The Daily Standup

How to Break the Spillover Habit - Mike CohnFor 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.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Grow Your Product Management SkillsManaging 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.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

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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From Dreary to Dazzling - 1 Young Man Makes a DifferenceCan one young man truly make a difference in his community? Indeed he can! How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Effective Storytelling in Product Management
If you’re not careful, product management can get really, really boring. Slide deck after slide deck, the details start to blur together, and the audience starts to disengage.If you’re throwing stats, facts, and bullets at your audience without constructing a narrative, your point isn’t getting across. Your audience will be quick to tune it out and, even if they do listen, they’ll struggle to turn the information into something memorable and useful.Product storytelling is a great way to add context and excitement to any product document or presentation. By sharing our data, insights, and strategies in a story-driven way, product managers can get more done with more impactful communication.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

3 Ways To Improve Team Morale
Team morale indicates how willing members are to push on in the face of difficulties. Teams with high morale find their work meaningful and feel motivated to work together. High morale is a buffer against inevitable setbacks and burnout, and a great indicator of the atmosphere in a team.So what can you do when team morale is low? In this blog post, we share three short formats that easily fit inside a Sprint Retrospective. Their purpose is to start a dialogue in your team and begin improvement. The formats are based on the Liberating Structures “Conversation Cafe”, “Troika Consulting”, and “Discovery & Action Dialogue”. So pick the one that you think will work best and take it away!
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Just watch the video already... How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Transitioning from a Product Manager to a Product LeadEver since I started my new role as product lead a few weeks back, I felt that there was a huge difference in the work and responsibilities I perform as compared to my PM roles back in Crypto.com and Alibaba.And I am not entirely sure if this is because of the role, or perhaps the nature of the company where the startup environment requires me to always be scrappy. But I am definitely loving every moment of it and I am constantly learning to be a better version of myself in this new role.With that being said, I wanted to share my experience and highlight some of the main changes I have identified to better prepare any first-time product leads out there.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Shake Off The Winter Blues, Spring Is Here!Don't let the depression of winter shut you down! Look forward to Spring and make small changes to prepare. How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Start With No... Why Most People Should NOT Be Managers Leading talented humans requires inspiring them, partnering with them in understanding the problem, designing the solution, and motivating them.Now, if you can’t influence people as their peers, that might be frustrating, but you can still usually do your job, and no harm is done. However, if you are the formal manager of the team, and you can’t influence them to do what the company needs, now you are failing in your primary job.Most of the companies I worked for took a “promote from the rear” approach, which meant that people should be promoted for roles they already demonstrated they could do. In this case, if you showcase that you can lead and do 70–80% of the manager role, then you will get that desired promotion.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/