Description
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:
- A fun beach holiday with family and friends
- Visit the Great Wall with Annabelle
- 20–30 minutes of reading every day
- Ice cream with Annabelle
- Cook with the Thermomix
- Pirate ship at Chaoyang Park
- Learn a new song on the piano
- Trampoline at Chaoyang Park
Annabelle’s Product Backlog (with the translation from Sophie):
- Watch a kids’ movie
- Do sport
- Paint
- Go swimming with her shark toy
- Read Mickey Mouse
- Learn to skip rope
- 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.