During inceptions and workshops, it's easier to poke holes at something wrong than to write the first words on a whiteboard. So instead of starting from a blank slate, synthesise what you think you know and then validate your understanding.

The lean inception is a focused way to gather information to start a project. You can complete this in a single week.

Technical design docs are an efficient way to communicate about software architecture and technical solutions. These docs precede an architectural decision record. They benefit from detail, though brevity is an important consideration too.

Feature breakdown documents serve as a single resource to catalogue all information about a feature. As the team enhances the feature, this document becomes a single source of truth about it.

Idea papers allow you to nurture fresh ideas by articulating them clearly. People can use this as a reference to share feedback and enrich the idea. Decision making is also easier if everyone can understand the idea well.

Most “quick syncs” can be async. This honours everyone’s need for flow and deep work.

The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async.

Sprint planning is amongst the most time consuming activities for development teams. One could argue that the value you get is not proportional to the effort you put into these meetings. With some effort you can drop sprint planning meetings completely.

Estimates aren’t necessary on every project. In such cases, where can you shift your measurement focus?

If you have an established product, then you’re probably less concerned about big release plans. Instead, your priority will be to enhance your product regularly. For such situations, I’m a big fan of Ryan Singer’s “Shape up” approach.

Back in the day when agile still wasn’t a thing, wideband Delphi estimation involved anonymously filling out forms. You can do the same thing now, but more efficiently with online forms.

You don’t always need a long meeting to play the velocity game. It’s easy to run this using a simple survey.

Nigel Thurlow and Dave Slayton came up with this approach to estimate scope, at Toyota. You can use this to estimate size at the start of a project. You can also use this technique when you have to estimate a large amount of scope for an in-flight project.

Warp speed estimation is a way to quantify scope at the start of a project.

Create smaller decentralised pods inside the team to devolve responsibilities. Pods operate autonomously and make their own decisions.

With a checklist in place, create a simple recorded demo showing each of the test conditions and "default to action" until the PO and tester are available.

DoR allows the team to set a standard for user stories that developers pick up. The DoD ensures developers aren’t aiming for a moving target.

It’s much easier to apologise than to get permission. In this world of computers, the best thing to do is to do it.

To minimise each team’s cognitive load and to limit noisy interactions, you may need to revisit your team structures. Team topologies offer you a handy framework to rethink what teams you need and how they interact.

While there is value in getting people together, we need to acknowledge that collaboration and creativity have little correlation with synchrony.