Backlog refinement is essential for Agile teams, but it's easy to fall into the trap of overloading the backlog with too much detail—or not enough. In this episode, we tackle one of the most common and painful mistakes teams make: detailing work too early or too late. Discover how to keep refinement manageable and effective by structuring your backlog with just the right level of detail, using the PO Board model for clarity and flow. Plus, actionable tips to eliminate churn and restore calm to your backlog refinement process. Read More
Too many year-end retrospectives suffer from recency and peak-end biases, causing them to devolve into superficial reviews or Q4 gripe sessions. In this episode, we share a structured approach to help teams and organizations overcome those biases and conduct meaningful reflection sessions that drive real improvement. Read More
"A beautifully detailed plan feels great—until reality intervenes." In this episode, Richard and Peter share hard-earned lessons about annual planning from their work with hundreds of organizations. They reveal why most companies should spend less time on detailed strategies and more time clarifying vision. Read More
What’s the real difference between Product Owners and Product Managers? This episode explores the evolving definitions of these roles and highlights how modern Product Management thought leadership aligns with the fundamentals of Great Product Ownership. Read More
"We've cut scope as much as we can, but the team still isn't fast enough." Sound familiar? In this episode, Richard and Peter reveal what actually makes teams faster—and it's probably not what you think. Learn the three key levers that influence team speed, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical steps you can take to sustainably increase your team's capacity. Perfect for engineering leaders, product managers, and anyone responsible for team performance. Read More
Are deadlines the enemy of Agile? Many teams think so. But while unreasonable deadlines can destroy morale and quality, legitimate business timing needs shouldn’t be ignored. In this episode, we explore how to work productively with deadlines while maintaining Agile principles. Read More
Get an inside look at how professional facilitators design and run high-stakes remote meetings. Follow along as we dissect a real 50-person marketing team retrospective, from initial planning through execution and lessons learned. Perfect for anyone looking to level up their meeting facilitation skills or manage large-scale remote collaboration. Read More
Does it take meeting after meeting to get to a decision in your organization? Do decisions you thought were done come back to life if someone later feels like they weren’t included enough?
In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss how to identify a consensus culture and share some practical tools and advice for making faster, more effective decisions while still maintaining the values that create a consensus culture. You don’t get better decisions in a consensus culture by just becoming individualistic and authoritarian—you get better decisions with better tools and skills. Read More
“We’re agile—we don’t need to plan.” “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Which is right?
In this episode, Peter and Richard explore two common mistakes around planning—either trying to plan everything or not planning at all—and why the alternative is something that looks like both planning and execution at the same time. Read More
While creating clarity through purpose, vision, and strategy is often crucial, sometimes the best leadership move is to step back. In this episode, we explore the case of Buurtzorg, a Dutch home healthcare provider that's challenging conventional leadership wisdom: - When traditional purpose, vision, and strategy statements become unnecessary - How Buurtzorg scaled to 10,000+ employees with minimal management oversight - The power of intrinsic motivation in highly skilled professionals - Applying the Theory of Constraints to identify true leadership priorities Read More
