Introducing the AI-Powered Agile Coach
Your personal Agile Coach, Built Into Every Lesson
This brand-new feature transforms traditional video training into active, personalized coaching.
As you watch, you can ask questions like:
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“How would this work for my remote team?”
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“Can you give me an example of this for a product backlog?”
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“How do I explain this concept to a stakeholder?”
You’ll get clear, practical answers based on the content you’re watching—instantly.
Whether you’re running your next retrospective, planning a sprint, or improving your backlog, the AI coach gives you real-time guidance that helps you apply what you learn right away.
What You'll Be Able to Do
Stronger Teams
Build collaboration and confidence across your Scrum team with courses like Better Retrospectives and Scrum Repair Guide.
Use the AI-Powered Agile Coach to get real-time answers, stories, and examples that help you explain concepts and coach your team to improve, fast.
Sharper Skills
Master practical techniques you can use right away. Write better stories with Better User Stories and estimate with confidence in Agile Estimating & Planning.
Your AI-Powered Agile Coach gives step-by-step guidance and tailored examples so you can apply every lesson directly to your projects.
Career Opportunities
Expand your expertise, grow your credibility, and open new doors for your career.
The AI-Powered Agile Coach turns every video into a personal mentor, helping you deepen your understanding and stay ahead in your agile journey.
You don’t always need another class
Often you just need answers. Especially when Scrum challenges hit you mid-sprint:
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User stories that are impossible to split
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Planning sessions that drag without producing a clear goal
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Retros where no-one speaks
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Stakeholders pressing for deadlines you know you can't meet
The Godfather of Story Points has done it! Successfully putting together a one-stop course to teach me everything he does when working with teams. WOW! How can I not succeed now using them correctly and teaching others the right way?!
Justin Amore
It can’t get any better than this Estimating is one of the toughest things that we face in Agile Projects. No body explains it better than the man himself. The logical sequence in which the content is presented, gives a better understanding about estimating. The reasons to use Story Points over other units is explained crystal clearly. A correct mix of Mike in person speaking to you and animated concepts helps you to focus on learning rather than just listening. Even after completing the course, I had the visual of Mike explaining the concept for few days afterwards. A highly recommended course for any agilist.Raju K.
This course was absolutely packed with tips, advice, and best practices for both avoiding and resolving issues that occur in using Scrum. I probably checked off a dozen or more issues that I personally experienced over the past 4-5 years that I'd have paid big money for to have the insights that Mike provided in this course. This was by far the most practical, useful course on Scrum I've ever taken. I plan to review this course over again as there is just so much useful stuff.Gregory Luze
This course goes much further than just treating basics. It really deals with well-known problems probably every Scrum Master and/or Scrum Coach experiences. Mike always offers several solutions considering different circumstances introducing appropriate examples as well. With his extensive knowledge of all parts of agility he convinces and encourages me to try out his hints without hesitation. I really like the length of the videos, all necessary is said and all unnecessary is omitted. The content is really absolutely substantial, interesting and helpful. I recommend this course to every practising SM and agile Coach.Eva Gysling
Eight Courses. Practical Help for Every Challenge
Better User Stories
With more than 7,000 licenses sold, Better User Stories is one of our most popular training experiences. You get a proven system for writing, organizing, and splitting stories so your team can focus on delivering value instead of arguing in planning meetings. Based on Mike's best-selling book User Stories Applied, this is the definitive course on making user stories work in the real world.
You’ll be able to identify the right personas, run productive story-writing workshops, and create consistent, valuable stories that move smoothly from idea to delivery.
Finally, you’ll know how to split any story to fit within an iteration, and ship faster.
Featured Topics
Common User Story Problems
Story-Writing Workshops
- Four Times to Write Stories
- Focus on a Single, Significant Objective
- Agenda and Participants
Backlog Refinement
- How Much Should Be Known and When
- Adding Detail to Stories
- Disagreements after a Story Is Done
- The Problems with Too Much Detail
- Sub-Stories and Acceptance Criteria
- The Full Lifecycle of a Story
Job and Tech Stories
- When Job Stories Are Appropriate
- Differences Between Job and User Stories
- Technical Stories
Story Mapping
- Common Story Map Problems
- Sub Maps Improve Readability
- Creating a Story Map
- Roadmaps
Splitting Stories
- The Goal in Splitting Stories
- SPIDR
Non-Functional Requirements and Bugs
- Non-functionals and the Definition of Done
- Bugs
Agile Estimating and Planning
Agile Estimating & Planning shows you how to create reliable estimates that give teams the freedom to deliver while keeping stakeholders confident and informed.
You’ll build a planning process that’s transparent, collaborative, and safe, where teams don’t feel pressured to pad or hide their estimates.
Learn how to balance flexibility with accountability, accelerate planning meetings, and improve the quality of every conversation about time and scope.
Plan realistically, forecast confidently, and deliver with trust instead of tension.
Featured Topics
Module 1: The Problem and Our Goal
Why is it so difficult to create estimates that have value for the business and developers? In this first module, you’ll discover:
- The statistical theory behind why we underestimate how long tasks will take.
- Why you can’t fight the Student-Syndrome that causes delays, but you can use systems to minimize its impact.
- That it’s criminal to produce inaccurate estimates and how trying to be more precise is often the underlying cause.
- How to build a flexible plan that can change as you go along, without changing the original estimate.
Module 2: Iteration Planning
Which product backlog items should you bring into an interation? Ones that meet the priorities of the Product Owner, and are achievable by the team. These lessons show you:
- How to run an effective iteration planning meeting. Find out who should attend and the four steps you need to communicate and manage expectations.
- The differences between velocity-driven and commitment-driven planning and when to use each one.
- When velocity-driven planning can speed-up planning meetings but at a significant cost.
- How to calculate how much work should be brought into an iteration so that the team doesn’t bring in too much or too little, and can handle uncertainty.
Module 3: Story Points and Ideal Days
This covers the key problem for estimating - how do we estimate real-world work without having all the details to hand? It comes down to being able to use story point or ideal days properly. In this module, you’ll learn:
- Why estimating size and deriving duration is the key philosophy behind accurate estimates.
- How to choose between using story points and ideal days for planning with your team.
- Why you need to make sure you’re answering the right question when talking to management about ideal time.
- How story point estimates can be used even if you don’t know all the information, and when you should defer estimating till you have the information you need.
- Whether you should use story points to estimate in terms of the time or complexity of a task.
Module 4: Estimating The Product Backlog
This module walks you through the practicalities of estimating items on the product backlog so you know:
- Why gut instinct isn’t a bad thing, and how triangulation can help estimates improve over time.
- When to break down larger product backlog items and estimate smaller pieces, but avoid estimation inflation by breaking them down too much.
- How to choose the right sequence of estimating numbers for your team.
- How Planning Poker is a simple, fun game that strips out subjectivity, shines a light on hidden risks, and prevents personal bias from skewing the estimation.
Module 5: Release Planning
To be valuable, estimates have to work on long-term projects. Stakeholders want to know what will be delivered and in how many iterations. This module provides statistical techniques for improving stakeholder conversations and protecting the team against unrealistic expectations. After this module you can:
- Use historic velocity to make accurate future estimates, using a statistical technique that prevents outlying data affect accuracy.
- Make forecasts even when there is no historical velocity because the team is new, or new to agile.
- Predict velocity when team size changes, and gather data to communicate the future of this change to management.
- Communicate what’s possible when stakeholders request estimates for fixed dates, scope and cost (and in a way that makes them listen).
Module 6: Topics for Multi-Team Projects
You may need to create estimates when there are interactions and dependencies between multiple teams. To make this easier, this module shows you:
- How to get consensus between teams about the common value of a unit of estimation.
- Why you should create a common baseline, but avoid comparing team velocities.
- How to facilitate a successful iteration planning with multiple teams.
- Identify upcoming dependencies that may affect progress by considering 3 upcoming iterations at once.
Estimating With Story Points
Cut through the confusion and make story points actually work for your team.
This course shows you how to explain story points clearly to both developers and stakeholders, create consistent estimates across different skill levels, and plan fixed-date or fixed-scope projects with confidence. You’ll uncover and correct the most common mistakes that derail estimation, use practical worksheets to apply lessons immediately, and get access to two exclusive bonus modules on stakeholder communication and agile planning.
Whether you’re new to story points or repairing old habits, this course turns estimation from frustration into focus.
Featured Topics
Why Use Story Points
If so many people struggle to estimate with story points - should we just abandon them? No. This module explains why it’s important to use story points, why time doesn’t work, and why we can get better at estimating.
What Story Points Are
This module helps you understand (and explain) exactly what story points are.
You’ll be introduced to estimating sequences such as Fibonacci and powers of two, and why those are good sequences. You’ll also see in detail how to get the team to understand exactly what type of estimate you’re going to create.
Creating Estimates
Once your team understands story points - you need to create your estimates. In this module, you’ll discover how to establish a baseline so that everyone knows what a 3 point, or an 8 point story looks like.
You’ll walk through estimating processes in detail, including Planning Poker® and affinity estimation. I’ll also explain when you should estimate, who should take part in estimating and when (if ever) you should re-estimate a story once work has started.
Improving Estimates
See how to avoid common mistakes that can make teams quit before they ever see success with story points. I’ll explain how to use triangulating to prevent anchoring and biased estimates.
You’ll learn coaching techniques to handle someone who refuses to budge on an estimate, and I’ll also share 5 ways to get better estimates, and 4 things to avoid when estimating.
Introducing Story Points to a Team
How you talk to your team about story points can make all the difference. Whether your team is resistant to using them, or has been using them incorrectly, this module shows you how to have those conversations in a way that makes teams more receptive to using story points (in the right way).
You’ll also get a presentation that you can use to train your teams, making it easy to coach them from good to great.
Troubleshooting
Understand problems of using non-additive scales, know how to tell if you’re estimating too much (or not enough) of the product backlog, how to avoid estimate inflation, and whether or not bugs should have story points assigned.
BONUS MODULE: Stakeholders and Story Points
You need a different conversation to explain story points to stakeholders. Register now and get access to a bonus module that includes what stakeholders need to know about points.
This includes why they can’t use person days, and why you can’t measure productivity or compare teams with points. You’ll also see how to predict date and cost using velocity.
BONUS MODULE: Planning with Story Points
Now that you understand story points and can explain them to teams and stakeholders—what do you need to know about planning before you use them? In this extra module you’ll get 6 brand-new lessons that explain:
- The components of a plan
- Estimating what you don’t know
- Estimating velocity as a range
- Estimating velocity without data
- An introduction to fixed-date plans
- An introduction to fixed-scope plans
Wrap Up
In the final module you’ll see an overview of the key lessons you’ve learned, with advice on where to go from here. Whether you’re about to start a new project, or are midway through delivery, you can apply what you’ve learned straight away.
Better Retrospectives
Turn retrospectives from routine meetings into real engines of improvement.
After this course, you’ll design and facilitate retros that spark honest discussion, engagement, and change. You’ll use frameworks like the Diamond Model of Participation and the Retrospective Menu to keep sessions fresh, focused, and productive. You’ll know how to draw out quieter voices, adapt to different team personalities, and build trust so feedback turns into action.
No more same issues, different sprint. Instead, you’ll leave with the confidence and tools to make every retrospective meaningful.
Featured Topics
Understanding Retrospectives
This lesson explains the purpose and power of retrospectives within Scrum. You'll explore how retros support continuous improvement, the role of Kaizen, and why teams stagnate without reflection. Learn how effective retrospectives foster growth, strengthen collaboration, and turn problems into opportunities.
Facilitation Techniques That Work
Discover how skilled facilitation turns retrospectives from passive sessions into productive conversations. This lesson introduces the Diamond Model of Participation, essential voting tools, and proven communication strategies that help guide teams from chaos to clarity.
The Retrospective Menu
This lesson presents a structured framework to design dynamic retrospectives using a five-stage model. You’ll learn how to vary exercises, keep formats fresh, and align activities to your team’s goals—without losing focus or momentum.
Creating Engaging Retrospectives
Explore why teams disengage and how to design retros that feel meaningful instead of monotonous. This lesson introduces creative formats to help you generate insight and action in new, unexpected ways.
Tailoring Retrospectives to Team Dynamics
Not every team thinks, communicates, or collaborates the same way. This lesson shows you how to adjust your approach based on personality, learning styles, neurodiversity, and team structure—ensuring inclusive participation and deeper trust.
Enhancing and Building Trust
This final lesson explores the link between psychological safety and high-performing teams. You’ll learn how to foster an environment where team members feel safe to speak up, offer feedback, and drive continuous improvement together.
Retrospectives Repair Guide
This course shows you how to fix retrospectives that have lost their spark.
In just over an hour, you’ll tackle 10 of the most common retrospective challenges, from quiet teams and surface-level discussions to remote disengagement and weak follow-through. You’ll learn how to spot the real issues behind recurring problems and apply practical techniques that rebuild trust, energy, and safety.
Retrospectives Repair Guide is your field-tested troubleshooting kit for restoring focus, momentum, and genuine value to every sprint review.
Featured Topics
How to Handle Retrospectives with Quiet Teams
This lesson addresses why some teams don’t speak up—and what you can do about it. You’ll learn strategies to support introverted team members, improve psychological safety, and structure conversations so everyone has a voice.
How to Get Your Team to Go Deeper
Move beyond surface-level feedback into meaningful insight. This lesson introduces techniques like the Five Whys and voting tools to help teams prioritize what matters and uncover root causes worth solving.
How to Handle Retrospectives with a Remote Team
Remote retrospectives come with unique challenges—lack of engagement, uneven participation, and tool fatigue. This video shows you how to structure effective remote sessions that keep everyone included and involved, no matter where they’re working.
How to Start Making Real Progress
Even great conversations fall flat without follow-through. This lesson focuses on creating clear, actionable, and trackable outcomes from retrospectives—so your team sees real improvement, sprint after sprint.
How to Handle Teams That Hate Retrospectives
Some teams just don’t buy in—yet. This lesson shows you how to reframe the purpose of retrospectives, switch up stale formats, and rebuild interest in a meeting that teams want to skip.
How to Handle Outsiders Who Want to Observe
When managers or non-team members join retrospectives, psychological safety often disappears. Learn how to diplomatically protect the space, offer alternatives, and create an environment where honest feedback can thrive.
How to Handle Teams Who Think There’s Nothing Left to Improve
Mature teams sometimes believe they’ve outgrown retros. This lesson helps you challenge that mindset, highlight deeper improvement areas, and re-energize continuous improvement—even when the basics seem covered.
How to Handle Issues Out of Your Control
What if the problems raised in retros aren't within the team’s power to fix? This lesson teaches you how to surface blockers, escalate effectively, and find meaningful actions—without ignoring organizational realities.
How to Handle Retrospectives When the Sprint Goes Really Well
When everything goes right, retrospectives can feel optional. This lesson shows you how to extract learning from success, build team connection, and keep the habit alive—even during smooth sprints.
How to Use Retrospectives to Build a Strong Team
Retrospectives aren’t just about fixing issues—they’re about building great teams. This final lesson explores trust, vulnerability, and team-building strategies that turn retros into your strongest culture-building tool.
Scrum Repair Guide
When Scrum starts to slip, this course helps you set it right.
With lifetime access to seven focused modules, you’ll get practical, bite-sized lessons that help you spot and solve the issues slowing your team down. You’ll learn how to pinpoint problems before they hurt productivity, manage stakeholder pressure without derailing your sprint, and rebuild focus and energy so your team collaborates at full strength.
Whether you’re new to Scrum or have years of experience, Scrum Repair Guide gives you the tools to restore flow, protect your team, and get back to delivering high-quality products fast.
Featured Topics
The Product Backlog
A well-organized product backlog lets a team start strong at the beginning of each sprint. But it can become chaotic, costing the team valuable time. In this module, you’ll see how to:
- Keep the product backlog up-to-date so the team doesn’t waste time searching for key information
- Remove resistance from a product owner who is reluctant to allow technical work within a sprint
- Increase the chance of delivering something potentially shippable by choosing the right product backlog items
Estimating and Planning
Even if your team is reluctant to make estimates, this module will show you how to:
- Make developers feel safe about estimating (so they don’t try and sabotage results)
- Build the credibility of a team so that stakeholders listen when a team says something can't be done
- Communicate estimates so that stakeholders are happy and the team doesn’t feel pressured
- Use the ‘no partial credit rule’ to encourage the team to perform better
Sprinting
Many things can can derail even an experienced team during a sprint, but with the Scrum Repair guide, you can:
- Know if a sprint that is too short (or too long) and how to fix it
- Understand the top 5 reasons teams under-deliver, and how to avoid this
- Make sure your team understands ‘potentially shippable’ so they don't think a sprint will fail when it can be saved
- Stop sprints becoming meaningless milestones with unfinished work left at the end
Problems During Meetings
Meetings are a common source of wasted time and team frustration. This module tackles this head on and shows you:
- Why the “2 hours per week of the sprint” advice isn’t always the right length for the sprint planning meeting.
- Why teams shouldn’t think of every task in the sprint planning meeting
- How to use the sprint planning meeting to stop the worst habit of all: failing to deliver
- 3 ways to have a successful sprint review if you have functionality that you can’t demonstrate
Stakeholders
There are ways to handle stakeholder requests diplomatically without sacrificing the morale of the team. In this module you'll dive into:
- How to use project success sliders to get a meaningful discussion about (true) stakeholder priorities.
- 3 great questions for stakeholders that give you flexibility on scope schedule and cost.
- A useulf illustration you can use to make stakeholders clear about what is flexible, and what is non-negotiable
- How to move from documentation to discussion, by proving which documents are truly necessary
Teamwork
Your team's ability to work together respectfully is a critical factor in its succes. This module shows you how to:
- Get team members to focus on group throughput rather than individual productivity
- Encourage team members to work outside their role (and understand when this won’t work)
- Have team members do smaller handoffs earlier, so that testing isn’t left until the last few days
- Support an overly busy product owner so that you can get their input when you need it
Culture
If Scrum isn't applied properly, it can negatively affect the team's culture. See how to prevent this and learn how to:
- Use 3 ways to work at a sustainable pace and eliminate burnout
- Understand exactly why separating sprints for testing and programming is a bad idea
- Quantify risk so that you can estimate it more accurately
- Choose 4 different ways to reward a team (and understand which incentive is the most damaging to motivation)
Let Go of Knowing
Challenge what you think you know about agile.
Based on Mike's popular keynote, Let Go of Knowing helps you spot the assumptions and biases that quietly hold teams back. Through personal stories and real examples, Mike shows how rethinking long-held beliefs can open the door to better teamwork, smarter decisions, and genuine agility. You’ll discover how to stay curious without over-questioning, and how to create a culture where learning and adaptation come naturally.
Short, honest, and thought-provoking, it’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest breakthroughs start with letting go.
Scrum Foundations
Scrum Foundations gives you a clear, practical introduction to how Scrum really works. In this short course, Mike walks you through the essentials, from the five Scrum values to the roles, events, and artifacts that bring agility to life.
You’ll see how sprint planning, daily scrums, and backlog refinement connect to deliver potentially shippable increments every iteration. You’ll also understand how timeboxing, a clear Definition of Done, and an organized product backlog improve both speed and quality.
It’s the perfect starting point for newcomers, or a quick, confidence-boosting refresher for experienced practitioners.
Upcoming Public Training
Course Includes:
Our Instructors
Mountain Goat has handpicked instructors that share our training values. These are people with deep experience, who are leading teams with agile today and can give you real-world answers about what does and doesn’t work.
Mike Cohn
With 20+ years of agile training experience, Mike has honed a talent for explaining agile concepts with clear illustrations and real-life examples. Participants enjoy his passion for teaching the agile methodologies in a relatable and digestible way.
Read more...Mike is CEO of Mountain Goat Software, and one of the industry’s most well-respected Certified Scrum Trainers. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the non-profit Agile Alliance, home of the Agile Manifesto.
Scrum Certifications include: CSM, CST, CSPO, A-CSM, CSP-SM, CSP-PO
Brian Milner
Starting out as a developer, Brian worked up through management layers, then transitioned to Scrum Master, then Coach and now Certified Scrum Trainer. His practical experience in both waterfall and agile organizations helps him clarify what works and what doesn’t, plus he has many years’ experience helping teams transition to agile.
Read more...Brian also brings more than 20 years of software development experience to his classes. People remark on his ability to answer even tough questions with ease, enthusiasm, and insight.
Scrum Certifications include: CSM, CST, CSPO, CAL-Educator, CAL-1, A-CSM, A-CSPO, CSP-CM, CSP-PO, Path to CSP Educator, Scrum Foundations Educator.
Got a Question?
What happens when you contact us?
- We’ll get back to you in within a day.
- Answer your training questions and discuss any custom needs.
- Recommend the best agile training path for your teams and goals.
- Want to talk to someone? Schedule a call.