Along with shared goals, tools, and boundaries, psychological safety is a pre-requisite for a truly self-organizing team. Research shows that if you can create psychological safety for your teams, they will be more creative, willing to take risks, and speak their mind — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs and reduce project risk.

But how do you cultivate psychological safety on a team? Is conflict ever ok? This workshop will give participants the chance to practice exercises for building safety in a fun setting. We'll focus on what safety is and isn’t, how agile leaders can support it using a learning mindset, and learn several team exercises for cultivating safety. We’ll also introduce one method for measuring psychological safety over time.

Strong cultures help people support one another, share their passions, and achieve big goals. And such communities aren’t just happy accidents - they can be purposefully cultivated, whether they’re in a company, a faith institution, or among friends and enthusiasts.

But what makes a belonging culture? How is community changing in America? Author and executive consultant Charles Vogl discusses these questions and introduces fundamental ideas from his book, “The Art of Community”. With wisdom distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition, Vogl will help leaders build loyalty, strengthen identity, and create meaning within their culture.

We will discuss

• 7 elements to create belonging
• How to make culture meaningful
• How to attract the right members

Many of you are familiar with a Kanban board, but it is merely a tool that's part of a method. Join Colleen as she explains how the Kanban method of work management can help you delivery software consistently.

I will teach one way to journey from a customer-focused problem statement to a defined and scoped solution definition.

By the end of the workshop, each team will have experience with:

• Identifying our customer - "Who"
• Defining a problem we want to solve for this customer - "Why"
• Describing the journey the customer will take through our solution (UI/Journey Map)
• Defining how we will enable the journey to happen (Story Map)
• Defining milestones and deliverables

Join Jen Krieger (Mile High Agile 2020 Chair) and Ronica Roth (President of the Board for Agile Denver) for an interactive session in which we envision the look and feel of next year's conference. This is your chance to influence the direction and content of Mile High Agile 2020!

We all go to conferences, attend meetups, read books, and subscribe to blogs. Everyday we hear new ideas but how many do we actually act on?

When you are thrown in the deep end of the pool and you don’t know how to swim – it can be a scary time. As a leader, it can be easy to try a radical new idea especially when you feel you have nothing to lose. But what if you have everything to lose? Fear can be paralyzing. It is the Fierce leader that ‘steps into the arena and dares to be different’.

Attend this keynote to explore how Fierce leaders can survive and thrive by letting go of everything they think they have to lose and taking a radical leap into the unknown – with or without a net!

Do you want to attract and retain the best talent – something that even the most prestigious organizations struggle with? Millennials, employees of color and women too often feel disconnected, unwelcome and even lonely inside the most high profile companies. Culture problems grow expensive and painful.

Research shows that the most productive teams share one trait – emotional safety. And yet, most managers have no idea how to create this.

In this workshop participants will learn tools to build cultures of connection, trust and safety. Each principle is distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition and can be applied to secular organizations or profit-driven companies.

This workshop introduces principles distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition to help leaders build loyalty, strengthen identity, and create meaning within their culture.

The workshop is broken into two 90 minute sections separated by a minimum 15 minute break. In each session participants will break into small groups to explore how belonging remains relevant to their own life and success.

The first session introduces fundamental ideas from Charles Vogl's book. This includes defining “community” and understanding how belonging culture is changing in America.

In the second session participants will discuss with one another about how to apply the fundamental principles to their specific cultures. Vogl will guide the group experience according to topics relevant to the day’s participants. This can include conversations about envisioning their community’s aspirations, noticing the current inspiration and commitment, and naming principles that can be used to strengthen their real world cultures.

Participants will clarify what missing principles could take their community to the next level of belonging. Leadership will leave with concrete next steps to create stronger belonging for themselves and others whom they want to bring together for enrichment.

It's inevitable, and almost unavoidable, that Professionals of all skill-sets and experience will encounter "coaching up" situations. In this session, I will review three coaching techniques that can be used in Sr Leader and "coaching up" scenarios. These techniques will provide participants with new/alternative ways to prepare for, engage, follow up, and reflect with Sr Leaders. These techniques are heavily based in the core values of openness, courage, and respect and rooted in the fundamentals of cultural and human interaction.

We prize our ability to multitask yet we rarely acknowledge the impact this has on our ability to get work done. As a team we look to process to create efficiencies but ignore one simple tool that has the ability to transform the amount, the speed, and the quality of their work: Limiting the amount of Work In Progress. In this talk I will share my stories and experiences of the power that limiting WIP has to bring a team focus, flexibility and follow through. Learn where to start, what to look for over time and how to optimize the amount of things you are working on so that you can get more done!

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

If you live in Colorado you have heard the term “14er” or have even hiked Bierstadt or Quandary, maybe climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado, Mt. Elbert and have probably heard of my unfortunate mishaps on Capitol Peak. That being said, how can you compare story sizing to Colorado 14ers? Just like stories, no two mountains are created equal. A lot goes into considering hiking a Colorado 14er, class rating, which includes exposure, distance, elevation game, skills or equipment needed and even drive time from the Front Range!

Similar to a 14er, a story point is an abstract measure of effort. In simple terms, it is a number that tells an agile team about the difficulty level of a story. Difficulty could be related to complexities, risks and efforts involved. As mentioned above, Colorado 14ers have the same difficulties related to complexities (skill needed), risks/uncertainty (exposure/class of mountain) and time/effort involved (elevation gain or distance).

Let’s bring story sizing and mountains together in a fun workshop session!

This session focuses on the five development practices that are often overlooked but are essential to iterative software development. These five practices include automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test-first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical areas are proving to be essential for sustained success with Scrum development. But many teams have not been exposed to the benefits of these practices or how to use them effectively.

In this session, we explore why these engineering practices are essential for Scrum software development and how to use them to reduce risk and build in quality at every level of the development process. We make the business case for these technical practices by showing how they address the inherent risks and challenges in building software. We then look at how these practices help mitigate the core issues of software development and help us drop the cost of maintaining and extending software in the future.

The cards are stacked against Agile teams succeeding in government. From misaligned governance, perverse incentive structures, and legal constraints, real Agile shouldn't work at all. Yet it is happening, for some teams, by pairing up private-sector product techniques with courageous public-sector domain expertise.

This talk will give a detailed look into the Federal government's 18F product team methods to support this change: mapping out a vision with stakeholders, crafting the strategy and roadmap, partner coaching, and citizen-centered design. It will show how these methods are working with state partners and pose some open challenges.

You will leave this talk appreciating what is going on behind the scenes in government and with an integrated theory for bottom-up Agile change in large organizations.

An agile coach needs to be able to do many different things that are not coaching. One of the basic skills of agile coaching is to understand when to coach and when not to coach and to know what else you might do instead.

This workshop will introduce you to a coaching stances model that includes coaching, teaching, mentoring, advising, and role modeling. We use this model to help you evaluate where you most frequently reside – as well as which stances you may be uncomfortable with.

From there, participants will use exercises to help each other build self-awareness of which stance they are in at the moment and how to move deliberately between them to use the most appropriate one for each situation.

Finally, participants will learn how to use a kata approach to gain deeper learning about coaching stances with practice.

Agile is all about change. Not only during the initial transformation, but continually as products evolve and approaches are improved. Therefore, it is important as Agile practitioners that we can lead our teams through the emotional and behavioral adjustments that are required to ensure these changes are a success.

Much like the seasons of the year, we as humans have a cycle that is experienced each time change is encountered. And as leaders, each of us has a particular style that may be more suited towards certain phases of change, and less suited for others.

Does your leadership style address all seasons? Whether you are seeding new ideas in Spring, planning in the Summer, experimenting throughout the Fall, or embedding in the Winter; it is important to understand your leadership style and how it aligns with the perspectives of the team.

Attendees of this session will be provided with a simple but powerful tool to assess their individual leadership style, how it aligns with the current 'season' of change, and what they can do to help others adapt and thrive. Through a combination of real-world experiences, illustrative analogies, and the latest findings in neuroscience; this session takes an engaging and interactive approach on how to tackle a complicated and vital subject...addressing all human needs when implementing change.

You have been hired to help lead a team just starting out with Kanban. They have been struggling with their implementation and are looking forward to your expert guidance, advice, and leadership. 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 have meaningful conversations so you can trigger improvements. The team starts assembling for their daily standup meeting and you want to provoke a thoughtful conversation once it ends.

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

This two-part interactive workshop begins with a detailed look at how to interpret Kanban boards and ask thoughtful questions so that you can improve the work of your teams. We will provide an overview of the Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of eight short exercises that will give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban board configurations with other attendees at your table. After a short break, part two of the session now puts the attendees in the driver’s seat to create their own board configurations. We provide eight business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique system constraints for each scenario.

Both exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems, give you practice interpreting and creating board configurations, and provide you with approaches for meaningful engagement. They are great for aspiring coaches, managers, and leaders who want to have more valuable conversations with their teams and improve Kanban implementations.

Please Note: we can tailor this workshop to be either 180 or 120 minutes.

The challenges of product development are not about products. They are about interpersonal relations.

The empathic component is what makes a product manager special.

In a field that values objective performance, spending your time on empathic interaction is perceived as a waste of time because is not measurable. But there is a connection between empathy and other outcomes, such as enhanced team buy-in, smoother communication and information exchange. Empathy is key to building great products. Give it to your office community, and they will love you.

Our understanding of how humans learn has grown tremendously in the last 20 years. Providing an environment in which people have room to think, and the safety to experiment and adapt is key. We will review fundamental concepts of neuroscience and how they intersect with organizational behavior. We will also review how the agile mindset takes advantage of these concepts. From there, we can begin to envision the conditions that will provide the greatest opportunity for learning and continuous improvement. Together, we will share ideas on how we can start to transform our environments into safe spaces where teams can grow and thrive.