Schedule

• Matt Heusser

Lean Coffee – Day 1

Sometimes the best conference sessions are in the hallway, or at the lunch table. Lean Coffee provides just enough structure on top of that, to align the group. Come to meet new people, stay to discuss your challenges, leave with a new meeting facilitation method to use back at the office (or zoom call) next week!

• Archana Joshi

Digital Emissions and what can you do about it?

Climate change is upon us. This session will explore what is the impact of the industry that we are in – software technology on climate change and what can we technologists do about it.

• Ryan Ripley

Your Agile Transformation is a Crime Scene

Far too many Agile Transformations move forward without an
empirical way to measure progress, value, and impact. It’s great to know how many teams were launched and people trained, but has any of these efforts moved the needle towards better delivery and happier customers? Let’s explore Evidence-Based Management to know if the cost of your Agile Transformation is worth the actual benefits realized in your organization.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) helps leaders ensure they’re measuring the right things and using that information to make data-driven decisions and reduce risks. Whether your looking to decrease time-to-market, increase your ability to innovate, or actually measure value EBM can give you the data, goals, and insights you need to make better decisions during your Agile Transformation.

• Charlotte Chang

Designing Systems of Compassion

Look…the way we’re working isn’t working. At best, people act with chaotic complacency. At worst, creative problem-solving and critical thinking are punished. This results in burnout, anxiety, depression, apathy, helplessness, and hopelessness. In short, not for humans. Our businesses, orgs, depts, teams, and people cannot innovate, adapt, or evolve.

Doing awesome work requires accepting and executing in a business landscape that’s in constant flux. Future leaders need to amplify humanity, provide optionality, calibrate talent, and round out people’s needs. Being this kind of leader starts with you – your needs, your opportunities, and your compassion.

Louder, this time for the folks in the back…the way we’re working isn’t working! The path forward? Together, we can nudge towards a System of Compassion – a system that focuses on humanizing people, empathetic leadership, and work that matters. We are at an inflection point where we each have a choice. The future holds promise!

• Cat Swetel

A Feminist Outlook on Digital Transformation

The technical capability of humanity has matured to a point where we can construct and maintain relationships in digital places. This digital paradigm is exciting and rich with possibilities. Is it now possible to begin to move beyond physical scarcity into a place of generative institutions? Yes, but this also means we must move beyond global patriarchy. Join this session to explore what could be possible through digital transformation infused with feminist perspective and an ethic of care.

• Ryan McCann

Leveraging assorted recipes (and a little secret sauce) to make your own delicious change stew.

What do you get when you mix a half cup of Radical Alignment, 3 cups of Dojos, a tablespoon of improv, 2 parts Design Sprint, a pinch of team health barometers, 3 teaspoons of Jeff Patton’s wisdom, a dash of Shangri-La studio, and, most importantly, a little secret sauce?

That’s right…a delicious change stew.

Come join us at this interactive session where we will share a few stories, make some of that secret sauce together, have some fun, and, if all goes as planned, leave you inspired to try out a few new recipes with your team.

• Nayan Hajratwala

Embrace these Three Fearsome Words: Test In Production

These three words strike fear into the hearts of development teams everywhere, yet Testing in Production can significantly accelerate product delivery by unleashing improvements in quality, feedback loops & infrastructure cost.

In this session you’ll see demos of real world, ultra-lean delivery pipelines. You’ll also see code examples that can get you to production without all those pesky Dev, QA, Staging, UAT, PreProd & Performance environments.

When you walk away from this session, you’ll have the confidence & strategies to start your journey towards implementing a true Continuous Deployment pipeline that culminates in automated Production Testing.

• Brian Urbancic
• Logan Farmer

The Power of Saying “I Don’t Know”

We’ve all been in situations – maybe a scrum meeting or a sprint review – where it seemed everyone around us understood a concept but we did not. In these situations, did we feel safe enough to admit our ignorance? Or did we put on a pretense hoping we wouldn’t be found out?
While it might seem like a minor thing at the time, the implications of the inability to say “I don’t know” can ultimately be detrimental to the success of the entire organization, its products, and its customers.
As powerful as agile practices are, they can be further enhanced when practiced in the right environment. This presentation will focus on how incorporating a culture of vulnerability and humility can enhance agile processes by promoting continuous growth and development.

• Caitlin Klink

A New Way to Work: Remote, Asynchronous and Thriving

As the permanence of remote and hybrid work begins to take shape across the industry, this talk takes a look at some best practices for establishing an inclusive culture for all types of employees from the moment onboarding begins. We will consider both the needs of the remote (or hybrid) worker as well as the support employers may need as they approach the reality that remote work is here to stay. Join us as we go beyond the makeshift home offices we may have had to get us through the last few years and dive deeper into how remote and asynchronous work can really work for you, your team or your organization.

• Annika Gidley
• Kealy Williams

The Domain Doesn’t Matter; the Discovery Does.

Are you tired of working in the same domain? Teams get typecast into the same domain limiting their growth and ability to expand the business. Stakeholders gravitate towards teams with the most knowledge of their domain when really they should be looking for a team that learns, problem solves and is effective no matter the domain. Teams can be domain agnostic by using a beginners mind with a well defined process of discovery. Join us at this workshop to experience using interviews, observations, and team synthesis to dive into an unknown domain and come out on the other side with a domain model.

• Jenni Lankfer
• Tricia Hembling

Are leaders the biggest threat to realizing the benefits of your transformation?

You have been to all the trainings, read the books, and implemented agile practices to the letter, but you are still not seeing the results or the culture you keep hearing about from agile organizations.  Could the issue be you or your leadership?  Now what!?!?  Explore the direct impact leadership behaviors, actions, and inactions can have on realizing the benefits of agility and a product mindset.  We will then dig into the specific things you can do to make a big difference on your outcomes.

• Markus Silpala

Come Test-Drive With Me (even if you can’t drive yet)

Like many change agents in the agile space, you may find yourself in a bind: your job is to help a software organization adopt agility, but you don’t have much first-hand experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD), pair programming, or any of the other bits of XP Awesome which enable software agility. What’s a coach/manager to do when the devs think you’re just trying to force stupid upon them?

Here’s what you CAN do in a 100 minute workshop:

* Write some code, using TDD.
* Feel the delight that comes from test-driving a bug out of existence.
* Get an idea of how the TDD style changes a developer’s day.
* Have your questions answered by someone who has been there and done it several times.

My goal is for you to leave the session with just enough knowledge of TDD and its joys, that you can connect a little bit better with the developers in your space. I want you to feel the infectious enthusiasm that I feel, so that you can bring a little bit of it along to the teams you coach.

• Jerret Batson

Lean your Fat App; An Exercise in Visual Story Slicing

The central part of Agile is delivering work at the right time, while maximizing the work not done. We often struggle to break down the work to small independent pieces of value and when we do, we often have a lot of dependencies that add risk.
In this workshop, we will explore visual story slicing to create a story map. Personas and a target goal will help us identify the simplest path in connecting the two. We will ruthlessly prioritize the user stories to understand what is truly out of scope. So join us to Lean that Fat App backlog.

• Mike Smithson

Better Test Quality Via Mutation Testing

Modern software engineering practices have embraced automated testing as a critical facet of delivering value to their customers with speed and safety. However, solely measuring code coverage alone is insufficient and can give a software engineering team a false sense of safety. Since test code is just ‘code’ like any production code, it can suffer from the same quality problems as production code. Therefore, how do you objectively assess the quality of your test code? There is an answer: Mutation Testing. In this presentation, I will give an overview with examples of why you should seriously consider incorporating mutation testing into your daily software engineering cadence.

• Ryan Knoblauch

Beyond Agility: The Marriage of Agile & Design Thinking

Agile and Scrum are simple and have much to offer teams, projects and organizations, but they alone are not enough. Finding and enabling further agility takes marrying agile and Scrum ways of working with tools and inspiration from outside of our traditional thinking. Tools and inspiration from agile and design-thinking can be powerfully combined and turned upside down to unlock increased agility. Come to learn about design thinking or agile and Scrum. Looking for more? Get inspired to connect these methods and frameworks to enhance agility and a greater understanding of those around your teams and your user.

• Jeremy Davis

Walking to School in the Snow or What to Do When You Aren’t Building Bridges with Bricks

Roman architects and engineers built colosseums, bridges and aqueducts that have lasted for millennia. Most software applications last… not as long.

The discipline and processes of software engineering are continuously evolving to deliver faster results. Meanwhile application architecture is undergoing a paradigm shift as the enterprise embraces the cloud.

What does engineering discipline look like when time to market is more important than time in existence?

This talk looks at 5 emerging architecture trends geared towards delivering business value faster and what these trends mean for developers:

* Putting Architects in the Elevators
* Composable Organizations
* Product vs. Project Thinking
* Golden Roads and Paved Paths
* Data Meshes

• Dennis Stevens

How to Make Agile Tangible for Executives

One of the biggest reasons Agile Transformations struggle is indifference & lack of engagement from C-level executives, VPs, & Senior Directors involved in the process. Over the years, I’ve seen our industry provide a lot of advice to executives about how effective engagement should look.

Most of the advice is passive, it’s not empowering to the leaders, & none of it leads to the needed engagement. To reclaim your business’ power and potential, it must be adaptable. To become adaptable will require that teams from across the organization & your business capabilities align with your customers & markets.

In this talk, Dennis will explore how to present a model that executives can leverage to help them understand where the organization needs to change & provide guidance on aligning the experts who are making the change. Dennis will offer insights into how executives can judiciously delegate change into the organization while providing leadership throughout the Transformation.

• Marie Toft

Dismantle the Driver Mentality and Learn to Facilitate Team Magic

Have you ever seen an “agile” team led by a person employing classic project management strategies? These approaches are often counterproductive. The question is, how does a person who has been doing things one way for years adjust to a radically different approach for a successful agile team?

This experience report covers the story of a Team Lead whose methods were creating disengaged team members, confusion, churn, sub-par work, and rework. We started by showing what success looks like. Then we looked at ways the Lead could be more personally effective. We then worked with the team to identify potential improvements. With our insights, we worked iteratively to improve and change long-held habits. This was done one-on-one and at the team level.

In this session, we will cover the resources, tools, and techniques used to help the Team Lead became an adept facilitator, the team members engaged and collaborative, the work high quality, and processes smoothed out.

• Carlus Henry

Scrum is not a Silver Bullet

For the past 10 -15 years of my career, I have been leveraging the Scrum to deliver successful projects that meet the needs of my customers. Recently, I have been challenged to question the assumptions and confidence that I have in Scrum and I was very surprised at what I discovered.

I now feel obligated to share what lessons I have learned through challenging these assumptions and how we can embrace the Agile Principal of Continuous Improvement in order to lead us and our organizations into the next phase of Software Development Methodology => Continuous Delivery

• Steve Schroeder

Experimenting For Ownership & Empowerment

What do self-selection, self-organization, and domain alignment all have in common? They’re all concepts we leveraged to create a culture of empowerment and ownership while scaling teams across continents. Join me as I detail the journey to foster autonomy through experimentation with teams of new and tenured staff. I’ll share successes, challenges, and lessons we’re continuing to learn through years of trying new ways of approaching our work.

Leading change is daunting, and the challenge grows exponentially with the scope of the change. Building trust, using feedback, sensing the situation, and nurturing enthusiasm for the change requires support from leaders at all levels. These changes take time, as too much change at once can cause turmoil. While our situation might be unique, I am confident there will be takeaways that apply in many contexts. My goal is to help initiate and cultivate system-wide changes to build stronger, more empowered teams.

• Dave Todaro

T-Shaped Teams: How to Speed Throughput by Avoiding Over-Specialization

Scrum teams are cross-functional, with all the skills required to create value every sprint. However, many teams still fall into the trap of over specialization, leading to inefficiency and unpredictability.

The answer is “T-shaped teams,” where each team member has an area of deep expertise, but also has general skills to contribute to the overall goal of shipping software.

In this session, software development expert and agile author Dave Todaro will talk about the pitfalls of over-specialization, and techniques to create unified Scrum teams capable of high throughput, high quality, and high predictability.

Key takeaways:
* The dangers of over-specialization on a Scrum team
* Techniques to develop additional skills within the team
* Tricks to keep everyone productive–especially at the end of a sprint
* Slicing tips to avoid user stories that deliver no value to the user (front end stories, back end stories, etc.)
* How to deal with skepticism from your team members

Lunch

Lunch in the Atrium & enjoy desserts provided by our sponsors

• Tom Churchwell

The Agile Puzzle

Learning is at the heart of agile. The first 5 words of the Agile Manifesto are “We are uncovering better ways…”.

Join us in a workshop for a series of exercises that demonstrate the organizational learning practices that are needed to establish Reliable, Adaptable, Value Delivery.

The agile puzzle explores vertical slicing, MVP, and how to use it to optimize value delivery, continuous learning, and automation for your teams.

• Dave Haviland

Advanced Tools for Strategy in Agile Organizations

In the uncertain and dynamic environments of agile organizations, sometimes basic strategy tools like SWOT or a 1-page strategy organizer are not enough. Dave Haviland has led 4,000+ strategy meetings and will open his toolkit to show some of the more advanced tools he uses when agile organizations need to make important decisions that go beyond “typical” strategic planning.

• John Krewson

The Power of Curiosity, the Limits of Expertise, and the Danger of Earned Dogmatism

As much as we take a learning mindset to heart in the Agile community, sometimes we fall short in practice. As product owners, we put large batches of software into production without testing whether or not our customers want it. As coaches, we advise our customers to implement good practices that worked well a decade ago, without regard to better practices that have emerged in their place. Why do we do this? The answer might be found in the concept of Earned Dogmatism. The Earned Dogmatism Effect suggests that we become closed-minded and dogmatic in our thinking when we allow ourselves to be labeled as an expert in a field or domain. In this talk, John Krewson will offer several antidotes to Earned Dogmatism. Together, we’ll challenge several closely held Agile assumptions, we’ll investigate curiosity as an alternative to expertise, and we’ll connect curiosity and a growth mindset to improving as agile coaches and product owners.

• Ken Rickard
• Jason Little

How to Get Your Transformation Unstuck (Hint: Focus on change, not frameworks)

For many organizations, mutually beneficial agility is not achievable, let alone sustainable, given current org dynamics. And organizational transformation is a complex process of significant change affecting an organization’s structure, processes, and culture. The complexity of these factors can quickly create stagnation that justifies the status quo instead of empowering change. This can feel hopeless, given many people work in top-down, matrixed organizations.

Experience suggests that bottom-up change initiatives, where non-managers actively craft and refine the change, are more effective and sustainable. But how can bottom-up change be successful in a top-down, matrixed organization?

In this workshop, we’ll explore transformational change concepts that help people and organizations become more elastic, causing them to focus on fluidity instead of frameworks. You’ll walk away with an assessment of your organization’s change challenges and a spark to see things differently.

• Steve Moubray

Change Your Language, Change Your Mindset

Language is powerful and can paint a picture, lift people to happiness or dive us into despair. Transforming our language can be a fantastic way to shift mindset in ourselves and others. What can you do to change your language when embracing a new mindset? Why not extend the same language to help agile teams and others transform?

We’ll cover language and mindset skills that you can incorporate immediately, including:
• Language of an Agile Mindset, Fixed Mindset, and Growth Mindset
• Clean Language to help teams uncover root cause issues instead of focusing on symptoms
• Leadership Language as defined by David Marquet (author of Turn the Ship Around)

Attendees will learn the following.
• How to know when you or teams are in an Agile Mindset, Fixed Mindset or Growth Mindset?
• How to immediately apply Clean Language and Leadership Language to help transform your mindset and that of agile teams.
• A quick way to explain “Agile” to your family and friends.

• Tom Meloche
• Helene Gidley

Beyond Agile Transformation

Agile Transformation Leaders: Concerned folks will quickly revert to toxic old habits after the outside agile coaches leave?

In “Beyond Agile Transformation” you will learn exactly how to protect your investment in Agile change using Cultural Change Strategies. Specifically, you will learn the key to maintaining and growing positive change… without having to maintain an army of expensive outside agile coaches.

We include:

* Step by Step Instructions for preventing a return to prior suboptimal pre-agile techniques

* The single greatest secret for advancing a culture of ongoing continuous improvement

* Why most agile transformations unwind and revert over time, and how to prevent this from happening at your company

The answer we present is simple in execution and profound in impact.

• Matt Barcomb

Empowerment, performance, & accountability: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

Year after year, companies keep trying the same blend of lackluster, uninspired practices to empower people, improve performance management, and increase accountability. It’s like some sorta effed-up corporate reenactment of Groundhogs Day.

Well, this session will show you how to break the cycle. For each topic, we will briefly cover typical practices of empowerment, performance, and accountability – and why they never seem to work. Then we will explore more progressive solutions that will help companies with the ovals to try them.

• Tobey Aumann

Demystifying Wardley Maps: Draw Your First Map & Create Situational Awareness

Do you find yourself unsure of what to do and why? Do you struggle to get others on board even when the right path feels clear? In a complex world, having tools that can support decision-making and strategy is key. Wardley Mapping supports situational awareness, anticipating dynamic shifts, and creating shared understanding to set yourself or your company on a path to success.

In this experiential learning session, you will draw your first Wardley Maps. We will learn how to use maps to validate your value proposition and market positioning; identity where to focus your future time, attention, and effort; and communicate with others to speed effective decision-making.

• Mark Hill
• Rob Maille

Your Knowable Future – Can You Find It?

The deadliest problem in modern business is the inability to sense what is in front of your face, and what is just ahead of the curve or the knowable-future. The knowable in your future story, exists in the connections between the data you know, and the patterns which tell the story of today and tomorrow.

My partner and I will explain, with real business examples, how to systematically grow your ability to see emergence, in the form of the knowable-future. The edge gained, by seeing emergence and understanding the evolving patterns, in the data the tells your story, has huge payoffs.

In this talk we will explain…

1. What is the knowable-future and why it is so valuable
2. Why companies make avoidable mistakes by missing the knowable in their future
3. How to test for the presence of your knowable-future

• Sarah Guthrie

Agile on Wheels: a Food Truck Simulation

Come on a journey to open your own food truck and learn how to apply Agile principles in the process. As a team you will be able to simulate opening your own food truck and use Agile to Lean out your truck’s operations, manage customer expectations and relationships, and balance your workload.

The simulation will not be purely theoretical. The exercises will be informed by the facilitator’s lived experience as both a Technical Agilist and successful food truck owner operator. Workshop participants will leave with experience applying Agile and Lean techniques outside software. Participants will also come to appreciate the practical trade offs between delighting customers and operating in a sustainable, resilient way.

• Sunny Dhillon

Kanban Policies: Greater Value Delivery with Explicit Policies

Kanban is often thought of as a board with tasks which move back and forth, hence the true benefits of Kanban fail to materialize. It is more than a list of tasks, it is a change management method for directly improving project delivery.

Often neglected are Kanban policies, which are set a guidelines and agreements that govern not only how we work but when and how do we pull in new work.

In this session, you will experience the a Kanban game, a fun and interactive simulation to experience how polices affect delivery performance and value to your customers

• Mike Vitale
• Markus Silpala

Micro-Services and Monorepos

Micro-services are all the rage. When you create an entire suite of micro-services, how you store your code has far-reaching impacts.

In this session, Mike Vitale and Markus Silpala will talk about their experiences with monolithic code bases as well as micro-services, and will dive into different ways to store code — from individual code repositories, to a monorepo for all your code, and a few options in between. Every choice is a trade-off; the speakers will cover the pros, cons, and mitigations for the different options.

Mike Vitale (he/him) is a software and continuous delivery consultant and coach with 25+ years experience in agile software development whose most recent production deliveries have been non-events.

Markus Silpala (he/him) builds great software and great software teams based on decades of experience including development, operations, and coaching.

• Teresa Cain

Advantages of 2 Hour Design Sprints

Many organizations have based their own design thinking process from Stanford’s Design Thinking Method or using Google and Jake Knapp’s 5 Day process from the book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. However, 5 day design sprints have had its challenges during the pandemic including the ability to conduct a remote design sprint using the same process effectively, loss of productive time and the ability to collaborate with multiple stakeholders in one room. 2 hour design sprints teach organizations, product managers, researchers and designers how to adopt a 2 hour design sprint process to create more opportunities for success by increasing the frequency and speed of problems you can solve as an organization whether virtual or in-person.

• Fred Estabrook
• Chris O’Connor

Agile Charcuterie : Why some agile transformations are a savory delight and others offend the palate

Agile presents you and your team with a full platter of options, but how do you find the right combination that delivers the delicious results you’re after? Join Fred and Chris as they guide you through the menu of concepts, including foundational skills, continuous improvement / learning / delivery, and product focus. They’ll go over selecting ingredients, choosing the right preparation, and finding the presentation that brings everyone to the table. This session will cover which pairings enhance the flavor of Agile implementation and how to avoid the bad taste left by anti-patterns and faux agilé.

• Jon Fazzaro

Stuckness: Zen and the Art of Software Development

> Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

— Robert Pirsig, *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*

Pirsig makes zero mention of software in his book. Yet he narrates the development experience tangibly–tell me you’ve never felt this way before.

Let’s talk about why we get **stuck**, how it cows us into feeling like imposters, and what we can do to dispatch it more effectively (even to use it to our advantage) and make great software fast anyway.

• Dustin Thostenson

Positively Influence: Change how you try to Change others

Consulting is not the art of telling people the answers. It is “the art of influencing them at their request.” – Jerry Weinberg

Do you want to be an influencer– a coach, a consultant, a Scrum Master, a manager –because you believe you can help others with your expertise and wisdom?

Knowing the best way to use a technology or process isn’t enough.
Your attempts to change others are likely to fail if you are just focused on your answers.
If you are getting frustrated, try something different. Try something better.

During this talk, I’ll provide you with three winning secrets to lead change:
– Clarify what you want to give and receive
– Discover what they want and need
– Learn techniques to plant the seeds of change

• Magali Pelissier

Trends in Product so far, and predictions for the future

Product organisations have faced challenges and undergone a huge amount of change over the past few years, and this isn’t slowing down in 2023 and beyond. The session will cover the trends we’ve seen accelerating recently in Product management, from the lenses of people, processes, data and technology. Then I’ll share my predictions about what is going to shape Product Management in the future, and have the most impact in the way Product organisations work. The talk will help both leaders and individual contributors in the audience get ready for the future of Product, with take-aways for them to think about and implement in their organisation, as well as insights into what other people in the audience think since the session will include interactive polling. From the use of data to the talent and skills challenges, through leveraging technology to support product decisions and evolving the very definition of “product”, let’s dive into the future of product management. Are you ready?

• David Horowitz

Stop Complaining and Start Learning! Retrospectives That Drive Real Change

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it’s very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

• Steve Ropa

Maybe we are taking this all too seriously

I do a lot of coaching. One common denominator I see is a strong focus on making sure we “do it right”. Whether we are focusing on the prescribed ceremonies, or estimation, or at a more detailed level around how a story should be written, we focus constantly on whether we have satisfied the required format. Lets consider a world where the format doesn’t matter, but the content does. What might that look like, and would it make it easier to focus on the software we make, rather than the ceremonies we attend?

• Joel Tosi

Growing a Learning Organization

How do you grow a continuously learning organization? If certifications and wikis were enough, organizations would be crushing it. In this session we look at how we learn in complex domains – focusing on tacit vs explicit knowledge; context learning; and growing coaches and teachers.

Afternoon Snack

Have a tasty afternoon snack while visiting our wonderful sponsors!

• Betsy Irizarry

The Dictionary Game: Hands-On Fun with Flow!

Do you ever feel like you and your team are really rocking it… but somehow, something consistently goes wrong with the ultimate delivery of customer value? Are you frustrated or flabbergasted by why your agile practices and continuous improvement efforts fail to measurably improve outcomes?

Join us for this fun, interactive workshop where we will play a hands-on game to explore some fundamental features of flow. Along the way, we will collectively reflect on how common flow anti-patterns show up in our organizations today. By the end of the game, you might find ways to look at some of your current challenges with a fresh perspective – and walk away with some flow improvement ideas to try in your own workplace.

• Emily Harper

What’s Good?: Leveraging Appreciative Inquiry to Enact Positive Change in Your Organization

In 1980, then PhD candidate David Cooperrider was involved in performing a conventional organizational analysis of “What’s wrong with the human side of the Organization?” at the Cleveland Clinic. In gathering his data, he was amazed by the level of positive cooperation, innovation and egalitarian governance he saw in the organization. He then shifted his inquiry of “What’s wrong?” to “What’s working?”. Six years later his dissertation, which began as a study of the development of generative theory, had evolved into a strategy for organizational change. That strategy is known as Appreciative Inquiry (AI).

In this session, organizational change management practitioner Emily Harper, will provide an overview of the Appreciative Inquiry framework, share AI success stories, and offer ways that participants can begin using the strategy in their own organizations.

• Kuldeep Naik
• Mike Milbocker

Electrifying the Program Management Office (PMO)

A Program Management Office with its traditional project coordination methods has often been an impediment to the flow of the work as organizations transform.

In contrast, an “Electrified PMO” serves, empowers, and motivates product teams while promoting strategic thinking, continuous improvement, innovation, and speed to market for our customers.

Join us as we share our journey to transform our system of delivery, product team structure, and tooling to “electrify” our PMO and achieve new levels of performance and agility that align with the ongoing changes and evolution in the industry.

Learning Outcomes:
– Foster a culture of continuous improvement and team autonomy
– Establishing program-wide predictability and improving productivity.
– Adopt and tailor industry practices like rolling wave planning
– Importance of tooling adoption and consistency​
– and more!

• Jeremy Willets
• Thomas Cagley

Mastering Work Entry: The Key to Sustainability and Flow

Agile and Lean embrace the idea that teams and organizations pull prioritized work. But what happens when work gets pushed on a team or organization? If you’ve seen this anti-pattern, you’re no longer dealing with work “intake” — you’re dealing with work “entry.” Pushing work kills sustainable pace and consistent flow of value delivery. Mastering the work entry challenge could very well make or break your career. Or even your company. In this workshop, we’ll start by defining work entry. We’ll then focus on how work enters different levels of organizations. We’ll also discuss strategies for recognizing and solving work entry anti-patterns. You will build a packet that examines work entry in your context from many angles. When you leave this workshop, you will be ready to start solving your work entry challenges.

• Jess Brock

Tales of Dojo Coaching – Insights for All

In the Agile space, do you ever wonder why we use words such as “transformation” and “journey”? It’s because coaching is really freaking hard. As a coach, there are days when you move a group one step forward only to realize that you’ve fallen two steps back. There are memory lapses like you could’ve sworn you’ve worked on this anti-pattern with the team before. Or, did you? What day is it again?

Imagine condensing a team’s learning journey into 6 weeks. What could we learn if we accelerated the journey with hands-on, intensive coaching? Well, no need to imagine this 6-week mania because it’s a real thing called Dojo coaching.

Join Jess Brock, author of The Dojo Coach’s Pocket Guide, as she shares the lessons learned and insights that can only be gained from the Dojo coaching of dozens of teams.

This talk is not limited to dojo coaches! Any coach can find value in these insightful and action-driven stories of a humble dojo coach just trying to do some good in the world.

• Kristen Belcher

An Exploration of Agile Models

But why male models?! I mean, Agile… why Agile models? Or just models. This talk isn’t about Tyra Banks or Heidi Klum, Tyson Beckford, or even Derek Zoolander… let’s unravel the sweater as we dive into that old notion that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” …which ones? And how can we make sense of them all? In this session, I’ll share my journey with models, the ones I’ve used, how I use them, and why I seriously see SPINEs everywhere. If you’re looking for a session that gets real meta, makes ridiculous movie references, and just might melt your brain a skosh, then look no further!

*no prime ministers, male models, or ants were harmed in the creation of this talk.

• Pamela Paterson

Interviewing Stakeholders: How to Get the Most (and Best) Requirements Like a Pro

Interviewing is a key technique to elicit information from stakeholders on IT projects. Whether a single stakeholder or a group, knowing how to conduct a professional interview will get us the information and data we need to create requirements and do our work. What kinds of questions do we ask and when, and for which stakeholder and scenario? At the same time, how do we document responses accurately and efficiently? Join us to learn the answers from Pamela Paterson, CBAP, an IT business analyst and communications professional.

Learning Objectives
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Research, plan, and prepare for various types of interviews and stakeholders.
• Identify the various question types and apply an appropriate use case for them.
• Learn how to layer elicitation and decide the most effective sequence of questions.
• Build trust and rapport with your stakeholders so they feel comfortable in the interview process.

• Holly Bielawa
• Christine DelPrete

Why Product Coaching is Hard

In his January, 2023 article Becoming a Product Coach, Marty Cagan says: “I do not see how a person can be an effective product coach without actual, relevant product experience.” Effective Product Coaches have experience taking products to market along with a desire to help others shift from an output mindset to leveraging Product Thinking and create products that successfully deliver outcomes and impacts to the organization. Agile Coaches can increase the chances of this success by coaching, guiding, and influencing the removal of systemic barriers to Product Thinking.

This lively workshop provides foundational knowledge of Product Thinking, and introduces organizational barriers and mitigations with practical Product Thinking tools to foster Product Thinking and product engagement in their own organizations.

• Daniel Ward

Hearing and Being Heard – Getting the Entire Team to Speak

Many of us have been on teams where the same few people speak every meeting, and likewise, the same few people very rarely ever speak. Often, we also fall into one of those categories ourselves. Learn why this happens, why it’s beneficial for everybody if the whole team participates, what happens when participation isn’t equal, and practical actions to take to encourage all individuals to share their opinions and concerns.

At first glance, it can be confusing to navigate this issue. Should team members be required to say something, or called on directly? What if they truly have nothing to say? Are there any benefits from addressing this? How do we get all people to participate and share knowledge, and more than that, do so comfortably?

Regardless of your role on the team, this talk will address these questions and give you practical actions to take to help your team feel safe and get the feedback, opinions, and concerns of all of its members.

• Amir Peled

Antidotes to Team Toxins – Visual Edition

Do you have experience with teams that resorted to unskillful communication occasionally or during some challenging times? You are not alone! It’s time to acknowledge that when these unskillful communications persist without being addressed, they become toxic to relationships and eventually erode performance, trust, and morale within the team.

In this practical and highly visual workshop (4 hand-drawn posters created by the speaker), we will expose the four team toxins that exist in all teams and their respective characteristics. The speaker will bring them to life with some real-life examples. Next, the participants will share with each other their examples from teams that they were part of in the past, followed by identifying our default toxin in a relationship (the speaker is going to model it first). Finally, we will cover the antidotes to team toxins and determine next steps for improvement.

• Ashley Johnson

Inclusion is not merely a cease fire

Every truly agile team performs a dance as they explore the problem space, discovering how to connect with each other and converge on solutions while navigating the puzzle of understanding the problem. As we do this we discover

* How to traverse our differences without becoming divisive?
* How to work within scrum, kanban, or other method of choice?
* How to tap into our innate human skills to connect and align?
* How we sometimes fail … then pick ourselves up again.

The art of coming together as a team is a dance of connection, inclusion, and understanding. This is the heart of agility.

Join us to experientially explore answers to these questions
1. How do we connect, to really click? How can we do it faster?
2. What prevents us from feeling included?
3. How can our inclusiveness amplify our agility?
4. What can I do today to create more inclusive teams and organizations?

Our goal is to dig deep, examine ourselves, and practice being the change we want to see in our workplaces.

• Aaron Wilkerson

Agile Data Strategy

As the volume of data grows, companies continue to have struggles leveraging it in order to drive value. Data leaders have challenges building data strategies that define how data can be used as a competitive advantage. In this session, we’ll discuss methods and frameworks around how to build a data strategy and achieve buy in from executive leadership in order to execute.

• Nilanjan Raychaudhuri

Building tomorrow’s engineering teams

An organization’s agility measure is its ability to adjust quickly and effectively as the world changes around them.

And right now, our industry is going through some massive changes.

Innovative AI tools & copilots are changing the way software is built. The influx of emerging developers and the shrinking skill gap create a larger global talent pool.

But there are challenges. How do you adapt to these new tools? How do you find & hire passionate emerging talents, and how do you build a sustainable engineering team that grows with the organization?

This presentation will explore these challenges and new techniques & strategies to build the engineering teams of tomorrow.

• Kealy Williams
• Chris Hutchins

Why Can’t Architecture Be Agile?

Software teams are paralyzed waiting for the solution architect’s approval. Most companies require this approval before any work can be done. This means the project is delayed waiting for the architect’s complete plan. Why can’t architecture be agile? If your team is agile, your architecture should be too! The development team is completely capable of designing the code to fit the business domain, all they need is a metaphor. We will explain how an understanding of the business domain, communication skills, and an agile process can organically grow the architecture without needing the complete plan up front.

• Andrew Crouch
• Matt Buettner

Remote Mob Programming – Lessons learned from a year of remote collaboration

During the past year and change we’ve been part of a remote team that mobs ~95% of the time. We didn’t start the year that way, and had a lot of success after landing there. We’ll cover how we arrived there, what we learned in the process, and how you can be more effective collaborating remotely.

• Dylan Barrell

Agile Accessibility Explained

Agile software development has become mainstream and it is a rare organization that is not practicing agile somewhere in the organization. Standard agile development practices are well established and processes are well documented for how to integrate these practices into the agile sprint cadence. Agile accessibility, on the other hand, is not well understood. This means that many organizations perform accessibility in a very old-fashioned “waterfall” way. This leads to accessibility testing being done very, very late in the development process, at a time when changes resulting from the testing are too costly to implement.

The right set of agile design practices and the right set of agile development practices allow accessibility to be successfully shifted into the ideation and design phase of development and the design intent can be carried through the entire development process.

This talk will show attendees what these practices are and how to implement them.

• Tara Scott

Our Culture Sucks! How to Get Executives to Make Real Change

How many of us have found ourselves on a team of people who create healthy culture with one another, but find yourself saying things like “yeah, WE all acknowledge what WE need to change, but what about the bigger problems here?”

Toxic senior leaders, non-valuable processes, a total lack of diversity, pizza as a thank you for backbreaking work? Enough already!

Join me for a talk about how you can start to change the conversation from the inside out. As Patti Smith says, “people have the power.” Let’s talk about how we can bring about bigger change realistically into the larger ecosystems.

• Brad Nelson

The Velocity Trap

Companies all over the world have fallen into the Velocity Trap. This is when companies only measure how fast teams are completing tasks. They forget that those tasks need to be of value to their users, customers, and their business. In fact, research has shown that 80% of software products are rarely or never used. This talk looks at what makes organizations profitable. It uses concepts from Product Thinking and User Experience to explain how you can identify what efforts are worth investing in. It also shares which productivity metrics (also known as outputs) are proven through research to promote high performance and a few common metrics that have no such correlation. Join this talk to learn how to escape the Velocity Trap!

• Amy Palazzolo

Are you failing enough?

We don’t learn if we don’t fail. But failure can damage a company’s reputation and burn through valuable resources if done without guardrails. There’s a better way to take risks and test ideas. Learn how FordLabs uses experiments to fail (and succeed) intelligently to determine which ideas are worth investing in and which ones to chuck.

You’ll walk away with the tools you need to start failing faster with your team.

• Kyle Morton
• Bryana Townsend

How Unconscious Bias Impacts Agile Values and Principles in Teams

The values and principles of Agile proclaim the importance of people working together, being self-organizing, self-managing, and being able to make quick, often consensus driven decisions. Unconscious biases can lead to poor decisions about people and things with harmful effects.
Unconscious biases are stereotypes about certain groups of people but can also be patterns of decision-making that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. We all hold unconscious beliefs and decision making, stemming from our tendency or need to organize people and information by categorizing.
In this session, we will explore how those unconscious biases are formed, how they negatively impact our decision making, and the negative impact on people and teams. We will also discuss how we start the journey as individuals, members of teams, and as members of organizations to address unconscious bias and lessen the negative impacts they cause.

• Pamela Schure

What you should know about Marketing, but probably don’t!

If you’ve ever wondered what your product marketing and marketing folks use to shape their point of view on your product, this session is for you. We know their goal is to convince customers and users to try your creation. We’ll tackle a few core concepts – and have you try a couple yourselves! Positioning? Launch? Funnels vs Flywheels? Copy? You will leave having a better understanding of their world – and how it impacts yours.

Evening Reception

• Matt Heusser

Lean Coffee – Day 2

Sometimes the best conference sessions are in the hallway, or at the lunch table. Lean Coffee provides just enough structure on top of that, to align the group. Come to meet new people, stay to discuss your challenges, leave with a new meeting facilitation method to use back at the office (or zoom call) next week!

• Kelsey Hightower

Engineering with Empathy

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of building software that we tend to forget who we are building our products and services for. Developers are often assigned to work on projects they will never use, and in many cases developers never interact with a customer outside of an issue tracker. This leads to software that works in Q/A but falls apart once a customer gets their hands on it. This session will define engineering with empathy through a collection of real world examples followed by a fireside chat to dig into the details.

• Damian Synadinos

The Hidden Requirements: Exploring Emotions with Placebos

Traditionally, software development has focused on various functional and non-functional requirements (things a system should be or do). While this is important, there has been a lack of focus on emotional requirements (feelings that a system should induce). Why is this important?

Because the way we feel about software is important and should be considered!

A bold claim? Perhaps. And, as with any claim, it should be supported with evidence. In this presentation, I stress the importance of emotional requirements and support the claim by providing relevant facts, opinions, statistics, quotations, examples, hypotheticals, and more. Once I’ve sufficiently supported the claim, I offer a few practical methods by which to elicit, induce, and test emotional requirements. Finally, I use placebos as lens to view software and gain insight into emotional requirements.

Join me for a thorough and useful exploration of The Hidden Requirements!

• Steve Ropa

Craftsmanship Still Matters

We are once again seeing a move toward “Low Code” and “No Code” solutions. At the same time, there are those who are arguing that AI can do All the Coding. Yet, we are also getting the usual litany of tech failures and glitches that are profoundly affecting our customers and their lives. Lets explore the impact of providing high quality software, as well as the impact when we lose sight of the values of well made, easily maintained software. For a bonus round, we will talk about which practices have the highest impact.

• Cat Swetel
• Sarah Guthrie

Is anyone new to Agile anymore?

It’s been over twenty years since the Agile Manifesto. Is anyone new to Agile anymore? While it’s true that many tech teams are Agile, there are still a lot of new folks arriving all the time. What about recent college grads who receive little, if any Agile training or exposure at university? What about career switchers moving to Agile and tech spaces from unrelated fields? What about folks from other business functions (HR, finance, etc) who are learning to work with Agile product development teams?

This session seeks to bridge the gap between the individuals who are new to Agile and the leaders and coaches who are responsible for perpetuating and adapting Agile ways of working. We will dispel the notion or sentiment that anyone is “late in the game” of learning Agile. Both those who are new (or new-ish) to Agile and those who wish to welcome newbies to Agile are invited to join and discuss what it’s like to be new to Agile and work with an existing Agile team or organization.

• Steve Bassette

Lead Where You Are: Don’t wait until it’s too late

Leadership isn’t limited to management. While the Senior Executive’s leadership is obvious, the most Junior Contributer’s leads in just as important ways.

Sadly, leadership skills aren’t actively developed in most tech spaces until there’s an immediate need for them. That’s too late causing poor leadership.

Today, I’ll teach Leaders and Devs how to work together to improve tech leadership. We’ll use leadership lessons I learned as a Junior Enlisted sailor in the US Navy. Despite it’s rigid command structure, it’s easy to find leadership even at the most junior levels.

For Junior Contributors, you’ll learn how to apply these lessons to support your Tech Career.

For Managers, you’ll learn how I provide my team similar experiences those I had in the Navy.

Bring your manager, bring your devs, even come alone.

Get ready to start learning leadership and taking ownership by Leading Where You Are.

Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late!

• Daniel Gilio

DevOps can Ignite your Agile Transformation! – Insights & Lessons Learned

According to industry surveys, the top 2 reasons organizations adopt agile are to accelerate product delivery and enhance their ability to manage changing priorities. DevOps is gaining an important role in accelerating the organizations’ agility by optimizing release management and reducing time to market. A solid DevOps setup is crucial for successful agile delivery. Agile teams relying on manual processes will struggle with meeting 2-week Sprints as well as with aligning and operating as the technology extension of the business. While Development optimizes for speed, Operations’ mandate is stability. In this presentation, we will share insights, lessons learned and best practices from 20 years of ensuring faster flow of value to end users.

• Fadi Khoury

Safety, a Cornerstone in Agility

Safety, a Cornerstone in Agility
“Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work.”- Modern Agile
Safety, a cornerstone in agility, is the ability to banish fear by applying a set of principles, frameworks, processes, and measures to prevent hostile consequences that might ascend.
Safety doesn’t happen by accident; in this session, we will identify a set of different types of safety and will explore the characteristics that different types of safety a team would need to achieve agility. Type of safety includes:
• Physical and Occupational Safety
• Phycological and cultural Safety
• Technical and Code Safety

“For safety is not a gadget but a state of mind.” – Eleanor Everet

• Helene Gidley

Scaling Kanban with your teams

Do you love the simplicity of Kanban but are struggling with ways to successfully engage multiple teams?

In this workshop we take the Kanban practice to a new level, operating at scale with multiple teams. We present you with the techniques to get a better flow of valuable work through the process. You’ll define the purpose, the customer, clarify the work, and leverage multiple teams to successfully deliver. You’ll see familiar ceremonies interjected into a simple Kanban process for continuous improvement.

We’ll be playing with Lego’s in this fun and practical hands-on workshop. So get your build on and sign-up to attend. Bring a friend and learn how to scale Kanban to multiple teams together.

• Joel Tosi

Metrics that Matter – Moving from Easy to Impactful

This session is a walk through of a popular blog post we did on metrics. In general, we are leading transformations where the standard questions around metrics (velocity, bug, mttr, come up) – and we use these groupings to help organizations to get some answers for questions organizations want, but also understand their limits. I.e. if code coverage goes up, that might be good directionaly but does not say we are getting code coverage of the important code paths. We wrap up the session giving examples of more impactful measurements and walk through process behavior charts to help separate signal from noise in data.

• David McKenna

Learn to be a better team by playing games

What if I told you that you could experience what it’s like working on an agile team without writing a line of code? What if I told you that you could explore both teamwork and team dysfunction while having a great time?

It’s possible by playing agile games

As an Agile coach, I’ve used agile games to teach both teamwork and agility hundreds of times as part of Broadcom’s Associate Software Engineer and vitality programs.
I want to take you through an interactive session where we will play games and uncover the power of learning while playing. The second part of this session will include the fantastic and fun “Marble run challenge”.
The idea for the game was to simulate an agile team under the conditions of doing actual work. The team is challenged with building a marble run using pool noodles, bamboo skewers, duct tape, and other items. They have 2 iterations of 15 minutes to try to create the most valuable “Marble Runs” as defined by a backlog I provide.

• Tresa Shaw
• Abbi Kotowsky

From Concept to Completion: A Framework for Large-Scale Projects

[Sponsor Session]

Challenges with large-scale planning? Learn about a unique technique to pull together different tools from your toolkit to help solve this challenge. This session focuses on strengthening your ability to set your team up for success by creating frameworks that support diverse project sizes and initiatives. We will cover how to build and implement a variety of frameworks with real-life examples, as well as how to figure out what framework is the best fit for you. Whether your team focuses on smaller day-to-day efforts, or projects spanning multiple months, we will cover it all!

• Gabriel L. Manor

Application Code of Conduct – Full Stack Policy as Code

The increasing complexity of applications and the need for fine-grained authorization mechanisms have made it necessary to build a comprehensive policy management system that covers the entire stack.

One of the biggest challenges in implementing policy as code is ensuring that the policies are consistently enforced throughout the stack, and streamlining policies across multi-functional applications and business functions. It’s important to have a solution that can handle policies across the full stack, while being flexible enough to support the unique needs of different business functions.

In this talk, We’ll show how we used modern policy tools to build an open-source administration layer, run sidecars in applications, and integrate with the front end using CASL to enforce policies in the web app. Come and learn about our experience and how you can implement a similar solution for your applications.

• Mike Cottmeyer

Building a Culture of Agility

How do you get past long standing behaviors & reinforced patterns of thinking so you can begin to do things a new way?
Let’s say you wanted to move away from a command & control management style toward a more empowering, human centered form of leadership? How would you go about asking those managers to change?
In large part, our behaviors are driven by what we see as necessary to get results within the bounds of our organization’s operating model.
Leaders often behave in a command & control manner, because the operating model of the company is chaotic, impossible to understand, & doesn’t produce results. So they take control & drive results.
What if they became empowering servant leaders in the presence of a chaotic, impossible to understand operating model, one that doesn’t produce results? They would most likely fail.
In order to get our people, leaders and organizations to change, we have to change the environment. We have to change the rules of the game

• Doc Norton

Forget principles and values; focus on behaviors

We don’t think our way to a new habit, we act our way to a new habit.

Dispense with the agile platitudes – They’re not getting you anywhere. And while you’re at it, toss out your prescriptive framework – You’re not going to find your own way by mimicking someone else.

In this session, Doc shares seven essential behaviors for creative teams who solve complex problems, such as writing software, designing user interfaces, or automating tests. Any team that focuses on improving how they represent these behaviors will automatically improve how they create.

• Sunny Dhillon

Are You Ready to Rumble: Scrum vs Kanban – Its NOT What You Think!

A lot of teams still question whether they should use Kanban or Scrum in order to deliver outstanding value to their customers. Scrum and Kanban are often seen as different and competing frameworks, its one OR the other and when one doesn’t work let’s switch over to the other! Why can’t that OR be an AND??

And NO, ScrumBan does not exist full stop!!. There is no definitive guide, it’s just different interpretations to every “Tom, Dick & Harry”.

There are many misguided perceptions between two, one is lightweight framework and the other a method. YES, that’s right, they are not both frameworks!! Yeah, so what, who cares? Right. Comparing a framework to a method is like comparing apples to oranges.

In this interactive session, we will uncover the truth, applying the respective Scrum and Kanban guides to prove that both are in fact two unique approaches to solving different problems and that they are not mutually exclusive, you can do both!!!

Scrum AND Kanban OVER Scrum OR Kanban!

• Mark Cruth

Throw away your slides: talking with people, not at them

Ever been to a “collaboration session” where the presenter runs through a 60+ slide deck? Not very collaborative. Distributed teams need more interactive time to drive alignment and connection. Join this interactive session where you’ll learn proven practices and techniques to supercharge your next meeting. Slides suck for that. We’ve got a better way!

• Victoria Schumacher
• Matt Scholand

Baking in Quality – How “taste testing” as you go leads to better software

Picture it: after hours of hard work, you’ve finally finished your holiday confection. But as you’re putting away your supplies, you notice it… you swapped the sugar with salt! It’s a tragic outcome for you as our fictional baker, but it teaches an important lesson that applies in the software world as well. If you want to create a robust, delightful piece of software, you’ve got to find ways to bake in quality instead of waiting until the end. Come learn how your team can holistically integrate QA practices into every step of the software creation process!

• Matt Barcomb

WTF: Why Transformations Fail (and how to avoid it)

Organizational change always takes longer and costs more than expected. And often, the results do not fully deliver the desired outcomes…or worse.

But why is this so common?

Well, some of the most frequent reasons are:
– Only a small fraction of the entire org design is considered
– Leadership activities and behaviors don’t significantly shift
– The psychology of change is ignored or not incorporated
– The method for change follows known failure patterns

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Taking a systems-first, people-centered approach resolves all these problems! We will explore how to use the Key Forces of Change models to consider the entire org-design and its impact on change. Then, we will review aspects of change that put people at the forefront for consideration. Finally, we will wrap up with an evolutionary change model that addresses standard failure modes. You will leave with a broader, deeper toolbelt for achieving successful organizational change!

• UWM IT

Are your Agile muscles ready for Gen Z, the workforce of the future?

[Sponsor Session]

Gen Z is taking over the world! By the year 2030, they will account for 30% of the labor force. Are you ready for the shift? Is your company prepared to embrace the change? Act now, before it’s too late.

This panel will discuss how different generations are flexing their Agile muscles to create an inclusive environment with an emphasis on teamwork, adaptability, and a desire for feedback. Come learn how to thrive together in the next wave of technological innovation!

• Nat Girish

He(art) of Storytelling – learn how to win the hearts and minds of your stakeholders

Storytelling is a key skill for leaders @ all levels.
Session Outcomes:
– Understand different frameworks for Storytelling
– How to construct your narrative for your story
– Practice with an accountability partner during the session
– Walk away with some ideas on how to tell a better story, that you can apply at work

Note: This session will not cover User Story authoring.

• Amber Conville

Leading Change from the Bottom

We’ve all been there: the Big Boss is demanding things change, right now. They’re doing it by force, through OKRs and merit increase penalties. Now you’re the Boss, and it all feels… yucky, maybe even manipulative. You don’t want to force a team of monkeys to do your bidding. You want to inspire change and have happy people doing their best. How? Let’s talk about how you can make it a support structure instead of a command structure.

Lunch

Lunch in the Atrium & enjoy desserts provided by our sponsors

• Erhan Koseoglu

Giants Can Dance – How to enable enterprise agility in an automotive company

The greatest challenge of automotive companies: How to grow with customer centric innovation while securing business efficiency, consistent supply management and long term talent engagement. OEMs are struggling with this challenge since the last couple of years because they are not used to be agile in the dynamics of new world.

Ford Otosan, which is the biggest commercial vehicle manufacturing and engineering center of Ford in Europe has put a strong ambition to transform itself not only in organizational perspective but also agile culture, leadership, business processes and way of working aspects.

Today, 600+ agile teams, 700+ agile roles and 3500+ of our employees are working with agile to enable “Product and Value-oriented Business and Platform Areas Structure” in which each organization comprises cross functional capabilities and diverse team structures with specific product portfolios and customers.

Looking forward to share our experiences with the audience.

• Josh Ether

Distracted Development

The internet has fundamentally changed the way we work. The way we work has changed so much that the term ‘work’ is now obsolete. We are always ‘online’, always ‘connected’, always ‘available’. We are constantly bombarded with emails, Twitter notifications, Facebook messages, and Slack messages. As a result, we have become a generation of multitaskers.

The problem with multitasking is that it is simply not possible to do two things at once. When we try to multi-task, we are just switching our attention from one task to another very rapidly. This process of switching attention from one task to another uses up a lot of mental energy and can lead to mistakes being made.

Together will explore the phenomenon of “Distracted Development” or multitasking in multiple contexts. Delving into the impact of multitasking on delivery, quality, and productivity. Discuss suggested ways in which we can overcome the challenges posed by multitasking.

• Sheyinka Harry

Agility for Ops: Maximizing Efficiency & Adaptability of Non-IT Teams

Agile principles are a natural fit for software development teams. We can get them Scrumming, prioritizing product features and working in sprints. However, when it comes to embodying these same tenets in volatile teams, such as Operations, Sales, Accounting, and People & Culture divisions, the approach will vary.

How do we modify a concept initially engineered for software development, to fit teams that deal with client acquisition, checks and balances, and human resources?

In this talk, I’ll explain how to apply Agile principles to maximize the adaptability, efficiency, and productivity of non-IT teams. Key takeaways include:

Why non-IT teams should adopt Agile ways of working
What working in an Agile way looks like for non-IT teams
How to structure and plan operations tasks using an Agile methodology
Five practical Agile tips that you can implement within your operations team today.

• Eric Heikkila
• Chris O’Connor

How to put the PMI and UXUI in the MOB

Have you ever struggled to include your non-developers on stories? Have you wanted to stop throwing stuff over the wall to your Project Manager or Designer? Have you wondered how to be more inclusive of the other roles?
We did, too.
Until we found Ensemble Programming! And included our PM! And our Designer! And soon the entire team was mobbing on EVERYTHING!
In this workshop you get to see a high performing mob/ensemble in action! We will demonstrate techniques to work on non-developer activities while still gaining the benefits of ensemble “programming”. Plus you’ll have a chance to jump in and get hands on experience!

• Nilanjan Raychaudhuri

Prompt Engineering

Discover the art and science of Prompt Engineering! This emerging field is all about mastering the use of language learning models (LLMs), such as GPT, to optimize your work, understand their capabilities, and even create new products.

Prompt Engineering isn’t just about creating prompts. It’s about understanding the nuances of LLMs and engaging with them effectively. It’s a vital skill for leveraging these AI models to their full potential – boosting their safety, augmenting them with domain knowledge, and integrating external tools.

Mastering Prompt Engineering becomes crucial as we increasingly rely on these tools to streamline our workflows and build innovative solutions.

We’ll be diving into the following:

An easy-to-understand introduction to LLMs
Key Principles and Techniques of Prompt Engineering
Real-world applications and use cases
Exploration of various open-source LLMs and their unique capabilities

• Gabriel L. Manor

GitOps as a Key Enabler for Agile Infrastructure Management

As Agile development methodologies have become more prevalent in software development, organizations are looking for ways to streamline their infrastructure management and increase delivery speed. GitOps has emerged as a popular approach to achieving these goals by enabling teams to manage infrastructure as code and automate deployments using Git as the source of truth.
In this session, I will explore how GitOps can be leveraged to enable Agile infrastructure management. I will discuss the benefits of using GitOps to manage infrastructure, such as ensuring consistency across environments, simplifying version control, and automating deployments. Additionally, I will share my personal experiences implementing GitOps in development organizations, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned.
Attendees will leave this session with a clear understanding of how GitOps can enable Agile infrastructure management, and how they can start implementing GitOps in their own organizations today.

• Diane Zajac

Three Components of Kick-A$$ Collaboration

You’re on a self-organizing team? The team openly shares, deliberates and efficiently comes to full agreement? Everything is by consensus and everybody participates? Yeah, right.

It’s okay – you’re not alone. Most teams struggle with collaboration because they don’t practice Autonomy, Safety and Structure. They don’t have autonomy to ensure the right people are involved so there are too many people or not enough. If they manage to get the right people, teams don’t have the safety to speak honestly or the structure to actually get to the best options and decisions.

Learn how to visualize your work in a way that allows autonomy in decision making roles. Practice structures for ideation and parallel thinking, along with techniques that encourage safety so that all voices are heard.

Your team will still not be perfect, but these three kick-A$$ components will bring your collaboration one step closer.

• Daniel Davis
• Jason Dinkelmann

Our Code, Their Code, Low Code, No Code

With so many options for getting our product code created and to market these days, how do we know what’s best for our organizations? In this session we will explore each of these code approaches to better understand them, then dig into each to explore their advantages and disadvantages. Then finally we’ll use all that new intel to look into if we might be able to make some changes around our own coding practices, which we can bring back to our teams to help us get to market faster and with less spend/effort.

• Elena Weissman

If you’re not having fun, maybe you’re doing it wrong.

How often have you looked around during a meeting and thought to yourself: “this meeting feels exactly like 4 (or 12) other meetings I’ve been to this week.?”
It doesn’t have to be that way. You have the power to disrupt, to instigate and to create changes that will shift the way you and everyone on your teams feel about meetings.
Learn how you can flex your agile muscles to mix things up a bit. Together let’s explore some easy ways to reshape what you’re doing in meetings and let me introduce you to techniques that enable everyone to have fun. Let’s face it, work is a time-suck, so we might as well find ways to enjoy it.
From scrum ceremonies to value stream mapping, and everything in between—you can stretch and change how you and your teams think about, approach, and behave in meetings. Come find out how you can add playfulness to your work and discover the benefits of having more fun at work.

• Emily Darin
• Kristen Belcher

Stop Assuming Positive Intent

Wait, what? Yes, you heard us right. “Assume positive intent” is something we’ve all seen listed in team working agreements, and many of us have probably given this advice to someone else. But what would happen if we… didn’t automatically assume positive intent? In this workshop, we’ll journey back to the origins of assuming positive intent, and wend our way through to the present, exploring the impact this mandate has had on us as agilists. You’ll leave this workshop with a more holistic view of “positive intent,” assumptions, and everything that goes along with it, including tools to help you and your teams create your own assertions. We invite you to come explore with us – and to stop assuming positive intent.

• Ken Rickard

Humans, Agile, and Change

There’s only one problem with cookie-cutter, commoditized Agile approaches… Humans. If it weren’t for the people, transformations would be the simple and repeatable process we desperately want them to be.

Meanwhile, we keep hearing that complexity and competition are increasing, and inherently, so is the pace of change. Yet, many continue to see Agile practices as things to implement with conformed rigidity. This mentality tends to be at odds with how humans prefer to change and how we need to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the 21st century.

In this interactive session, we’ll discover change agility concepts and explore a placemat of mini-assessments to help you sort through your approach to changing with agility.

• Jeffery Mortimer, CBAP, SAFe LPM
• Ashley Slaughter

Value Eats Productivity for Breakfast

Does your team have a strong sustainable velocity but still not seeing value for the customer? Do you still think more is better?

The practices you learned yesterday are outdated. Prioritizing solutions? Measuring velocity? Gathering Requirements? Insert other practice here? Throw it out with the stone age!

Learn how to infuse product thinking into everything you do and enter into the modern era of product development. Give your company a competitive edge, question everything.

• Clint Edmonson

Flow, the Universe and Everything

The world around us filled a myriad of high performing, large throughput systems that we can borrow ideas from to help our IT teams and organizations perform and higher levels. Join us for a thought experiment where we examine several examples from our everyday world that can help us achieve unprecedented levels of flow and scale within our organizations.

• Dan Chuparkoff

REINVENTING TEAMS: The Practical Guide for Changing, Collaborating, & Innovating Faster

Everyday, the amount of change, data to manage, & availability of new technologies blast teams in the face like an uncontrollable firehose. But most teams aren’t reinventing the way they learn, collaborate, & automate at the same speed. Teams know they need to innovate – the problem is they don’t know which things to to tackle, when. 

Today, Dan is a technology leader at Google where he helps teams to build high-quality, mobile apps for billions of users. Before Google, he was an OG at Atlassian bringing JIRA to the world’s Agileist teams. Dan spent the last three decades, hands-on, reinventing the way teams work. He’s seen thousands of ideas, experiments, & failures. With this learning, he’s built a framework for reinventing teams. 

To survive in the world today, teams must reinvent they way they work, faster than the world is being reinvented around them. With the lessons in this talk, you will discover how to learn faster, decide faster, collaborate faster, & innovate faster.

• Matt House

What To Know Before You Dojo

Dojos have been around the Agile landscape for a couple of years now. This immersive learning pattern can create tremendous growth over a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately it can be hard to get this dedicated time with a team. How do you ensure you’ll get the return on this time investment? Is it weeks of planning and preparation? Is it just winging it once you get in there? Spoiler Alert: It’s a little bit of both. Recently I coached a team through my first 6 week dojo. The team grew well beyond my expectations, but the biggest surprise was the path we took to get there. In this talk I’ll take you through everything I learned from coaching my first dojo and help you expect the unexpected

• Josh Klein

Feature Flags: Release without Fear

Over the past few decades, agile software development as a mindset has changed the industry from top to bottom. Delivering working feature increments on a regular schedule is now the expected model for high performance software engineering organizations.

However – some features are bigger than what can be accomplished in one sprint. And moreover what happens when a code deployment cause performance degradation and needs to be rolled back, and quickly? How can features deployment be controlled safely and with confidence? What if you wanted to deploy a feature to just a small subset of your users? Or a big subset?

Enter the humble feature flag. These booleans as a service can wrap code and be used to target what code gets released, and to whom. They allow for nearly instantaneous rollbacks and ramp-ups of feature deployments, slicing and dicing a user base in a multitude of ways.

Excited to learn more?

Join me in this session as I discuss the finer points of feature flagging.

• Ashok Sivanand

What happens to our QA team once we automate the testing?

Most of us are moving to test automation and even test-driven development. I will walk you through different options and examples to leverage your QA/Testing expertise as your software engineering teams take on more of the testing responsibilities.

• Matt Van Vleet

Identified: 5 Silent Killers of Business Agility

As more companies scramble to untangle the code of their monolithic legacy software & get it into the cloud, strategic priorities are shifting. 10 years ago, it seemed that a little Scrum here & some coaching there would suffice. But as companies scale, as the market shifts and more parts of the business become software-focused, there’s been an increase in demand for an end-to-end solution to help large organizations build infrastructure around sound technical practices.

Today, Agilists must have a plan for incorporating DevOps practices into the early stages of Agile Transformation. But what if we told you there’s a whole class of DevOps considerations that no one is talking about that’s secretly killing your ability to unleash the potential of Agile?

In this talk, we’ll look at what’s left out of the conversation & discuss 5 non-obvious DevOps barriers to Agility in large organizations.

• Amy Palazzolo

Discover your inner “Influencer” to get anyone to listen to your idea.

Have you ever had a big idea but struggled to get leadership buy-in to make it a reality? You’re not alone. Join Amy Palazzolo as she takes you through her personal journey using her influencer strengths to implement wild ideas through small steps at Ford.

You’ll leave the session better prepared to pitch your ideas to your team, department or organization.

• Pamela Schure

Earned Influence – and Authority

This popular session is a highly interactive discussion of techniques you can use to be more effective with your teams. We’ll work through fun and memorable exercises to that you walk away with new ways to be influential and gain authority even without direct reports.

Afternoon Snack

Have a tasty afternoon snack while visiting our wonderful sponsors!

• Roger Turnau

Cost of Delay: An Economic Approach to Decision Making

Cost of Delay is a lightweight approach to feature and product prioritization that asks a simple question: how much does it cost you not to have something? Reinertsen has said that Cost of Delay is the most important thing to quantify when producing a product. Great, but how do you start? How do you assign a dollar amount to something you have not built yet? How do we make sure that our teams focus on building the most important thing right now? This talk will give you the tools you need to understand Cost of Delay, as well as a set of techniques, from simple proxies to more sophisticated real-dollar analyses to help you understand the impact of delays on your organization.

• Chad Green

Secrets of Conflict Resolution

One of the most challenging aspect of being a leader is dealing with conflict amongst your team. It’s vital to productivity to get the team running like a well-oiled machine, even in the face of adversity. Improving your relationships with your coworkers, clients, and managers and find your way through conflict back to cooperation. This session will provide you with the secrets of effective conflict resolution and how to prevent conflicts from ever starting.

• Sheyinka Harry

Tips for Executing your first Agile Transformation

An agile transformation is a lengthy process, spanning anywhere between 2-3 years, that requires meticulous planning. In this talk, I’ll walkthrough:
● How my team planned and initiated an Agile Transformation
effort at a local bank here in Jamaica.
● How we managed the expectations of our stakeholders and brought alignment to all team members on the ground.
● Problems faced in our execution, and how we overcame them.

• Dan Roman
• Antonio Segura

Legacy Code Sucks – Agile will make it Better, right?

Ask a room of developers if they write maintainable code and they’ll all raise their hands. Ask the same room if their colleagues write maintainable code and no hands will come up. It turns out, writing maintainable code is hard. Nevertheless, software teams are never going to stop encountering old code, in old frameworks, written by a lone contributor who is MIA. While a full rewrite is always an option, it isn’t always the practical one. This talk will describe some of the strategies that Menlo has deployed in helping teams perform Legacy Application triage and rehab. We will be discussing several case studies in legacy rescue and some of the key tools used to create a successful outcome for all participants in a project.

• Drew Colthorp

Developer Archetypes: Embracing developer strengths diversity through careers in agile teams

At our software product development consultancy, Atomic Object, our developers often jump between various roles in full-stack, agile teams. To support career growth and leverage diverse strengths, we’ve introduced Developer Archetypes. These broad categories highlight different strengths and interests, helping developers understand their place within the team and company.

Archetypes enable developers to map their career paths, find potential mentors, and advise team members on seeking opportunities that align with their interests. Discover Developer Archetypes as a practical tool for nurturing growth and harnessing the unique strengths of your diverse, agile team.

• Josh Ether

Flow: Friend or Foe

Have you ever been so focused on a task that your mind seems to not be concerned with anything else except what you’re doing? There is almost no time to even contemplate action, your energy seems to just flow.

Flow was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi author of the book “Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience” where in:

“people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.”

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows however, quoting from the book of Flow again:

“a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”

Between the lines of positivity there lurks a negative we need to be aware of :

“will continue to do it even at great cost”.

The risk in flow is enjoying the feeling so much that we don’t want it to end..

• Mary “M” Bobbitt
• Archie Woods

Improv by the Iteration:  Fostering High Performing Teams with Stage Craft

Did you know that posture conveys status in an improv scene (and anywhere else)? That creating space for others to speak is stage craft? That a game of tape ball will improve your team? That conflict is in fact…good? In Improv by the iteration Mary Bobbitt and Archie Woods will explore how stage craft creates more agile teams, literally and figuratively. They will have you go through a series of exercises you can bring to your teams, as well as some activities that will make you think about your leadership style, participation, and awareness. After all, we’re all doing improv on our teams, have you ever been to a sprint review? 

• Padma Putrevu
• Leila Rao

Cultivating empathy as change trigger

Of course, empathy is essential to realizing the value of agility as well as in establishing psychological safety and creating a high-trust culture, but how to actually cultivate empathy? Empathy as a concept is often discussed but hard to contextualize; we recognize it when we experience it, but don’t often have the language and skills to cultivate empathy as a cognitive attribute with measurable behaviors.
In this experiential session, we will focus on the role of empathy in achieving any of these objectives. You’ll explore what it takes to build empathy, for yourself, your teams and your organization. You’ll learn pragmatic and personalized techniques you can apply immediately in your organization.

Attendees will attain a deeper understanding of

1. Why and how to build empathy within yourself, your teams and the organization sustainably
2. How empathy is an important skill for organizations’ Agile practices
3. Understand when and how to apply gamification principles

• Allessandria Polizzi

S.E.E.ing What Your Project Needs: Creating a Psychological Health & Safety Plan for Your Projects

In 2015, Google and Re:Work produced results from their 2-year study of what makes teams successful. They identified Psychological Safety as the most critical differentiator in high performing teams. Beyond this research, many academic studies have shown a direct correlation between fostering psychological safety and innovation, worker commitment, and team effectiveness. In fact, psychological safety is so critical to future organizational success that the WHO and ISO have standards and guidelines for managing psychosocial risks in the workplace.

In this session, we will go through the 3 pillars of psychological health and safety you can apply to your project plans to support innovation, build resiliency, and overcome barriers. As a result, you will learn:
– the foundations of psychological safety
– project structures and processes that may hinder psychological safety
– actions you can take to address psychosocial hazards and risks

• Salah Elleithy
• Ganesh Murugan

Agile Indicators: Start with Questions!

Most teams hate tracking or sharing metrics with managers or leaders. When the teams are asked to share metrics like velocity, burn down and other output-driven metrics, teams hear what are you “busy” doing? So, the team starts to focus on showing how busy they are which drives the wrong behavior and stifles their opportunity for learning and growing and using metrics for good.

Since the essence of agility is continuous improvement via inspection and adaptation. We want to reframe the conversation around Agile indicators that start with questions! What questions are you asking your team? How are you helping them to learn and grow? What indicators are you looking at?

In this session, we will be providing insights around using Agile indications with questions in order to embrace a mindset that encourages more learning, growing, and less judgment. A curiosity mindset encourages organizations to move from “busy work” or output-focused metrics to outcomes-focused using questions.

• Ashley Slaughter

Death to the Feature Factory: A Product Manager’s Guide to Ending Your Obsession with Outputs

Are you obsessed with shipping feature after feature? Are you proud every time you ship on time and in scope? Do you measure your success by how often and how much you ship? If so, stop now! It’s time to put an end to our feature factory mindset and gain a new passion and obsession for outcomes. Wake up every morning wondering how your product is going to bring in amazing results for your business and delight your customers and users. We’ll show you how you can use a simple tool like impact mapping to write OKRs for your product that will drive business results and put our obsession with outputs to bed once and for all.

• Wayne Hetherington
• Vivian Xu

Uncertainty and Your Brain Handling Risk in an Agile Environment

Everything we do carries some amount of risk, from getting out of bed in the morning to skydiving. Even writing software is risky! How do we handle those risks? Are common approaches to risk management still applicable in the Agile world?
If you’ve ever struggled with how to handle risk on an Agile program then come join us to see why our brains make us react in a mostly risk averse way, what we can do about it, and how Agile specifically addresses many aspects of software risk. Also, we will look at how an Agile program can live in harmony with enterprise risk departments.
We’ll have fun along the way. We’ll play some games, we’ll see how cognitive biases often mess us up, we’ll find out why people play the lottery, and how you can avoid gambling with your software projects.

• Tom Churchwell

Essentials for more effective teams

Great teams are built on a foundation that enables great culture and practices to emerge. An ecosystem that fosters great teamwork needs to be in place. Historically, technology teams are blindsided by unanticipated impediments and dependencies. The best of intentions are thwarted by an environment that does not set the teams up for success.

Moving towards becoming self-organizing won’t happen overnight. Teams need to understand the essentials of capacity, demand, flow and continuous improvement. Team capabilities, cadences, capacity and commitment all contribute to the ability to self-organize and deliver on promises.

Join us to explore the essentials for establishing teams with everyone and everything needed to get the job done.

• Aaron Wilkerson

Connecting Data Governance to What Business Leaders Care About – Money!

Data governance leaders often struggle to effectively gain leadership buy-in for their initiatives and face issues with getting participation. This can be associated with our inability to speak the language of business and align what we’re trying to do with tangible business value. We talk about data quality, but does the business understand why it’s important and what the potential impacts are? How does this help the business with its goals and objectives? In this session, we’ll walk through methods to align governance initiatives to tangible business value.

Understand the pain points of the business
Data governance alignment to the business
Understanding business value (especially financial)
Understanding value proposition
Communicating with business stakeholders

• Sylvia Aybar
• Jeremy Willets

Agile and Lean Principles Across Firmware & Hardware Development

How often have you heard the phrase, “Agile is for web development. It doesn’t apply to us.”?
The truth is that Agile and Lean Principles are for everyone. Come join us for an experience report, where we talk about Agile and Lean Principles in practice across Firmware, Hardware, and Software at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company – Rockwell Automation.

• Nicole Tibaldi

“Up and to the right” is lying to you: how your metrics are holding you back

Your hiring process is humming along, bringing you employees who are quickly becoming excellent contributors. Your team’s agile process is dialed-in, and you’re delivering features at a good clip. You’re tracking your results, and you’ve got your “hockey stick” graph, so you shouldn’t change anything, right? Well, not so fast.

What if it’s true that you’ve rejected some candidates who would have been equally successful? What if your ceremonies are more disruptive than helpful, and your team has been succeeding in spite of them? And how can you know?

In this talk, we’ll cover how to interrogate your success metrics, what other data you should be tracking, and strategies for effectively reflecting on your team’s work. We’ll also review methods for influencing change when an issue you find falls outside your direct scope of responsibility. You’ll walk away with greater confidence that you can spot issues and make adjustments in real time, without worrying about unwelcome surprises.

• Jeff Harry

Building Psychology Safety At Work Through Play

Managers often associate “playing at work” with goofing off or wasting company time and money. But what if play was a crucial component of building a solid foundation for your team? What if it could help create a sense of belonging and psychological safety in the workplace and rekindle morale — especially surrounded by all this uncertainty? In this workshop, we will explore how play is key to building camaraderie in this surreal new reality of work.

• Jenni Lankfer
• Jeffery Mortimer, CBAP, SAFe LPM

Product Flops and Other Reasons Why Product Thinking is So Important

Lots of Products fail – but why? Typically it’s because product thinking hasn’t been applied. Let’s talk through how to apply product thinking incrementally to improve your products and organization. You don’t have to do a full product transformation to start seeing benefits.

Join Jenni and Jeff to learn how to introduce aspects of product thinking within your organization to help change the way you think and work to realize better outcomes.

• Artsem Lashchonau
• Brad Nelson

Sustainability in coaching at scale: the dilemma between burning out and missing out

Most coaching engagements and training tend to be focused at the team level. This is adequate for smaller organizations, but as an organization scales, the approach to agile coaching needs to scale with it. In this session, Art, a certified Professional Scrum Trainer, and Brad, an Agility Consulting Manager, will share a structured approach to coaching at scale based on actual experience helping Fortune 500 companies to become more Agile. Attendees will hear what works, what doesn’t work, and leave with an understanding of how to offer coaching services at scale without relying on any heavy scaling frameworks and without overcommitting and overworking your Agile Coaches.

• Tim Schalk

Taking a Thin Slice Approach to a Legacy Product

Replacing a legacy application can be a massive undertaking. You have a desire to modernize and add cool new features but if your users don’t have the functionality that they had before, their adoption of your new and amazing product may not be what you expect. There’s a tendency to take a “do it all” approach in these situations to ensure users have everything they want when the application launches. As the saying goes though, perfection is the enemy of progress. Applying agile principles to product development may allow us to take a different approach.

In this session, we’ll look at examples of projects that went down the “give them everything” path and how those projects failed in one way or another. We’ll then look at how our team took a thin slice approach to one of those same projects which allowed us to deliver important functionality to our customers faster and more efficiently.

Evening Reception