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,…
If you’re here for a straight answer first: a Sprint is one month or less. That’s the official time-box. Most elite teams today run one or two weeks, with two weeks still the common default. The rest of this playbook shows you how to pick your length, prove it works, and when to change it—without…
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…
Scrum gives you focus and cadence. Kanban adds flow and predictability. Used together, you can deliver more steadily without changing Scrum’s roles, events, or artifacts. This guide shows exactly how to layer Kanban practices into your existing Scrum setup to visualize flow, limit WIP, and actively manage aging work—plus a 4-week pilot plan and clear…
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…
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) —…
Turn your DoD into measurable checks, wire a simple quality gate into CI, and audit it without drama.
Most teams treat the Definition of Done (DoD) like a checklist pinned to a wall. Useful—until things get busy. Then “Done” slides, defects leak, and CI turns red at the worst time. Let’s turn DoD into a…
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…
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…
Introduction
Scrum doesn’t bolt quality on at the end—it bakes it in from day one. Yet many teams still treat “QA” as a separate phase or a lone specialist’s job.
In this guide you’ll learn how to integrate QA seamlessly into the Sprint cadence, share ownership for quality across the whole team, and use lightweight…