My Top 10 Most Popular Articles of 2024

In 2024, I published 66 articles with roughly 500K views and 6 authors published on my Substack: Jon Odo , Stefan Wolpers, Jenny Wanger, Amy Mitchell, Mark Karimov, and Nick Brown.

Let’s walk through my top 10 most popular articles together and I’ll include additional backstory or what triggered writing it, where applicable.

Let’s start with my personal favorite article of the year (it didn’t make the top 10).

Wasabi Scrum - When the Fake Thing Becomes the Real Thing

I just thought this was a simple way to explain the current problems with Scrum. Everybody is talking about fake wasabi and treating it as the real thing, but unfortunately, just like with real wasabi, they are unaware of the real thing.

This is my personal favorite article of the year, because this is an easy and apt comparison many people can relate to I could have come up with many years back, but I didn’t.

#10. Why OKRs Often Slowly Wither Away

I’ve worked at many different organizations start-ups, scale-ups and big corporations where I’ve seen OKRs fail. Sometimes even multiple times at the same company.

I wanted to come up with an easy explanation why OKRs fail so frequently, and I drew inspiration from my childhood and visiting beautiful coral reefs as a teenager.

#9. Reviewing 4 Different Sprint Goal Templates

I wanted to create a Sprint Goal template in Miro, and hence I thought it would be sensible to look at what’s out there first for inspiration, and also to see where I could potentially do better and offer something new.

This ultimately resulted in my next article at spot 8.

#8. Maarten’s Sprint Goal Template

Definitely read this one if you want to see how I compare Sprint Goal templates to tuna fish, plus if you want to have a template that’s different, better and worse than what’s already out there.

#7. Why Do All Elevators Have Mirrors?

This is one of my favorite stories. We can extract important lessons from the elevator story. Like why it’s crucial to be able to reframe problems and why reverse engineering outcomes from features is non-sensical.

#6. Maarten’s Sprint Review Guide V0.8

Most Sprint Reviews suck and are not useful, and there are almost no Sprint Review templates out there. That’s why I decided to set out to create one of the first Sprint Review templates out there.

#5. Sprint Planning: Stop Wasting Time on Spreadsheet Capacity Micromanagement

I see so many beautiful Excel spreadsheets to help with capacity planning / velocity forecasts. I wanted to put in words why I believe these sheets aren’t all that useful and focus on solving the wrong problem.

#4. Sayonara to the Golden Age of Scrum

Scrum is slowly withering away. It’s like a dinosaur that will gradually become niche like XP. It’s time for something new, because the Agile Industrial Complex screwed the pooch and I believe the enshittification that has happened to Scrum is beyond redemption.

#3. Scrum’s Built-in ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ Against Criticism

Criticism against Scrum doesn’t exist, because it always gets dismissed with ‘You’re not doing Scrum’. Which is incredibly frustrating, and I wanted to capture this frustration in an article.

#2. Your Company’s Problem is Hiding in Plain Sight: High Work-In-Progress (WIP)

Many companies suffer from high WIP, yet they choose to ignore it as being one of their biggest problems. I wanted to explain how this problem is often hiding in plain sight, why we choose to ignore it (and why we shouldn’t ignore it!).

#1. The Era of Copy-Paste Agile is Over

This article exploded, probably because many people feel the same way: it’s the end of an era. It’s time for something new, because the era of Copy-Paste Agile is over.

What’s up next? Who knows! Most likely: Agnostic Agile.

What Will I Write About in 2025?

I don’t know yet, but what I do know: much less about Agile and Scrum, and much more about Product and Product Management.

As that’s far more interesting to me at this point in time, and I write about what interests me. I’m also fed up with the Agile and Scrum community, as there’s too much dogma that saps away my energy.

Next year I will do the same thing I always do: turn things that frustrate me or I find interesting into articles. After 9 years of writing I still don’t know what readers find interesting. I do know what I find interesting, and that’s my most important guide.