This presentation is about how to do agile software development well. For people who have been doing it for a while but without necessarily understanding some of the deeper principles of how to do it well.

Some of the things we will cover:

• How do discovery and delivery work together in agile?
• What are we delivering, and how to deliver value?
• What is shift-left, and how to do it well?
• What is flow, and how to improve it?

Background:

Over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of candidates in the product-development space from Software Engineers to Product Managers and seen a pattern that most people who have been practising some form of agile software development (and some for many years) don't really understand the underlying principles well. They understand the mechanics (usually of Scrum) of how many teams work but not why those mechanics can be effective and as a result, don't really understand what to do to improve their teams.

I've seen this manifest itself in interviews where I ask people questions like "how do you go about building great teams", or "what hints do you look for to see how a team is performing", or "what are the top 3 things you look for to improve a team's performance" and most of the time I get answers that show that people have been working in teams (some that may well be high-performing) but without much of an idea why the teams are performing well.    

I've also seen it manifest itself when new employees (particularly team leaders) join us, and then try to lift-and-shift their ways of working at previous companies to a new company without properly understanding why what they used to do worked in a previous context and may not work in this new context.

This presentation covers some of the things you can focus on to help improve your team's practices and understand the deeper principles behind the way you are probably working at the moment.

It's for people who may be interviewing for their next role, or who have recently joined a new team, or anyone wanted to understand how to get their teams to improve.

Ahh, that thorny problem, how do we place the right 'bets' on the right ideas that have the best chance of become winning products? As a lifelong learner, I'm propelled by searching for tools and techniques to support my continuous improvement journey. 

I've long been a fan of the Google Design Sprint.  Over the past couple of years, I've become more familiar with Pretotyping, Alberto Savoia's technique to ensure you're 'building the right it before you build it right'.

Recently I've been incorporating pretotyping into design sprints, resulting in even more focus on validating an idea and determining how likely a product is to succeed. Doing so requires higher order facilitation skills and additional pre-planning. However, in the sessions I've run to date, the addition of pretotyping has resulted in the testing increments more tightly aligned to areas of concern. This means potential blockers ie sprint goals or potential 'how-might-we' HMW statements can be effectively tested and real data gained, rather than just more internal opinion. 

This approach is potentially of interest to people in organisations that have difficulty getting product to market; find it hard to align on common business goals; or who are looking for an additional evidence-gathering approach to support effective decision-making in product development. 

The Cynefin framework has had a huge impact on being able to talk about complexity in systems thinking, and its widespread use facilitates many of us situationally finding which approach might suit our current problems. However, as simple as it looks, it can be difficult to learn and use.

Sure, there are alternative ways of exploring Cynefin. I've used the corridor game, designed a 3D printed model (see below), and even scripted a Lego stop-animation movie for it -- but recently got a lightbulb over the head moment -- maybe it would be easier to learn as a board game?

I've had some initial thoughts, but thought it would be fun to collaborate with others on this, to co-design what it could look like. Dave Snowden is already on board and keen to see what could be developed (he's also keen on the Lego movie, but that's for another day).

Every Agile team these days seems to be up to their eyes in numbers - the scrum master can reel off the team’s velocity, cycle time, throughput and average happiness rating off the top of their head. Many of these are said to reflect how productive a team can be. How we reconcile these measures with a team's psychological safety can lead to marked differences in team performance.

In this discussion group we’ll discuss one seemingly simple question - what metrics can be used to capture motivation? Drawing on the experiences from the group and sharing horror stories about the team health check surveys that we’ve all been asked to fill in (there’s only so many ratings on a scale of 1-5 that one person can give), we’ll move past velocity and dive deeper on how to measure psychological safety, why psychological safety can lead to leaner teams with less waste, and finally how we can act on these numbers to make a different to teams after we've measured them.

70% of people worldwide have felt like an imposter at some point in their career. 46% respondents to a women-in-tech survey agreed that help overcoming imposter syndrome would make them happier and more successful. Do you worry sometimes that you're not as smart as the other people in your organisation? Or that you won't be able to keep up and they'll find out that you don't really belong there? Do you stress out about living up to the expectations of the people you manage?

People working in tech, specially those in leadership positions, often struggle to overcome prejudice and lack of privilege but still end up feeling like they don't belong, like they are a fraud, even when they're achieving success and making an impact. Imposter syndrome can affect people at any stage in their career - whether they're new to tech or in a senior leadership or executive role.

In this talk I'll go over personal experiences with imposter syndrome and practical strategies I've developed that anyone can apply to banish imposter thoughts and prevent them from getting in the way of your success, career progression, mental health, and happiness at work. An easy to remember acronym (REACT) with 5 realistic steps you can take away and practice can help you create a more accurate representation of your performance. You can take these steps away for yourself, or if you are a people leader, use them to help coach your people through the confusing world of imposter syndrome.

This storytelling activity lays the foundation of applying good practices, instead of the best practice in the agile world. The session details the lessons I learned from my dad's car mechanic and how they can be applied to contemporary workplaces. To explain a bit more about the concepts of framework and tool kit: An agile framework normally offers a compilation of “best practices”. Experience has proven that a best practice in a particular context may woefully fail in another, hence context matters.

So, instead of agile teams blindly following “agile in name only” tactics and prescriptive frameworks, this session proposes freedom. The freedom that does not force teams to adopt certain processes and tools, but values individual and interaction.

One of the most common ailments espoused by product businesses is their inability to consider the long term. How do we create strategy when things change so fast?

This thinking is symptomatic of ‘fragile’ strategy – a strategy that does not consider change in its inception, and therefore really only ever plans to change the plan. Moving beyond ‘fragile’ strategy towards ‘resilient’ strategy means that product & business leaders consider change not as a possibility, but as a certainty.

Change is our constant companion, and therefore must be included in our strategy along with all the other usual suspects - competitors, market, customers, business priorities, risks etc. In this session, learn how to use Scenario Gaming to build a change resilient Product Strategy.

What if a mobile app was a human: with its traits, sense of humour, values, physical appearance, and music preferences? This presentation is about tools and means used by UX/UI designers to create brand experiences in a meaningful way. The presenters will walk the audience through examples.

Inspiration

Q: What is something you appreciated or wished you’d been told at the beginning of your career? — Ringo
A: Problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills trump tech skills 10x — Craig Brown

Introduction

• We believe that these are the key factors for team happiness
  • Great Culture
  • Career & Personal Growth
  • Pride in work
• What to Do: Individually and Organisationally!
  • Org: Bottom-up involvement in defining values & core skills
  • Individual: Career planning
  • Team: Collaborative exploration of the "skills we need to win"
• What we’re doing at Everest Engineering

Workshop

The bulk of the session will be an experiential workshop in which you will learn a couple of collaborative formats identifying shared values (values tournament) and project-specific skills (team skills mesh).

Afterwards you will be able to take these formats and adapt them to your own organisation and team contexts.

Presenters:

Michelle Gleeson

Susan Brander

Gretchen Scott

This session will be run by the Tech Diversity Lab team, Michelle Gleeson, Gretchen Scott and Susan Brander. All veterans of the tech industry, these co-founders have recently come together to consolidate all they know of building diverse, high-performing teams into a SaaS platform. They are excited to share their knowledge and experience about Career Growth and Development with the LAST community.

Content:

Come along to our presentation where we will guide you through building your own career progression plan. We will walk through the skills, contributions and opportunities that exist for you.

At the end of the session, you will be empowered to have meaningful conversations with your manager and direct reports about career planning and skill development.

Format

Interactive 60 minute workshop

Tags

Careers and Career Paths

Diversity

Leadership / Management

When growing an organisation it is easy to follow established patterns for the organisational structure and end up with a situation with line managers, middle managers and executives.

But when we did a comprehensive review of our organisation and culture, we found that most of our line managers loved mentoring and growing people, but struggled balancing that with the more administrative and managerial tasks like leave, reviews, recruiting and assigning work.

And so we set out to overhaul our organisational structure into one where we have people dedicated to growing team members through mentoring and coaching and people solely responsible for organising and delivering work.

This session is about sharing insights in why, what and how we did this change.

The aim of this session is demonstrate the process of analysing a business domain using Wardley Strategy Maps by walking through real-world example.   This case study describes the process of using Wardley Strategy Maps at construction-tech start-up SignOnSite to map the customer needs and competitor landscape in order to refine the product strategy and agree a roadmap of product features to best leverage their increased investment.

Wardley Mapping are difficult to understand and difficult to start. They have as steep learning curve but are very valuable as a strategy collaboration tool.

My goal is to introduce Wardley Mapping in a more informal manner. I'll talk through the case study with lots of ongoing Q&A to ensure that each concept is well understood before moving onto the next concept.

Coaching is one of the biggest drivers of performance improvement.  This workshop will help everyone, in particular Team Leaders,  Technical Leads and Managers understand and practice the basics of coaching which will enable you to to be a more effective leader and coach.

International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

LAST (Lean Agile & Systems Thinking) involves many changes in mindset, process, practice and ways of working.  We often get stuck as we try to figure out how to incorporate LAST into our daily work.  Coaching is an approach for helping people to get unstuck and trying to accelerate their transition to a different way of thinking and working.  In this workshop we will also move away from Agile and Agile Coaching and explore Professional Coaching as described by ICF and how it can help people's personal and work lives in general.  

In this workshop we will explore two parts of coaching.  The first part consists of supportive behaviours and the second part the coaching-specific skills.  We will then have the opportunity to practice coaching skills in pairs.

We are experiencing a tech talent shortage in Australia, which is set to intensify. Onboarding new people into our industry is an important part of addressing the shortage. Designing and running great programs for graduates and career switchers isn't easy though. Some organisations already have progressive programs, while many are still working out where to start. And everybody has a role to play - especially the team members who are providing the mentoring and coaching day by day.

This session is about experience sharing - through roundtable conversations we will hear the stories from those who are doing it, and to hear the questions from those who are keen to try.

The insights from the session will be combined with work being undertaken by RMIT FORWARD (Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation) who are exploring this space and are seeking to create a shared resource for our community.

Supercharge your next project with the collected wisdom of over 100 people who worked for over two years on multiple major replatforming initiatives

The main topics covered are:

• The common problems across large replatformings

• The things that worked well — and how to apply them elsewhere

• The things that could be improved — and how to improve them

This session will be of interest to:

• Delivery people wanting to help their next major project avoid our mistakes and benefit from our successes

• Product people wanting to set their teams up for success on large projects

• Tech people wanting to understand why business people are so obsessed with progressive delivery

• Senior leaders wanting to support their groups to deliver value more predictably

This session is also relevant to:

• Anyone interested in running large retrospectives

A discussion  about Tech Leadership, featuring some top tech leaders in our community. This will  lead into the workshop about Career Growth with Michell, Gretchen and Susan.

Part of the 10 Year Reflections Project.

This session will be an opportunity to hear 3 short presentations about how the state of our industries and the way that we work in 2012, when LAST started, compares to today. You'll then have a chance to discuss this in small groups to think about what's happened in the past 10 years and also think about what might happen next.

NOTE: This session will have 2 concurrent sessions running in the North Magdalen Laundry and in the Industrial School that is adjoining.

A follow-up from 2021 - work is being done right across this land by First Nations people to take control of the narrative related to us Blak fullas.  This work is occurring within government, with the Closing the Gap refresh reform four, within communities and the not-for-profit sector.  I'm working with several organisations who are empowering people to design capture systems, collect and hold information, and use the best available technology to manifest knowledge and wisdom about Blak fullas for Blak fullas.

Do you lead a team who gets frustrated by the endless hamster wheel of getting shit done and wondering why this work is important? 

No doubt there's a layer of management at work obsessed with velocity, delivery dates and getting more done with less. Sound familiar? If so, this session is for you. But, only if you're keen to be part of the answer. This will be an interactive workshop and you will be challenged!

A core tenant of high performing teams is clarity of purpose and clear goals. Basically a mission with waypoints giving a sense of progress. This is what connects people with something bigger than themselves. Done well, you can unleash an incredible sense of purpose and meaning within the team. The energy created is the secret sauce that enables teams to create wonderful products for customers.

But who's responsibility is this? Is it up to management? Or the team? No, it's you. Your role as the leader of the team is to make this connection and create this environment of empowerment.

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is one means to enable this, but I'll only be touching on this. Together, we'll walk away with specific actions to move our teams to more fulfilling work, and influencing management to not only support, but lead this movement.

From this session, you'll elevate your team to be known as the group which gets shit done. Although, we all know you simply connected them with something meaningful. 

Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!