72 articles on coaching, product management, leadership, and organizational design. Newest posts first.
Most companies are caught off guard when product launches slip, incidents occur, team conflicts arise, or budgets are exceeded. Yet what managers call "unexpected" disruptions are often statistical tail events playing out predictably. Until now, organizations have relied on consultants and managers for ad-hoc post-crisis analyses. But traditional analysis is expensive and inconsistent because we humans struggle with inductive reasoning, statistics, and we usually only have access to a portion of the data we need. This year, I've run two experiments to get a glimpse at the role that LLMs will play in organizational development. In my first experiment, I replaced an agile coach with OpenAIs GPT-4.5 and had it help a team in addressing slow code peer review. In this experiment, the team interacted directly with the LLM through prompts, and I sat in and listened and observed...mostly (more on that later).
Many are wondering when hiring and consulting will return to normal, but the reduced hiring and corporate spending we're seeing is not just a cyclical downturn that will reverse once the economy picks up. Traditional treasury functions broke during 2010-2022. We're now seeing a paradigm shift in how corporations manage their treasuries. The corporate game is becoming excess cash generation, not growth-at-all-costs.
Financial discipline is back. And with it, many roles are disappearing, among them, the Agile Coaches. This isn't because Agile itself is failing—but because capital is expensive, and companies now demand real returns on every role. It's not just about cutting costs—it's about making smarter financial decisions across the board, and it is a necessary correction. For Agile Coaches, that means one thing: unless you can align and show that your interventions drive measurable business value, you're at risk.
Learn how Viafree successfully transitioned disbanded teams to Viaplay using a remote, partial self-selection process during COVID lockdowns. This case study reveals how deliberate preparation, flexible decision-making, and bite-sized sessions enabled efficient team formation while maintaining agency and motivation.
Stop making random acts of coaching and start building deliberate practice with a coach log. Learn how tracking interventions, reflecting on progress, and aligning with long-term goals transforms reactive coaching into intentional, sustainable team development.
A detailed 10-month journey through Estuarine Mapping for enterprise architecture adoption, from getting executive buy-in to creating story packs and facilitating mapping sessions. This practical guide shares lessons learned, pitfalls encountered, and honest reflections on what worked and what didn't.
Three experienced practitioners explore the Hexi Base Kit V2 through a public transportation challenge, discovering both its non-linear nature and cognitive demands. Learn practical insights about clustering, decomposition, and managing cognitive load when working with this Cynefin-based facilitation tool.
Ecology's "Interspecific Interactions" framework reveals hidden patterns in workplace relationships and offers a practical lens for reducing harmful interactions like competition and parasitism. Learn how to shift from predation and competition to mutualistic relationships that boost both team performance and innovation.
A re-missioned team overcame shallow communication by creating their own peer feedback template aligned with team values. Within 10 weeks, open communication flourished, fewer issues escalated to managers, and the practice became core to their team culture.
An organizational study mapped how 26 Engineering Managers spent their time, revealing vast discrepancies in role execution and misaligned expectations with directors. By visualizing activities and creating space for honest conversations, managers could redistribute work and refocus on what truly mattered.
Controversial topics elicit strong emotions with little effort invested in resolution, yet coaches often push these issues despite low team engagement. Use the five-level effort ladder to assess whether a topic is being ignored, discussed, or actively worked on before determining your coaching approach.
When visualizations get messy, resist the urge to simplify before understanding whether the mess stems from unfamiliarity, an unfit technique, or a skillfully depicted messy reality. Each type of mess requires different interventions, from adjusting constraints to helping teams process what they're seeing.
The fastest way to kill a grassroots movement is to assign it an owner or sponsor, yet management interventions often stifle the very agency that could solve organizational problems. Learn how to distinguish grassroots movements from mobs and protect creative energy while providing necessary context.
Teams that resist coaching fall into four distinct categories: those who don't want it, shouldn't have it, cannot be coached due to environmental factors, or don't respond to your specific approach. Understanding which situation you're in prevents automatic coping styles and reveals more productive paths forward.
"Voice" changes systems from within while "Exit" creates new systems that replace the old. Both mechanisms work together, and lowering barriers to Exit amplifies signals that force systems to evolve from "Power Over" to "Power With."
Just as spiderwebs became visible only under specific conditions of moisture, light, and low wind, organizations reveal their hidden patterns when you create the right viewing conditions. Learn how deliberate observation and creating new vantage points lead to informed interventions and better situational awareness.
Most agile coaches make dogmatic interventions based on unquestionable beliefs rather than informed decisions grounded in situational awareness, options, and feedback loops. Learn how to move beyond "if teams just tried [favorite practice]" thinking and develop the observational skills needed for context-appropriate coaching.
A garden story about removing bushes and losing ladybugs reveals how managers and coaches often destroy symbiotic relationships in organizations. Learn why allowing decay and not interfering can sometimes be the key to restoring balance rather than imposing new frameworks or processes.
The Spotify model emerged through years of evolution, not as a blueprint to copy. Instead of replicating evolved outcomes, discover why coaches should focus on restoring evolutionary processes that allow solutions tailored for your unique context to emerge naturally.
Strategic interventions require holistic observation, not surface-level diagnosis. This framework helps coaches systematically observe teams from both interior and exterior perspectives to identify the right leverage points for meaningful change.
Book clubs can be a great way for people to learn more about a subject or concept–if they are designed with that in mind. Unfortunately, many book clubs are poo
Virtual tables—graphical representations showing speaking order—dramatically reduce cognitive load in remote meetings. Ten practical tips demonstrate how this simple structure balances airtime, manages tangents, and makes remote collaboration significantly more effective.
Psychological safety isn't just about management—it requires work across four quadrants: safe collaboration, safe interactions, self-management, and internal dialogue. This integrative framework shows how teams and individuals share responsibility for creating environments where people can truly thrive.
Overview Avanza Bank underwent a comprehensive agile transformation to address internal inefficiencies a
Social and Organizational Psychologist Richard Hackman observed that one of the most crucial components for high-performing teams is having a compelling mission. Learn about four different ways to express team mission statements—Name, Metric, Customer Value, and Combination—and discover which approach works best for your organization.
When teams get stuck repeating the same points in discussions, they're often oscillating between different temporal states: the past (Why), the present (What), and the future (Where To). Learn how to identify temporal dynamics in your team and use practical exercises to help teams navigate these states together, breaking through discussion gridlock.
Agile Transformation (capital A and T) and agile transformation. Same words, vastly different concepts. An "Agile Transformation" is a cookie-cutter product tha
While most organizations focus on improving individual teams, they often overlook how their team growth strategy impacts performance and psychological safety. This article explores four organizational growth strategies—Recruitment Whac-A-Mole, Mitosis, Team Progression, and Building New Teams—with practical countermeasures to reduce the downsides of each approach.
Despite tremendous investments in coaching teams, many coaches find themselves stuck with the same issues resurfacing repeatedly. Stefan Lindbohm and I identify the top 5 agile coaching pitfalls: thinking agile is the answer to everything, taking ownership of the team's problems, not paying attention to team dynamics, not enabling early success, and not challenging team performance.
Feedback is a hot topic, but not everyone agrees about its usefulness—some praise it as fundamentally important while others claim it can be harmful. This comprehensive guide introduces the EPIQ Feedback Model, exploring how Empathy, Position, Intention, and Quality can be used to craft and deliver great feedback.
Many organizations fail at building high-performing teams despite offering tremendous support, and one overlooked reason is whether the working group is actually a team. Stefan Lindbohm and I explain the crucial distinction between Teams, Pseudo-Teams, Temporary Alliances, and Co-Workers, and why knowing your working group type dictates what support structures to build.
When teams focus only on what's not working in retrospectives, they often surface things outside their control and drain energy. This retrospective format helps teams 'Turn up the good' by building upon practices that are working well and making them even better.
Setting individual goals together with the entire team increases performance, engagement, and motivation by creating a holistic overview of collective knowledge gaps, personal interests, team goals, and company direction. This article introduces Team Talent Management, a process that makes individual goals more relevant and establishes a learning support network within the team.
It takes weeks or months for teams to collaborate well, so when we put people who don't regularly work together into a workshop, they're unlikely to operate at their collective best. The Workshop Collaboration Canvas accelerates group collaboration through introspection about personal expectations, exploring style differences, and giving explicit permission to call out unconstructive behaviors.
When people resist becoming T-shaped, it's often not due to lack of information but deeper psychological factors. This article explores six main reasons people resist T-shaped development: identity tied to their role, motivation by their skillset, choosing instant gratification, imposter syndrome, unreasonably high self-expectations, and fear of losing status.
This final part of the Product Owner hiring series covers how to evaluate candidates through work samples and auditions. Work samples like backlogs, roadmaps, and vision decks give insight into a candidate's style and approach. Learn three ways to use work samples in interviews and how to design effective auditions.
Continuing the series on recruiting Product Owners, this post provides interview questions to help you evaluate candidates' level of experience and potential to learn the role. Includes explorative questions covering high-level understanding, vision, product success, prioritization, and stakeholder management.
Many companies try to hire Product Owners with extensive experience, but this is looking for a needle in a haystack and prone to bias. This first post in a three-part series helps you decide whether to hire for potential or experience by evaluating your organization's ability to grow POs and your team's empathy towards customers.
In self-managing organizations, strong peer feedback loops are essential for distributing leadership and decision-making effectively. Without a culture of feedback that comes from within, organizations exhibit bad smells like deteriorating relationships, stalled growth, forming subgroups, and dropping quality.
To help teams share and document tribal knowledge I run/facilitate an exercise I call History lines [1] . In this exercise teams are asked to visualize how diff
Teams thrive when they understand each other's motivations, priorities, and decision-making frameworks. But in many cases, these remain implicit, leading to mis
When we aren't aware of our feedback intentions and don't deliberately shape feedback accordingly, we risk damaging working relationships, performance, and self-esteem. This article introduces the Four Intentions Feedback Model, helping you distinguish between nine types of feedback and match the right format to your intention.
Some organisations attempt to increase their teams performance by injecting agile coaches or scrum masters into their teams. At the same time the environment is
Two years ago the Internal IT tribe @ Spotify was greatly understaffed but got approval to scale from 25 to 75 employees. As we started scaling we recognised th
Some agile coaches and managers are uncomfortable with setting expectations, offering feedback, and making decisions on behalf of other people, and they go arou
In order for organisations to become conducive to high performing teams it is crucial that managers have time and mental capacity to engage in complex problem s
Coaches at Spotify are expected to help squads who need help. Sometimes we stay with a squad for a year and sometimes we only stay for a few months. Some reason
Agile coaches and leaders in agile organisations sometimes refer to parts of their job as herding cats. While said with a smile it has a negative connotation. I
Overview Most teams do not measure lead time and cycle time [1] , missing opportunities to improve their system's value flow. Here's an example of how a data ce
For the past two years I've been facilitating and evolving a hands-on feedback workshop for existing teams that I have run with support teams, dev teams, and le
About a year ago I worked with a team that wanted to improve their planning meetings. As I observed this team, I noticed that they used their planning meeting f
In this blog post I go through the differences between conceptual and experiential book clubs. I also share some tips if you'd like to organise an experiential
Subjective models are charming but hinder clear thinking but are common and easy to understand due to their quadrant nature. In addit,ion they do not require yo
When I worked as an Agile Coach at Spotify , people were surprised to learn that, contrary to popular belief, Spotify was in fact very hierarchical (6 layers fr
In my tribe (BITS IT) we are currently experimenting with distributing leadership and amplifying self-management. We are iterating on Spotifys organizational mo
Every now and then people behave in a way that negatively impacts their environment. Sometimes that's because they lack a diverse toolbox, and sometimes they're
If you've ever worked in a team that makes lots of decisions but that struggles with making progress on those decisions, here's a technique you can use to under
Many developers I have worked with think they are doing a good job as long as they fix many bugs and complete many features. As time passes and aforesaid develo
Over the summer I will publish several blogposts containing some of my interview questions that I ask people who apply for the Agile coach positions at Spotify.
A practical framework allowing Product Owners to evaluate their skills across multiple dimensions and identify growth areas. Created to help new POs develop their toolbox quickly, this work-in-progress tool provides structured self-assessment and development guidance.
Survey of 30 agile coaches reveals what makes coaching difficult: quantifying success, managing yourself, and building relationships. Their advice for new coaches emphasizes forming alliances, setting clear expectations, and mastering the art of listening well.
Survey data reveals Spotify's agile coaches heavily favor INFJ personality types (30% vs 1.5% general population) and high-I DISC profiles. Understanding these biases helps organizations recognize what perspectives they might be missing when building coaching teams.
An agile coach's focus shifts constantly based on context—from 70% strategy work to balanced delivery and people work within months. Tracking how time is spent across strategy, delivery, and people reveals how coaching evolves with organizational needs.
We sent a development team to a group development course to test if increased self-awareness leads to high performance. While we couldn't prove it definitively in one month, teams lacking feedback culture and healthy conflict clearly benefited from the intervention.
Teams often jump to solutions without understanding the real problem, leading to repeated failures. Using experiments with clear goals, success criteria, and desired effects helps teams iterate faster and avoid analysis paralysis.
Teams make decisions differently—some want consensus, others prefer clear leaders, and some resist top-down altogether. Nine questions help you discover your preference, understand team dynamics, and identify where interpersonal conflicts around decisions originate.
A retrospective timeline revealed that team effectiveness jumped after defining vision and discussing how to work together. Tracking product and non-product events over time shows which improvements actually stick and why.
When teams run out of epics or face roadblocks, this 2-hour workshop creates alignment through shared data. By mapping team observations on frequency and impact, patterns emerge that reveal which problems to solve next.
Some love variation, others love routines—when your natural style mismatches your environment, exhaustion follows. Five questions help you discover if your work environment aligns with what energizes you and identify changes needed for greater happiness.
Before your next 1-on-1, predict what your direct will discuss and why—then compare your notes to reality. This simple exercise reveals whether you truly understand their context or are missing important struggles they're facing.
Stakeholders, users, and customers are three distinct roles with different needs and priorities. Understanding these differences ensures you engage the right people, ask the right questions, and build features that actually solve real problems.
User stories spark questions while use cases document decisions—they're as different as forks and knives. Understanding when to use each tool helps teams avoid building the wrong product or spending excessive time in planning.