Two decades ago, Wang Man and I worked together at the German Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. Back then, Wang Man ran Customer Satisfaction Surveys — and that’s where we both learned to ditch uneven scales. Given the option, respondents drift to the middle. Comfortable, noncommittal, and not particularly useful if you actually want to know where to improve.

An Agile Parent Is an Agile Manager on Oxytocin.

Brigitte Neumann

When we started practicing Agile Parenting, the move felt obvious: take what worked in the office and bring it home. The books, the methods, the mindset — Design Thinking, SCRUM, the art of being a good Product Owner. All of it, transplanted e.g.

• The Professional Product Owner by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham
• Nea Machina – die Kreativmaschine by Thomas and Martin Poschauko
• Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo

Description

The agile world’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths — and occasionally its most frustrating quality. Without clear metrics, it’s hard to know where you stand or how far you’ve come. So we decided to change that.

The Agile Parenting Self-Assessment covers three categories. First, how your family experiences you as a parent. Second, which values you actually get across — not the ones you intend to, the ones that land. And third, how you manage the family as a unit.

Simple. Honest. A little uncomfortable, perhaps. That’s the point.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

Once you have your result, sit with it. Where do you want to grow? The agile community runs on exactly that impulse — the quiet conviction that there is always a next level.

And if you have a moment, leave a note in the comments. How well did the result reflect your reality? Where does the tool fall short? This is an MVP — and like any good one, it gets better with honest feedback.

The post How Agile a Parent Are You, Really? Time to Find Out. appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Either way, it’s never too early for a little startup megalomania. So we got t-shirts made. When we sat down with Sarita to talk design, one thing was non-negotiable: the wearer had to look great. Not something you can say about the average startup t-shirt. But then again, we were never going for average.

Soft organic cotton, sizes S, M, and L — available in a body-hugging cut or a straight shape.

Want to wear the spirit? Drop us a message.

The post Agile Parenting in Style: Show the Spirit of Being a Parent in the Growth Zone appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Lapbooking is making a collection of mini-books, each covering a different angle of a larger topic. Once you’ve made enough of them, they come together in a single folder — sprawling, tactile, and satisfying in a way that a digital file never quite manages to be. The name comes from the finished product itself: open it up and it covers your lap. Learn more here.

What do you need?

• Cardboard
• Paper, pens, pencils, crayons, glue, tape, scissors
• Magazines to raid for illustrations
• A computer and printer, if you want to pull in anything from online
• 30 minutes to get your kid settled, started, and in the mood to make something

Let’s do it!

1. Pick a topic together — anything goes, from potatoes to black holes, from Confucianism to ancient Egypt.
2. Break it down into knowledge areas. These become the topics for each mini-book inside the lapbook.
3. Decide together which mini-books your kid tackles solo and which ones need your input. A delegation board can help make this visual.
4. Design, build, and complete the mini-books.
5. Assemble everything into the lapbook and decorate it however you like.
6. Before you start, take a moment to align on the bigger picture — timeline, depth of research, overall structure. A short conversation upfront saves a lot of course-correcting later.
7. Check in for ten minutes each morning or evening. Review what’s done, adjust the plan. One mini-book per day works well as a rhythm — though complexity will always have the final say.
8. Present it. Your kid can showcase the finished lapbook to the whole family, you can do it together, or film it and share with us. After all that work, the story deserves an audience.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

• Your kid owns the project. You’re the Scrum Master — there to support, not to direct.
• The final presentation is borrowed straight from Design Thinking. It matters to tell your story!

Think back to your last genuinely interesting dinner conversation. A heated debate about vaccination. Female entrepreneurs in Africa. Something that sent everyone down a rabbit hole and left you wanting to know more. Tulip flowers. Chinese silk. It doesn’t have to be weighty — it just has to spark something.

The post Lapbook: Create a Mini-Book of Your Learning and Present Ideas in a Tangible, Attractive Way appeared first on Agile Parenting.

My daughter Antonia loves playing Roblox with her best friend, who lives in Australia. Honestly, I think computer games have a place in a healthy childhood — and there’s something that genuinely warms my heart about hearing the two of them strategising over a MS Teams call while they play.

That said, I limit screen time. There’s too much else to explore. The side effect: Antonia accumulates fewer in-game credits, which means no fancy outfits for her avatar, no upgrades to her virtual home, no better digital toys.

The frustration was real. So we sat down and figured it out — starting with Antonia educating me on how “Adopt Me” actually works. Credits, it turns out, can either be earned in the game or purchased with real money via the parents’ credit card.

I’ll be honest: spending real money on tokens in a virtual world, with nothing physical to show for it, strikes me as a complete waste. But then again, I am not a nine-year-old digital native. It’s entirely possible that I’m the one missing the point.

Let’s do it!

The solution we landed on: she could still earn her way to purchasing power in the virtual world — just through the real one first. Complete tasks, earn rewards, spend them on Robux. Antonia’s target was 1.300 Robux, which came to around EUR 15.

I laid out what I needed from her:

1. Practice creative writing in German — a subject she actively avoids.
2. Experiment with the website toolbox I had installed on her iPad.
3. Create content for it. She’d had an idea brewing for a while — an animal lovers’ and activists’ community.
4. Help around the house.

Antonia did the maths. If she worked hard, she could hit her Robux target within a week.

These were her assumptions:

• One piece of creative writing: 100 Robux.
• One hour experimenting with the website toolbox: another 100 Robux.

Now comes the hard part…

The two hardest, most tedious tasks commanded the highest price. Complexity, as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old.

• Three pieces of content for her website came in at around 50 Robux each. She’d probably spend an hour on each one, research included — but since she actually enjoyed it, it was “cheaper.”
• Helping around the house: 10 Robux per day, for an unspecified amount of work. Low, because she accepted that household chores are duties, not a service she’s rendering.

When I looked at the result, something clicked. Antonia had naturally landed on a logic that closely resembles story points — arrived at through a kind of accidental reverse engineering.

Agile teams use story points to estimate effort. The rule is simple: the people doing the work do the estimating, because they know best what’s easy and what isn’t. Skill level, context, and experience all factor in. Crucially, the unit of measurement is not time — it’s relative effort. There’s no fixed definition, no Excel formula. Story points are deliberately imprecise, built to capture the qualitative texture of a task. Honestly, they’d always struck me as a little esoteric.

Until a nine-year-old reinvented them over a Roblox negotiation.

It’s Not About How Long It Takes. It’s About How Much It Costs You.

It finally clicked. A story written in German, with a fixed structure and zero tolerance for spelling mistakes, is genuinely painful — and should therefore cost more than an inspired piece about endangered animals, lovingly illustrated. Even if both take exactly the same amount of time.

This is why story points confuse people in real IT projects: they don’t predict billable hours or delivery dates, and that feels uncomfortable. Yet Antonia arrived at the same logic without ever hearing the term.

What I suddenly understood is where the power of story points actually lies. They acknowledge the struggle. They recognise that doing something well — really well — costs more for some people than others, in ways that a clock can never capture. That’s not imprecision. That’s fairness.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

• Story points surface the effort behind the outcome — and in doing so, they signal something deeper: respect for the person doing the work, and genuine appreciation for what it costs them.
• As always, alignment matters. Your idea of “easy” may not match your team member’s — or your child’s. Only the person doing the job knows what it truly takes. That voice deserves to be heard.
• The metrics we default to — time spent, pages written, test scores, certificates — don’t always reflect real learning. Agile parents value the process, not just the result.

What metrics actually reflect progress in your family? Hours not spent on the iPad. Peaceful dinners per week with no finger-pointing. We’d love to hear yours — drop them in the comments below.

The post Apply the Fuzzy Concept of “Story Points” to Your Kid’s Chores appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Wang Man is a Kanban enthusiast who has turned her home into something of a SCRUMtopia. The motivation is straightforward: running a business, raising a family, keeping up with friends, the gym, and everything else in between requires a level of organisation that doesn’t leave much room for chaos. Self-organised kids aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re a success factor.

Her two daughters use a Kanban board to navigate the after-school hours — everything that needs to happen between walking through the door and the end of the day, visible and manageable.

What do you need?

The setup is minimal. Paper, stickers, pens, and a wall.

Start by listing everything that needs to happen from the moment the kids walk through the door. And here’s where it matters: if parents write the tasks and kids just execute, that’s not agile. That’s pseudo-agile — and if you’ve spent any time in the corporate world, you’ve seen exactly how well that works. You can do better.

Begin with the bigger picture. Something like: “We want to have dinner together and watch a movie three times a week — and that only happens if we free up mum’s time by doing things like clearing our snack box ourselves.” From there, kids define the tasks themselves. They write them down, or draw them.

1. Draw a Kanban board with three columns: To Do, Doing, and Done.
2. Stick the tasks on the board in a sensible sequence.
3. Take five minutes before bed to review — what got done, what didn’t, and what tomorrow looks like.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

1. The Kanban board is the most widely used tool in the SCRUM world — and one of the simplest.
2. It makes the invisible visible: transparency, responsibility, and the quiet satisfaction of moving something to Done.
3. For children — and adults, if we’re honest — it builds a genuine sense of ownership.

Where in your family’s daily life could a little more visibility make a difference? A smoother morning routine, a fairer split of chores, an after-school rhythm that runs itself? Tell us in the comments — we’d love to hear where the Kanban board could help.

The post Kanban Board: How Wang Man’s Kids Organize Themselves After School appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Home schooling during Covid had blurred all the lines. After spending most of the year at home, Sophie (9) and Annabelle (6) had settled into a rhythm of late mornings and self-directed lounging — which, to be fair, is a perfectly reasonable response to a year like that one. But when every day feels like a holiday, the actual holiday loses its magic.

As the festive season approached, the four of us faced the same question: how do we make this feel special? Fresh from a positive experience with agile home schooling, we decided to try the same approach on the holiday itself.

The vision for our product: a holiday that was fun, rich in learning, and genuinely relaxing — with friends and family woven in.

One of Agile’s core principles is a self-driven team. Sophie and Annabelle were in from the start. We brought them into the planning, gave them real influence over the decisions, and made clear that with that influence came commitment. Their holiday, their plan.

What do you need?

First, agree on a product vision. What does your ideal holiday actually look like — and for whom? A family chasing adventure has a different plan than one that needs to decompress. Get that clarity first, before anything else goes on paper.

Second, you need paper, stickers, and pens or crayons for your holiday backlog.

Let’s do it!

Here is how we planned our holidays.

Sprint 0: Defined Product Backlog

In Sprint 0, our two little product owners built their backlog. Everything they wanted from the holiday went on the board — and then came the harder part: prioritising. Not every wish makes the cut, and learning that is half the lesson.

We also brought in a delegation board to map out which tasks they could own completely and which ones needed a parental hand. Agile tools, put to work by a nine and a six-year-old.

Sophie’s Product Backlog:

1. A fun beach holiday with family and friends
2. Visit the Great Wall with Annabelle
3. 20–30 minutes of reading every day
4. Ice cream with Annabelle
5. Cook with the Thermomix
6. Pirate ship at Chaoyang Park
7. Learn a new song on the piano
8. Trampoline at Chaoyang Park

Annabelle’s Product Backlog (with the translation from Sophie):

1. Watch a kids’ movie
2. Do sport
3. Paint
4. Go swimming with her shark toy
5. Read Mickey Mouse
6. Learn to skip rope
7. Read Donald Duck

We divided the holiday into sprints — one week per sprint, eight in total. Some sprints held one item from the backlog, others two. Every Monday morning, Sophie and Annabelle chose what they wanted to tackle that week. Together, we broke each item down into smaller tasks and built the sprint backlog from there.

Take one of Sophie’s backlog items: visiting the Great Wall with Annabelle. Broken down, it looked like this:

• Find a hotel near the Great Wall
• Invite friends to join
• Plan activities for the trip
• Decide what to pack

Review & Retrospective:

At the end of each sprint, we sat down for a short review to discuss these questions:

• What did we do this sprint?
• Did we finish everything? If not — why, and does it carry over?
• Are you happy with how it went?
• What worked? What didn’t?
• What would we do differently next time?

Needless to say, the girls were thrilled. Grown-up tasks, real ownership, and a Kanban board they could call their own — in the early days, they checked it every few minutes. They loved watching tasks move to Done. They loved the retro that followed each sprint.

By the time the holiday ended, two little girls were using agile lingo and tools with the ease of seasoned practitioners. At the closing dinner, they declared it the best holiday ever.

Happy kids. Happy parents. Mission accomplished.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

• The kids take real ownership — and the holiday reflects their ideas, not just the grown-ups’.
• The whole family has full transparency: what’s planned, what’s done, and what’s next.

What’s your product vision for the perfect family holiday? Share it in the comments — we’d love to be inspired.

The post Agile Holiday: How Families Share Wishes — and Concerns — for a Plan That Actually Holds appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Every family member comes to the holidays with different ideas. Time is finite, budget is finite, and no two wish lists look alike. This game gives everyone — parents and kids — a way to put their wishes on the table and work out priorities together.

What do you need?

Playing cards:

1. Take a deck of playing cards and add stickers with activities and their point value — their “price.”
2. Plain post-its or scraps of paper work just as well if you want to keep it simple.

Wang Man’s instinct, though, was that playing cards set the right tone — something about holding a hand of cards puts you in the mood for the haggling and bargaining that sits at the heart of this game.

Pens and crayons to write and draw on the cards.

Coins, toy money, tokens. Each has the same face value.

Let’s do it!

Start by giving everyone a moment to think about what they actually want from the holiday.

Then agree on the rules. Our suggestion: each family member gets 5 coins, each worth 10 points — giving a family of four a total budget of 200 points to spend on activities.

Next, everyone gets blank cards and fills them in. Write, draw, or do both — whatever suits the age and the mood. There’s no limit on how many cards you can make. The person who creates a card also sets its price, in one of three sizes: 10 points for small, 20 for medium, 30 for large. Expect some debate here. A child might price a board game at 10 points; if the parents aren’t particularly enthusiastic, the value might need to go up. Sizing a story correctly is an art in any agile project — it takes practice.

Once all the cards are done, lay them out in the middle of the table.

The shortest player buys first. Pick the activity you want most — but here’s the rule: every time you buy something, you have to tell the family why, and what it means to you.

For the expensive ones, negotiate. You can pool your points with other family members — but you’ll need to make a convincing case. Why should they spend their budget on your activity?

The game ends when everyone is happy with what they’ve bought. Leftover points are perfectly fine.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

By the end of the game, everyone — parents and kids — will have practiced something worth practicing:

• Prioritising in a way that works for the whole group, not just yourself.
• Managing the people around you and what they need.
• Making your case clearly and listening when others make theirs.

These were Wang Man’s takeaways

1. The game makes prioritisation tangible — when resources are limited, you quickly find out what you actually want versus what just sounded nice.
2. It’s a fast, effective way to work through a long wish list without endless discussion.
3. Everyone gets a real say — not just the loudest voice in the room.
4. The result is a high-level holiday plan built on what each family member genuinely values.
5. And along the way, you’ll learn things about your family that a normal planning conversation would never surface.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes — experiences, surprises, and takeaways all welcome in the comments below.

The post Holiday Planning Game with Playing Cards: A Marketplace for Family Activities appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Competing teams build the tallest tower they can from a fixed set of materials. Simple in theory — part engineering challenge, part creative experiment, entirely dependent on turning an idea into something that actually stands up. As always, talking about it is considerably easier than doing it.

In the corporate world, this is a classic team-building exercise for good reason: you can’t build a tall tower without communicating well, and you find that out very quickly.

What do you need?

• One pack of spaghetti, shashlik sticks, toothpicks or straws
• One marshmallow per team
• One roll of scotch tape
• One pair of scissors per team

Let’s do it!

Each team has a fixed amount of time — five minutes works well — to build the tallest tower they can, with a marshmallow sitting on top. The marshmallow is the measuring point. Highest tower wins.

To count, the tower must stand freely on the floor or table and hold for at least ten seconds before it collapses.

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

Once the towers have fallen — or triumphantly stood — teams can run a quick review, reflecting on the work itself:

• How many approaches did we try before finding one that worked?
• What did the failures teach us?
• What would we do differently next time?

And a retrospective, zooming out to look at how the team functioned:

• How did we support each other?
• Did we have a good way of making decisions together?
• Did we actually enjoy it?

Play with us!

Know a game that sparks the same kind of conversation — about how to work better, communicate more clearly, and reflect honestly? Share it with the community in the comments.

The post Agile Game – Marshmallow Fun: Practice Review and Retrospective appeared first on Agile Parenting.