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Three office professionals in a bright office lean over red cylinders wired to a small clock on a desk, conveying high-stakes deadline pressure.

Mistakes Teams Make When Changing Sprint Length—and How to Fix Them

Changing Sprint length sounds small. It isn’t. You’re rewiring the team’s heartbeat: planning, demo cadence, stakeholder expectations, metrics—everything. Get it right and throughput climbs with less stress. Get it wrong and you’ll drown in churn, missed goals, and noisy metrics. Below are the most common traps I see when teams tweak Sprint cadence, plus fast,…

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Capacity Planning That Survives Reality

Replace wishful thinking with arrival/throughput trends and variability. Here’s a no-theory-bloat playbook you can run this week to set a simple capacity cap and boost predictability—without spreadsheets breeding in the wild. The 20% that moves 80% of results Match intake to historical throughput. Cap WIP by target cycle time (via Little’s Law). Price variability into…

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Scrabble board with tiles—rack reads “DEBTS” and loose tiles spell “HELP ME.”

Flow Debt: The Hidden Cost of Blocked Work

Track blocked time %, aging WIP, and handoff counts; add blocker clustering and a weekly impediment burn-down If your delivery feels slower than it should be—even with “full” utilization—you’re likely paying flow debt: the silent tax created when work sits blocked, ages in progress, or pinballs across handoffs. You don’t need a giant transformation to…

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The Product Goal as a Portfolio Compass

Translate your Product Goal into quarterly EBM targets (CV, TtM, A2I) and Sprint Goal hypotheses — plus a one-page alignment board you can use today. If your Product Goal isn’t shaping real-world choices, it’s just a slogan. The move is simple: connect the Product Goal to three quarterly evidence targets from Evidence-Based Management (EBM) —…

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Forecasting Without Story Points: A Monte Carlo Playbook

Build probabilistic delivery forecasts from historical throughput—plus caveats, confidence intervals, and an executive-ready chart. Most teams still try to “estimate” delivery with story points. You don’t need them. If you have a list of items finished per day/week (throughput), you can simulate thousands of futures in seconds and answer the only questions that matter: “When…

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5 Signals Your Product Backlog Is Failing (and How to Fix It)

Introduction If you’re honest, does your backlog health inspire confidence—or dread? Many teams plan with good intentions but get blindsided by stale items, half-ready stories, and a growing queue that never seems to shrink. In this guide, we’ll make backlog health concrete using four measurable signals—item age, readiness ratio, arrival vs. completion rate, and reorder…

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