Instilling Agility, Common Strategy Mistakes, Disempowered Teams — Hands-on Agile 2025

TL; DR: Johanna Rothman, Roman Pichler, and Maarten Dalmijn speaking at Hands-on Agile 2025

The third batch of videos of Hands-On Agile 2025 is in, and you don’t want to miss them: Johanna Rothman warns against fake “Agile,” urging a focus on genuine agility by choosing fit-for-purpose lifecycles and improving feedback loops. At the same time, Roman Pichler outlines five common product strategy mistakes and how to avoid them for better product outcomes, and Maarten Dalmijn highlights systemic blockers to empowered teams and advocates for shifting from rules to cultivating environments that enable high performance.

📺 Watch the videos from the first batch: Change Questions, The Agile Way, Humans Robots Agents: Dr. Lynn Kelley, Peter Merel, and Jurgen Appelo speaking at Hands-on Agile 2025.

📺 Watch the videos from the second batch: Product Discovery Mistakes, Agile Leadership, Taylorism to Product Mindset — Hands-on Agile 2025.

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Hands-On Agile 2025: Instilling Agility, Common Strategy Mistakes, Disempowered Teams

Johanna Rothman: Fake “Agile” is the Norm: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices

Summary

Is your team or project supposed to “be agile?” You might not feel that way if you have a years-long backlog, standups are individual status reports, and everyone is still multitasking. The people on the project want to do great work. But how you work feels a lot like an “agile” death march.

There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Worse, fake agility is the norm in our industry.

No one has to work that way.

Your management does not care about “agile”—but they care a lot about agility. Instead of fake agile, you can assess your culture, project, and product risks to select a different approach. You can choose how to collaborate, so you can iterate over features and when to deliver value. When you do, you are more likely to discover actual agility and an easier way to work.

Learning Objectives:

1. Have a clear understanding of the different lifecycles and when to use each.
2. Be able to assess your project, product, and portfolio risks.
3. Know how to customize a lifecycle based on the unique culture and requirements of the team.
4. How to create shorter feedback loops in any lifecycle for product success.

Who is Johanna Rothman?

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby) and Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver.

Meet Johanna Rothman

LinkedIn.

Twitter.

Website.

Read Johanna Rothman’s Book

Modern Management Made Easy.

Roman Pichler: Common Product Strategy Mistakes

Summary

The product strategy is probably the most important product management artefact. But despite its importance, it is not always effectively used. In my talk, I’ll discuss five common product strategy mistakes. I explain how you can avoid them and maximise the chances of offering a successful product.

Who Is Roman Pichler?

Roman Pichler is a product management expert specialised in digital products and agile practices. Roman has taught product managers and product owners and advised product leaders for more than 15 years; he has been involved in product management and agile software development for more than 20 years.

Roman shares his knowledge through his training courses and consulting services, his books, his popular blog, podcast, and talks, and his product management tools, including his widely used product vision board.

When he’s not busy with work, Roman enjoys spending time with his family, cycling in the Chiltern hills, playing the tenor saxophone, and helping with family events at Amaravati Buddhist monastery. Roman is based in Wendover, near London in the UK.

Meet Roman Pichler

Website: Roman Pichler’s website.

LinkedIn: Roman Pichler’s LinkedIn profile.

Twitter: Roman Pichler’s Twitter profile.

Youtube: Roman Pichler’s Youtube channel.

Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams

Summary

Why do most Agile transformations fail?

Why do we see so few empowered teams?

The beam of a lighthouse doesn’t illuminate the ground underneath the lighthouse. When we’re part of an organisational system, it’s difficult for leaders to see the obstacles that stand in the way of high-performing and empowered teams.

In this talk, I will present a simple model you can use to help build high-performing teams within your organization.

The problems we have usually have little to do with expertise, but our inability to shine a light on the (dys)functioning of our organizational system.

Let’s shift our conversations from processes and rules, towards creating an environment for high-performing empowered teams.

Who Is Maarten Dalmijn?

Maarten Dalmijn is a consultant, speaker, and trainer at Dalmijn Consulting. He is the author of the book Driving Value with Sprint Goals.

Maarten helps teams to beat the feature factory all over the world. Millions of practitioners have read his best-practice articles on Agile, Scrum, and Product Management. He specializes in helping companies build empowered teams to discover better ways of delivering value.

He has been working as a Product Leader. He’s focused on coaching teams to deliver the highest value for their customers. One of his hobbies is writing articles. He shares his ideas on Substack and loves learning from everyone.

Maarten is a frequent speaker at Fortune 500 companies and international industry conferences. He has worked with many award-winning start-ups and scale-ups. He is an ambassador and editor at Serious Scrum, the largest Scrum publication on Medium.

Meet Maarten Dalmijn

Maarten Dalmijn’s Substack

Maarten Dalmijn on Twitter

Maarten Dalmijn on LinkedIn

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