Each week we share key ideas from our client work, our interactions with the Humanizing Work community, and our travels on the internet. We’re constantly thinking about how individuals, teams, and organizations can be more effective in a human-centric, complexity-aware, and sustainable way.
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This Week
Project Estimates Are Better without a Detailed Plan - In my years as a senior program manager, I saw a pattern repeat itself over and over again. In the early days of a release, we’d develop increasingly detailed plans and estimates. By the time we were ready to build, the plans looked solid. There were risks, but we had mitigation plans in place. Then, […]
The Archives
- Project Estimates Are Better without a Detailed Plan
- Using CAPED to Survive Big Time Zone Differences
- A Better Way to Approach Stakeholder Management
- Why Projects Feel Fine Until They Don’t
- “I Want to Feature Mine Everything Now”
- CAPED Continues to Expand Its Reach
- What Makes a Team a Team?
- Delegation Doesn’t Have To Be So Hard
- How Much Authority does a Product Owner Need?
- Can a Product Owner also be a ScrumMaster?
- How to Show Up to a Meeting
- Humble Confidence
- Should the Product Owner come from the Business or from IT?
- New Year’s Experiments (instead of resolutions)
- How to Do Quarterly Planning That Holds Up Past Week Three
- AI for better BDD
- Our Favorite “Modifications” to Scrum
- The Powerful Gratitude Practice Most People Have Never Heard of
- Build Capability as Part of Your Work
- 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 High Stakes of Internal Products
- What do we mean when we say work is complex?
- PI Planning Problems
- CAPED for Better Agile
- “Agile doesn’t work for…”
- Stakeholder Management Doesn’t Have to Be So Painful
- 3 Ways to Reset a Stuck Team
- Give Instructions Your Meeting Participants Can Actually Follow
- 2 Ways We Support Internal Coaches (And Why Everyone Benefits)
- Agile, Documentation, and the Emerging Role of AI
- Scrum Done Right
- Avoiding Delegation Theater with the Team Empowerment Map
- Too many meetings?
- Reverse Your Thinking to Reveal Hidden Solutions
- Product Management for Internal Teams
- Make the Right Things Easy
- How to Get Useful Feedback on a Work-in-Progress
- 5 Ways to Get More Participation in Your Meetings
- Which One of Many Should You Start With?
- Can an Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Even Work?
- 3 Ways Multitasking Destroys Complex Problem-Solving
- Do Something That Won’t Compute
- Scarcity & Abundance in Product Development
- Choose the Right Tool for Your Desired Interaction
- 3 Things Devs Wish Their POs Understood
- When 33°F is colder than 11°F
- The Secret to Keeping Your New Year’s Goals (It’s Not What You Think)
- Why Are We Still Talking About Story Splitting?
- The 1-2 Punch for Effective Goal Setting
- Bring the Work to the Team
- The Hidden Power of One-Way Giving
- How I Learned Scrum Wasn’t Enough
- Breaking Free from the Delegation Trap
- “This Worked For My Last Team” (And Why That’s Not Enough)
- The Hidden Leverage of Great Product Management
- The Return of Pragmatic Agile: Coming Full Circle
- The Secret to Making Facilitation Skills Feel Natural
- Spreadsheet Problems
- The 4-Step Roadblock Buster
- The 3 Essential Levels of Planning
- Perception ISN’T Reality, But…
- Why Is Prioritization So Hard?
- 3 Essential Skills for Engineering Managers
- 5 Common Mistakes When Answering Questions Under Pressure (And How to Avoid Them)
- The One Thing You Control In Every Meeting
- Decision Making in Consensus Driven Cultures
- Does Agile Make You Faster?
- Three Approaches to Goals
- Our Favorite Prioritization Question
- Why Most Teams Underperform
- Don’t Put That In Your Backlog
- Facilitation Case-Study: Remembering the Future Together
- Maximizing the Flow of Value
- Customers Don’t Want Your Product, They Want This…
- Why 40-hour work weeks aren’t a good target
- 5 Business Insights from the World of Music
- Using Vision as a Filter
- Teams Need a Shared Purpose
- Lightweight Async Feedback
- What to Focus On in 1-on-1s
- Unsplittable Stories—Myth or Reality?
- Are POs Responsible for Strategy?
- From Intuitive to Instructive in 3 Steps
- 3 Course Formats for Different Kinds of Learning
- A Sprint Review Is More Than a Demo, But It’s Not Less
- How Long Should Backlog Refinement Take?
- 5 Principles for Org & Team Structure
- No More Bad Meetings!
- Get to Done Every Day