Featured Resources
The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories
The definitive source for how to split features and user stories well. Consolidated and updated from almost 15 years of Richard and Peter’s writing and teaching on the topic.
Complexity Aware Planning Estimation & Delivery (CAPED)
Learn how to break the false dichotomy between predictability and agility using our CAPED approach.
Book: Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber
Learn how your software team can collaborate more effectively to build higher-quality products in a fast, human-friendly way. Many people think of BDD as a software testing approach. Richard’s book shows how BDD is really a whole-team collaboration practice, with automated tests as a nice side-effect.
Resources by Topic
Weekly Newsletters (Subscribe in footer!)
- Rework Isn’t Inevitable
- Finish the Year With New Product Skills
- Our First Class of Certified CAPED Consultants
- Are You Defining Your Contribution Too Narrowly?
- Asking Why Without “Why”
- Scrum or Kanban? (And Why That’s Not Really The Question)
- How You Start Is Everything
- When you can’t say “Agile”
- Why Take a CSPO Course in 2025?
- 5 Ways AI Prototypes Mess With Your Brain
- 2 AI+Backlog Pitfalls to Watch Out For
- From Debate to Decision: 3 Strategies to Get Unstuck When Feedback Goes Sideways
The Humanizing Work Show
- Three Strategies to Reduce the Pain of Cross-Team Dependencies
- The Life-Changing Focus of a Clean Backlog
- 5 Ways to Say No Without Being a Jerk, Backed by Research
- Retrospectives that Actually Improve Things
- Scrum vs Kanban–Getting the Most of Both
- Metrics, Trust, and Escaping the Status Report Trap
- Quick Wins Are a Trap: How Leaders Make Tackling Core Complexity Safe
- How to Present to Leaders and Get Results
- Vibe Coding Prototypes Advice
- How to Fix Story Point Estimation
- Why Forecasting Works (and Estimating Fails)
- From Debate to Decision: Three Strategies to Keep Feedback Useful
Product Ownership & Backlog Management
- The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories
- Three Categories of Infrastructure Work (and why you don’t need it all right now)
- Growing DONE—How to Make the Definition of Done Work for Your Team
- MMFs: What they are and why they matter
- Prioritization Heuristics
Agile Fundamentals
- Why Scrum works when it works
- Effective Sprint Planning
- How To Have a More Effective Daily Scrum Tomorrow
- Effective Sprint Reviews
- Two Key Moves for Better Sprint Retrospectives
- How to Give a Great Sprint Demo
- Why Longer Sprints Probably Won’t Help
- What You Need to Know About Cynefin
- The Magic of 1-Day Sprints
- HW Show S2E5: How tools like XP & Scrum create effective teams
- Ask Humanizing Work: Long-running Stories
- Org Structure, Software Architecture, and Cross-functional Teams
- Functional Managers in Agile
- We’re agile, so what do managers even do now?
Leadership & Management
- Turn The Ship Around – A View Into Agile Leadership
- Functional Managers in Agile
- We’re agile, so what do managers even do now?
Teams
- The Magic of 1-Day Sprints
- HW Show S2E1: Most Great Work Happens in Teams
- HW Show S2E2: Jazz, Teams, and Work
- HW Show S2E3: What Kills Great Teams, and What Can You Do About It?
- HW Show S2E4: Adobe Audition Team Reunion – What makes a great team great?
- HW Show S2E5: How Tools Like Scrum and XP Help Create Real Teams
Facilitation
- Give Instructions Your Meeting Participants Can Actually Follow
- Scrum Done Right
- Behind the Scenes of a 50-Person Remote Retro
- Facilitation Case-Study: Remembering the Future Together
- Our Favorite End-of-Year Retro Format
- Great Facilitators Accomplish These 6 Goals
- Framing a Meeting Right
- How to Get the Quiet Ones to Engage
- Review Agenda
- Talking About Our Feelings—Potentially Awkward, Definitely Important
- Ask Humanizing Work: When the Observation Part of Focused Conversation Gets Boring
- 80/20 Facilitation (or, all the study on facilitation most people need)
Agile Outside Work
- Lessons from 14 Years of Agile Homeschooling for Families Suddenly in the Middle of It
- How We Use Agile at Home
- Agile Homeschool
- Agile Homeschool Update