7 Tips To Read Someone’s Personality in 10 Seconds

People think it takes ages to really figure out what someone’s about, like you need to sit with them through a few heartbreaks, swap childhood trauma stories, maybe even get caught in a road trip disaster together.

Nah.

Give it ten seconds, maybe even less if they’re the loud, obvious type, and you’ll get everything you need to know.

And this isn’t about “vibes” or whatever people say when they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. This is straight-up psychology. Well, mostly. Some of it is just paying attention and comment sense.

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6 Daily Habits of Highly Effective Scrum Masters

1. Start Each Day With a Quick Review
2. Lead Effective Daily Scrums
3. Make Time For One-on-Ones
4. Keep Communication Open With Stakeholders
5. Dedicate Time For Continual Learning
6. Reflect and Plan For Tomorrow

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Scrum Fails When Product Owners Think They Are The Boss

I’m afraid that everyone interprets it differently, and that’s the source of problems. For me, the word owner is misleading. As a Product Owner, you own nothing, though you may think you do.

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Why Your Scrum Teams Are Failing - The Hard Truth

Agile was presented to me as the ultimate project management approach — promising productivity, transparency, and value delivery in short bursts. However, many teams struggled to effectively implement and scale Scrum, missing the mark on its potential.

Waterfall was declared a relic of the past — outdated, painfully inefficient, and completely incapable of keeping up with the demands of modern projects.

The question wasn’t which approach was better, but rather why teams were failing to embrace the very solutions meant to propel them forward.

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Product Owners vs. Product Managers vs. Project Managers

While you are knee-deep looking for your next role, I’ve seen endless variations of “product” roles. Specifically, the terms Product Owner (PO), Product Manager (PM), and Project Manager (PjM) seem to be used interchangeably, or even used to describe the same person. Yet, some teams have all three within each individual squad.

So, what’s the difference between these three roles? And why do we need all three in the first place?

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The 5-Second Conversation Hack

Learn how to become better in conversation with this 5-second hack!

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The Great Agile Reset

1. Framework Fatigue Is Real

Marty Cagan nailed it recently: “The product model addresses three major dimensions: how you decide which problems to solve (product strategy), how you solve these problems (product discovery), and how you build, test, and deploy your solutions (product delivery). Real Agile can certainly help with this third dimension.” (Source.)

Translation: Organizations are done with copying and pasting frameworks. They realize that true agility means finding your own path to creating value. Standardized training and certification programs? That train has left the station. #ParadigmShift

2. AI Is Eating Agile (Sort Of)

Have you played with DeepSeek R1 yet? This isn’t just another tech trend. This is a seismic shift in how knowledge work happens. No, ChatGPT or Claude won’t steal your job tomorrow. But what about your colleague who’s mastered prompt engineering, AI-based data analysis, and agents? They might make you obsolete.

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How to Break the Spillover Habit - Mike Cohn

For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the problem of habitual spillover—when a team routinely rolls over unfinished work from sprint to sprint.
So far, we’ve talked about why spillover happens, and why it’s a problem, plus I’ve given steps to start a reduction in your team’s spillovers.
This week, I want to share two ways to break your team’s rollover habit.
 

Sometimes teams miss their goals. That’s OK. Sometimes teams miss when they aim high and fall a little short. Don’t try to fix those teams—celebrate their effort.
Other times teams miss because they just hit a run of bad luck for a handful of sprints. Again, no need to intervene there. (Next week, I’ll share what to do with the unfinished work that results from either of these first two scenarios.)
Most often, though, teams miss because they are overly optimistic about what they can achieve. They plan each sprint to be a best-case scenario.
If you think that could be your team, in your next sprint planning meetings try asking questions like these:
 

• What could go wrong that could cause the team to miss its goal?
• What has to go right to achieve this goal? These questions can help a team see any risky assumptions they’re making about how easy the planned work will be.

As most of us who made New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of 2025 have re-discovered by now, old habits die hard. Sometimes you have to take drastic action to realize lasting results, and to succeed with agile.

Curb Their Enthusiasm   Drastically Under-commitIf these kinds of questions don’t help the team make more realistic guesses about what they can accomplish, you might have to resort to drastically reducing what the team commits to achieving.
At the next sprint planning, encourage your team to truly under-commit. I’m not talking about cutting the sprint goal by some small amount, like 10–20%. I’m saying you limit team members to committing to only 50% of what they believe they can accomplish.
The team may push back on this. They are used to filling up their sprint and will be optimistic that they can get a lot more done than the items they’ve chosen. Don’t give in.
When team members push back, remind them that if they run out of work to do, they can always bring more in. But hold firm that no work will come in until the sprint goal is achieved and all the work planned into the sprint is complete.
(You’ll likely need to have a talk with the product owner prior to sprint planning so they too can be prepared to hear that the team is bringing only a few items into the sprint.)
The goal in under-committing is to let the team feel what it’s like to add work into a sprint rather than always needing to drop work.
After they feel this, they’ll likely want to feel it again.
Encourage them to plan a bit more work into the next few sprints until they get close to missing their goals and rolling over again. Incorporate the enthusiasm-curbing questions as needed.

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Grow Your Product Management Skills

Managing a product through the product life cycle is hard. It is even more difficult to grow as a product owner in these challenging times. Product ownership is a very complex and multifaceted challenge. And because of the complexity of the topic, there is no single linear approach to mastering product ownership. That’s why we need agile and lean approaches and a wide range of knowledge and skills.
You can study product management for years at university. This shows how profound and demanding the entire discipline is. It also shows how long it takes to build the skills required to be successful in this field.

To succeed, you need the right skills and the right approaches. Only if you are aware of the complexity and know what you are doing will your product be successful throughout the entire product life cycle.

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5 Things a Manager Should NEVER Do...

1. Skip-Level Feedback
2. Take on Individual Contributor Work
3. Add More Work to the Team
4. Take Sides in Personal Disagreements
5. Make All the Important Decisions

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