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.

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'.

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!

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.

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.

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.

With every product we ship, we learn what we wished we’d known: what customers *really* wanted. What if you could gain those insights before beginning development? What if you could “unit test” a product idea? Or at a bigger level, what if you could “system test” your business idea/plan?

Engineering teams are experiencing productivity gains of 30-300% when applying Agile and Lean practices and methods. These same Agile and Lean principles can be applied beyond engineering, to the business itself. Using a lightweight yet powerful tool, assumptions behind a business plan can be tested and iterated almost on-the-fly. With a hands-on exercise, attendees will learn how to build a map of any business ecosystem, and how to use it to check and iterate solution viability. Come experience the application of Agile to Business so you and your team can focus on your richest opportunities over chasing your competitor’s taillights.

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, [email protected], 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.