Story is a profoundly important device to unite design teams around a shared product vision. This powerful communication tool helps us retain information and empathize with others. As companies scale and teams sprint through product iterations, it’s easy to lose sight of how your product should fit into the lives of your customers. The best way to keep everyone pointed in the right direction is with a clear, compelling story—a story that will unite and guide teams towards success.

But how do we fold storytelling into our design practice? Aarron Walter uses real-world stories of product teams at Disney, Apple, Airbnb, Twitter, and more to show how storytelling improves team communications and elevates design practice.

Since its founding, Google has created six products that each have at least a billion monthly users. Google continues to innovate rapidly, and in many new areas. The organizing principles and cultural elements that drive this monster of innovation are a hot topic among designers. So what are they? Find out in this engaging talk by Google’s Chief Evangelist, Brand Marketing.

The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

As part of organizational digital transformation journeys, CIOs are moving from hierarchical models to 'self organizing' Feature teams, in order deliver efficient and effective IT, but still need to retain the deeper functional expertise. Hence the growing importance of building and sustaining "Communities of Practices" (CoPs), as the traditional functional silos are broken down, with the transformation themes.

But if you are a Change Agent responsible for the Transformation, you understand how challenging it is to nurture, and especially "sustain" these CoPs.

So join my session, as I will share my experiences in nurturing and especially "sustaining" enterprise wide Communities of Practice (CoPs), while you recognize the key success and failure patterns in your own journey. In this session, you will learn techniques, tips and strategies that you can apply immediately, and in the end will walk away with practical advice on building "long lived" communities.

Agile Principle # 12 defines that at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. From Scrum to Kanban and other agile frameworks, this is accomplished through retrospectives and continuos improvement processes. The key to being a successful agile practitioner is to identify areas of improvement and then experiment ways of improving it. But it doesn't stop there; positive improvements ultimately become success stories for other teams and motivates them to experiment with newer ideas which eventually leads to innovation. A negative outcome isn't bad either since it adds to the experience of situations where ideas may not apply. Thus the key to this process lies in being a child, an explorer, and inculcate an experimentation mindset. The SLICE framework addresses this in the following way:

• S hare: Share an area of improvement
• L earn: Explore the area for ways of improvement
• I mplement: Search & apply the learning to identify the success factors
• C ollateral: Publish blogs, white papers, presentations, etc. as observations of the implementation
• E xpansion: Grow, Seed, and Split in order to explore new venues for success

In this workshop, I create an environment that inculcates an experimentation mindset and utilize the SLICE framework to drive the exploration.

Session is for Lean Agile Leaders which will help them manage portfolio Agile way.

Lean Agile principles when applied to portfolio management, will help you keep pace with fast changing business by giving you a disciplined approach to implementing you strategic vision as realistic work plan.

Keeping up with the new pace of change requires light weight processes and an adaptive mindset.

It will cover the following main pillars of Agile Portfolio Management

- Work Management

- Capacity Management

- Financial Management

- Value Management

- Continuous planning

- Continuous Visibility

APM session will help you look at the portfolio in different way; and help you outpace changing business.

Session name - Outcome based agile coaching

We all want to become good agile coach. But what does that mean? How do you get better outcome from your agile coaching sessions? In this session, participants will experience how to improve outcome of your coaching session. Some areas we will focus in this session are output Vs outcome, why, what, how of coaching, how to make coaching outcome etc.

This will be a hands on workshop with very minimal guidance from facilitator. Participants will have experiential learning through the activities to understand how to align agile coaching to deliver maximum impact on business outcome.

In October 2016 I received a call, "Hey dude, I don’t know nothing about Agile, but I need to become an Agile coach a-s-a-p – my company just got a new contract." I laughed for a second, explained that it takes a bit longer than a week to learn to coach, and wished him luck. I also knew that, shortly, he would be walking into his customer's office in this new role.

Agile Coach is the new black! But how can you, a good coach, stand out from the crowd of less competent peers? Let me offer you this workshop to explore the science of coaching and the ways in which it works. We start with concepts of neuroplasticity and the brain processes of creating new neuron pathways. Then we move to motivation and learn which type is the best. Finally, we finish with the discussion on brain activation states which we practice in a few short exercises. By understanding the new field of coaching psychology, you will become a better practitioner.

I am an affiliate member of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, the Harvard Medical School affiliate. I studied coaching psychology at Harvard Extension School.

Product Owners and others responsible for creating and maintaining the Product Backlog often focus on functional items.

With good engagement in the Backlog Management process from the Development Team and Architects, technical and architectural items also find their way into the Product Backlog.

But what about the human-centric items related to accessibility, inclusivity, internationalization and sustainability?

Through the talk and with the help of several supporting examples and a short exercise, I would like to highlight the importance of addressing these aspects in the Product Backlog. The examples will include examples of good and bad backlog items and design decisions.

I will also share some tips on how Product Owners and supporting roles can work these aspects into the Backlog Management process. These will include some ideas from Design Thinking but will not be limited to that.

In Distributed Agile many times, people don't trust members on other shore. My topic will cover few of the aspects which has helped our teams to gain that trust of customer and give co-located results.

In Session I will speak about case study covering below points which helped our customer who is a “first time offshore” to “Trust the Stranger”!

1) Building the Trust

2) Creating Continuous Visibility

3)Rotation of resources between shores

4)XP practices

1)Code Ownership

2)Use of technology to share code/ builds

5) CI CD – tools enhance visibility

6) Test Automation to look at Tested Running Features

7) Speak about my code! - Technical presentations within teams

8) Explore Business Flows!- Business Understanding among Business Owners, Product Owners, Proxy PO, team.

9) Innovations in business areas

10) Distributed Agile – tools techniques

11) Measuring the business Value (using custom Framework)

12) Saying No!

13) Re-Enforcing agile Practices!

This topic is not meant to demean the profession of Product Ownership and doesn't mean that the Product Owner is not essential so killing them would solve the problem; rather it highlights the amount of dependencies a development team may end up building around the Product Owner that may end up killing the credibility and value chain driven by product ownership.

Keeping aside the fact that organisations today recruit Scrum Masters and Product Owners as designations instead of scrum roles, the role of product ownership has been misunderstood as a one person job, which kills the entire purpose of being a Product Owner - voice of the customer to maximise ROI. PO doesn't own the product alone and definitely doesn't own the implementation details. Enough said, this scrum role needs a deeper understanding. Then again, who performs this role in XP or Kanban or SAFe or a no framework setup?

In this session, I execute 3 iterations to highlight the team's dysfunctions, and apply practices a team can perform so a Product Owner can function much better and improve the credibility of this role. It's pretty quick and enlightenting; all hands-on, no PPT.

The Key challenge organisations are facing today is having to deal with the exponential rate of change which is happening in the external environment. The extent and pace of change is so disruptive that no organisation, regardless of age or size can take their competitive advantage or even their survival for granted.

The main reason why organisations are struggling to change is that they are modeled as mechanistic or close-ended systems. On the contrary, all natural socio-economic systems essentially which are living systems have dealt with change very effectively since eternity.

This talk is about infusing life into organisations. The speaker will highlight the key characteristics of living systems which enable them to deal with change effectively and also suggest actionable guidelines that will help leaders/influencers to bring their organisations to life. This approach will enable organisations to not only survive but thrive on change.

It’s a common mindset to jump into “Solution to a Problem” without deep thinking about the problem. We know what the solution is but do we really know what the problem is, have we really empathized with customer to solve the wicked problems? That’s where Innovative design practices come into picture.

Many of us have successfully adopted DevOps, some of us have started with the journey and some are still thinking about it. Irrespective of the stage you are in, you will benefit from moving towards “Design-Led DevOps adoption”. An approach which will “help you solve a problem” which “you didn’t know existed”.

Design-Led DevOps adoption first focuses on understanding the problem, understanding customer needs, tap customer emotions and gain insights before designing and prototyping solution.

In this session, We will talk about innovative way to apply design thinking, how it can be implemented and a case study of how it was applied to solve the DevOps problem.

T-shirt sizing. Fruit Sizing. Planning pokers. You might be familiar with any or all of these estimation (relative sizing) techniques. Story points based estimations (along with velocity mapping) is touted as a predictable method to plan for software delivery. Teams are expected to get a good sense of the effort needed to deliver a piece of work by comparing estimates with references of similarly complex work they have delivered in the past.

The accuracy of point based estimates fares more or less in the same range as sheer gut feel. So, the natural inclination for software teams is to try and make it more accurate than gut feel. Thereby, we obsess with breaking functionality into smaller byte sized stories. We freak out when there is "scope creep". We debate endlessly about ideal days vs. person days. We fuss over the specific visual representation for the burn-up or burn-down.

Does it matter anymore how many days the team spent chipping hard at a feature that added no value to the business? Have we made agile teams into mini waterfall teams by focussing on the wrong metrics? Can product companies afford this?

Process heaviness in product companies can cost a lot. We need to find better ways to invest in success metrics. We need to change the conversation from productivity to value add.

My talk intends to challenge prevalent estimation practices and contest their validity in product companies. I will also introduce ideas around capturing relevant business metrics and sizing stories using business value.

I will focus on a possible transition of organizations who are introducing the agile way of working. Starting with a traditional project setup using permanent PMO (portfolio level) and a temporary PMO (project level). What will happen if the keep the team together as an agile team. What does that mean for the project manager. I will continue my story by adding an agile team. Coordination between the teams can be managed by a scrum of scrum. Still no need for a project organization with a project manager and a project board and no need for a temporary PMO. I add more teams and the coordination asks for a project manager. What dos this mean for a PMO? We can continue and institutionalize the coordination by using frameworks like Nexus, S@S, SAFe et cetera and has an Integration Manager, a Roadmap Manager or a Release Train Engineer and Product managers and Product Owners. I will add some new to be created teams (aks for a Project Manager to organise) et cetera. I will end with an overview and positioning of different agile frameworks and the role of the permanent PMO (focus portfolio management and Center of Excellence) in an agile world.