Akrem Saed

Agile Numbers: The Signposts on Your Agile Journey

When I first saw the infamous Deloitte Agile Landscape diagram, I wondered how did agile get so complicated. The second thought was a question: ‘how can I inspect those techniques and practices and choose the right ones for my team?’.

In this session, I’ll talk about how empirical data (which I’m calling agile numbers) can serve as signposts on our journey to reach the goal of delivering customer value faster with maximum reliability and minimum issues. I’ll show how agile numbers can help us determine if a practice is worth the investment and whether it will improve our team’s performance. I will also share examples of agile numbers that can assist you in your agile journey. Those numbers are pulled from different sources like scientific studies, research from Google, and the 2017 State of DevOps Report.

Brandon Carlson

IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY.

Chad Holdorf

Big Company Product Management

Product Managers are the CEO of the company, and they can make or break the company. However, most times we are not the CEO of the company, but we are the “owner” of some part of the overall product the customer uses. But what does the mini CEO do? What should we focus on each day? What are the skills we need to become closer to the CEO?

Follow Chad on his journey as an Agile Coach, being the co-owner and co-manager of his wife’s cupcake business, and leading a team of product owners at at Salesforce. Chad will share how each of these roles have all helped him understand the role of a Product Manager much better and how to succeed at it. Pick up top three habits you can do each day to stay on top of your PO game, the top four skills you should have or work toward, and the metrics you should track as the “owner” of your product.

Dave Saboe

Audrey Boydston

Building and Sustaining Anti-Fragile Teams

How does your team deal with stress and change? Does it cause them to fall apart, or are they able to adapt? What if you were able to create a team that is antifragile; one that actually grows stronger through experiencing stress and change? Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Antifragile teams go beyond resilience and use those stressors and uncertainty to further develop and flourish. The move toward antifragility creates a learning culture and has a positive impact on business outcomes. In this session, we will explore the difference between fragile, robust, and antifragile teams and how to move your team toward antifragility. You’ll understand how to diagnose the current state of your team by observing key behaviors and responses to change. You’ll also discover approaches that you can use on your teams, regardless of where they are now, to make them more robust and even antifragile.

Learning outcomes:
• Understand the prerequisites to coaching for antifragility
• Develop a specific plan to move your team toward antifragility
• Understand the key to sustaining an antifragile team

Diane Zajac

Stop Building Useless Software

Useless \ˈyüs-ləs\ use·less: not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome. [Synonyms: futile, to no avail, (in) vain, pointless, to no purpose, hopeless, ineffectual, ineffective, to no effect, fruitless, unprofitable, profitless, unproductive]

If you want to stop building useless software, then you have to start understanding your customers. Unfortunately there’s no magic trick for reading their minds. But there is a simple technique that can help you gain insights and build empathy for them.

Empathy mapping is a simple activity for your team, stakeholders and anyone else who is responsible for delivering products and services. It allows you to collectively explore what your customers see, hear, say & do, as well as consider what they think and feel. This leads to insights about their pain and potential wants which are the keys to building more useful software.

In this session, Diane guides you through building an empathy map, showing you how to use silent brainstorming to encourage everyone to contribute. You will see, first-hand, how easy it is to work collaboratively to create a shared understanding of the customer. And that is the first step to start building software that customers find useful.

Doc Norton

The Building Blocks of a Creative Culture

Much of what we've learned about management and motivation isn't necessarily wrong, it's just inappropriate and ineffective for knowledge work. Knowledge work requires creativity and adaptability. To create a truly impactful knowledge work environment, you need to use appropriate leadership styles and create an environment that allows people to achieve their highest potential. Doc takes a look at types of work, the management styles that work best for them, and the qualities necessary to create a high-performing creative culture.

Dustin Thostenson

So, who's gonna tell 'em?

The growing emphasis on "Individuals and Interactions" yields tremendous rewards, but not without risk. Teams who work together increasingly find themselves in situations where they NEED to have sensitive and high risk conversations, but don't always know how to approach those discussions.

Everyone knows about some of the biggest challenges that face a team. They are also aware of the many ways the corrective conversation that can go awry.

These conversations are often indefinitely delayed. Opportunities for growth are missed and resentment grows.

Attend this session to learn how to be the agent of change your team needs with techniques and practices to help you master crucial conversations.

Jeff Patton

Agile 2.0: Balancing Continuous Discovery and Delivery

Common Agile practice leaves out a critical piece of work. This talk is about how teams are working to put it back.

If Agile development is working in your organization, you’ve probably seen that you can get pretty high quality software out predictably – every two weeks or so. But, you’ve probably noticed that choosing exactly what to build is a problem. And, that even when the choice gets made, you often still end up building software that doesn’t get used.

Some organizations, maybe yours, have started to include discovery approaches. Processes like Lean Startup, Lean UX, and Design Thinking help us identify problems and solutions, and then test them before fully investing in them. But, “discovery” can be relegated to the phase ahead of development that everyone is waiting for and that only a few people get to participate in.

Learn how contemporary teams combine both discovery and delivery work within the same team. Jeff will share concepts and examples of teams making this messy process work.

Kevin Reiter

Agile Roles in a Flat Organization

When Geonetric decided to take Agile Beyond Software in 2012, they also decided to take out their traditional management hierarchy. As you might imagine, this solved some problems and created a lot of new ones! Come learn about the Geonetric transition story, the assumptions they made when deciding to take it on, and the lessons they learned along the way.

Kupe

Applying Improvisation on Your Team - The secret skill you have been waiting for

To accomplish anything, you need the help of others and others need your help. Successful teams have members that are continually improving how they interact and communicate with each other. Collaboration, creativity, influence, and results grow out of an environment that is positive and affirming.

In this highly interactive and fun session, Kupe, an improvisational actor, focuses on key improvisation lessons that will help you be a more attentive and flexible team member. You will walk away with lessons to help you improve the following skills – communication, collaboration, relationship building, negotiating, influencing, critical thinking, leadership. And your ability to gain buy-in, earn trust, and to make high velocity, quality decisions. The Improv Advantage will help you and your team go the extra mile and separate from the rest!

In his book, To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink highlights improvisation as a critical skill for everyone. With Kupe’s improv, IT and business background, he will be able to help you directly apply these skills on the job. Improv to Improve.

Expected Outcomes

• Learn how to listen to understand (Foundation for sales, influence, trust, etc.)
• Gain the appreciation for diversity and inclusion
• Learn how to build a trust with team members and clients
• See how to promote failure and continues learning
• Learn ways to Co-Create and innovate
• Yes, and…there is more

Luke Amdor

"We'll do it live!": Monitoring and Debugging in Production

That big "P" word: Production. That new piece of shiny code you just wrote with a hundred percent test coverage goes ka-put once it's deployed. What's broken, and why? Sometimes the errors are a little more subtle, lying and growing there until you reach the right conditions. Either way, when users experience problems, it's not good.

Maybe we need to check our assumptions a bit and figure out how to lower the risk if things go sideways. We'll go over my experience in a highly regulated industry to apply the OODA loop, continuous delivery, ownership, observability, and others to embrace failure to lower risk of production incidents.

Matt Barcomb

Strategy Deployment, Portfolio Planning, And Organization Design…Oh My!!!

You work in an organization that struggles to prioritize work. There are too many handoffs to get things done. Issues snowball downhill, impacting what teams deliver. You feel blocked by issues above your paygrade.

Sound familiar?

Come join Matt Barcomb as he introduces Strategy Deployment, Portfolio Planning, and Organization Design. He will explore how these topics are interrelated, as well as their typical organizational impacts.

Attendees will leave equipped with practices to sense these impacts and build the business cases needed to influence senior leadership—no matter where you may fall in the soul-crushing hierarchy of your organization.

Nate Adams

Your brain is broken and you’re bad at making decisions – Why Agile thinking can help you

The human brain is really good at lots of things, but living and making decisions in our modern world typically isn't one of them. Learn about some of the ways our brain works less than optimally in decision making scenarios and how to stack the deck in favor of not totally messing things up.

After exploring some of these concepts (they're features, not bugs, am I right?) we'll talk about why thinking in increments and iterations, and using empirical decision making can help us be more awesome.

Ryan Bergman

Monoliths & Hydras: Strategies for Goldilock Sized Service

Once upon a time a developer had a monolith with problems and said "I know, I'll use microservices"; Now they have 20 applications with problems. In this talk we will discuss applications of all sizes (without size shaming). How can we find the right size for our services? What are the strengths and weaknesses of monoliths vs microservices? How can we identify our dependencies and make data driven choices for our architecture? While this is a mostly technical talk, we will be looking more at diagrams than code. Everyone is welcome!

Tadd Hatch

A Pirate Looks at Forty. Although, I’m Older than 40

Jimmy Buffett taught us about the sadness of being a pirate, 200 hundred years too late. But, what if everything that pirate does now is the same as what we do in our agile software development world? Take journey through 15+ years of building software, smuggling and other generally pirate-y things. See the things that have worked and did not work in those years and how a group of people have settled into a comfort zone in and out of agile ideas.

Tricia Broderick

The Importance of Experience

Have you ever been skeptical about something until you tried it? That is a pretty common reaction, yet, we seem to forget this when we are leading others. Tricia Broderick says that most people attempt to lecture others or simply state things like “you’re now empowered”; yet, rarely get the intended results. Join Tricia to engage first-hand in the power of using exercises to experience a key value/message. Dissect and explore interactive exercises to gain insights into self-organization, empowerment, communication, wisdom of the crowd, vulnerability, and responding to change. Leave with higher expectations and tools for helping people directly experience the power behind Agile.