Are You Protecting Your Team Against

the Right Thing? - Mike Cohn

A lot has been written and said about the responsibility of a Scrum Master to protect the team.
Examples of protecting the team typically involve running interference with well-meaning but overzealous product owners, stakeholders, and managers. Teams run into trouble all the time from people who want it all now or who keep adding more work in the middle or a sprint. Scrum Masters keep all that noise away so that the team can focus on delivery.
But if you are only focused on problems coming from squeaky wheels, you’re missing one of the biggest dangers out there: complacency.
Agile is about continually getting better. I don’t care how good a team is today; if they aren’t better a year from now, they’re not agile.
Complacency can creep in when a team sees some initial improvement from adopting an agile approach. Team members will notice how improved they are and think that’s enough.
But there’s almost always room for further improvement.
Some teams become complacent about their process and stop looking for ways to deliver more value each iteration. Still other teams become complacent in seeking out new engineering practices that could make the team even better.
Protect your team from complacency by setting high expectations and encouraging the team to set even higher expectations of their own performance.
Teams that refuse to settle for the status quo are teams that advance from good to great.

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Is Scrum Slowly Taking Away Your Will To Live?

On the surface, it sounds innocent, doesn’t it? Cheerful even. Like something British schoolchildren might play on a muddy field before promptly breaking an ankle. But no. In reality, Scrum is a framework for managing work in software development, and it is somehow both wildly popular and completely misunderstood by… well, almost everyone.

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Project Manager vs Product Manager vs Business Analyst

You’ve probably heard the terms project manager, product manager, and business analyst tossed around like interchangeable buzzwords.

But let’s be honest — most posts explaining these roles either put you to sleep or leave you more confused than before.

So let’s break it down properly.

No jargon. No textbook talk. Just real, human language.

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The Black Friday That Bought a Neighborhood Back

The Bell & Book was a tiny independent bookstore wedged between a dry cleaner and a pawnshop on a corner that hadn’t seen much sparkle in years. Its owner, Marta, had run it for twenty years: poetry nights, school field-trip discounts, repair-your-soul advice between the biographies. Two months before Thanksgiving, a national big-box retailer announced a shiny new superstore three blocks away. Marta watched foot traffic thin out like coffee in a slow pot. She had bills. So did several other local owners on that strip.

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The Thanksgiving Sprint — an AgileDad story

It started two years ago in a neighborhood I know well — a mix of veterans, young families, recent transplants, and folks who’d been in the same house so long they remembered when the stoplight at the corner was just a tree. Someone on the block said aloud what people often think but don’t say: “We’ve got plenty, but a lot of us are missing the parts that make Thanksgiving feel like Thanksgiving.”

So we did what agilists do when a problem’s fuzzy: we created a backlog.

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Can teams pull in more work during a sprint? - Mike Cohn

“Can we bring in more work if we’re ahead in a sprint?"
It’s one of the most common questions I get from Scrum teams — and honestly, for a long time, I couldn’t understand why. The answer felt obvious.
Of course you can bring in more work if you're ahead and clearly going to finish everything you committed to do. Just like you can drop work if you're behind.
A sprint plan is a forecast — a best guess at what the team thinks it can get done. It's not a contract. No one gets it perfect every time, and that’s OK.
But I kept hearing this question over and over, so I started asking why. Why does adding work spark so much hesitation — even fear?

Here's what I learned: Teams are afraid that starting something they can’t fully complete within the sprint is somehow breaking the rules, or even worse, a failure.
That fear leads teams to hesitate to pick up something new unless they’re 100 percent sure they can finish it before the sprint ends.
Let me reassure you. Being halfway done with one or two things at the end of a sprint isn’t a problem. Sometimes, it’s even desirable.
It only becomes a problem if a team is consistently halfway done with several things or worse, everything.
If the team is genuinely ahead, and they’ve completed what they committed to, they can absolutely pull in something new — even if they might not finish it.
Good agile teams always try to finish everything, just like good sports teams try to make every attempt on goal or get a hit at every at bat.
And when given the opportunity, great agile teams don’t hesitate to make progress on something new even if they might not finish.

What’s the real issue underneath the question?

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Most Backlog Management Is Just Organized Procrastination

We’ve been told the backlog is how we steer.

How we prioritise.

How we plan.

So we invest hours, maybe days, maintaining it:

• Refinement sessions
• Estimation rituals (battles?)
• Prioritisation debates
• Acceptance criteria roulette

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What Makes a Great Product Manager?

When I first stepped into product management, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I thought it was about building cool features, running a few sprints, and celebrating launch days with cake and confetti. What I didn’t expect? The emotional rollercoaster of stakeholder battles, last-minute pivots, and the constant juggling between what’s ideal and what’s possible.

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