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2026 22

  1. Descoping is the Lazy and Incompetent Approach to Meeting Timelines
  2. Spoon-Feeding Competence Rot
  3. Mastering the Four Abstraction Levels of Refinement
  4. Shipping Exposes Reality: Don’t Ship and Forget
  5. Controllable Pain Now Vs. Uncontrollable Pain Later
  6. Screw Your Story Points
  7. Artisanal E-mails
  8. Blessed With Constraints: Part II
  9. Blessed With Constraints: Part I
  10. Autonomy Is Overrated: Why Alignment Beats Autonomy
  11. The Peacock's Tail🦚Strikes Back in the Age of AI
  12. Job Applications: Your Experience Is Irrelevant
  13. The Cannibalization of Competence - Part II: Rocket Fuel In Rusty Land Mowers
  14. The Cannibalization of Competence - Part I: Waiting For the AI Meteor to Strike
  15. Force Mapping: A Tool For Fixing Systemic Organizational Issues
  16. Late Descoping Is Pure Incompetence
  17. The Sisyphean Tragedy of Planning
  18. The Seven Laws of Rules
  19. "AI Changes the Bottleneck From Delivery to Something Else"
  20. Red Vs Blue Roadmaps: Why Most Roadmaps Suck
  21. Escaping the 'Bloat Mode' of Your Brain
  22. Simplicity Is MORE Work

2025 68

  1. The Stars We No Longer See
  2. The Slipstream Model of Competence
  3. Better Than Post-Mortems: The Meta Post-Mortem
  4. CEOs: "Why Are People Not Taking Ownership?"
  5. Cats, Cucumbers and Story Points
  6. Keep Developing the Scars of Experience
  7. Both Architecture-First and Delivery-First Suck
  8. Forget Better: Focus on Different
  9. Lessons Learned: Working For Myself - 3 Years In
  10. The Best Product Managers Optimize For Reversibility and Optionality
  11. Goals Are Not Summaries
  12. CEOs: Stop Sending Mixed Signals About AI
  13. The Virtue of Early Ruthlessness
  14. Why Do Complex Changes Fail?
  15. How Big Is Your Kraken?
  16. No Surprises, No Agile
  17. Most Organizations Will Never Reap the Benefits of AI
  18. AI: The Ultimate Product Killer
  19. Lazy Requirements: Why Worse Is Better
  20. "What Do You Want To Be?"
  21. More Features, More Headaches
  22. Always Lead With Context
  23. On Inversion, Rules and Purpose
  24. Reducing WIP: It's All In Our Head
  25. Don’t Make Me Wonder
  26. If You're Using AI to Generate Requirements or User Stories: You're Completely Missing the Point
  27. Plato's Cave of Requirements
  28. "What's the Ideal Percentage for Spending on Tech Debt?"
  29. Spit-Shining the AI Bubble
  30. The 5C Strategy Framework: Why Most Companies Suck at Strategy
  31. Introducing Roman Estimation in Your Organization
  32. Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps
  33. "What's It Like To Be a Product Manager?"
  34. Maarten's Guide to Shipping With Impossible Deadlines V0.8
  35. Late Vs. Early Disappointment
  36. Pinky And the Brain Teams: Part Deux
  37. Product Management — Saying ‘No’ to Frankenstein Octopus Products
  38. Atlassian is #@!%-ing the Customer
  39. How 'Mimetic Signal' Is Destroying Online Platforms Like LinkedIn
  40. We ♥️ Making Shit Up to Pretend We're Not Making Shit Up
  41. Convincing People is Hard
  42. 'Pinky and the Brain' Teams Are Screwing Up Your Business
  43. Use Constraint Hacking to Stop Being a Victim of Your Situation
  44. The Danger of Expertise
  45. Agile or Agility is Never the Goal
  46. Tell a Story That's Easily Retold
  47. The Return of the Scrum Master
  48. The Explosive Nature of 'Big Bang' Rewrites
  49. The Dutch Government Bans Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
  50. Fooled by Proxies
  51. Vibe Agile
  52. The First Rule of Product Management
  53. The 5 Obstacles to High-Performing Product Teams
  54. "What Framework Will Replace Scrum?"
  55. The Inability to Set Goals Exposes Your Existing Problems
  56. Why Most Organizations Produce Brittle Teams Instead of Elastic Teams
  57. Roman Estimation: A Simple, Easy and Quick Alternative to Story Points
  58. Distrust Breeds More Distrust
  59. Institutionalized Competing Interests: Part II
  60. The Unintended Accountability Sink of Scrum
  61. Writing as a Thinking Tool is a Superpower
  62. AIShittification: How AI Shits Over Online Communities
  63. Institutionalized Competing Interests: Part I
  64. The Fear of Making the Wrong Choice
  65. The OKR Deception
  66. Value = Money?
  67. Creativity: The Art of Noticing What's Around You
  68. Audiobook Giveaway: Driving Value with Sprint Goals

2024 74

  1. Agile in One Sentence
  2. My Top 10 Most Popular Articles of 2024
  3. "How Do I Prevent My Ideas and Writing From Sucking?"
  4. Don't Let Rejection Mess With Your Head
  5. "Why Do You Criticize Scrum, When You Wrote a Whole Book on Sprint Goals?"
  6. Sprinkle Squirrels 🐿️ On Your Resume
  7. Stop Wasting Your Time On MoSCoW Prioritization
  8. The Lie of Overnight Success
  9. Sayonara to the Golden Age of Scrum
  10. How a Digital Transformation Can Bankrupt Your Company
  11. Pushing Work to Teams Vs. Pulling
  12. The Prettier the Slides, the Worse the Agile Transformation
  13. Two Steps Back, One Step Forward
  14. The Copy-Paste Agile Bubble
  15. Michael Jackson and The Blinding Pursuit of Perfection
  16. Making The Case for Replacing Story Points With Ideal Days
  17. Why Do Most Agile Transformations Fail?
  18. Are Product Owners Too Much Overhead?
  19. The First Rule of Agile: You Don't Talk About Agile
  20. Are Scrum Masters Too Much Overhead?
  21. My #1 Writing Advice
  22. Revisiting INVEST 20+ Years Later
  23. WTF Is a Requirement?
  24. Stop Drooling Over User Stories
  25. Addicted to Addition
  26. The Era of Copy-Paste Agile Is Over
  27. 10 Valid Reasons Why You’ll Struggle with Sprint Goals
  28. When to Kick Managers Out and Call Them Back Later
  29. Escaping Story Points with Right-sizing
  30. How to Prevent Being Buried by Work as a Product Manager
  31. The Efficiency Trap
  32. Honey, I Shrunk the Backlog
  33. The Burden of Good Ideas
  34. Be Aware of the Agile Anti-Patterns Baked in Your Tool of Choice
  35. Two Agile Manifesto Co-Authors on a Couch
  36. Maarten's Sprint Goal Template
  37. Agilesplaining: Why the C-level Doesn't Get Agile
  38. "It Doesn't Work Because They're Not Doing Scrum"
  39. Your Company's Problem is Hiding in Plain Sight - High Work-In-Progress (WIP)
  40. Why Isn't LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) More Popular?
  41. Sprint Planning: Stop Wasting Time on Spreadsheet Capacity Micromanagement
  42. Scrum Alternatives: SCREAM!
  43. Reviewing 4 Different Sprint Goal Templates
  44. What Does a Product Manager *Really* Do?
  45. "The Business Wants X"
  46. Welcome to the Age of Noise
  47. Maarten's Sprint Review Guide V0.8
  48. Scrum's Built-in 'Get Out of Jail Free Card' Against Criticism
  49. "What If We Don't Spend Enough Time On Planning?"
  50. The Confidence and Curiosity to Doubt
  51. When Doesn't It Work?
  52. Why OKRs Often Slowly Wither Away
  53. Legacy Systems All the Way Down
  54. Gummy Bears and Unicorns Don't Transform Organizations
  55. Stop Hiding In the Comfort of Your Expertise
  56. Wasabi Scrum
  57. Don't Make Your Sprint a Straitjacket
  58. The Best Sushi Ever
  59. The Tyranny of Not Picking
  60. Agile: The Blind Watchmaker?
  61. Velocity Theater Produces Awful Meals
  62. Don't Get Trapped On The Content Level
  63. Prepare For Disappointment When You Throw Deadlines Over the Fence To Your Teams
  64. The Irony of a Definition of Ready
  65. Five Ways You're Unintentionally Screwing Up Sprint Planning
  66. If You Truly Hate Someone, Give Them a RFP - Request For Proposal
  67. Scope Creep: When Your Scope Is The Least of Your Problems
  68. Why Do All Elevators Have Mirrors?
  69. Book Interview: Stefan Wolpers
  70. Working For Myself: One Year In
  71. "Is It Okay To Not Use Sprint Goals?"
  72. The Feynman Gemba
  73. "Will This Be on the Test?
  74. More Features, More Problems

2023 40

  1. 11 Common Mistakes When Creating User Stories
  2. Most User Stories Are User Fairytales 🧚‍♀️
  3. The Agile Certification Flywheel 🏆
  4. Exhaustiveness Vs. Clarity
  5. "Sprint Goals Don't Work For Us"
  6. Don't Place Your Trust in a Unreliable Narrator
  7. Agile Is Not About Predictability
  8. In Rocks We Trust
  9. The Cannibalization of Progress
  10. Book Launch Party: Driving Value with Sprint Goals
  11. Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
  12. The PM Vs. PO Flowchart
  13. Prediction vs. Adaptation
  14. The Liberty of Enabling Constraints
  15. On Scrum and Hamsters 🐹
  16. AMA: Sprint Goals
  17. Scrum: Failure By Design?
  18. Top 10 Sprint Goal Memes
  19. A Gentle Introduction to Dysfunction Mapping
  20. The Dysfunction of Dysfunction
  21. Agile Maturity Model Adherence - Be Careful What You Wish For!
  22. Planning or Progress?
  23. The Easiest Way to Explain Story Points - Corgi Edition
  24. Maarten's Agile From First Principles Guide V0.8
  25. #1 New Release on Amazon: My Book 'Driving Value with Sprint Goals: Humble Plans, Exceptional Results'
  26. Why Should All Scrum Teams Use Sprint Goals?
  27. In Refinement We Trust
  28. SAFe: Why Can't We Be Friends?
  29. My Book Goes to Production!
  30. Why Stakeholder Management Is Incredibly Difficult When You Work in Product Management
  31. Why Better Planning Won't Fix Your Scaling Problems
  32. Things You Shouldn't Do When Rebuilding a Product, Part I
  33. Agilists Are Better at Explaining Waterfall Than Agile
  34. Why Many Tech Companies Suck at Planning and Don't Hit Their Targets
  35. 🎧 Podcast Episode: The Product Owner and Scrum Master Relationship
  36. The Problem Isn't Convincing Your Manager
  37. To All Scrum Masters: Please Step Up Your Game
  38. Why Inexperienced Teams Shouldn't Start With A Definition of Ready
  39. 🎧 New Podcast Episode: Humble Planning
  40. Unearth the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) of a Product by Interviewing Customers

2022 26

  1. Breaking the Planning Cycle of Madness
  2. My most popular posts of 2022
  3. The 7 best Scrum / Agile articles I've read in 2022
  4. 6 Biggest Sprint Misconceptions
  5. What Topics Would You Like Me to Write About in 2023?
  6. Hard Work Is Not Enough For Promotions
  7. The Way of the Lazy Product Owner
  8. 10 Books I Wish I'd Have Read Sooner
  9. Cost of Delay or Crystal Ball 🔮 of Delay?
  10. Speculative plans create the illusion of competence
  11. Unwarranted faith in the GANTT
  12. You can't prevent the mess
  13. Ask a Product Owner #3 - Stakeholder Management
  14. Uncommon sense in software development
  15. Down the RACI rabbit hole
  16. When to not do Scrum
  17. Introducing Scrum Without Doing Scrum
  18. New Scrum Feedback Board available at Scrumfeedback.com!
  19. Scrum's Unintended and Gradual Disconnect from Product Management
  20. I see Scrum monsters everywhere!
  21. Empowered teams are essential for complex work
  22. Are you a Puppet Owner?
  23. My most popular posts of 2021
  24. Book Update #1 - January 2022
  25. Resolving the one Product Owner per product conundrum
  26. The 10 best Scrum / Agile articles I read in 2021

2021 33

  1. Are you practicing Anaconda or Hummingbird-style Scrum?
  2. How Story Points Turned to the Dark Side
  3. The Usual Response to Deadlines in Development Teams Causes Delays
  4. Copy-pasting frameworks and expecting success is foolish
  5. How I Reached 32K Followers With a Niche Audience
  6. Complex work makes mistakes inevitable
  7. 10 Agile and Scrum memes inspired by Squid Game
  8. Showing all features at the Sprint Review should be like having mustard after the hot dog
  9. Should we chase badges?
  10. Stop viewing stakeholders as adversaries to manage
  11. A hideous solution that doesn’t scale is sometimes the best option
  12. Stop suffering from 'Goldfish Memory' at the Sprint Review
  13. 11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work
  14. How writing made me a better Product Owner
  15. Most roadmaps are an orchestrated delusion meant to preserve the illusion of control
  16. SAFe is a marketing framework, not an Agile scaling framework
  17. Why Scrum prevents and causes Technical Debt
  18. User Stories are ill-suited for expressing requirements
  19. The immutable framework definition makes it impossible to criticize Scrum
  20. How to deal with an absolute unit of a Product Backlog?
  21. Why always Sprinting is at odds with delivering value
  22. Why Roadmaps Reflect the Level of Organizational Inadequacy
  23. Debunking the 'Scrum isn't Agile' misconception
  24. 15 Scrum / Agile Writers you should follow on Medium
  25. Product Owners are great when their team doesn’t need them
  26. Why ‘Don’t do Agile, Be Agile’ is terrible advice
  27. The unlikely story behind the finest herring in the world
  28. Having Product Owners and Product Managers work together is crazy and ineffective
  29. Will the real Product Owner, please stand up?
  30. Doing perfect Scrum doesn’t mean you are delivering value
  31. Why Estimates and Timelines Are the Biggest Enemy to Delivering Value
  32. Why most scaling frameworks are a fad that will blow over
  33. The 12 best Scrum articles I read in 2020

2020 47

  1. Struggling with Product Goals? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!
  2. A pretty burn-down usually means ugly Scrum
  3. Why we switched from Feature Teams to Component Teams
  4. Stop locking estimates, start forecasting
  5. SMART Sprint Goals Are Stupid
  6. Companies That Obsess Over Velocity Are Clueless About Scrum
  7. 7 years ago when I started with Scrum…
  8. Stop treating your Sprints like Fort Knox
  9. Scrum alienates the world of Product Management
  10. Why Scrum doesn’t kill your product — you do
  11. Scrum is about inventing your own rules
  12. Must Product Owners and Scrum Masters be Archenemies?
  13. 5 things I hate about Scrum
  14. The #NoEstimates movement is a pointless infatuation
  15. How to escape your Scrum prison
  16. A Response to ‘Scrum Is Dead. All Hail Kanban, the New King’
  17. Carry-overs are good when you use Scrum
  18. Sprint Goals are the beating heart of Scrum
  19. Reflecting on your problems at the Sprint Retrospective is too late
  20. Agile isn’t an excuse for winging it
  21. Help! I’m working in a Feature Factory, what should I do?
  22. What a red paperclip can teach you about being a Scrum Master
  23. Product Owners lose their job when SAFe is introduced
  24. Why Scrum Masters shouldn’t be coaching Product Owners
  25. The inability to use Sprint Goals is symptomatic of serious Product Management problems
  26. Should you hire Product Managers or Product Owners for your Scrum Teams?
  27. Basecamp’s Shape Up: how different is it really from Scrum?
  28. Are all Scrum Masters in eternal pursuit of a Fata Morgana?
  29. 6 Common Mistakes When Rebuilding a Product
  30. How Product Owners can stop developers from being a pain in the @## during refinement
  31. How seemingly trivial details can derail your valuable project
  32. Delivering features on time is overrated
  33. Supermarkets are using Kanban to help fight the Coronavirus
  34. What is the easiest way to explain Story Points?
  35. Learning the Scrum values through Aesop’s fables
  36. Scrum is like Jazz — it works best when you play and improvise
  37. How to stop features from killing your product
  38. Working without Sprint Goals guarantees technical debt
  39. 10 things you must do to build high-performing Scrum Teams as a Product Owner
  40. By saying no, your yes counts
  41. 14 Signs you’re working in a Scrum Feature Factory
  42. How Do Product Owners Deliver Value Without Actually Building Anything?
  43. Introducing Scrum at a company where everyone hates Scrum
  44. Stop Talking So Much About the Different Scrum Roles
  45. To all Scrum Masters: please step up your game
  46. Scrum sucks without solid Product Management
  47. What’s the role of the Product Owner at the Daily Scrum?

2019 30

  1. Product Goals and Sprint Goals complement each other
  2. 8 best Scrum articles of 2019 I’ve read
  3. The 10 most popular articles I wrote in 2019
  4. It’s time to ditch your Definition of Ready
  5. The drawback of making everything a must-have
  6. How you say 'No' determines a large part of your success as Product Owner
  7. Hitting the right note with your product is hard
  8. How to do effective Sprint Planning as a Product Owner?
  9. What is the secret to a great job application?
  10. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): when you don’t have the guts to do Scrum
  11. Scrum Is Not Enough to Build Great Products
  12. Tutorial: How to build a ‘Now, Next, Later’-Roadmap in Jira with just 3 easy steps
  13. Why Product Owners should challenge technical solutions
  14. Scrum in a single sentence
  15. Leveraging the Sprint Review to simplify your stakeholder management
  16. 6 common mistakes when doing Sprint Planning
  17. Lessons in Empiricism from making espresso
  18. Why using Sprint 0 is a cardinal sin for all Scrum Masters
  19. Scrum in 1000 words for PMs and POs
  20. A Large Product Backlog is Pointless
  21. Great Product Owners Write Awful Backlog Items
  22. Why You Should Have Sprints That Fail
  23. Recognizing the two types of Monkeys in Scrum
  24. Apply FOCUS to set great Sprint Goals
  25. Why teams should stop obsessing over their velocity
  26. Why most Scrum Masters are destined to fail
  27. What is Product Vision?
  28. If You Are Not Flexible, You Are Not Doing Scrum
  29. Why you should never call the Sprint Review the Sprint Demo
  30. The only thing that matters when planning a Sprint

2018 10

  1. Unheralded Alternatives to User Stories
  2. Improvement Stories: a simple alternative to User Stories
  3. 6 Common Mistakes When Using Spikes
  4. Make bugs great again by using REPORT
  5. A practical introduction to the fundamentals of Jira Portfolio
  6. How companies leverage psychology to steer our choices
  7. Lessons learned from rolling out feature teams
  8. Highlights of INDUSTRY Europe 2018 Product Conference in Dublin
  9. 7 common mistakes when starting with Scrum
  10. Why your development team structure might be slowing you down

2017 19

  1. Use Job Stories To Hook Users
  2. So You Want To Be A Product Owner?
  3. Is It Good Enough?
  4. The Best And Worst Things Happen When You Are Scared
  5. Want To Understand API’s? Read This.
  6. The Three Phases Of Great Tech Companies
  7. Why Estimate Twice In Scrum?
  8. Why The Best Coke Ever Failed
  9. You Do Not Need User Stories
  10. When Is Kanban Better Than Scrum?
  11. Mastering Backlog Refinement
  12. You can’t A/B test to success
  13. Why Overloading Developers Never Works
  14. Stabilizing Your Velocity
  15. Widespread Product Management Anti-Patterns
  16. Passing the Product Owner (PSPO/CSPO) certification
  17. Hole in one at 1000 yards
  18. Bring Data To Your Retrospective
  19. 12 Common Mistakes Made When Using Story Points

2016 3

  1. Supercharge Your Job Search Using Trello
  2. 5 Marketing Secrets Of Houdini
  3. REPORT Acronym For Better Bug Reports