How to slow down your business
If you can change direction every 2 weeks ?, but you only decide to change direction once a year ?, you‘re not agile. Agility is far too often confined to the delivery organiza...
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Agile Compass
A growing collection of articles on agility, innovation, leadership, and product management. Practical insights to help you navigate change and build high-performing teams.
Your budgeting kills agility!
Agility is much more than teaching teams to deliver in sprints. If your goal is to tackle the challenges of today, you’d better become agile on all levels. Traditional budgeti...
Are you sweating over picking the right agile framework?
Whether you use SAFe, LeSS, Scrum, Kanban … is NOT the important success factor for agility. Just as picking the best electric guitar is not gonna make you a rock star. ? Frame...
Are you afraid of user feedback?
While sprint reviews or system demos are meant to focus on feedback from users, so that you can deliver more value… …some PMs and POs are afraid that user feedback could challe...
Have the damn guts to walk out on a meeting!
Take responsibility for your own productive time! Agility is about autonomy. Autonomy means you‘re responsible for your time. Sitting through meetings just because somebody in...
Transparency is damn misunderstood by many!
? Transparency doesn’t mean that management can see everything the team does. Transparency means: ? The team can see everything management does. ? The team can see everything...
A sprint review or system demo without stakeholders is useless.
How many times have you seen sprint reviews without stakeholders? I must admit, I have seen this far too often in my life. And it’s a waste of time! Why is it useless? First w...
Leadership is a relationship ?
Leadership is not something one person does! It’s a relationship between leader and follower. A leader without a follower is not a leader. If you want to be a great leader, ask...
Agility is NOT what many companies move towards with their transformation
The meme shows a typical evasive move commonly camouflaged as “Agile Transformation“. Sometimes it‘s a deliberate evasion technique, sometimes it‘s subconscious. What makes you...
The simple 7-step guide for awesome Retrospectives ?
Retrospectives often end up as “letting off steam” or “endlessly discussing problems” events. That’s not helpful. Retros should help a team continuously improve! They should fee...
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed!
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed! Many delays in building products come from long decision-making processes. In this time and age, hardly any com...
What makes or breaks an Agile Transformation?
Is it the framework you pick? Is it the tools you use? Is it how many teams dutifully exercise their sprints? I often see significant focus on choosing a scaling framework, tea...
From Explosions To Success: How Some Leaders' Approach To Failure Fuels Innovation
I know many leaders who wouldn’t have congratulated their people on the explosion of a big project on launch day. The quality of good leadership is to recognize your role and y...
Without a goal, Sprint Plannings are wasted time ?
Sprints need a goal! Just handing out unconnected stories to developers is NOT agile. Product Owners are not only responsible to create and have a product vision, they’re also ...
Almost done – how to ruin your agility with unfinished user stories at the end of a sprint in Scrum!
What to do with an almost finished story at the end of the sprint? Finish it? Carry it over? Put it back? Count 90% of the story points? 100%? 0%? We cannot predict the future....