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. 

Startup and ScaleUps are known stages of organisational growth for tech companies. Often less recognised is the distinct interim stage of Startup-to-ScaleUp -- this period of a tech companies time has its own unique needs and gotchas, and as a result requires an organisational design to suit. 

In this interactive presentation, with elements inspired by systems thinking, I'll explore common organisational design patterns (and anti-patterns) in startups as they attempt to scale, with a focus on B2B SaaS tech companies. I'll cap it with my recommended structure for this stage of growth, including some options, based on my hard earned experience -- which includes over 10 years of successes & failure at driving scaling product & engineering teams + 10 years of being part of them, followed by a discussion.

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.

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.

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.

No matter what the future brings.

These 6 words are the heart of agility - but they are also an invitation. Does your organization have the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose - no matter what the future brings?

And to complicate matters; it is a continuum, where the question is not whether you have it, but rather how much you have and is it enough?

There aren't many of them, but those organizations who can answer yes to these questions can instinctively seize emerging and unforeseen opportunities for their customers’ benefit. But copying their processes isn't going to help you. There is no single framework, method, or system that can create business agility — and, by definition, because an organization is a complex adaptive system, there can never be one. In many cases, even different business units within the same organization need different approaches.

Yet, while no two organizations follow the same journey, common patterns of behavior emerge. And I can tell you how they behave.

Since 2017, ongoing research from the Business Agility Institute continues to study what it means to be an agile organization, regardless of industry, size, or context. Since then, over a thousand companies have taken part in this research, culminating in a behavioral model for agility.

In this talk, together we will explore these behaviors to better understand the characteristics of an agile organisation.

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.

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!