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
New Gallup engagement numbers look bad — what it means and what to do about it - Gallup has been surveying employee engagement since 2000. Last week, they reported that US employee engagement dropped below 30% for the first time in 15 years. To make that more concrete, between Q2 and Q3, about 3.2 million US workers shifted from describing themselves as involved in and enthusiastic about their work to not. What […]
The Archives
- New Gallup engagement numbers look bad — what it means and what to do about it
- The Actual Work of Leadership
- Timing can matter more than ROI
- “Claude, Make Me a Backlog”
- Measuring Sentiment in Org Change Experiments
- Why Steering Committees Can’t Steer
- 7 vs 7: Comparing Two Modern Delegation Models
- What Does It Mean to Be an Agile Company?
- “But What If We Need That Later?”
- Two Moves When Everything’s Priority #1
- The Suggestion Box Retro (and the ORID fix)
- Claude’s Plan Looked Completely Reasonable
- Don’t Build Workflows Left-to-Right
- Two Months to One Week
- Surprisingly few teams are actually cross-functional…is yours?
- Precision Bias and AI in Product Management
- Vertical Slicing’s Elephant in the Room
- Addressing Complexity Mid-Project
- 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