Mark Levison

Hindsight bias makes retrospectives lie to us. Once something has happened we reconstruct the past so the outcome looks inevitable, and the story we tell gets so good that we stop seeing the other options that were live at the time.

🧾 The complexity tax arrives one tiny decision at a time. Few of them hurt; the sum does. Quick test: if you need a flow chart to map how your organization makes decisions, you have a complexity problem. What could you eliminate? #Leadership agilepainrelief.com/blog/how-hid...

Asana's CEO: AI change "has effectively broken traditional planning cycles." Annual planning never made sense. Replace it with clear options, and every quarter ask: - What did we learn? - Which options no longer make sense? - Which do we pursue next?

🏭 Feature Factory signs: rigid roadmaps dated a year out, a team that doesn't know the strategy, velocity obsession, output over outcome. GenAI makes it worse: more output, no better outcome. Which of these do you recognise? #ProductOwner agilepainrelief.com/glossary/fea...

You know your vision has been understood when you hear it come out of the mouths of others.

🎯 Stop promising features by a date. Try: "Next quarter we can deliver one major feature; our choices are …" Now the conversation is about trade-offs. When did your stakeholders last see a list of choices instead of a list of dates? #ProductOwner agilepainrelief.com/blog/portfol...

🚦 Use WIP limits to stop the multitasking madness and actually finish work. See where the bottlenecks are. Scrum Better with Kanban: hands-on, experiencing not memorizing, and not just for software teams. Nov 13, live online. #Scrum agilepainrelief.com/courses/scru...

🐐 The old GOAT was about agile itself. We won. Now we're all juggling tariffs, GenAI and climate at once. GOAT 2.0 is a day with people facing the same problems: Radical Uncertainty. Come find me in the room, not at the booth. Nov 26, Ottawa. #Agile agilepainrelief.com/blog/gatinea...

💻 "He knows where the bodies are buried." a former student. Certified Scrum Developer: build a Product with Scrum, and practise handling legacy code, technical debt, testing and architecture. Nov 4-6, live online. #Scrum agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

📊 Understand why your team is stuck and where. Scrum Better with Kanban: visualize workflow, reveal bottlenecks, use real data to improve, and stop the overload of meetings. No prerequisite. November 13, live online. agilepainrelief.com/courses/scru...

🐤 "We're skipping the Retrospective, we've already started next Sprint's work." That's a canary in the mineshaft. When good people do something strange, examine the system. Don't cancel the retro or force attendance: dig into the why. #Scrum agilepainrelief.com/blog/scrum-t...

Ten years ago we all knew not to blindly paste StackOverflow code into our products. Now we do it every day and call it productivity. #AIinSoftwareDevelopment

🗂️ Watch the work items, not the workers. Work often waits three times longer than it's worked. Give waiting its own column and a WIP limit, and track Work Item Age. What's the oldest item on your board right now? #Agile agilepainrelief.com/blog/kanban-...

🧭 Job hunting? A clear vision of what you want from your next job helps you avoid impulsive decisions. "ScrumMaster" isn't a vision. Approach it in a Scrum way: a Story Map, small steps, and don't be afraid to make mistakes. agilepainrelief.com/blog/agile-t...

📚 As ScrumMasters you have no formal power. Two books on my reading list for exactly that: The Catalyst by Jonah Berger (influence, the easiest read) and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (negotiation is about emotional needs). #ScrumMaster agilepainrelief.com/blog/recomme...

🐐 GOAT 2.0 is back after a six-year hiatus: a room of peers carrying product, delivery and organizational trade-offs while AI rewrites how technology is built. November 26, Ottawa. $200, capped at 250 people. www.goagiletour.ca

⏳ In most organizations, work spends more time waiting than being worked on: 31-57 days waiting vs 14-28 days of work in this example. Speed up only the developers and you save, at best, 20 days. Where does your work wait longest? agilepainrelief.com/blog/portfol...

🛠️ Coding agents write code faster than ever. Whether it's the right code, at the quality your team agreed on, is still up to the team. Certified Scrum Developer: User Story to Acceptance Criteria to Implementation. November 4-6, live online. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

📦 Big bang releases: months of features, light testing, then a crunch and bugs out the door. The bigger the batch, the higher the testing cost and the harder defects are to find. If it's hard to release, release more often. #Agile agilepainrelief.com/glossary/rel...

😐 Research reported in HBR: people using GenAI for emails, social posts and brainstorming were more productive, and reported lower motivation and more boredom. Have you noticed this on your team? #AIinSoftwareDevelopment agilepainrelief.com/blog/the-hum...

🤖 Alaska's courts estimated 3 months for a probate chatbot. 15 months later it's being scaled back. Agile coaching is harder than probate. Can you afford for your clients to get subtly wrong advice? #AIinSoftwareDevelopment agilepainrelief.com/blog/ai-chat...

🗣️ Great Retro, then at Sprint Planning a senior team member says: "We tried that before." Don't tell them they're off topic. Ask: "What has changed from the last time?" What do you say when you hear it? agilepainrelief.com/blog/difficu...

🤝 Grouping people together doesn't make them a team. Katzenbach and Smith's test still holds 30 years on. The two I see missed most: a specific, challenging performance goal, and mutual accountability. #Scrum agilepainrelief.com/blog/charact...

🛠️ A code smell is a hint, not a verdict. Building the taste to tell good code from GenAI code is hands-on work, and it's what the Certified Scrum Developer course practises: legacy code, real design questions. November 4-6, live online. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

⚙️ A focus on efficiency can make systems worse. What works: clear priorities (three, max), study the flow to find the bottleneck, push decisions down. Can GenAI help? Perhaps, once you've found the bottleneck. agilepainrelief.com/blog/will-ai...

📊 Coordinate work continuously through visualization, not endless meetings. Scrum Better with Kanban: a one-day workshop that strengthens Scrum with Kanban, plus a Kanban University certification. November 13, live online. agilepainrelief.com/courses/scru...

🧪 Unsure which receipt-scanning provider was most reliable, I ran a hundred receipts through each and compared. None of that code reached production. That's a Spike: a small experiment to learn, written fast and thrown away. agilepainrelief.com/glossary/spi...

🐐 GOAT 2.0's AI panel: how leaders move past "AI pilots" and handle data sovereignty, hidden structural costs, ethics, and genuine customer value. Its own 75-minute breakout. November 26, Ottawa. $200, capped at 250 people. www.goagiletour.ca

📋 A frequent question in my Scrum workshops: how do Definition of Done, Acceptance Criteria and User Stories relate? Start here: if I asked three people on your team what "Done" means, would I get the same answer? #Scrum agilepainrelief.com/blog/definit...

🗂️ Scrum Better with Kanban, November 13, live online: a one-day workshop on layering Kanban onto your Scrum. See where the bottlenecks are, use WIP limits to stop the multitasking madness, and actually finish work. Not just for software teams. agilepainrelief.com/courses/scru...

🐐 GOAT 2.0, November 26 in Ottawa: panels in the morning, facilitated peer breakouts in the afternoon. No passive presentations. Capped at 250 people; $200 covers the full day, breakfast and lunch included. www.goagiletour.ca

AI-generated code is a major new source of technical debt. Where an agent works independently for a few months, static analysis warnings rise 18% and Cognitive Complexity 39%. Code nobody can understand is debt. #TechnicalDebt agilepainrelief.com/glossary/tec...

Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence: the ARC motivational model. Lose one and the others diminish. Micromanage someone and they may start asking, "Am I being micromanaged because I lack competence?" agilepainrelief.com/glossary/arc...

Coaches are launching AI chatbots "trained" on their writing. I built one on my own content: some questions it answered well, for others it made up an answer. The person asking usually can't tell which is which. agilepainrelief.com/blog/ai-chat...

The "Spotify Model" probably isn't a model, and isn't what Spotify practices today. Renaming your teams "Squads" and managers "Chapter Leads" is Cargo Cult. Culture will eat any structure. Grow your own Agile model. agilepainrelief.com/blog/the-spo...

🛠️ Take code that is an antiquated mess and bring it into the modern age: legacy code, technical debt, testable Acceptance Criteria. Simon Willison: coding agents "make software engineering even harder." Certified Scrum Developer, Nov 4-6, live online. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

Sales wants discounts to hit quarter-end targets. Finance wants firm prices to protect margins. Both serve "company growth." An Evaporating Cloud boils it down to conflicting assumptions. One answer: discount only for longer terms or upfront payment. buff.ly/S3TpWK7

Six months of Claude Code: more code in less time, and code that shouldn't exist. A full OAuth2 flow when I needed a simple hook. A fragile regex where a standard approach existed. These tools are a megaphone: they make what you say louder. agilepainrelief.com/blog/ai-gene...

Do we really have a difficult person? Or a good person stuck in a difficult situation? Incentives, pressure, fear, priorities: nine times out of ten, the circumstances are the problem. Change the situation, and the "difficult person" disappears. agilepainrelief.com/blog/difficu...

🎯 Certified Scrum Product Owner, October 8-9, live online: GenAI for Product Owners, a hands-on product backlog, and case studies, not guesswork. Certification fees and two years of Scrum Alliance membership included. Registration closes October 7. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

Speed up ER triage with AI and the beds are still full. We tackled the emergency room problem in isolation. The ER is full for reasons that mostly are not in the ER: no family doctor, long term care waitlists, staffing. No single cause, no magic fix. agilepainrelief.com/glossary/sys...

🙅 How do you say "no" to stakeholders and stop inflicting a feature factory on your team? Two days of practical answers, grounded in evidence rather than wild promises. CSPO, live online, October 8-9. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...

"Resulting" is judging a decision by how it turned out. Luck plays a big role: good decisions get bad outcomes, and bad decisions sometimes work. For expensive or hard to reverse calls, judge the process instead. Start with the Rule of Three. agilepainrelief.com/blog/why-are...

🔀 OpenAI says it has reached AGI. Mostly that is positioning ahead of an IPO. The bigger shift is underneath: AI upended retail and is coming for knowledge work. Organizations that only want the Agile bumper sticker will struggle. agilepainrelief.com/newsletter/?...

Red-Yellow-Green reports summarize a summary of a summary. Green can mean within 5% of budget and tells you nothing about quality. Red says serious issues, not what or why. And green is the default, so too few questions get asked until it is too late. agilepainrelief.com/blog/red-yel...

🐐 GOAT is back. The Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour returns November 26 in Ottawa: three panels on geopolitical disruption, the future of work, and whether AI is uncovering better ways. No slides, real trade-offs. $200, capped at 250 people. www.goagiletour.ca

The federal government moved to four days in the office. Nobody coordinates who comes in which day, so people go in and still do not see their team: same Zoom call, now from a hotdesk. If the goal is collaboration, mandating days is the wrong lever. agilepainrelief.com/blog/forcing...

A vendor promises AI brings "a new level of objectivity" to estimation. But inaccurate estimates do not come from humans doing a poor job, they come from variability. AI does not make estimation better, because estimation was never the real problem. agilepainrelief.com/blog/gen-ai-...

When someone says "We do Agile", they are saying something impossible. Agile is four values and twelve principles from a ski hill in 2001. Scrum is a framework. You can do Scrum, Kanban, XP. Agile is how you behave, not the practices you follow. agilepainrelief.com/glossary/agi...

Learn Scrum from someone who has walked the walk, and will help well beyond the course when you hit the "yes, but in real life" questions. Lifetime access to the materials. CSM, live online, October 1-2. Registration open until the end of September 30. agilepainrelief.com/courses/cert...