Written by Mary Kay Krouze
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You Know the Feature, Now Write the Stories: Part Two of The Art of the User Story
Part two of The Art of the User Story. You know the feature — now write the stories. Set AI up as a conversation, answer with discipline, and walk out of a stuck moment with well-formed stories and a clearer picture of where the feature goes next.
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The Art of the User Story (and Where AI Fits In)
There's an art to writing a great user story—and it lives in everything surrounding that one sentence. In Part 1 of this three-part series, Mary Kay Krouze shows how AI can act as a story reviewer: sharpening your wording, surfacing acceptance criteria, and even revealing stories you hadn't thought to write. Using a…
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I Hadn't Found the Value of AI. Then I Handed It the Right Problem.
Most of us are using AI by now — but have you actually found the high-level value we were all promised? I hadn't. Then I handed it a real problem: synthesizing days of complex system evaluation sessions into a gap analysis leadership needed yesterday. What I learned surprised me.
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The Adaptive Team: When Leaders Trust Us to Do the Right Thing
When leaders say they trust teams to make the right decisions and deliver on organizational goals, something shifts. That statement isn't just reassurance—it's an invitation to a different kind of partnership. But here's what most teams miss: trust isn't a gift you receive and file away. It's a living system that…
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When Good Ideas Go Hollow: How Buzzwords Kill the Things We Care About
Buzzword Bingo is not a game you want your passion to end up in. When people roll their eyes or call out “buzzword” at the very thing you believe can fundamentally change how teams work and what it means to be a successful organization, something has gone wrong.
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Evolving Agile for the Future: Keeping pace when everything changes
Agile today looks a lot different from what it was 24 years ago. I don’t believe its creators could have fully predicted the pace of technological change we’re living through now. But what they did anticipate was change itself — that’s exactly why Agile was designed as a framework, not a rigid process. It was built…
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No Heroics: How do we know Agile is working?
By looking at sustainable development . What do I mean by that? It’s the pace of work a team can maintain—not just for a sprint or two, but for months and years—without burning out, without late nights, without the constant cycle of “just one more push.”
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From Office Heroics to Healthy Workplaces: Rethinking Recognition
I recently read a post on LinkedIn describing two men deserted on an island. One immediately builds a raft and makes a plan. The other writes HELP in the sand and waits. The point the author was making was agency vs. complacency. Agency is owning your own destiny and your situation. Take the lead, act, don't…
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Agile Is a Mindset
A t first glance, doing Agile can look like success: your teams are running stand-ups, managing sprints, writing user stories, and holding retrospectives. The frameworks are in place. Boxes are checked. But here’s the reality—doing Agile doesn’t guarantee agility.
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Is Agile Dying?
Agile’s been around for about 25 years now—officially kicking off in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto. Since then, it’s evolved into all sorts of frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and others. We've seen some teams knock it out of the park, and others... not so much. So the big question is: is Agile on its way out?