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.
Agile CPG Innovation: Pharmavite case study
Agile applies well beyond software development. This case study describes how an Agile way of working transformed innovation for a leading vitamin and supplement company.
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.
The Three Jobs of Agile Management
Management doesn’t go away in an agile organization, but they do refocus. Learn about the three jobs of agile management, the two lenses on each job, and the focus areas for growth.
Resources by Topic
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
- 80/20 Facilitation (or, all the study on facilitation most people need)
- Ask Humanizing Work: When the Observation Part of Focused Conversation Gets Boring
- Talking About Our Feelings—Potentially Awkward, Definitely Important
- Making Info Visible for Better Decisions
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
Training, Coaching & Skill Development
- On the Value of Product Owner Training
- Why a Prerequisite Course?
- Coaching Surgeons, Cyclists, and Software Teams
- Why Simulations in Training?
- Coaching Stereotypes & Realities
Key Ideas of the Week
- When Busy Becomes a Buzzword: The Art of Value-Driven Work
- The High Cost of Ineffective Backlog Refinement
- Groups of Customers Lie to You
- But We Must!
- Confirmation Bias: The Silent Product Killer
- Keep Showing Up
- Purpose, Mission, Vision, Strategy: What Jobs Do They Do?
- Business as Usual Product Ownership (and why it doesn’t work any more)
- New Manager Mistakes
- Can’t Fix It? Make It More Visible
- Framing a Meeting Right
- Do It Once Before You Scale It
View our Key Ideas of the Week archives here.
The Humanizing Work Show
- Overcoming Burnout through Daily Purpose and Vision
- How Coaches Benefit from PO Skills
- The Business Case for Better Product Backlog Refinement
- Can Agile Even Work With This Business Model?
- How Has Our Thinking On Scrum Changed?
- Meetup Replay–A Path to Real Empowerment
- Celebrating 100 Episodes
- Two Questions to Shift Stakeholders from Solution to Problem
- Making Sense of the ScrumMaster & Agile Coach Layoffs
- Great Facilitators Accomplish These 6 Goals
- 3 Mistakes New Managers Make & 3 Things To Do Instead
- The Latest Viral Scrum Criticism: What’s Right About It?
- Rethinking the Manager vs Leader Meme
- Communicating In Uncertainty
- Top 5 Backlog Refinement Mistakes Meetup Rebroadcast
- Commitments in Scrum and Abnormal Sprint Terminations
- Purposeful Quick Wins: How to Get Momentum without Avoiding the Hard Stuff
- Collaborate vs Coordinate
- On “The reality of Big Tech’s ‘fake work’ problem”
- My Stakeholders Want It All Right Now
- I Can’t Get My Team to Collaborate
- Cracking the Code of Effective Leadership with the Leadership Circle
- Interview with Lee McCormack
- Do we need a sprint goal?
- Visionary vs Facilitating Product Ownership
Check out all show episodes here.