Sticky Agile LLC

09/18/2026

Our friend Jean Tabaka taught us something we’ve used in every retrospective since. Start with appreciations.

Before you touch a single problem, everyone names something they’re grateful for from the sprint. A teammate who caught a bug before it shipped. Someone who stayed late to help a teammate.

It does two things at once. It builds a celebration into every sprint, and it opens people up before you ask them anything hard.

The other move is even simpler. Get the team out of the conference room. The weather is beautiful right now across most of the country. Stand under a tree. Sit in a park. Walk down to the local pub and have a beer together.

People talk differently when they feel like friends instead of coworkers going through the motions. You’ll hear things under a tree that you would never hear across a conference table.

So here’s one move for this week. Open your next retrospective with appreciations. Just that. Watch how much the room opens up before you’ve even reached the hard part.

08/13/2026

Most teams don’t drift away from Scrum by dropping the events. They keep everyone of them and quietly turned the Daily Scrum into a status meeting.

The tell is the language:

“Yesterday I did, today I’ll do, no blockers is a report.”

The Daily Scrum was never meant to be a report. It’s the team‘s health check on the Sprint:
“Is it OK? Are we in trouble? Who needs help?”

If you can’t answer those three every day, the event is intact, but the point is gone. You don’t need a title or a transformation to fix this. You need to listen to your next Daily Scrum and ask whether anyone actually changed course because of it.

What does your Daily Scrum sound like right now? Is it a check-in or a check up?

08/10/2026

Every event on the calendar. Every box checked. And they still couldn’t tell me what they’d ship on Friday.

The Daily Scrum isn’t a status update — it’s the team’s health check on the Sprint. If nobody changes course based on what they hear, it’s a report, not a regroup.

Try it tomorrow: don’t run your Daily Scrum, just listen. Did anyone change their plan? If not, that’s your starting line. No title required. 👇

08/06/2026

08/03/2026

Every time a Scrum Master becomes the middle layer between the developers and the product owner, the team loses something. They lose the direct conversation. They lose the friction that actually produces good decisions.

And the Scrum Master loses the time he or she needed to be coaching, not couriering.

Here’s the fix. This sprint, when a developer asks you to relay a question to the product owner, don’t.

Point them to the product owner directly. Let the conversation happen where it belongs.

Small move. Real difference.

07/30/2026

Jeff Patton’s advice to his 25 year old self: find a mentor.

Not a book. Not a certification. A person you trust who’s actually done the work and can teach you the way a chef teaches, not the way a recipe teaches. Recipes get you started, but the e best chefs stopped using them a long time ago.

His follow up was just as real: failure is the best teacher. Doing things before you were ready to do them. Getting it wrong and learning why.

This is episode two of Sticky Conversations.

07/24/2026

Have you struggled as a PO? If you’re a leader of PO’s, be sure to give them the authority that they need.

07/23/2026

I was coaching a Product Owner names Lisa. And for months stakeholders treated her like she wasn't worth their time.
 
They'd skip the refinement meetings, they'd bring their requirements late, and then they’d get frustrated that the team wasn't moving fast enough.

Lisa was frustrated, too, because spent most of her energy scurrying between the stakeholders for decisions.
 
This wasn’t working so I went to Lisa’s leader, who was an executive with authority. This person understood the benefits of doing Scrum well. So fortunately, she stepped in with some new rules.
 
-Lisa was now empowered to be the decision maker that was needed
-AND stakeholders must attend the refinement session, or their work didn’t go into the Sprint.  

Lisa stopped running in circles. The team stopped waiting on answers.
 
What changed was she was allowed to do the job she already had.
 
If you're a leader, look at your own Product Owners this week. Give them the authority they need to do their job well.

You will be glad you did.

07/21/2026

We ask every class the same question. Who makes the call when priorities conflict, the Product Owner or the leader everyone actually listens to?

Half the room hesitates and that’s the problem.

Swipe through for what actually happens when a Product Owner isn’t empowered to decide, and why it’s never really about the person in the role.

If this sounds like your organization, the fix starts with one question: who actually holds the authority right now, and does your Product Owner have it?