Is Sprint Planning Quietly Hurting Teamwork? - Mike Cohn

I hated group projects when I was in school. I didn’t want to rely on others for success. I wanted to be accountable for what I’d personally done.
Teams that are new to agile often feel the same way.
A developer will gladly take responsibility for their own code. But tell that same developer they’re also responsible for someone else’s code and you’ll often get a confused look.
And yet shared team accountability is one of the biggest predictors of whether an agile transition succeeds. High-performing agile teams understand: we succeed or fail together.
Until that shared accountability exists, people experience their “commitment” as individual. I have my tasks, you have yours. That mindset leads to predictable behaviors:

• People stick to the parts of the product they already know.
• They avoid work outside their primary skill or role.
• They optimize for being “done with my work,” not for finishing as a team.

So how do you help a team move from personal accountability to team accountability?

Team accountability doesn’t exist without personal accountability. If someone doesn’t feel responsible for completing work that is clearly theirs, they won’t feel responsible for the work of others.
A practical place to reinforce this is the Daily Scrum. Listen for whether people clearly state what they finished since yesterday—and whether they did what they said they would. If not, help the team talk about why, and what they’ll change today.

Sprint Planning is your next best lever. Near the end of planning, ask a simple question:
“Can we, as a team, meet the Sprint Goal and deliver these items?”
Emphasize that the sprint backlog represents a team commitment. If one person is overloaded, we don't wish them good luck, we offer to help.
That means team members should speak up when someone is taking on too much, and then discuss how to lighten the load—by shifting work, pairing, swarming, or reducing scope.
Team accountability will always be bounded by skills. A programmer won’t suddenly do award-winning design work. But they might research image options, draft alt text, or assemble reference examples—small contributions that protect the bottleneck and help the team finish together.

One of the most practical ways to build shared accountability is to broaden skills across the team.
Look for opportunities for pairing, mobbing, or short “teach me” sessions where teammates transfer knowledge as they work. Then protect time for it. People will (rightfully) resent being told to broaden skills if they’re expected to do it on nights and weekends.

If you want team accountability, stop allocating tasks during sprint planning.
Instead of pre-assigning everything, leave tasks unassigned and have team members pull work from the sprint backlog day by day. This keeps work flowing, increases collaboration, and makes it easier for people to help where help is needed.
Personal accountability matters. But to succeed with agile, teams have to move beyond “my tasks” and toward “our outcome.”

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The Lucky Green String

Every year, St. Patrick’s Day turned the open floor into a sea of plastic shamrocks and forced cheer. There was a potluck, a “wear green or get pinched” joke that refused to die, and the inevitable moment when someone would nudge him and say, “C’mon, you’re Irish, right? Say something in Gaelic!” He wasn’t. His last name just sounded like it could be on a pub sign. By the time March rolled around this year, Liam had already decided: he would keep his head down, get his work done, and wait for the decorations to come down.

On the morning of March 17, he arrived early to avoid the crowd. The office was quiet except for the hum of the lights. He dropped his bag at his desk and noticed a new bulletin board by the break room. Across the top, in crooked green letters, someone had pinned: “WHAT LUCK MEANS TO ME.” Underneath was a basket filled with small pieces of green string, each tied to a safety pin. A handwritten note said, “Take a string, share a story, pin it when you’re ready.”

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Is Agile Coaching a Waste of Money?

Around the world, software organizations are desperately trying to improve how their teams build and deliver software. Companies will hire herds of “wise sage” coaches to bring them out of the Dark Ages but are often disappointed when nothing extraordinary happens. Despite pouring loads of money into coaching efforts, their applications still fail to perform, their customers are still not having their needs met, and it still takes forever to get an idea to become reality. This project is 50% over budget, that one has missed three delivery dates now, and nothing seems to be going as planned. While all this is going on, agile coaches are hard at work “making the world a better place.”

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Celebrating PI Day!

“I finally see where I belong” often starts quietly, almost by accident. A student wanders into a Pi Day event because there’s free pie, not because they think math has anything to do with them. They expect to feel like an outsider again—another room where the “real” math people will do the talking. But as they listen, they hear a guest speaker casually mention being the first in their family to go to college, or struggling with math in middle school, or switching careers into STEM later in life. The stories sound less like polished genius and more like persistence, doubt, and small, stubborn steps forward.

As the activities unfold, the room feels different from a normal class. There’s laughter during a silly pi‑recitation contest, teams arguing over who measured a circle more accurately, someone proudly wearing a homemade π shirt. Instead of being tested, everyone is invited to play: to estimate, to experiment, to be wrong and then correct themselves. In that environment, the student stops seeing math as a gate guarded by a few brilliant people and starts seeing it as a language that anyone can pick up, slowly, with practice.

What makes Pi Day powerful in this story isn’t the number itself; it’s the way the day reframes who “gets” to enjoy math. The student notices a teacher cheering loudest for the kid who improved their pi‑digits record from 7 to 15, not just for the one who recites 200. They hear peers admit, “I thought this was going to be boring, but this is actually kind of fun.” For someone who has spent years feeling like they’re on the outside of every math conversation, that small, shared enthusiasm signals something profound: you don’t have to be the best to belong here.

By the end of the day, nothing magical has happened to their test scores. What has changed is the story they tell themselves. Instead of “I’m not a math person,” it becomes “I’m a person learning math, and people like me are welcome at the table.” That internal shift doesn’t show up on a Pi Day poster, but it quietly shapes their future choices—raising a hand one more time, signing up for the next course, or even mentoring someone else who feels out of place. In that moment, surrounded by digits of π and crumbs of pie, they finally see where they belong—and it’s in the circle, not outside it.

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Why I Switched to a Hybrid Approach and Tripled My Team’s Delivery Rate

Agile was supposed to be the answer. Stand-ups, sprints, retros, these rituals promised faster delivery, happier teams, and stakeholders who finally felt in sync with engineering. For a while, it worked. My team hit a rhythm, delivered features quickly, and felt engaged in the process.

But over time, the cracks showed.

Velocity slowed to a crawl. Stand-ups became theater. Engineers dreaded sprint planning. Stakeholders kept asking when features would actually be done. And remote work made it worse with Zoom fatigue, Slack overload, and endless context-switching draining the energy Agile was supposed to give us.

At first, I blamed the team. Maybe we weren’t “doing Agile right.” So I doubled down on the rituals. More retros, stricter sprints, tighter velocity tracking. But the harder I pushed, the more Agile turned into bureaucracy.

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AI Is Changing The Economics of Software Development - Mike Cohn

5 Ways High Performers Disrupt Team Harmony

High performers rarely disrupt teams on purpose. More often, disruption happens because they move faster than the systems, processes, or people around them. Their confidence, speed, and problem-solving ability can subtly change how work gets done and how others show up.

The problem isn’t their performance. It’s their speed and capability that invisibly reshape team dynamics. Teammates begin working around them instead of with them. And gradually, they become the team’s single point of dependency, which is great for short-term results but not for the long term. When strong performance starts disrupting team harmony, knowing how to guide it in a way that maintains both results and collaboration.

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