Which Leadership Pattern Shows Up Under Pressure? - Mike Cohn

Every year around April 1st, we like to have a little fun.

But as with most good humor, there’s usually a grain of truth underneath it.

After working with thousands of teams and leaders over the years, one thing has become very clear: agile rarely succeeds or fails because of a framework. It succeeds or fails because of leadership behavior under pressure.

When deadlines tighten…. When scope grows…. When velocity dips…. When stakeholders ask uncomfortable questions…

Patterns emerge.

Some leaders protect the outcome.
Some protect the date.
Some protect the process.
Some protect momentum.

None of these are “good” or “bad.” They’re instincts. And under enough pressure, we all fall back on instinct.

So this year’s April Fools exercise is a simple (and only slightly unscientific) question:

Which leadership archetype shows up most often?

Answer it about yourself. Or answer it about someone you work with.

Just choose the responses that feel uncomfortably familiar.

The results are 100% accurate. Approximately.

It’s easy to laugh at archetypes.

It’s harder to recognize that under pressure, most of us drift toward one.

Agile frameworks don’t fail because teams forget a ceremony. They struggle when leadership instincts unintentionally override the conditions that make empiricism work: transparency, adaptation, and trust.

The good news? Leadership patterns aren’t fixed traits. They’re habits. And habits can change.

If this exercise felt a little too accurate, that’s not a problem. It’s an opportunity.

Because small shifts in how leaders respond — to scope, to deadlines, to uncertainty — can have an outsized impact on how teams perform.

That’s the part that isn’t a joke.

If you’re curious what those shifts look like in practice, we’ve spent the last two decades helping leaders explore exactly that.

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The AI TPM Landscape

If you search for "AI Technical Program Manager career advice," you'll find two things: job postings and generic reassurance that "your skills transfer." What you won't find is anyone mapping the actual landscape showing which companies expect what, and where your existing experience actually gets you.

I've spent the last three years at a cybersecurity company during its AI transformation, watching how AI products actually ship. I've analyzed job descriptions across dozens of companies spanning three tiers (Frontier AI, AI-Applied-to-Business, and AI-Powered Applications).

AI TPM roles vary more than the job titles suggest. Some require deep fluency in model development. Others require working knowledge of how to ship AI-powered products without building the models yourself.

This distinction matters because it defines the depth of your technical pivot. It determines whether you need to master the 'physics' of model development, the 'orchestration' of AI-powered systems, or the strategic integration of AI into existing workflows.

Scrum Is Dead - Here Is What Killed It!

My dear friend Katharine reached out to me and asked me to review and reply to this LinkedIn post. NOW I perfectly understand why! Great job bringing this to my attention.

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That's What Friends Are For

What does true friendship look like? Join us for this Friday episode to learn what exactly stands behind true friendship.

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Predictability Is My North Star

Velocity said “healthy.”
The system said “unhealthy.”
I chose to trust the system.

For six straight Sprints, the velocity chart looked great. Every Sprint, the team hit the number. Every review, the dashboard showed green.

And yet… the last couple of Sprints felt bad.

Work thrashed. Priorities shifted. Unplanned items kept sneaking in. The team was exhausted, and I needed a way to explain why the system felt chaotic when the metric insisted everything was fine.

That was the moment I realized velocity wasn’t telling me the truth. I needed a better way to understand what was happening. I needed a way to see what went wrong and account for the change.

That’s when Predictability Became My North Star.

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The Most Underrated Advantage of Short Sprints - Mike Cohn

A recent Gallup survey found that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are engaged at work.
For comparison, Gallup’s overall engagement numbers are often around 30%.
That’s a striking gap.
It suggests something many leaders overlook: performance may depend less on changing team structure and more on improving feedback inside the structure you already have.
When results lag, organizations often reach for the org chart. They reorganize teams, redraw reporting lines, or debate how many teams a coach or Scrum Master should work with.
Sometimes those changes help. But they rarely go far if feedback is infrequent, unclear, or missing altogether.
Feedback isn’t just a management technique. It’s a strategic advantage.
And agile teams have been building that advantage into the way they work for years.

When people talk about one- or two-week sprints, they usually focus on speed.

• “We need to move faster.”
• “We need more output.”
• “We need shorter release cycles.”

But speed isn’t the real advantage of short sprints.
The advantage is shortening the time between action and learning.
A sprint isn’t a delivery cycle. It’s a feedback cycle.
Each sprint gives a team a natural point to stop and ask:

• Did we build the right thing?
• Did we misunderstand the need?
• Are we still aligned with stakeholders?
• Are we learning what we hoped to learn?

The shorter the sprint, the shorter the gap between assumption and validation.
That’s not about velocity. That’s about reducing risk.

Early Scrum teams often worked like this:
Sprint, sprint, sprint… then release.
That pattern made sense at the time in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was a huge improvement over what had come before. But it meant some feedback arrived in a big, delayed batch after the release.
Over time, many teams evolved to:
Sprint, release, sprint, release.
And today, many modern teams have gone further still. They release whenever it makes sense—sometimes multiple times per sprint, sometimes many times per day.
In other words, modern agile teams have largely decoupled sprints from releases.
So if sprints aren’t primarily about shipping anymore, what are they for?
Sprints provide a reliable cadence for feedback and alignment—even when delivery happens continuously.

Many organizations treat the Sprint Review as a demo.
It’s not.
It’s where reality gets a vote.
The Sprint Review is where the team inspects what was built with the people who care about it, and adjusts course based on what they learn.
When that meeting becomes optional, rushed, or performative, you don’t just lose a ceremony. You lose your learning loop. And you start optimizing for finishing work instead of finishing the right work.
If weekly feedback really is one of the biggest drivers of engagement and performance—as Gallup’s numbers suggest—then the Sprint Review isn’t overhead. It’s how you reduce rework, prevent expensive surprises, and stay aligned with what actually matters.

Of course, simply running one-week sprints doesn’t guarantee meaningful feedback.
Stakeholders can skip reviews.
Teams can ignore input.
The conversation can stay superficial.
Short cycles create the opportunity for feedback. Leaders decide whether to use it.
That’s where the advantage lives.
If you’re running one- or two-week sprints, ask yourself:
Are we using sprints as delivery deadlines—or as learning deadlines?
Because the real power of agile isn’t producing more every two weeks.
It’s learning more every two weeks.
And that’s a competitive advantage that will help you succeed with agile

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Corporate, Business or Functional Strategy?

The differences between Corporate Strategy, Business Strategy, and Functional Strategy lie primarily in their scope, time horizon, and focus. These three levels form a hierarchy that ensures all parts of a diversified organization are aligned, moving from the broad, long-term vision down to specific, day-to-day actions.

The structure of these strategies is often visualized as a pyramid, with the Corporate Strategy at the top providing the overall direction, the Business Strategy in the middle defining how to compete in specific markets, and the Functional Strategy at the bottom detailing execution within departments.

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Why, When, and How Do We Clean a Backlog

Teams working in an agile way commonly use a backlog. However, teams often find that managing a backlog becomes more complex than expected once it begins to fill up.

We can agree on the importance of managing the backlog. When used properly, the backlog should be the core repository for requirements (with product backlog items referencing other artefacts as needed). Yet, it may contain needs and requests from various stakeholders, each with a very different perspective. If it transforms — paraphrasing Allan Kelly, in “Moving Away from Backlog Driven Development: A New Chapter in Agility?” — into a bottomless pit, we will lose sight of what is important.

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