On our teams, we deal with many individuals with diverse perspectives. It's not always easy, but we are animals, and many animals live and work—and are only able to survive—in teams. You can look to how animals interact with and react to each other to see how we, as human animals, can not just survive, but thrive.

If people have to guess what you’re saying, they may discount even your best ideas. If you can’t tell whether you’re pronouncing and enunciating your words well, record your presentation practice sessions or read a few paragraphs from a book to monitor the clarity of your speech. Your listeners will thank you.

Continuous backlog grooming means systematically refining your user stories: breaking up larger stories, obtaining detailed requirements, writing the requirements in terms of acceptance criteria and acceptance tests, and sharing and refining these details with the team. Acceptance test-driven development can help.