to ruin your agility with unfinished user stories at the end of a sprint in Scrum!
What to do with an almost finished story at the end of the sprint? Finish it? Carry it over? Put it back? Count 90% of the story points? 100%? 0%? We cannot predict the fu...
Agile Team Rehearsals: Proven Tactics to Boost Efficiency and Collaboration
“An important success factor for bands are rehearsals and sound checks to deliver a good performance. How do agile project teams “rehearse”?” This was a wonderful questi...
The Surprising Benefits of Walking Meetings
Who said that meetings have to happen in a room or at a desk? Like with so many things in life we hardly ask about why we do meetings the way we do. And there is a lot to ...
Agile Requirements Game (aka Draw the Requirements Game)
Update: In the meantime I created an entire Agile Game Collection, including this game (with downloadable images, a visual cheat sheet, as well as video and written instructi...