Using examples from his award-winning design consultancy, Alan Cooper shares the secret to his success: working backwards. Working backwards means taking the time to ask the hard questions before wading into unfamiliar territory. It can be scary (and for some, frustrating), but it's the only way to innovate.

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.

While microservice architectures allowed teams to scale delivery of independently deployable services, most frontend layers are still run as monolithic applications. Similar to server-side applications, frontend layers often grow into large monoliths that are difficult to maintain and evolve. Building, deploying and consuming frontend components across a diversity of teams and web applications can be a daunting task, especially at scale. To address this issue, at OpenTable we enable fast-moving teams to easily build and deploy front-end components using OpenComponents, an open-source, battle tested, front-end microservice architecture for painless component delivery.

The idea behind micro frontends is to enable multiple teams to work seamlessy together by fostering end-to-end ownership of independently developed, tested and deployed features.

Think about UI as the composition of features which are maintained by independent teams. These teams could be cross-functional allowing them to develop such features end-to-end, from a database to user interface and independently deploy them.

During this session I'll explain how OpenComponents works, how do we use it at OpenTable and how we allows teams to build ship and consume frontend components at runtime across teams and web applications at scale.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the Internet. Quickly scale up and down with demand and pay only for what you use.

In this demo, we will explain and demonstrate

1. Infrascture as a Code - Key DevOps practice
2. Azure - Key Concepts
3. Script Infrastructure as code
4. Provision Infrastructure
5. Compare and Contrast Azure with other Cloud Providers like AWS / GCP

Shared Services Teams, such as DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Networking, etc., for a variety of reasons do not receive agile training and coaching specific to their needs. This often results in failure to consistently deliver expected outcomes, resulting in costly delays in overall delivery, often undetected until it is too late.

Shared Services Teams are expected to simultaneously:
- build assets, such as delivery pipelines, networking, cloud, infrastructure, etc. on time and on budget, and
- support Agile Development Teams and Operations, often at short notice.

These two different types of tasks are typically managed in the same way and usually as a dual priority Kanban, which is not addressing their different nature, thus causing costly delivery delays.

This talk explores this Dual Nature of work and the difficulties arising from addressing both types by a single team. The lecture presents experience with Coaching different types of Shared Services Teams.

It shows ways how their specific needs can be addressed at various agile maturity levels, including areas such as Governance, Capacity Optimisation, Supplier Reliability and Support Mix Optimisation.

Improv your coaching skills (pun intended) and your team performance! On a superficial level, improv techniques introduce play and fun into every team. On a deeper level, it helps you create a culture of safety, experimentation and true collaboration. It helps people to welcome change, uncertainty, open up and helps infuse teams and individuals with a dose of EQ. It also helps you to improve your own coaching skills! Wanna know more? Come and find out! This workshop will introduce you to improv by throwing you heads-first into one exercise after another.

Most organizations and teams talk about DevOps practices. Most of them might find it difficult on how to get it started. If you are a Microsoft shop, this would be a good session for you and your team. In this session, we will demonstrate different DevOps practices using Visual Studio Team Services & Docker