I’ve been mentoring a group of young Scrum Masters for the last seven months, and recently one of them asked me a question: How do I foster trust within my team? Immediately, two thoughts came to mind: They’ve been listening. Affecting change isn’t about process, mechanics, or imposition. It’s about…

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating. What civilians call agility the Marine Corps calls leading Marines. I’ve compared my decade in the Corps to my experiences as an agile coach in a pair of blog posts here and here, and I think it’s time to revisit this theme…

A Medium follower asked me a few questions recently: What’s the difference between a Scrum Master and agile coach? How can they both be involved in Scrum? Why is it seen as a natural ‘progression’ to move from Scrum Master to agile coach? These are popular questions, and I’ve run…

I hold firmly to this truth for many reasons. For example, how can we iterate on a product that isn’t real? Wouldn’t you agree that continuous improvement is at the heart of agility? So if the product isn’t real, how can we be sure we’re learning the right lessons? And…

Ask most Scrum Masters, and they’ll tell you their favorite event is the retro. It’s rewarding to create space for learning or to inspire a conversation between team members as they discover brilliant, new ways of working together. And you’d think that after the 750+ retros that I’ve facilitated that…

What’s my plan? That’s a question I was asked recently. It occurred to me in that moment that I didn’t have one. Sure. I had a vision, I knew the next few steps, and I knew where I wanted my teams to get. However, the longer term was fuzzy, and…

I often get asked what to do when a Scrum adoption begins to stall. This is especially true to those in the earlier stages of adoption. Whenever these conversations occur, it inevitably leads to the same answer. I can’t help. I just don’t understand your context or your organization. Don’t…

5,000. That’s the number of daily scrums, or stand ups, I’ve been a part of in my career. There’s not a lot of things I’ve done 5,000 times so I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned. First, let’s remind ourselves why we’re there. Why have the meeting at…

In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner. In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people. So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people…