Humanizing Work Library

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.

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

• 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
• Does it need to be a meeting?
• The Most Misunderstood Motivation Factor
• Drifting into Consensus
• The Problem with Quick Wins
• Designing Org Change Experiments
• How to Learn Faster
• When a Team Isn’t Performing

The Humanizing Work Show

• 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
• Designing Good Experiments
• Senior Leadership Challenges in Agile Orgs
• The one where Peter apologizes to the CEO
• Own-Influence-Respond
• They’re All Customers
• The 15 minutes that reveal the health of your team
• How does my work as a developer change in Scrum?
• How much of Scrum should be standardized across teams?
• What do I focus on as a new Product Owner?