Blog
Notes from the trenches on Agile, Lean, Kanban and the craft of leading teams that ship. Areté — the pursuit of excellence — is what this is all about.
AI is Behind the Storm in Tech Again A little over a year ago, I wrote a sobering article about tech layoffs in 2025 and how they were affecting developers, Agile Coaches and many tech professionals. I wrote then of the need to become effective and efficient and take accountability for delivering real value to escape …
What works will remain, the rest will be gone. Agile is dying, and becoming much less relevant. There are only two paths ahead for Agile to diminish even more until it becomes irrelevant or to finally change to survive by focusing on delivering value and not dogma. I do hope Agile adapts because despite all the valid …
Two of the Agile Manifesto lines say: “Working software over comprehensive documentation… Responding to change over following a plan” At the time Agile Manifesto signatories, people like Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith wrote these lines because they were dealing with very detailed planning demands from management, …
As an experienced Agile Consultant, certified in several methods and frameworks including Scrum, SAFe and Kanban I have a distaste for magical solutions. Nothing is perfect, everything has flaws. Yet, I still recommend a Kanban Variation to most of my customers. Why? Kanban, contains the wisdom of the Lean movement, …
In any large organization, and that includes businesses and government, the people who run that organization constitutes their Bureaucracy. Inside every Bureaucracy you will find two kinds of people: Some people who are actually devoted to the mission of the organization and that is to serve customers who need their …
In the last five years SAFe or the Scaled Agile Framework has experienced tremendous growth and adoption at large organizations. The evidence is not just in surveys, such as the large one conducted by Digital AI which I share below, but also by simple word of mouth that confirms many large organizations are adopting …
Over 10 years ago, a lifetime for the technology world, Henrik Kniberg, famous for the Spotify Model, and his brilliant videos for Product Owners gave us a guide for Kanban teams that do software development. A few years later Yuval Yeret did his own revision to Henrik’s guide but focused this time on Marketing. Both …
On occasion as professionals we observe what seems to be irrational behavior, something that seems to defy logic. After years of seeing this “irrational” behavior in managers, co-workers and consultants I realized it is usually not irrational, just hard to comprehend. Most decisions people make involve a complex array …
Scrum is the undisputed leader among all Agile approaches today, survey after survey confirms that it is the leading choice for organizations that want to improve their efficiency, and speed their time to market. However, despite their success Scrum still continues to revise and improve their own framework, their …
Sometimes people ask me, Joseph what’s the simplest Kanban board I could use, one that may even work with a small team? On those occasions, I am tempted to recommend Trello, but the fact that it does not even have support for Work-in-Progress limits, or mentions Kanban support anywhere dissuades me. Trello seems to …
