So Superman can go away and the rest of the Justice League can get it done while Superman's gone.

Exactly.

So, yeah, we're all superheroes and we all have our special skills.

Not all of us.

Yes.

But we all have our special skills, but when the time comes and one of the superheroes is off to another galaxy, et cetera, the others can cover for a short period of time.

This is where visualizing the work is so important.

So if I'm listening to this and I realize that this is a thing that I do that I need to figure out how to change, is that something I can change myself or does that have to be changed like systemically within the organization or the people on my team or what? You could definitely start it off

So can you walk us through, I don't know, three or four of the things that you think are most instrumental in removing hero culture and replacing it with something that's far more sustainable?

Right, so I already talked about the leadership shift going from a shepherd to beekeeper.

There's backlog bankruptcy, which kind of ties into our earlier discussion on deleting, right? So I talk about a six month rule.

There's no someday pile, just delete it.

I talk about the value litmus test, right? Some questions that you ask before anything ends up on your backlog.

And then there's prioritization, right? Actually coming up with a force rank.

of one, two, three, and there's different ways to do it.

agree can i dig a little deeper what did you would you be able to share what you learned about how to say no because i think people out there probably struggle with that and would love to hear what works in your experience

How do you see that maybe adjusting or maybe even refining what a, what a sprint or Agile would even look like? Or is it as, as you wrote, is it just, is it dead and we just need to figure out, like I guess AI killed it now? [chuckles]

Yeah, that's, that was the book last year I co-wrote, uh, Who Killed Agile, which, uh, we're gonna do a refresh, a second edition this year because of AI agents, right? And so how do you have agents be a part of your Scrum team? And, and, and, and so to answer your question, you know, more than ever as a product owner, being able to refine the backlog, if we're gonna do one day...

So a typical rule of thumb in, in, in Scrum is what we say the product owner should get the team together once or twice during a sprint to help refine the backlog for the next two or three, you know, one to two sprints.

So that way when you get to sprint planning, "Hey, we've seen this before.

We understand the what and the why.

Now let's talk about the how." Now, if you're doing one-day sprints, [chuckles] "Hey, guys, at twelve o'clock, we're gonna take a break to do backlog refinement," I don't know.

I c- I mean, that's, that's how you would answer it given the patterns of the past, but I'm wondering can you just take an entire day now? Uh, because like, because like you guys are saying too, right, you could be throwing so much at the, at the user, um, and at the, and, and, and the stakeholders, how do you keep, keep them up to date, right? So definitely we can create dashboards and stuff to kind of say, "Well, this was our last delivery, and this is the KPI that we're gonna be impacting with this next release." But it could be too fast, so maybe we do have to slow things down.

Mm-hmm