A lot of the agile practices have become standard (at least in name). Organizing work in iterations is commonplace. Cross-functional teams are more common than functional ones (again, not always fully cross-functional, but there’s definitely a directional trend). We’ve talked about this before on our show—agile isn’t dead, a lot of it is just standard practice now.
We’ve seen one critical exception: real product thinking.
Understanding customers and stakeholders on their own terms. Deliberately making and testing hypotheses. Structuring work to show incremental value and learning every day.
Most so-called product backlogs are full of tasks and components misnamed as stories, epics, and features (because that’s what the backlog tool calls them).
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to stay this way. Participants in our product classes start transforming their work in meaningful ways the very next week after class.
Almost overnight, teams who were busy stacking up tasks start delivering customer value.
There’s one more chance to pick up these key skills with us in 2025.
December 9th-11th, I’m teaching my final Certified Scrum Product Owner course of the year.
Though it has “Scrum” in the name, this isn’t really a course about Scrum. Scrum is the framework for structured collaboration, but it’s actually a course about how to supercharge your team by focusing on the right work every day.
You’ll learn:
- Why you can’t have the same definition of ready or acceptance criteria for different kinds of backlog items
- How to understand your customers and stakeholders on their own terms
- How to translate real customer problems into features and user stories that move the needle for them
- How to split initiatives, features, and stories at every level of detail
- How to organize your backlog so it has just the right detail at just the right time, making backlog refinement calm, sustainable, and even fun
Finish 2025 with a powerful new set of skills and tools. Start 2026 with fresh momentum.
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