How long should your sprints be? Generally, 1-2 weeks, with a preference towards a shorter sprint. But that’s not what I’m writing about today. I…

My wife and I have homeschooled our boys for 14 years. Two started university this school year, returning home last week when their campus closed.…

I encourage my clients to find and focus on the core value of whatever they’re creating. What is it that doesn’t yet exist in the…

Working in small increments of value—good user stories—is the key habit that makes the rest of Agile Software Development work. But people everywhere struggle to…

Industry leader, @Adobe, is known for its innovation in the creative industry, allowing creatives to do what they do best with the help of innovative…

Great models for building a strong and healthy team include regularly reviewing the work and how it’s being done to improve going forward, creating structures…

Trust is a key component in any healthy team. Business outcomes soar and individuals thrive when trust is at the team’s core. But what builds…

Think about it. When people are paying attention to what other people are doing in a more present and engaged way, it frees them up…

Most meaningful work happens in teams so to further expand the Humanizing Work movement and conversation we are taking season 2 to focus on teams.…

My popular How to Split a User Story flowchart has already been translated to French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Hungarian. Thanks to work from…

Why now? What conditions in the world make this the right time for a Humanizing Work movement? There are two key shifts that have happened…

Growth is one of the core things that motivates people in all aspects of their life. “Work that doesn’t provide opportunities for growth is dehumanizing.”…

When you think about what motivates someone within their job or work it tends to go back to what their connection is to the purpose…

“This is why successful serial entrepreneurs, even after a big exit, go on to start something else, not because they need the money, but because…

This week, we launched the Humanizing Work Show. In episode 1, we summarize what we mean by Humanizing Work and where the phrase came from. Humanizing Work…

Participants in our courses are sometimes surprised to find out that they have work to do in advance of the course. Most of our live,…

“This year,” says your friend (who’s never run a 5K), “I’m going to do a marathon.” “Yeah? How are you going to do that?” you…

Thanks to Janos Facsko, Istvan Margetin, and Andrea Török of Sprint Consulting, my story splitting poster is now available in Hungarian. For translations in several…

For those who were in my recent Agile Boulder or Agile Arizona sessions on “Growing Your Facilitation Skills,” here are the slides and handout to…

It’s a classic facilitation blunder: You start giving instructions for an activity, and as you’re talking, people begin the activity. You try to reel in…

Hi Richard, My Scrum team has been working on a particular service for over a year. It’s been 20+ Sprints. I’m concerned about the deliverables…

A key part of the ScrumMaster’s or Product Owner’s job is making information visible.* Whether that’s a product backlog, taskboard, cumulative flow diagram, or a…

Last week, I described how to do the observation step of Focused Conversation without having to talk about all the details. At this point, many…

The Focused Conversation method asks us to start with observations before assigning labels – good, bad, effective, worthwhile, motivating, etc. In real-life facilitation, it can…

Suppose you have a headache. A bad headache. “I’ll take Tylenol to make it go away,” you think. So, you grab the Tylenol bottle and…

As I’ve said before, working in thin vertical slices is the key habit in Agile software development. Many people struggle to find vertical slices, but…

Workflows are a very common element of software. But they can be hard to split well when you’re trying to work in small, vertical slices…

Here’s a short video about how my family uses an Agile approach for homeschool and chores:

Last week, I tweeted, Working in thin vertical slices is the keystone habit for agile software development. It enables so many other good practices. —…

In response to my recent post on developing your skills in 2016, several people mentioned facilitation as a skill they want to grow. As with…

You’ve probably heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. That notion, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, isn’t quite accurate—Gladwell has…

Transforming the way you work to an Agile approach has implications for the relationship between software teams and their customers and stakeholders. But in many…

A few updates on 80/20 Product Ownership, my online course that teaches you how to slice your work at every level of detail to get…

Being Product Owner is hard. Actually, that’s not quite true. Anybody can make a list of things to build, call it a backlog, and bring…

Thanks to everyone who attended my Mile High Agile 2015 session, “Resistance to Change Doesn’t Exist.” Here are the slides and handouts: If you missed…

Thanks to Bob Jiang for the translation (with feedback from Evelyn Tian and Daniel Teng). This poster is also available in English, French, German, Russian,…

Every year, we put on a conference just for agile practitioners who’ve been in one of our classes. Check out this 90 second video to…

Last year, I wrote about how we use an agile approach for homeschool. Since then, we’ve refined our approach. This school year, we updated our…

As I was preparing for my Agile Denver session on Unscaling, which leaned heavily on the Cynefin Framework, I reread Liz Keogh’s excellent post, “Cynefin…

We’re often asked which day or days are best for scheduling the Sprint Planning, Review, and Retrospective meetings. In general, we prefer mid-week sprint transitions.…

For those who attended my Mile High Agile 2014 session, Models for Support, here are the photos of the flip charts (with a little explanatory…

Two years ago, when Bob and I merged our companies into today’s Agile For All, we wrote out a vision statement for the company that…

In November, we asked our wives, Dawn Lawrence and Carol Hartman (whom many of you met at the conference), to plan a unique company Christmas…

The period from mid-December to early-January can be disruptive for an agile team. You’re used to working on a regular cadence, maybe in 2-week iterations.…

Last month’s Humanizing Work Conference was organized around one big hypothesis: that it was possible to do to a conference what we’d done to our…

“Yesterday, I was in Sprint Planning…” I hear it once, and I’m suspicious. By the time the third team member says this, it’s clear the…

My wife and I have been homeschooling our 3 boys since our oldest, who turns 13 tomorrow, started kindergarten. From the beginning, we’ve tried to…

Change on software projects is expensive; it leads to wasteful rework. Change is risk. We can deal with risk one of two ways. We can…