Startups need to be agile, customer-focused, and able to respond quickly to market changes. To achieve this, startups require an effective product management approach that can align business goals with customer needs. Kanban, a lean and agile project management methodology, can be a valuable tool for startups looking to implement an effective product management framework.

In this talk, I will share my experience as Head of Product for InDebted, and how I used Kanban to identify bottlenecks and improve the product development lifecycle. I will discuss the key principles of Kanban and product management, and demonstrate how they can be used together to create a streamlined and effective process for managing product development.

I will explain how I used Kanban to manage product backlogs, prioritize tasks, and ensure that product development was aligned with business goals. I will also share how I used Kanban to track product development progress and measure the success of the product. I will provide examples of how I used data from Kanban to identify bottlenecks in the product development lifecycle, and how I used this data to improve the process from right to left.

Through my experience and case studies, attendees will learn how startups can leverage the combination of Kanban and product management to accelerate their growth. I will cover topics such as creating a Kanban board for product management, identifying and managing workflow bottlenecks, and establishing a culture of continuous improvement.

By the end of this talk, attendees will have a clear understanding of how to use Kanban and product management to accelerate their startup's growth. They will leave with practical tips and strategies that they can implement right away, regardless of their team size or industry.

This case study examines a local government organisation in NZ that provides services to a smaller division. This smaller division had several outstanding pain points that were not getting the required focus. The relationship was strained, and frustrations on both sides were high.

We were called to provide management services and remove all outstanding pain points. This talk walks through that journey and how we started to separate the people from the problem and were able to resolve all pain points and foster a better working relationship between the two organisations. It also shows the challenges we faced, what we did to overcome them.

Perhaps through no one's fault but my own, the "expedite swim lane" on my teams' Kanban boards have been the first solid thing to appear, and the last to disappear. In seemingly breaking the laws of physics-I-mean-kanban, the swimlame then proceeds to wreak havoc on everything from flow, WIP limits, priorities to ultimately team sanity-I-mean-culture. In this talk I'm going to share various experiments I've run to get rid of the "expedite" swim lane, some with greater success than others - and my hope is you'll come along and share some ideas back with me too!

After working with Kanban for seven years, I relocated to Australia to assist with Agile transformations. To my surprise, Kanban was nearly absent in these transformations. At that time, there was only a single documented case, and a handful of trainings led by the only two trainers in the entire country. I became the first female Kanban trainer in both Australia and Brazil.

In 2017, Australia experienced an explosion of SAFe and Spotify implementations. As I had suspected, six years on, these implementations fell short of delivering the anticipated outcomes proportional to the investments poured into them. In 2023 Kanban remains a hidden treasure in Australia, and companies continue to struggle with efficient delivery.

If you're curious about implementing Kanban amidst apparent disinterest or skepticism, I invite you to join my talk. I will share insights drawn from my 14 years of experience implementing Kanban stealthily across companies of diverse sizes, cultures, and industries. I hope you leave the session with some good insights about how to start benefiting from the superpowers of Kanban