How Agile Leaders can use AI to Better Understand their Teams and Support a Product Mindset
Why leaders need to shift focus and how AI can help
👋 Hey, Carlos here! Welcome to “The Holistic Leader”, your weekly source of simple and honest leadership, Agile, Management & team insights.
Most agile leaders I know are busy.
Delivering.
Planning.
Reporting.
Trying to keep things moving while the ground keeps shifting.
But here's what I keep seeing—over and over again:
Teams are delivering work..
But they don’t always understand what they’re building.
Or why it matters.
Or whether anyone’s even paying attention to how they’re feeling.
And that’s a problem no sprint velocity will solve.
What Agile Metrics don’t tell you
We track a lot in agile teams:
Story points
Lead time
Throughput
Burnup/burndown
But we don’t track:
Psychological safety
Real alignment
Quiet hesitation
Team trust
And those are the things that make or break product teams.
I’ve worked with teams that looked fine on paper, until they missed a release, or lost motivation, or quietly delivered something no one really believed in.
Here’s the shift we need
As leaders, we need to stop managing the work and start understanding the people doing it.
Because when your team is confused, disconnected, or afraid to speak up, no amount of process will fix that.
I’ve started focusing more on the human side of team health:
Are people engaged in sprint planning or just going through the motions?
Are we really having retrospectives or just checking the box?
Does the team understand the product vision or just the next task?
And lately, I’ve been using GenAI tools to help me see these things more clearly.
Using AI to understand the team (Not replace it)
I’m not using AI to generate stories or automate delivery (though it can do that too).
I’m using it to listen better.
Some ways I’ve found value:
Summarizing transcripts from sprint events to spot confusion or misalignment
Surfacing recurring themes from retrospectives
Analyzing patterns in team conversations—who speaks, who stays quiet, what gets skipped
Highlighting knowledge gaps or miscommunication early, before they become blockers
It’s not about watching people.
It’s about supporting them.
AI helps me ask better questions and offer better coaching.
That’s it. And that’s enough.
A real example from the field
I recently had the opportunity to be part of a meeting where a team shared how they’re using an internal AI tool to support their product development process.
Here’s what stood out:
They use AI to generate user stories from existing Jira data and templates
Teams refine those stories together in a shared chat space during backlog sessions
Acceptance criteria are generated automatically in the right format
Once approved, the stories are pushed straight into their backlog
What impressed me wasn’t just the speed
It was the clarity and alignment it brought to the team.
✅ Everyone had access to the same context.
✅ Everyone could contribute.
✅ And most importantly, everyone stayed on the same page from start to finish.
That’s the kind of practical support AI can offer when it’s used the right way.
What Agile Leaders can do right now
Here’s what I’d encourage you to reflect on if you lead agile teams:
Are you focused on velocity or value?
Are you checking the backlog or checking on the people?
Are your teams truly aligned or just delivering?
Do your retros and check-ins create safety, or just more status updates?
And most importantly:
Are you measuring what actually matters?
Because if your team doesn’t feel safe, trusted, and clear—you’ll always be chasing the wrong problems.
Final Thought
Leadership isn’t about pushing the team to do more.
It’s about making space so they can do their best work.
If tools like AI can help us listen better and lead better, we should use them.
But the real work?
That’s still on us.
Let’s not lose sight of what matters.
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Thanks for reading
See you next week!
- Carlos✌️
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