Team Greatness Archives - Agile Authority

Reinvigorate Your SAFe Transformation with a Product Operating Model Concept

Many SAFe transformations stall or fail to deliver the promised benefit of business agility. One prominent reason for these failures is SAFe’s insistence on using the Feature Factory approach. Let's reinvigorate your SAFe transformation with a Product Operating Model concept. The Dreaded Feature Factory A Feature Factory is where someone other than the Agile development team defines what to do. For example, SAFe describes the [...]

Agile Authority2026-01-15T00:24:45+00:00Categories: General, SAFe, Team Greatness, Transformation|

Stop the Madness – Technical Tasks as Backlog Items

Stop the madness! In my 20+ years of coaching Agile Teams and orgs, this is one of the most pervasive and disheartening aspects I have seen. The Pervasive Situation Take a good look at your Team backlogs. Chances are they are replete with technical tasks. The work item name typically gives it away – “Implement the ABC method”, “Code the retry API”, “Insert the new [...]

Agile Authority2025-12-03T15:47:30+00:00Categories: General, Team Greatness|

Leveraging AI in the Product Operating Model: Accelerating Discovery and Delivery

In today's fast-paced product development landscape, the Product Operating Model (POM) emphasizes close collaboration between the Product Trio - Product Manager, Designer, and Engineer - and the Customer to solve real problems efficiently. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming this model by supercharging creativity, planning, and execution. While there are countless ways of leveraging AI in the Product Operating Model, let's explore three standout ways that [...]

Agile Authority2025-10-15T17:58:16+00:00Categories: General, Team Greatness|

Rethinking Agile Transformations

Imagine. Let's start rethinking Agile transformations. What if Leaders would issue an “Agile statement of intent” instead of attempting another costly framework-driven transformation? How would our life at work be different? Can you imagine the agility innovation that this would spark? For example, what if a Leader made the following statement: “For our company to be successful, our teams really need to have a desire [...]

Agile Authority2023-06-11T00:22:07+00:00Categories: Team Greatness, Transformation|

Simple Agile Scaling

Simple Agile scaling - is it an impossible dream? As humans, we have a natural propensity to over-complicate things. Growing up, I always enjoyed looking closely at Rube Goldberg cartoons to see the incredible convoluted solutions he would come up with to do the simplest of tasks. For example, this Goldberg invention for squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush requiring 16 convoluted steps from A to P: [...]

Agile Authority2022-04-18T21:47:27+00:00Categories: Team Greatness|

Daily Standup Greatness!

How to achieve Daily Standup greatness? Let’s start with how not to! “Yesterday I …, today I …, no impediments.” These are the infamous 3 questions associated with the Daily Standup (also called Daily Scrum). Using this format for your Daily Standups is a guaranteed way to ensure this event sounds like a verbal status report, is boring, and is considered wasteful by the team [...]

Agile Authority2022-04-04T18:25:54+00:00Categories: Team Greatness|

Tasks Masquerading as User Stories

A pervasive anti-pattern in many companies is Team-level backlogs replete with technical tasks. Not a single real User Story in sight. This is what I call “Tasks masquerading as User Stories”. There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t know where to begin! I’ve heard it all and seen it all. “We write technical stories.” “We’re different – we just capture what [...]

Agile Authority2022-04-04T16:23:53+00:00Categories: Team Greatness|