Reflections From 2025

It’s the last day of 2025 and, despite everything that happened work wise for me this year, I am coming out of 2025 very grateful. I have taken some time to write down a few reflections from the year.

• There has been a dwindling number of available roles for Agile practitioners such as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. Yet there is still a lot of work to be done, as long as there are teams that struggle to ship software consistently and many more teams operating as a feature factory with little clue about how much value they are delivering. What we need more of are agile practitioners with hands on product delivery experience who can help teams navigate the complexity of their work.

• There are still many practitioners who approach change by documenting “best practices” and then trying to force teams to comply. That is not going to work in the long run. What works better and actually sticks is involving people in co creating the change they want, and creating an environment where that is possible is one of the first steps to long lasting change.

• The marketing “rule of 7” from the 1930s suggests that people have to see an advert seven times before they buy. That principle still applies today. In practice, Product Owners need to share their Product Vision and Goals multiple times – maybe more than seven – before it really sticks, and even then these will eventually need to change. Try different formats: audio, video and text; the teams will get it over time.

• There continues to be widespread misinformation about Scrum and other agile frameworks, and the truth is that our clients do not care about the frameworks themselves. On a recent client engagement, I found that using terms different from Scrum’s official terminology helped us get started. It just means that, as a change agent, you have to define a delivery framework that is explicitly designed for your context.

• Velocity and “Say/Do” continue to be useless metrics. Better alternatives include flow metrics. In large organisations, I have found “Lead Time” – how long it takes from the conception of an idea to releasing features to users – particularly useful. It exposes organisational waste that cuts across multiple areas of the organisation, in ways that leaders might find interesting (or uncomfortable).

Despite the rush for AI tools and similar technologies, it is not the end of the road for true professionals who have dedicated their careers to helping others improve ways of working. There is a lot of real work to be done, and it goes far beyond creating fancy PowerPoint decks – AI (and hallucination as a feature) can probably handle that part.

I wish you all a prosperous 2026!

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