Project Retrospectives are an important part of any software development process. The Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto state that, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." How can this be done? By taking the time to reflect and learn and proactively determine what should be done differently in the next iteration, release, or project. Linda's presentation will introduce techniques for project retrospectives, whether they are agile or not. The techniques help teams discover what they’re doing well so that successful practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance. Retrospectives are not finger pointing or blaming sessions, but rather a highly effective process in which teams reflect on the past to become more productive in the future. Linda will share her experiences with leading retrospectives of several kinds for dozens of projects—successful and unsuccessful, small and large, in academia and industry. Her lessons learned can be applied to any project to enable teams and organizations to become learning organizations.

I'll share my experience on how we shipped products faster using story maps and how team's focus on smaller goals than estimates / numbers / complexities helped us achieve it. 

The session would give an insight on:

• Aligning team with product vision 
• Shiping features fast / faster 
• Better product backlog management 
• Delivering without estimation 

Some of our challenges / questions were:

• Are we delivering value ? 
• How do we know we have delivered enough for our customers ? 
• What is our priority right now ? 
• Do we have a bigger picture ? 
• Aligning team with product vision
• Is tracking numbers the right thing to do ? 
• How fast should we ship ? What are the related challenges ? 

We solved these questions / challenges first by using story maps and then removed estimation. Story map gave a clearer picture of what's planned and what's in the next customer release. Other ideas helped us easily identify when to ship and what to ship (I'll discuss more about these in the session). 

Story map is a great way to collaboratively identify the features, prioritize them and create milestones. We used story maps as our card wall also. It was an interesting experience :) 

No estimate helps the team focus more on goals and less on numbers. It helps the team to think more about the customers and how would they use the product and less about velocity, charts and commitment. It changes team's perspective and team starts shipping a usuable product for customers.