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.

Large Insurance enterprises find difficult to renew and find new ways to transform their customer experience, improve operational process and find new business models. As an experiment they engaged an insure-tech startup to lead their digital transformation journey.. This case study is about a point of view, approaches, challenges and cultural surprises that we faced during this journey..

The more we share more we learn!!

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.

You have tried Scrum, Kanban, XP, Crystal and other even less known frameworks and methods that claim to help you to become Agile. You have applied them pure, you have tried to tweak them, and even you have made some homemade cocktails out of them. So yet you still can't say your company is Agile. Your Cxx-s are willing to change the company, and themselves. Your employees on all levels genuinely want to step into the Agile journey. Yet there is nearly no progress toward a real organizational agility.

What is the secret? Why is it so hard? Why there are so many crashes on this way in our industry? Why most of the companies will still fail to become Agile, and yours will most probably too.

I'm going to answer all these questions during this talk. We will figure out what aspects of a large-scale agile transformation have a mission-critical impact and how they influence each other. Where to put your efforts? How to cut corners? And moreover, how to survive on this journey.

In this age of a variety of cloud-based-services for virtual Mobile Test Labs, building a real-(mobile)-device lab for Test Automation is NOT a common thing – it is difficult, high maintenance, expensive! Yet, I had to do it!

Attend this talk to understand the Why, What and How I built my own MAD-LAB (Mobile Automation Devices LAB). The discussion will include –

• Understanding the context,
• Why no cloud-based solution worked for me,
• The automation strategy for Android / iOS / Web platform,
• The tech-stack (cucumber-jvm / Appium), and,
• The core implementation to build your own MAD-LAB! (already open-sourced)
• How this results in Continuous Delivery (CD)

Ever feel like the market moves faster than your marketing team? Or, wonder how flexible your finance (& leadership!) teams would really be if self-direction glitched and blew $1M? Organizations introduce Agile believing it will lead in part to greater responsiveness and resiliency. Yet, why do so many fail to achieve those outcomes?

It isn’t just that they’re structured and operated by default along hierarchical lines rather than by design for iterative work. Achieving the full benefits of Agile comes from shifting the culture and mindset of a whole organization, sometimes as radically as encouraging it to “Make New Mistakes.” This very philosophy was a driver in the fastest division in HP’s history to reach $1B, a hardware division that was focused on manufacturing operations, with razor thin margins, and markets that changed 3x faster than the development lead time.

Through a series of short stories and exercises, attendees will explore 5 practices from that business which led to roaring success. We’ll probe their parallels in Lean / Agile practice. With each one, you’ll briefly self-inspect the state of your own organization, as well as create a backlog you can use to adapt in your “real world” beyond the conference.

Do you have, or want, a vision that takes you beyond high performing teams, to a high performing, resilient business? Come hear how you can help your organization shift from mechanics that “do” Agile, and walk away with a feel for what’s possible when not just development, but a whole organization surfs the flow of “being” Agile.

For transformations to be successful, typical Component teams are giving way to self managing, cross functional teams, organized by customer value (Feature Teams)!

These Self-managing teams are the basis of Scrum, where the team has the authority to design, plan, and execute their task and to monitor and manage their work process and progress. The team rather than a (project) manager—has the responsibility of deciding how to work.

But Self-managing teams do not just happen by chance. Instead they need the right environment. The organization is responsible for supporting the team development by creating the conditions needed for the teams to succeed and the real empowerment starts when the teams are 'self designed' from the beginning - which means that team members choose their teams to work!

This workshop will showcase to the participants HOW they can form 'self designed' teams, and experience the joys of 'self organization'.

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.

Lies, damned lies and Statistics!

(the phrase is frequently attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli).

Many of us work in environments that value Agility or are at least attempting to be more Agile.

We frequently turn to data, metrics, reports to help us navigate through our complex software environments, to help make sense of what's happening, to support subjective information we see around us and gain insights about the way we work.

But with the myriad of reports and metrics available to us, it is easy to misinterpret, over-analyze, overlook and generally make a big mess of things.

Through this talk, I will present some of the popular Agile reports and metrics and how they can be misread.

I will also share tips of how to counter some of these "lies".

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!

Every organization aspire for faster time to market, release of features on demand, reducing the time between concept to cash and better quality of products. Agile has been a popular choice to achieve this objective. While agile was becoming a streamline approach, software industry saw the advent of DevOps. By adopting DevOps practices, organizations were trying to bridge the gap that existed between different groups within the organization, such as business, delivery, QA, Operations, Infra, etc. In spite of adopting agile practices, organizations were not fast enough to respond to changes. And one of the major reasons was the misalignment of purpose and processes withing these groups, hence while features were dev ready but it would still take the same amount of time to release to market as it was before. That's where organizations found the missing piece in DevOps in the entire delivery process.

Everyone started hoping on it without realizing the complexity involved in its adoption. It is now a big buzzword in the industry. DevOps involves bringing changes not just in the delivery but also in the operations. with greenfield projects its a bit easier than doing it with legacy systems because greenfield projects have the opportunity to start from scratch which legacy systems lack.

The purpose of this proposed talk is to share experience of devops implementation on such legacy systems which are complex and not just on its own but a web of multiple systems working together. How scaling devops practices becomes a necessity when working with enterprise applications.

Most often people think that when anyone has an idea, they innovate. But why is that you have people around you who have lots of idea but never get them into "existence".

The reason is that it's not with an idea that Innovation starts.

Its easier to discuss challenges to get the ideas from concept to cash. But there finer human behavioral elements when we talk about innovation and this session tries to address fundamentals of how innovations starts.

This session is mainly about the myth that "Innovation starts with an idea" backed up by research of centuries and essence from Hindu Vedas

This session had got a round of applause and appreciation in APGI 2016 conference

1) What was problem?
Longer release cycle time, ever increasing code base, tightly coupled
functionalities of application making difficult to implement change, complex
organisation structure.
2) How we have approach towards problem: -
A) People transformation: - New organisational design where people are
responsible for making and running small set of Microservices. The services are
defined based on bounded context by levering Domain Driven Design.

B) Process transformation: -In order to identify the organisational process bottle
neck, End to end value stream mapping done and Improvements themes such as
change management, release management etc has been implemented.
C)Technological transformation: - New technologies, tools and practices adopted
that has helped in achieving engineering excellence by Automation,
Autonomation ,CICD, Infra as a code, cloud only infra , Microservices and API
led economy etc.

3) Our Approach towards Microservices :-
1. API led connectivity: - Composiblity of different system is the key for
Microservices experience and we can achieve the composiblity of
different system by leveraging API led connectivity approach. In this
approach, we will have system API, process API, and experience API.
System API takes cares of system of record underpinning the service,
process API takes care of business process underpinning the service and
Experience API is responsible for experience of consumer of services.
2. Elements of API design:- In our API design we have used domain
model , architectural standards , API catalogue ( experience , process ,
system) to identify development details, stub details , deployment
details, RAML specification ,data mapping ,back end system
specification and integration specification.

4) Client –Server Monolith application to Microservices application: -
1. Strangler pattern of Microservices: - In client –server monolith
application to Microservices application journey, we have used the
strangler pattern of Microservices. As we can see from architectural
diagram that we have put the dispatcher (API gateway, reverser proxy)
in front of monolith and directed our clients to it. The dispatcher also
acts as an API gateway and provides utility such as Authentication and
authorisation, logging and Auditing. The dispatcher is just a proxy to
endpoints exposed by monolith. We have refectored each domain into
Microservices and deployed them into Microservices platform.
2. Swagger: - We have used swagger to define, generate and Document
API’s.
3. Caching as a service: - We have implemented cashing as service and we
have cached the static data of system API, experience API, and process
API. Cashing helps in improving the user experience.
4. Configuration of the API security context: - Our API Gateway exposes
API to consumers and protects services using the policy enforcement:
security policies.
5. Engineering excellence in Microservices landscape - We have achieved
engineering excellence by practicing CICD, Infra as code, automation
etc in Microservices landscape.
6. Other API design consideration: - a) Asynchronous event based
communication using the network for loose coupling between services.
b) Circuit breakers for isolating the failure of services c) Consumer
driven contract as way of service consumption.

5) When not to go for Microservices.

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.