Zenhub is one of my favorite tools for Scrum teams — lightweight, integrated with GitHub, and simple to use.
But after facilitating 100+ sprints, I’ve noticed Scrum Masters often make the same mistakes when adopting it.
✨ FREE resource: Grab my Retrospective Checklist to start improving your team today.
Here are the 5 biggest ones I’ve seen (and how to avoid them). 👇
1. Treating Epics Like a Backlog Dump 📦
Epics are meant to give structure and connect work to goals. Too many Scrum Masters just throw everything into Epics with no clear theme.
Fix:
Keep Epics outcome-driven, not just “buckets of issues.” Align them with your Product Goal and Sprint Goals.
Epics should fit nicely into your roadmap. Optimally your Product Owner creates and prioritizes the Epics and the team refines them into small issues for the sprint.
2. Overcomplicating Pipelines 🔀
Zenhub pipelines are simple by design. Creating a ton of extra pipelines just adds friction and confusion.
Fix:
Stick to 5–7 pipelines that reflect real states of work: To Do, In Progress, Review, Done (plus 1–2 extras if needed).
3. Ignoring Automation ⚙️
Zenhub has great automations — moving cards when PRs merge, closing issues when commits land, etc.
Many Scrum Masters don’t bother setting them up, so the board gets stale fast.
Fix:
Spend 30 minutes setting up key automations. It keeps the board alive without manual babysitting.
4. Using Reports as “Proof” Instead of Insight 📊
Velocity and burndowns are meant to spark conversations, not as weapons to push the team harder.
I’ve seen reports misused as “proof of productivity.”
Fix:
Use reports to facilitate dialogue: “What slowed us down here?” or “Why did we burn faster this sprint?”
It’s about learning, not policing.
5. Forgetting Action Items from Retros 🔁
Teams capture great insights in Retros — then forget them. Zenhub doesn’t enforce reminders, so action items fade away.
Fix:
Track retro action items as issues in Zenhub. Give them owners. Review them at the start of each Retro.
Wrapping Up 🎯
Zenhub is powerful, but only if you use it with the right mindset. Keep Epics meaningful, pipelines simple, automate the boring stuff, use reports for learning, and always follow through on retro actions.
💡 I put together a FREE Retrospective Checklist you can grab right now to start running smoother retros. And if you want to go further, I also built a Zenhub Agile Toolkit with ready-to-use checklists, guides, and templates — all based on lessons from 100+ sprints, in clean PDF format.
What about you — have you run into any of these mistakes in Zenhub? Or others I didn’t list? Drop your thoughts in the comments 👇
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