Agile has proven its business value: product quality, time to market, and team satisfaction are the order of the day. Scrum, for instance, became a great framework for Product Development: planning in small chunks, getting rapid feedback, delivering continuously, and pivoting as necessary. When done correctly, it’s like a Smart Factory: if we feed the system with a good “product idea,” chances are we will end up with an outstanding product.

However, have you wondered where that “product idea” is coming from? Maybe from the product manager? The executive team? Some stakeholders? A couple of sponsors? The product owner? A client’s whim? All of the above? With what exactly are we feeding the system? Guesses, assumptions, gut calls, extrasensory perceptions, the magical wisdom of marketing departments, historical data projected into the future?

If “yes” is the answer to any of those questions, then Design Thinking should come into play –in order to create an intimate connection with people, uncover true needs and problems and propose less risky solutions.

In the first part of the talk, you will take a quick trip through the framework. In the second part, you will learn 11 secrets that only the Pros know. You will walk away with a graphic organizer, filled out by yourself, with the most relevant tricks ready to be used in your context.

The Agile Manifesto doesn't explicitly talk about what changes in management should happen and neither do the approaches. In fact, sometimes we hear the exact opposite from teams - "What do we need managers for..?" or perhaps "Can't they just get rid of all the impediments we have?"

As a former manager and now as a coach, I find the words Servant Leadership sometimes doesn't resonate. It actually only paints part of the picture anyway. What we want are ways to enrich management so that they can do more for the organization and its teams. Let's discover what some of this enrichment might be.

Do you feel like Agile Scaling has become a goal rather than the means to an end for your organization? To determine where you stand on the Scaling spectrum, ask yourself a few soul-searching questions: Why do we need to scale? Is this the right time for us to scale? If you’ve checked these boxes, you may wonder “where do I go from here?”

This talk will focus on 3 areas that emerged as common themes throughout my experience working on government Agile Scaling projects and ultimately influenced the trajectory of each agency's scaling journey:

• Communicate vision consistently
• Focus on your people genuinely
• Create your own path intentionally

I've seen successes and some struggles with Agile Scaling efforts in government agencies. Regardless of the agency acronym or the frameworks used, these key elements shaped their scaling outcomes.

Have you tried TDD? Do you hate it? Do you have a hard time applying it in practice? Do you find it promoting bad design decisions because you must write micro tests instead of looking at the big picture? Are your tests tightly coupled to the implementation due to a lot of mocking making refactoring a pain? Do tons of tests break when a simple change is made? Do you have a hard time justifying all the time spent on writing tests vs. just focusing on development?

You are not alone. Every organization or team that I run into is supposedly Agile. Some are also applying agile engineering practices such as automated unit, integration and acceptance testing, etc… However, many struggle with TDD. TDD is hard, seems counter-intuitive and requires a lot of investment. Come to this session for a TDD reboot. We will look at the benefits of TDD, discuss the resistance to TDD and uncover some common difficulties along with misconceptions. We will then address these misunderstandings and explore different approaches to making TDD easier. Leave with a fresh perspective and new insights on how to become better at TDD and apply it with ease.

As leaders, team members or facilitators, we all attend tons of formal and informal meetings every year –brainstorming sessions, kickoff meetings, feedback and retrospective sessions, status update reports, planning discussions, demos, and meetings without agenda.

Truthfully, during a few of those meetings I’ve become paralyzed –especially if I wasn’t in a facilitation mode. Have you ever found yourself frozen or simply speechless during one of your meetings? Or hesitant about how to start one of them?

Although it is normal to run out of words now and then, we still need to get and maintain people engaged, interested and excited. There is where a JOLT come into play! In those hard times, a short, yet powerful short activity can rescue us.

In this high-energy session, you will learn at least seven of them –from icebreakers to brainstormers, meeting openers, retrospective engines, and creativity boosters. It would be like a marathon of learning, making connections and having fun.

If you hold any form of leadership position, whether as a manager, scrum master, or coach, you will find that you will be at times offering guidance or advice. What unfortunately happens though is that your observation of the need and conversation to help fill that need can get tangled with your biases. Want to improve your coaching conversations? Then this workshop is for you.

To help you work through the arc of your conversation and understand how these biases come into play, we're going to discuss the GROW conversation model and the Satir interaction model. This workshop will open with an anchoring activity. We'll then use an exercise and focused discussion to review each model and see how these played into the coaching received.

With the rise of Agile, rewards and recognition have become more important than ever: “influencing rather than demanding desired behaviors” is the new rule for leaders.

While money is important, research shows that what motivates teams to perform at higher levels is the thoughtful, personal kind of recognition that signifies true appreciation for a job well done.

The creativity and variation that tech companies bring to the “reward-and-recognition” table continue to be impressive. The simplest and least expensive options often work best to make team members feel valued and important. The reason is simple: their true power comes from how they are used –timing, context, symbolism, modeling and leveraging.

In this interactive session we will share proven strategies and best practices. You will walk out with at least 30 low-cost ideas to reward team members. To make it spicier, bring what you consider to be the most creative way to reward teams –you’ll have 30 seconds to share it. The winning idea receives a prize!

DevOps has become all the rage from a technical change perspective; it really has changed the game. And while it provides numerous benefits, only after you also embrace the human side of change within the organization, can you really get to full Agility.

What if we could take advantage of a continuous delivery of change just like we do in our development pipelines? As executives, managers, Scrum masters, coaches, or anyone else in a leadership role, we should desire to make each change focused, easy, and small to contain risk. Once this is done, changes can mimic a development pipeline that delivers towards a business outcome. This workshop will help you learn how to keep the number and size of changes in check and consider how to manage the risks of deploying change.