New course just dropped: Drive Effective, Efficient Agile Meetings. Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.
Most new agile teams misread the word flexible and let their meetings drift into formless conversation. They think "no fixed agenda" is the agile move. It isn't. Agile teams ship faster than waterfall teams because the ceremonies are tight, time-boxed, and over before anyone notices. The flexibility is in what you build between meetings, not what happens inside them.
This course is the operator's manual for each ceremony — sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review, retrospective, refinement — including the bit nobody teaches: how to re-tighten a ceremony that has started to drift.
What's in the box
- Sprint planning that doesn't take three hours (it shouldn't)
- Daily stand-up that doesn't become a status report for the manager
- Sprint review where stakeholders actually see working software, not slides
- Retrospectives that produce 1-3 action items, not 12 vague feelings
- Backlog refinement that runs between sprints so planning is calm
- The drift detector — how to spot a ceremony that's gone from useful to ritual, and what to do about it
Who this is for
- New scrum masters who got the role last quarter and the meetings are running them
- Engineering managers running scrum with senior engineers who think ceremonies are "extra meetings"
- PMs and POs trying to graduate the team off ad-hoc Slack threads back into structured rhythm
- Anyone running cross-team standups where the format has stopped fitting the work
What you'll be able to do after
- Run a 15-minute stand-up that nobody dreads
- Cut sprint planning in half without losing precision
- Recognize the four most common ceremony failure modes (silence, theater, sprawl, repetition) and fix each
- Run agile meetings for distributed teams without making remote folks feel like second-class participants
→ Take the course
Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment. PMI Registered Education Provider — this course qualifies for PDUs.
Thanks to every team that put up with me running their stand-ups badly while I figured this out. Especially the team in 2014 that pushed back hard on the "status report" version — that conversation became the entire fourth module. Thank you.
The four ceremony anti-patterns this course actively un-teaches
The "status report" stand-up. Three questions, answered to the manager, while everyone else zones out. Net value: zero. The course teaches the team-facing alternative: blockers first, dependencies second, signals to leadership separately.
The "vibes" retrospective. "What went well, what could go better." Nobody owns anything, nothing changes, you do it again in two weeks. The course replaces this with the action-item-owner-date format that produces 1-3 real changes per retro.
The "everyone demos" sprint review. Three engineers each spend 15 minutes walking through their code while stakeholders glaze over. The course teaches the product-narrative format — one person tells the story, screens move accordingly, stakeholders see working software in 20 minutes total.
The "open backlog" refinement. Two hours of discussing every story in the queue. Net velocity loss: massive. The course teaches the 3-2-1 model — refine 3 stories deeply, 2 medium, 1 lightly. Hard stop at 60 minutes.
Quick test: are your meetings working?
A meeting is working if every attendee can finish this sentence: "In this meeting I learned X, which changes my next 24 hours by Y."
If three or more attendees can't fill that in, the meeting is theater. Cut, restructure, or replace.
The five-meeting baseline the course teaches as a starting point
A team running scrum properly has exactly five recurring ceremonies — daily standup (15 min), refinement (60 min weekly), sprint planning (90 min biweekly), sprint review (45 min biweekly), retrospective (60 min biweekly). That's about 6.5 hours of structured meeting time per two-week sprint per person.
Anything beyond that is overhead, and the course walks the audit pattern to find which "extra" meeting can be cut, which can be merged, and which is actually a replacement for a missing ceremony in disguise. The single highest-impact change most teams make after the course: deleting one recurring meeting that nobody could justify when asked. That hour back, per person, per week, is the entire ROI of the course.
Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.