Product owners face a challenge: potential new markets are vast and full of unknowns. Current thinking in successful product management recognizes the importance of learning about potential customers
and adapting product decisions to reflect those insights. However, many exercises and workshops
geared towards product owners treat target products and markets as a fixed, concrete objective—failing to include any market feedback

Dicey Markets is a product owner simulation designed to reflect many of the forces driving product owners, including unknown information about the market, competitive pressure, and technical debt. The simulation
emphasizes the role of rapid regular feedback in creating successful products in the face of uncertain markets.

Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market, and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly-changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.
Agile transformation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how your company organizes for delivery, how it delivers value to its customers, and how it plans and measures outcomes. Agile transformation is about building enabling structures, aligning the flow of work, and measuring for outcomes based progress. It's about breaking dependencies. The reality is that this kind of change can only be led from the top. This talk will explore how executives can define an idealized end-state for the transformation, build a fiscally responsible iterative and incremental plan to realize that end-state, as well as techniques for tracking progress and managing change.

The patterns for implementing Scrum at the team levels have largely been set, but what about dealing with Agile and Scrum across multiple teams. Is the answer just magical words like scaling, or SAFe, or LeSS? What are the core concepts and successful patterns? Is it just one big group hug?

In this session, we will explore core concepts around implementing Agile concepts across multiple teams. The session starts with a simulation that explores distributing people across teams (which will actually NOT involve any hugging). From there, this session dives into:

• Prioritization across multiple teams
• Product Ownership across multiple teams
• Dependencies and team alignment
• Communities of Practice
• Communication and collaboration across teams
• The role of managers
• A quick look at scaling methods

Coming out of this session, attendees will have an understanding of core concepts and fundamental helpful practices in implementing Agile concepts across multiple teams.

For a long time multitasking has been considered a must-have skill when, in fact, it makes us less productive and more prone to error. But even with plenty of studies and papers supporting that idea, it can be hard to convince managers and stakeholders that we should be taking on less at a time. In this lightning talk, we'll run through one very quick, lightweight simulation (Multitasking is Evil) you can use to help make that case and show that lowering work in progress is the way to go!

Are your solutions to recurring issues having only minor improvements? Are some of these solutions actually making things worse in the long run? When answering yes to these, typically, we are trying to solve the issues with too narrow a view. Oddly we think we are addressing it at sufficient level but usually not. In order to see the entire picture we need a common language that will enable us to understand an entire complex adaptive system (e.g. organizations, teams, individuals). Join us as we learn a language called System Modeling (aka. Causal Loop Diagrams).

With this language we will be able to have rich dialogue to gain a full understanding of the entire complex adaptive system so that we can create solutions at the fundamental level and not the symptomatic level. Addressing system issues at the fundamental level will significantly improve the system. Symptomatic solutions may give the appearance of improvement in the short term but typically make things worse in the long run. Unfortunately we usually pick the symptomatic solutions because they seem obvious and we don't realize the long term impacts because of feedback delays that could take weeks, months or even years to realize.

Have you spent a lot of energy and time with your teams focusing on estimation? Do you feel that everyone isn't quite on the same page? There are many challenges on teams who wish to work with an agile mindset, and negative patterns around estimation can have quite the impact on productivity and team morale.

In this workshop, participants will revisit what a Product Backlog Item represents and exactly what an estimate represents. Using this as a foundation, session participants will learn about four distinct parts of a pattern that repeats itself in organizations who may not have a strong handle on these concepts. The workshop concludes with a lightweight estimation exercise that participants can take back to their organization.

Having a better understanding of estimation is helpful, and having a simple yet powerful game to compare items relatively to one another will help break your teams of the pattern of misunderstanding the point of backlog item estimation.

Imagine you were hired to provide consulting assistance for a new team just starting out with Kanban. The team has been struggling with their implementation and is looking forward to your expert guidance, support, and advice. It’s your first day and you just walked into the team room to look at their board. You want to make smart observations and thoughtful interpretations so you can have meaningful conversations with the team members. The team starts assembling in the team room for the daily standup and you plan on making some comments afterwards.

What comments would you make? What thoughtful questions would you ask?

This interactive presentation provides a detailed look at how to interpret and thoughtfully observe Kanban Boards to better understand the work of your teams. We will start with an overview of the Lean Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of interactive exercises that give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban boards. The exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems and provide opportunities to practice interpreting various board setups so you can have thoughtful and meaningful conversations with your teams.

Our roadmaps and backlogs are usually littered with pet projects, squeaky wheels, and recent ad hoc items that gain priority simply because they are the latest shot across our bow. Impact mapping is a powerful practice that helps us identify and align our work to the most valuable business goals and mission objectives and avoid many of the common challenges that arise from an unfocused set of work priorities.

Impact maps help us visualize quantifiable benefits that deliverables should produce towards our business objectives. They allow us to focus our work on those deliverables that move the needle the most, not just deliver features. The practice is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans, and align stakeholders as well as aid in strategic planning, roadmap management, and defining measures of success and quality.

This workshop will provide an appreciation for the power of impact mapping by walking you through building your own impact maps and the facilitation process for doing so in your own organization. You will leave the workshop having participated in a tangible example of the technique, and having gained an understanding of best-practices for facilitation with a focus on an impact map’s outputs and how they lead into the creation of actionable user stories when completed. Hands-on collaboration with your fellow attendees will help encourage your own application of this technique in your real world road-mapping and backlog refinement activities.

Many teams struggle with fitting in testing activities inside of a Sprint. They end up doing primarily development activities in a Sprint and push testing activities to run in dedicated testing Sprints following the coding Sprints or have a coding and testing Sprint running in parallel. However, in Scrum, the output of every Sprint is a potentially shippable product increment. This means the product increment should be well tested within the Sprint and ready to be delivered. Come to this presentation to learn how to tackle testing on an Agile team, what kind of tests to execute, what to automate and what not to automate, the different testing responsibilities, and when to run which tests. Leave with a testing strategy that you can start applying the next day to gradually get a team to start testing from day 1 of the Sprint and deliver a true product increment at the end of each Sprint.

Everyone wants to know which Agile metrics really count, and why. But a lot comes down to context: who's asking, what decisions are on the horizon, how you communicate, and so forth. Add scale, and you've got a major challenge.

David Bujard, Dante Vilardi and Nate Conroy have spent the last few years trying to figure how to make agility measurement effective at a big federal program. In this talk they will discuss lessons learned from numerous experiments -- those that produced results, and those that didn't.

David and Dante are Agile coaches who support a transformation program at USCIS.

Tired of Agile As A Lip-service?

Feel like Lean is getting lost?

Being asked to improve everything without changing anything?

Do you want to know what you can do about it?

If so, this talk is for you! Join Trent and Matt as they use Institutional Theory to examine the current state of Agile adoption, what it means for our work today, and what it suggests for the future.

They’ll explain the increasing emphasis on frameworks, the move away from lightweight methods, and the paradoxes we’ve all observed in Agile adoptions. These developments follow clear and established patterns; they’re not unexpected. Come explore why we are where we are, and what we can do to move beyond Agile Despondency.

Are you sometimes overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of Agile teachings you’re supposed to know and have at your fingertips to address every possible situation in the proper Agile way?

Sure, Agile is a “mindset” and you’re supposed to “own your process” but the reality is, that’s not how we teach or learn or usually even talk about Agile. Instead, we are bombarded with ever more retro formats, technical practices, prioritization techniques, facilitation tips, and other snippets of wisdom that we should all know before we can be considered good Agilists. And if your job title is Scrum Master or Agile Coach, the range of things you’re expected to master only expands.

In this session, Mathias Eifert will share how he found his footing in a vast sea of loosely connected Agile rules, processes, techniques and tools by recognizing that a small number of fundamental concepts can help with finding answers that are “good enough” as a starting point to tackle most new contexts or problems. Together, we will examine how many established Agile approaches can be traced back to these essential concepts and hopefully help each attendee a little further along on their journey from rules-based Agile to fundamental understanding.

In this lightning talk, Richard Cheng will share a story from his Motley Fool days in regards to the 5 things to look for in a Product Owner:

• Bandwidth
• Power
• Knowledge
• Interest
• Vision

Is your Product Owner available to the team, empowered to make decisions, knowledgeable in their business domain, engaged in the product and leading the way for delivery of value? This session does a deep dive in the these ideas.
The session starts with a brief Seinfeld video to demonstrate the importance of Product Ownership. The session then discusses 5 key attributes to look for in a Product Owner:

1. Bandwidth
2. Power

3. Knowledge
4. Interest
5. Vision

After that discussion, we will have an interactive exercise to identify what a Product Owner does day to day. The debrief will identify the balance a Product Owner must have between working with stakeholders, end users, customers AND working with the Scrum team AND product backlog refinement.

The session concludes with the presenter sharing a Product Owner persona sheet. This persona sheet measures product owners across the 5 attributes mentioned above and presents a narrative on their core strengths and risks.

Why do we talk? How useful is it?
Let's work together in small teams to make products in complete silence, experiencing how talking both benefits and stifles collaboration.
What does collaboration really mean? How can this experience improve your collaboration?

In this experience, which is modeled after experiments run by Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg and Katherine Kirk, participants will experience a
* 90 minute period of complete silence while working together to build prosthetic hands for charity, noting down each time they have the urge to speak
* 45 minute review period where our facilitators will help us look at what we wanted to say and what happened instead, along with summarizing the outcomes we experienced through silent collaboration so that participants can take back with them these enlightenments.

We will pay particular attention to re-evaluating our model of collaboration and deep diving on the things people still felt like they wanted to say -- Did they really need to? What happened when they couldn't? How did that affect the outcome? We were moved by this experience when we participated in it at Agile2017, and are excited to provide the same experiential learning and awareness of silent collaboration to our community back in DC.

Do you want to write great User Stories (a.k.a. small features that are part of a product) that provide the vehicle for conversation and confirmation that we build the right thing? Do you struggle with completing stories (of business value) that are potentially shippable within a fraction of an iteration/sprint? During this session we will do a quick refresher on User Story formatting to include Acceptance Criteria. The reason for the refresher is that over the last few years, despite people using User Stories, I have experienced their usage far from the intended purpose.

After the refresher, we will learn at least 2 techniques for splitting stories in this interactive workshop.

One of the struggles I have seen when organizations transition to Agile in relation to the Agile principle "Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation" is: When and how do I involve the right customer.

Goal of this presentation:

• Provide tools on how to involve different types of stakeholders
• Tool to identify different types of stakeholders

In the presentation I will explain the 2 step process of:

• Step 1: map out the players for a value stream, product, or feature(set) in a simple 2x2 Stakeholders Matrix (influence/power and interest)
• Step 2: Learn about the tools and techniques to involve players in each quadrant based on their specific strength or opportunity

“Going Agile” is a big cultural change for most organizations and it’s significance, impact, and the effort required for successful implementation can often be underestimated. There are many benefits to be gained by adopting a more Agile approach, including quicker feedback loops, more focus on value, and higher levels of collaboration. However, for Agile to succeed in the long-term it’s essential to set expectations up front and to balance the amount of change with the amount of disruption it will cause. In this session, we will look at how David Anderson intentionally built change management principles into his Kanban Methodology and explore other change management techniques the Agile community can leverage when helping organizations transition to Agile.

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and probably continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little (or big) fire in your belly that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. From this, we will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.