Acknowledgements

This book exists because many people gave their time, attention, and honest feedback along the way.

To my family, for the patience and the support that made the long writing sessions possible. You carried more than I asked, and without you there would be no book.

To Andy, for being a friend, a business partner, and a kindred mind for so long. Everything you read here, we shaped together.

To the agile and lean community: decades of open discussion, exchange of experience, and experimentation gave us the shoulders to stand on. AME3 would not exist without the ideas, debates, and practices we absorbed from countless conversations.

To our customers, trainees, coachees, and mentees, for every question that forced us to think harder and every engagement that taught us something we did not know.

To Emil Drud and Mike Cohn, for generous consulting on the practical realities of book publishing.

To Anna-Luna Beck, for the cover design.

Thanks also to Tobias Becker, Daniel Büscher, Ilker Demirel, Aki Enomoto, Martin Hammerle, Jürgen Hoffmann, Allan Rennebo Jepsen, David Kirwan, Jan Neudecker, Chris Richardson, Stefan Roock, Stefan Spiegel, Simon Wardley, and Anna Zsigmond, who read drafts, challenged arguments, and returned with sharper questions.

Someone is almost certainly missing from this list. If that someone is you, I am sorry. The omission is a failure of memory, not of gratitude.