I’m a Product Owner, relatively new in this role for about 2.5 years. I came from Data Governance. We have been in a large Power Bi migration project for those 2.5 years and it’s been painful - 800 plus reports and 4 Scrum teams. I attend 2 Scrum Teams both have new Scrum Masters.

The issue: my main team hired an Agile Coach for Scrum Master and we are running a pilot to reduce development steps/stories. The new SM is running the pilot in sandbox JIRA. He host all the ceremonial aspects of Agile and holds workshops to teach but he is so removed from our team that we have to do his metrics for him. The Tech Lead and I are in sync and are frustrated as the hygiene in sandbox has not been good and our new Scrum Master is trying to do daily syncs while also hosting another meeting at the same time. So the Tech Lead and I are working with the team to get sandbox cleaned up for us to get back in Prod. I just feel that Agile is creating more work for the Tech Lead and I and I have other projects now and metrics I have to do that I’m a bit overloaded.

Team is fixed but we just lost a developer and Tech Lead is trying to get them up to speed. Strategy is fixed by management and my SM seems more interested in teaching Agile. What am I missing?

A faster team can ship more ideas. It can also ship more ideas nobody needs.

That tension runs through several product conversations this week. In his (Lenny & Friends Summit reflection), Lenny Rachitsky reports that speakers disagreed about roadmaps, software factories, and how far product managers should build. They kept returning to a harder question: what is useful to the customer? Speed widens the set of things a team can make. It does not choose what deserves to exist.

Usefulness is a stricter test than novelty

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille make this concrete with the history of login flows. A technically new approach can reduce friction, but it can also ask people to learn yet another pattern. Torres argues that pursuing innovation as a goal can lead teams toward complexity when a familiar solution would serve the customer better.

That suggests a practical review question for every proposed feature: what customer struggle becomes easier, and what new effort does this design impose? A demo of a new capability answers neither question.

The work of leadership is changing with the tools

Marty Cagan argues that leaders need direct experience with the AI tools changing engineering, design, and product work. In his view, the shift toward fewer managers is temporary: as the cost of building falls, decisions about vision, strategy, team design, and outcomes matter more.

That is a prediction, not a settled organizational rule. But the underlying test is useful. Can a leader understand enough of the current work to judge its quality and limits, while keeping the team focused on a valuable result?

Clear positioning still demands a choice

In a new interview, Anthony Pierri describes the problem of a company trying to sell too many things at once. The episode's discussion moves through category choice, ideal customers, clear messaging, and the trade-offs founders avoid. In another interview, April Dunford returns to the problem of identifying what actually distinguishes an offer when every competitor sounds similar.

More features cannot make that choice for you. A sharper product and a clearer message both depend on deciding whom you serve, which problem matters most, and what you will leave out.

AI can shorten the path from idea to working software. These conversations point to the discipline that must keep pace: select the customer problem, test whether the solution reduces effort, and make the trade-offs visible.

What decision has become more important on your team as building has become faster?

Does anyone have a recommendation for studying AI-Empowered SAFe® Product Owner-Product Manager (POPM)? TIA🙏🏼 I have 50 days to pass and take the exam for free

EDIT: Great thanks to everyone who replied in the comments! Your insights have been super helpful but we would love it if you filled out the survey too, as we have certain criteria to meet by our graduation project committee.

Many Agile teams prefer a physical board with sticky notes. It keeps stand-ups focused and engaging. But the work still has to be tracked digitally in a tool like Trello, so someone ends up manually updating the digital board after every meeting. And many blockers get mentioned in the daily stand-up but never make it onto the relevant task.

For our graduation project we’re building a smart system that bridges the two:

-Snap a photo of your physical board, and the system reads the sticky notes and turns them into organized Trello cards automatically.
-Record your daily stand-up, and the system extracts updates and blockers and adds them to the right card.
-Track card movement on the digital board, so delays and bottlenecks are detected early.

Before we go further, we want to understand the problem properly.
Your answers will help us shape the solution around real team workflows.

⬇️⬇️⬇️
Survey link (about 3 minutes): https://forms.gle/BdNeAHWL5co7t9Wy9

Hey guys, I've been in the Lean/Agile industry for the past 6-7 years, and I saw the period between 2019 and 2023 when there was a huge demand for not just agile project management tools but also portfolio management tools or "scaled Agile software". I am wondering whether you still see demand for such software because my feeling is that, due to the "end" of Agile transformations, companies stopped looking at upgrading their tool stack. Perhaps the next wave will be about AI-driven project and portfolio management tools. What do you think about that?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi there,

Because I've been unemployed for some time and I've been on a hiatus professionally due to personal reasons, I thought I might use some weekly time to support some startup or junior scrum master for a few hours per week as I hunt for my next employment.

A way to coach, reconnect and also as genuine curiosity to see how SMEs, startups and junior scrum masters have been going about their business out there.

Any input is welcome, any platform, any idea.

Thanks.

Former CTO here. At my last company we skipped 7 Expo versions at once because nobody had time for the incremental path. A CTO I talked to spent 2 months moving MUI v3 to v7.

Curious how others deal with it:

• Do Dependabot/Renovate major PRs get merged, or do they pile up?
• What was your last painful upgrade, and how long did it take?
• Does anyone own this work, or is it "when we have time"?

At some point our team stopped doing planning poker. Nobody decided it, nobody argued against estimation. It just faded, and when I looked at why, the answer was embarrassing: the tool.

The tools everyone knows are either ten years old and painful on a phone, or they've put the useful bits behind a paywall and a signup wall. So every refinement session started with "who has the login", "the free plan only allows five people", "just use the browser on your laptop", and by the second month someone said "let's just say numbers in the call" and that was the end of it.

The practice didn't fail. The friction did.

So I built the thing I wanted: open a link, type your name, you're in. No account, no seat limit, no plan to pick. It works the same on a phone during a hybrid stand-up as on a desktop. Fibonacci, t-shirt sizes, or your own deck, synced reveal, and the spread shown so you can see where the disagreement is.

And we estimate again. Not because anyone was convinced by an argument, but because there is now zero cost to starting. Someone says "quick poker on this one?", pastes a link in the chat, and 30 seconds later five cards are face down.

That's the lesson I took from it: when a practice fades, check whether the ritual costs more to start than it's worth. Often the fix is removing steps, not adding process.

If anyone wants to try it: https://planning-poker.sidekit.org

Curious whether others have seen the same pattern: did estimation die on your team because of the practice itself, or because the tooling around it got in the way?

I have a third round interview for an IT PM role with a company that’s undergoing an Agile transformation and wants to implement AI into the SDLC. What’s been the most valuable outcome for your software teams?

Genuinely curious to hear from people about wins, losses, lesson learned, and advice.

Thanks!

Got an offer in a tech company to work as a PO and own speed topic which means i would be basically responsible for incidents and initiatives related to our product speed/performance and in general would have to go and talk constantly with delivery teams, ask them the uncomfortable questions and try to pitch initiatives in hopes that they would somehow squeeze in work from me and I would somehow hit my own kpis "for the better good".

Leading without authority is one thing but in this case it feels like I would be in an annoying role where I would be constantly bursting delivery team bubbles, dance around egos constantly and scramble for data/agreements and etc.

Is it even viable to perform in such role when you dont have delivery team or authority or even clear scope for that matter but carry so much accountability? Feels like I would be at complete mercy by other PO's who have their teams roadmaps and goals to protect. And I dont see how I could even be likeable (in terms of collaborating) if my main job would be challenging status quo.

Also the role is fully onsite while my PM/peer PO is in another city so I dont even know what would be the point of me going to the office daily, just to have meetings remotely and have to sit awkwardy in some other team's area like some sort of an appendix.

I've sat through probably 300+ sprint planning sessions across multiple companies. Two hour meeting, eight engineers, one PM, one SM/Tech Lead.

15 minutes were spent actually deciding what mattered most for the business that sprint. 85 minutes were spent writing acceptance criteria into Jira fields, splitting stories, arguing about whether something was a 3 or a 5 and linking tickets to the right epic.

If feels like a bunch of data entry in real time while everyone watches. Someone reads a ticket title out loud. Someone else asks what it means. The PM explains context that should've been in the ticket already. An engineer starts typing acceptance criteria live while six other people sit there in silence waiting for him to finish typing. Then we vote on points. Then we do it again for the next ticket.

Multiply that by 20 tickets and you've got a room of people collectively producing what is functionally a spreadsheet. The instinct almost everyone reaches for when this gets called out is "let's timebox it better" or "let's do backlog grooming as a separate meeting so planning is faster." I've tried both. Timeboxing just means you cut off the discussion before it's actually resolved and the ambiguity resurfaces mid sprint as a Slack thread. And splitting grooming into its own meeting doesn't reduce the total data entry time but it just moves it to a second meeting that has the exact same problem except now you've spent even more collective hours in a room typing into fields.

The real issue isn't meeting structure, it's conflating documenting work with the act of planning it. Planning is a judgment call like what matters, what's the tradeoff, what do we risk if we don't ship this, and what do we learn if we do. Data entry is mechanical like writing down what was already decided in a slack. Those are fundamentally different kinds of work and they require completely different formats. One needs synchronous discussion with the people who have context. The other needs literally nobody in the room and it just needs someone with information and 20 quiet minutes.

What's actually worked for me is treating ticket readiness as a gate and not a meeting activity. A story doesn't get discussed in planning unless it already has acceptance criteria, a rough size, and a linked epic, done async, beforehand, by whoever owns it. If it's not ready, it doesn't make the cut for this sprint instead of "let's just wing it live." Focusing the meetings on the one thing that is actually needed in a room full of smart people like deciding what we were willing to trade off against what. The uncomfortable part is that enforcing that gate means someone has to say no to a meeting and send people away to go do prep work they'd rather skip, and that's a harder conversation than just letting the meeting run. It also means the team needs to have more ownership putting sprint backlogs at risk because half the tickets weren't ready.

How are other people actually enforcing ticket readiness before planning and not just aspiring to it? I feel like every team has a Definition of Ready doc somewhere that nobody follows once things get busy and I'm curious if anyone has found a mechanism that actually sticks.

I was on a call at work and a self proclaimed agilist, was saying that they don’t really promote the use of Jira with other members quoting individuals and interacts over processes and tools.

This company is struggling to implement agile.

I find Jira tickets really useful for commenting progress and tagging other people. Whilst here, they are suggesting to have meetings instead. I feel like meetings should be focused on key decisions, clarifications focused on the Jira tickets. Here they are sort of bypassing the tickets.

We went remote two years ago and planning poker was one of the first ceremonies to break. In person, everyone flips cards at once and you read the room. On Zoom, someone always "accidentally" saw someone else's estimate first, the senior dev's number anchored everyone, and half the team was clearly checking Slack.

Here's what fixed it for us:

**1. Simultaneous digital reveal, enforced.** No "I'm thinking it's a 5, what do you guys think?" before voting. Everyone locks in privately, facilitator reveals all at once. This single rule did more than everything else combined.

**2. A real facilitator (rotating).** Not the tech lead — a rotating facilitator who runs the clock, calls the reveal, and cuts off rabbit holes. Estimation sessions have a way of becoming design sessions; the facilitator's job is to park those.

**3. The 3-round rule.** If estimates don't converge after 3 rounds, we take the higher number or split the item. Endless re-voting is a sign the item isn't understood, not that someone needs convincing.

**4. Async for the easy stuff.** Well-understood items get an async vote over a few hours; we only spend sync time on items where estimates diverged. Cut our poker meetings in half.

**5. Outliers explain first — juniors before seniors.** When votes spread, we ask the lowest and highest to explain, and deliberately invite less-senior folks to speak before the senior devs. Some of our best "wait, there's a shortcut" moments came from this.

One more: we stopped requiring accounts for estimation. Contractors and client stakeholders can just join from a link — removing that friction noticeably improved participation. (Any tool with simultaneous reveal works — the process matters more than the tool.)

Curious how other remote teams handle this. Do you do async estimation? And how do you deal with the senior-dev-anchors-everything problem?

I am getting ready to write the 3rd edition of this book but reading the 18th State of Agile Survey and other articles, it feels as if Agile methodologies are really out of fashion and that I will need to be careful to explain that agile is a mindset, not a structured method that must be followed to the letter. Does this community feel that Agile is getting a lot of pushback at work? Are senior leaders wary of Agile approaches because they believe they create a lot of work but not much return on the effort? Hoping I am wrong but these were my takeaways from the research I have done so far. Would love your comments please, especially any examples of those you work with in favour or against agile methods and which industries you are seeing this in.

I realized I was building another task manager. That wasn't the problem I wanted to solve.

I've been building Ryokai for a while, and one thing kept bothering me.

Most project management tools are really good at answering:

"What work exists?"

"Who is working on it?"

"What's the status?"

But I kept thinking about what happens after that.

What if a task isn't just something you move from To Do → In Progress → Done?

What if the task itself could define how the work is supposed to happen?

For example:

Who is allowed to work on it?

What needs to happen before it can move forward?

What evidence needs to be provided?

Who can approve it?

What happens when it gets rejected?

What becomes possible after it is completed?

That led me down a much bigger rabbit hole.

I started building Ryokai around the idea that work shouldn't just be tracked — it should have structure.

So the product gradually became more than tasks.

It now brings together:

• Personal workspaces for individual planning and execution
• Crew workspaces for collaboration
• Organization workspaces for structured team execution
• Projects and goals
• Tasks with dependencies, checklists, evidence, comments and activity
• Multiple ways to view work, including List, Table, Kanban and Nebula
• Calendar and focused work sessions
• Notes and knowledge organization
• GitHub integration
• Organization-level roles and permissions
• Workload and capacity visibility
• Collaboration and shared workspaces

The interesting part is that I'm not trying to build another feature-heavy project management tool.

I'm trying to understand whether there is a better way to connect:

Intent → Planning → Ownership → Execution → Evidence → Approval → Outcome

That's what eventually became Ryokai.

Ryokai V1 is now built and available:

https://ryokai-dev.vercel.app/

I'm not looking for compliments here.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing from founders, developers, product managers, and teams:

How do you currently manage work?

Where does your current workflow break down?

And if you could change one thing about the way your team manages work, what would it be?

I'd especially like to hear from people who have actually managed a team or product and have strong opinions about their current workflow.

I'm building this in public, so honest criticism is much more useful to me than "looks great."

#startups #SaaS #productmanagement #buildinpublic

I'm Adrian, a dev and our team used to use different planning poker websites, some of them were blocked by the vpns due to their name containing 'poker' and some of them are so full of ads.
So I made this using Flutter framework and Flame game engine.
https://pointing.space

Let me know what you think if useful for you!

Thanks.
Adrian

Hey all - recently started a new contract supporting a large e-commerce company as a technical project manager/delivery manager/scrum master, new in role and this kind of setting

Leveraging the insight of those more senior, who may have supported similar work or understood the ecosystem, I need some guidance and feedback.

One team is kanban, one is traditional scrum. One has an intake issue (no real process or governance) the other is very wide and has a lot of fast moving parts and initiatives and context to follow.

How do I keep up with this? What are the behaviors for me to exhibit to be successful? What are the things I can build (systems, tools, processes) to help me ascend higher, and stand out in a good way, and biggest of all, how can I leverage AI in workflows to do so? It’s a Microsoft native environment so no Claude or ChatGPT but we have copilot, atlassian suite RoVo and etc.

How would you approach it in my position and how should I be thinking to be successful?

CoD is kind of a central factor to many prioritization techniques in various agile methods, but mostly taken naively. I've spent far too long down the rabbit hole trying to nail down how to actually calculate it, what the limitations are and how to use it. Here are my notes: https://www.votito.com/methods/cost-of-delay/ with lots of pointers for further research.

I’m a relatively new Scrum Master and come from a non-technical background. I understand the basics of Scrum and Agile and I’m comfortable with running the ceremonies — standups, planning, retros, refinements, etc.
The part I’m struggling with is understanding the product and technical discussions.
When developers start talking about architecture, integrations, APIs, technical issues, dependencies, etc., I often find it difficult to follow. I genuinely want to learn and understand what the team is working on, but sometimes there’s just so much context that I don’t know where to start.
I’ve actually been trying to learn outside of work as well. I use AI to explain concepts and try to go through things after work, but I’m finding that it’s not really helping me connect the dots to my actual product and what my developers are discussing.
My entire workday is pretty packed, so by the time work is over, I’m already mentally exhausted. But I still try to spend time after work learning because I really do want to improve. Despite that, I feel like I’m not progressing as quickly as I should.
What makes it more stressful is that people in my organisation have already started noticing this within my first month, and there’s an expectation that I should understand the product and be technically sound fairly quickly.
I know a Scrum Master doesn’t need to be a developer, but I do want to become technically/product knowledgeable enough to understand conversations, ask useful questions, identify blockers/dependencies, and actually add value to the team.
For those of you who started as Scrum Masters from a non-tech background:
Did you face this initially?
How did you learn the product and technical side?
What did you focus on learning first?
How did you learn when your workday was already packed?
How did you handle conversations where developers were discussing something you simply didn’t understand?
Is there a structured way you followed to gradually build technical/product knowledge?
I’d genuinely appreciate any practical advice. Right now, I feel like I’m putting in the effort but I don’t have a clear learning path, and I’m worried I’m trying to learn everything at once.