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

This session is not only for current and aspiring Scrum Masters but also for People Managers, Development Team Members, Product Owners, Project Managers, and Leaders.

The Scrum Guide defines what is expected of a Scrum Master. When you read it, I bet you react like "that's a piece of cake!" But when you actually do it, many of us come to a realization that it's really, really hard. (That's what happened to me!) The Scrum Master job is hard because much of it has to do with humans, one of the most complex beings in the universe. Humans are intelligent; humans have emotions; and humans are unpredictable. Just going through the motions does not cut it. Even if you approach with the best of your intention, matters could backfire on you anytime. Borrowing "You might be a redneck if..." from a comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, Tomo will present behaviors of a great Scrum Master and those of a "not so good" Scrum Master. Then, he will take you through why the great Scrum Master's behaviors make her great and how they contribute to building a high performing team and helping the organization be more effective and productive. Finally, he will share tips and tricks that help Scrum Masters grow into greatness (for example, powerful questions, 3 levels of listening, facilitation tools & techniques, etc.)!

This session will give current and aspiring Scrum Masters what to focus on for career development and people in other roles a concrete idea on what qualities to look for in a Scrum Master.

There will be a handout for participants to take home with.

How do you prioritize complete randomness from every angle against the work that is mission critical? How do you keep your developers engaged while slogging through the worst maintenance project they have ever seen, while also helping them work on their passion projects? How do you get the fun stuff done while you work on the opposite, all while having the most impact for the team, the business, and your customers?

As a product manager, it is important to be able to find ways through the craziness, the passion, and the demands in order to make sure you are working on the right things at the right time. In my career, I have been asked to balance wild ideas, an open source community, required work, developer burnout, all while keeping a product backlog moving forward properly. I will talk about how I bring order to chaos using a framework called RICE and how you can apply this to the simplest or the most intense backlog using real world situations. I will also talk about how I have modified this framework to fit the real world, you know with deadlines and things.

As a career software tester, I’ve heard rumors DevOps culture will put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. I’m new to DevOps, but aren’t we all? What matters most is our teams’ intentional decisions to grow our DevOps practices along with our development community.

Join me as I share my experiences blending disciplines, companies, levels of experience, and differing expectations as a member of efficient and effective delivery teams. I’ll describe common cultural and interpersonal problems I experienced while transforming a cross-functional agile team dogfooding a DevOps implementation.

Whether you’re into development, operations, testing, customer support, or product ownership, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for improving your DevOps working relationships to keep the technology running smoothly. People factors strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes, so optimizing your flow includes improving your people practices.

Don’t feel afraid to ask about DevOps anymore!

This activity-based workshop will give you an understanding of what Mindfulness is and how it can be used in the workplace. In addition, you will learn how more than half of the 12 Agile Principles directly relate to Mindfulness. This workshop is for you if you've ever thought that some doors can only be opened from the inside.

One of the foundational principles of the Agile Manifesto is that the best solutions “emerge from self-organizing teams,” yet most of us are still locked in hierarchical organizational structures better suited for the factory floors where they originated. What should become of the role of people manager in the age of digital transformation?

In this session, we'll explore different ways that managers can become the catalysts that their teams need, as well as some things Agile practitioners can do to cultivate these important behaviors in the teams they work with. Come ready to learn practical tips for how to navigate the tricky space between ensuring that business needs are met and that the individuals on your team reach their full potential.

Lean UX as a discipline needs specific considerations at each stage of agile product development. Value streams need design standards to ensure UX governance and consistency are aligned throughout a product and product suite. Teams and programs need to decrease lead times and bottlenecks while implementing consistent experiences and simultaneously exploring options within design sets and testing outcomes. This consistency is achieved from the work of a Lean UX Center of Excellence (LUXCE) focusing on governance and empowerment through backlog enablers to build, refine, and validate the product vision through rapid experimentation cycles.

This session will introduce how to establish a LUXCE to inform UX enablers, address UX debt, inform how set-based design decisions can be made at the last responsible moment using the UX Runway concept, and share how programs and teams can best utilize Lean UX experts to further their product vision, program planning, and execution with assistance from the LUXCE's guidance. By making UX a consistent and key part of teams, product and architecture, a consistent and more usable product emerges!

Agile transformations have been key for speeding up software development via agile "projects". With projects, development is still often segregated from the business and work is often prioritized based on making the project successful and not what can bring the most value to the business and end users. A new approach is needed. During this session, Wendy Flowers will discuss why the gap between modern technical practices and the business is causing organizations to fail and how managing work via product and not projects will optimize value creation across the entire organization.

Creating a sustainable transformation means more than most companies think. In this talk, we’ll review real-world examples and case studies of common transformation pitfalls, how to avoid them, and - most importantly - how to overcome them to get the treasure at the end, just like Pitfall Harry.

Creating a sustainable agile transformation is possible for every organization and company, but there are many pitfalls and obstacles. Some are obvious (not getting the right people to lead it) and some aren’t (does your performance review system support agile?). What matters is knowing what some of those pitfalls are, how to identify when you’ve come across one, and what you need to do to avoid or overcome it.

In my years of supporting and leading transformations, I’ve pretty much seen it all. From a VP of IT who wants to know “when we’ll be done with this agile thing” to a manager who still tries telling teams what to work on daily to executives who think that it’s just everyone else who needs to change. But it’s not just about seeing these problems - it’s about knowing how to mitigate or overcome them. How do you convince that executive that they’re going to have to make changes to support a sustainable transformation? How do you convince that manager to stop telling his people what to do? And how do you help that VP of IT understand that we won’t be “done” with agile - that this is the new way of working?

Getting started can seem overwhelming, but there is hope! Join us as we explore how teams have made the shift within their organization to prioritize inclusion and diversity from the ground up. Human Inclusive’s Lia James and Christopher Guest will moderate an interactive discussion with Mo Abdullah, Founder of Culture Energized, Natalie Bonifede D&I at Pivotal, Lauren Burgess, Founder and CEO of Garden, Inc and Dirt Coffee Bar. We will learn how they have shifted team culture to implement inclusive, belonging, and diversity initiatives. We will explore how they’ve made changes, what they've learned, and how others can make a similar impact on their own teams. Together we will learn:

• How they got started and keep their teams accountable
• What were their biggest challenges and hard-to-learn lessons
• How to approach team dynamics differently to empower diversity to thrive
• Best practices for getting everyone on board and start the process

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!

Over the years, we've talked quite a bit about how to become a craftsman, exploring deeply how to progress from Apprentice to Master. What is often missing is any detail beyond the general thoughts that this is a Good Idea. Steve will share an approach, based on his experience of many years and many development organizations, to learning and career development for your team. This approach goes beyond the general ideas around Craftsmanship, but provides actual concrete areas of development. Unlike a formalized "skills checklist" we will apply a pattern language to help identify a continuum of growth for anyone's long term development.

We will discuss building understanding and building skills in the following areas:

Codecraft
Professional Skills
Process and Technical Ecosystems
Workflows
Tools

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!

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.

What is the IT guy doing in the Marketing Department and what does Agile have to do with marketing strategy? Originally proposed as a simple Kanban roll out, the effort to bring Agility into a Marketing Strategy team became the start of transformational effort to define value streams, push through organizational boundaries, implemented CI/CD pipelines for Marketing Products, and bring an Agile Mindset to a team at the nexus of multiple value streams and central to the transformation of a revolutionary view of client experience.

This talk focuses on the application of Agile/Lean foundations in a Marketing Organization to unlock hidden potential, detailing how the foundations of an Agile transformation in technical delivery teams -- team Agility, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) -- are integral to Marketing Products in a digital media age. Critical to success is the definition of value streams in order to re-align teams from functional organizations to the flow of continuous customer value.

Beyond Marketing, Agile professionals can apply the lessons learned from this coaching engagement to any enterprise services team concurrently supporting multiple lines of business through multiple business channels: HR, Legal, Finance, etc.

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.

Your Organization is Agile…YAY! You are working in a prescribed framework (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)…YAY! You are a part of a Dynamic team…YAY! You are all set and running as a defined High Performing team…NO! So, what is in the way? I can help answer that, it isn't just a team problem.

Through my experience in Agile environments, organizations check all the boxes for implementing agile, but forget the most important which are the behaviors. Over the years, I have started to focus on the behaviors needed in an agile environment. In this session you will look at what gets you excited? What makes you frustrated? What motivates you? How are you showing up? Are you owning your day or renting it? And why reflecting on these matters!

I will provide tools that we will use to identify personal behaviors and statements that you will be able to use not only within your profession, your team, your organization, but also in your daily life outside of the office.

Are you ready to show up to be your best?

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.

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!

We all know that features in a backlog should be prioritized, as should projects in a portfolio, but how can we optimize the ordering to get the best outcome? In this session you’ll learn about and compare seven different techniques, from basic to advanced, for setting priorities: multi-voting, risk analysis, business value game, ROI, Buy a Feature, Cost of Delay profiles, and Weighted Shortest Job First. Participants will work in small groups to practice a few of the techniques on a hypothetical application.

When not uncovered and resolved, impediments can do harm to an otherwise well run project in ways that are often subtle and easy to miss. If impediments undermine the success of our teams, then we as project managers, leaders, and stakeholders should all be very passionate about removing impediments. In order to accomplish this we need to do three things: we need to give impediments the proper attention, we need to become experts at uncovering them, and we need to integrate them into the process of continuous improvement within the team.

In this session Tom makes a passionate appeal for the importance of the lowly impediment - often ignored, but never missed.

Let’s be honest. Distributed Agile teams are here to stay, but not without considerable stumbling blocks. It’s easy to lose focus or feel disconnected, misunderstood or disengaged due to language barriers, limited time overlap and communication mishaps. For new teams, it’s even more challenging establishing relationships, since we lack face to face interaction.

This talk focuses on shifting a distributed team from stunted to high performing despite language / cultural / time zone differences, misunderstanding of Scrum, and the "us" vs. "them” mentality (all bothersome moles we will whack).

Using a true case study, we’ll journey through the challenges of relationship building, the anti-agile mindset, lack of focus, and lifeless ceremonies. You will walk away from this presentation with a toolbox full of proven, creative, and innovative ideas for successfully overcoming these obstacles.

Every team’s goal is to deliver business value faster, the question is how do you do that? Using continuous integration (CI) and deployment techniques a team can increase velocity, improve transparency, and reduce risks. During this session, you will also learn the differences between CI/CD for applications development and data focused teams. Working with databases and especially data warehouses can be challenging, but there are simple techniques to help alleviate the pain.

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.

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.

Do you love speaking? If so, this session is probably not for you! If the thought of speaking or presenting makes you feel uncomfortable (or maybe even a little sick ...), then this session is for you! You will learn somatic techniques for managing fear and anxiety. You will also learn some simple strategies for organizing your content so it is easier to present.

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 CHALLENGE: Every year we may attend numerous presentations and meetings - filled with the typical dense and disorganized Power Point decks. We may leave that session thinking: "there's an hour of my life I’ll never get back."

For years I've worked with IT and HR leaders and project managers to improve their presentations. A key part of their job is to influence key decision makers - but more often than not we just don't know how to design a compelling presentation. We overwhelm our audience with too much information and we ignore what brain science teaches us. The result: too much random information delivered in a confusing way. So, our presentations fail to influence our audience and get us the results we want.

THE SOLUTION: Then, when we least expect it, we hear a presentation that rises above the noise. One that persuades us to take action. What makes that one so compelling?

Science shows that our brains work beautifully when we can focus on a few key ideas. So, what do good presenters do? We powerfully land a small number of BIG ideas. I will teach participants how to follow this simple and powerful method using the PRESENTATION PYRAMID.

Product development is very much dominated by the idea of thinking forward. What are we doing next? What does next year's product roadmap look like? How many features are we launching in Q4? All good, valid questions for any software company.

However, this idea of always looking towards the "next thing" leaves little time for reflection during the product planning and development process and can often lead to products failing to reach their full potential.

By design, the 3 Panel Feature Evaluation is a super simple framework designed to help provide teams the ability to look at the feature area in question in three ways: before improvement, during improvement and post improvement. This 3 panel flow is designed to make sure that the user remains front and center during the planning and development process with an eye towards the pre and post experience that so often gets lost during development.

What can you learn about professional success from Chris Rock, Joan Rivers, and Charlie Chaplin? Just ask a behavioral scientist who teaches MBAs by day and decodes comedy by night.

Dr. Peter McGraw—a business school professor, co-author of The Humor Code, and founder of the Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL)—translates the perspectives and practices of the world’s funniest people into powerful prescriptions for professional success.

Drawing on real-world case studies from his global travels to crack the humor code, cutting-edge behavioral economics research, and his own comedy successes (and failures), McGraw reveals how the perspectives and practices of stand-ups, improvisers, writers, directors, clowns, and other comedy misfits can help you live a more successful professional life.

And you will never have to tell a joke.

McGraw pulls back the curtain on the craft of comedy to give you a glimpse into a mysterious world that will surprise you. Lessons include:

• How a simple “101” comedy trick can help you overcome biases, improve your brand, and identify new business opportunities.
• Why Nike and other innovative brands are behaving like Sarah Silverman, Andy Kaufman, and Joan Rivers in order to stand apart from the competition.
• How the habits of Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and other great comedy writers can be used to improve productivity—and well-being.
• What Bill Murray’s 1-800 number illustrates about how saying “no” can be more important than saying “yes.”
• And why $50 is not too much to pay for a notebook…if you actually write in it.

Have you found new team members take months getting up to speed with the rest of the team? Do you wonder about their engagement and happiness in a new place of work?

Many agile organizations struggle with these questions. Perhaps we’re still getting people off on the wrong foot with some details of our hiring and onboarding practices. These often overlooked, easily forgotten practices have a big impact on engagement and culture. Your hiring process can catalyze excitement for the company mission. Agile-appropriate onboarding quickly harmonizes the team and quickly returns them to productivity.

This talk for team members, managers, and change agents examines the positive impact hiring and onboarding practices can have on agile transformation. Using real world examples from successful agile companies, the session shares a mixture of new principles and practices audience members can experiment with. Additionally, the content is wrapped in systems thinking to increase knowledge for organizational change.

There are many leadership frameworks that one might use to help with growth in leadership skills, approaches, and methods. As you begin to review various frameworks, there emerge similarities that when exposed can provide further insight into your own learning. This session explores several of these frameworks, 'mashing them up' into a cohesive bigger picture. Explore MindSET to MindSIGHT to MindFULNESS!

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!

Too much design up front and you are bumping into the design all of the time (and losing time). Not enough design and your system can crumble in reality. How do you blend architecture so you have the right decisions at the right time, and give them enough due dilligence? How do you embrace cloud and microservices and not risk getting into different failure scenarios or overly complicated maintenance and ripple effects?

In this session we will walk through visualizations that help teams blend product thinking with architecture. Along the way, we will look at microservices and domain modeling as well as chaos engineering and fault tolerance - blending all of these into a context that is consumable by all and gives the right emphasis at the right time.

Leave this session with simple visualizations and approaches that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture, especially if you are looking to run in a cloud world.

Getting leaders to adopt an Agile Mindset doesn’t happen by sending them to training. It won't happen simply because they approved the funding to do a transformation. Many leaders need your experience and appreciation for how Agile works differently than what they may have seen in the past. Helping them build, own and progress through a backlog of system wide challenges is key to their success and the success of the teams. We will walk through some examples, create backlog items of your own and create an actionable plan to take back to our office during this workshop style session.

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.

Often the landscape of exploration and freedom is reserved for "greenfield". So much so, that we refer to established markets as "brownfield". What happened? When did the grass die out? At what point did the fruited plains become a wasteland of Mad Max resource clawing? Probably when your organization stopped engaging in novel ways to explore continuous product improvement- or worse!- segmented out an entire division that gets to go do "cool things".

If constraints create creative solutions and your product is already a necessity, our challenge is to forget everything we know about how the products we build got to their current state but instead continuously reevaluate their fit. This action is harder done than said. Where do you start?

Changing legacy products is hard, transforming them is even harder. Over the last two years, we set out to do just this and we would love to share what we learned about this process, the skills you will need, and the challenge of repetition, failure, and human dynamics in uprooting.

Learn how a tenacious group of humans attempted to let go of everything that had gotten them to success until that point and rather than bury their heads in the sand- wrapped their arms around reality.

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

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

You’ve worked with the meeting leader, designed a great purpose and agenda, and invited all the right people. Then the meeting goes sideways. Someone comes in angry and drops a bombshell that has everyone fighting. A team clearly has a second agenda but won’t be honest about what they want and need. A leader came in angry and threatening and now nobody will say what needs to be said. You’re trying to help the group make a decision, but they are off on tangents and going down ratholes with no end in sight.

When meetings get challenging, standard facilitation techniques won’t cut it. It’s time to pull out the stops and apply some advanced techniques to create a safe, action-oriented space to help get your meeting attendees where they need to be.

Building the right thing and building it quickly! How about building it the right way?

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Dan Salomon

Is your delivery team delivering Spaghetti code, all complex and tangled up? Want them out of bed on a Monday and working on Lasagna code, all structured, well defined and layered?

Starting out introducing Agile engineering practices is difficult. What is it? Where do you go? How do you start?

In this session Agile Engineering practices, concepts and philosophies will be introduced. Through structured exercises, attendees will demonstrate the following agile engineering practices:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Pair Programming
• Continuous Integration
• Refactoring

Through this highly interactive hand on workshop, you will learn the concepts and develop an understanding of Agile engineering practices in a playful way without touching a single piece of code.

Target Audience: Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Executives, Managers, Agile Leaders and Scrum Teams.

There are leadership workshops, peer reviewed literature and TED talks abound recommending that knowing your WHY will make you more successful. It’s in our DNA that we work better, live better, love better when we understand our why.

In this workshop, you will learn what it is about understanding your Why that makes the difference in your Agile journey and then begin your journey to find your Agile WHY.

EventStorming enables a team struggling with understanding and exploring a complex business problem to model that problem collaboratively in hours instead of weeks. In this talk you’ll learn how this technique quickly generates shared understanding and insights into how the software can, and should, support the business capability being explored.

In EventStorming, development team members and business people gather in a room and together they create a visual map of the flow of events - important things that happen - through concrete business examples. They use sticky notes to map out a story of how the software system behaves, or should behave, given a particular business problem to solve. This session will teach you the rules of EventStorming and how it can help your team cultivate shared understanding and be more productive.

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.

You recently completed a two-day training, and you are now a Certified ScrumMaster. There's only one problem: what do you actually do next? Or maybe you feel like your team's adoption of Scrum is sluggish and somewhat ineffective. How do you breathe new life into your practices?

Part of the genius of the Agile Manifesto is that it doesn't tell you exactly what to do. It gives you a resilient foundation of values and principles that is grounded in discovered truths, and then lets you figure out how to apply it. Scrum describes process a bit more, but still leaves a lot of open questions. Again, this room to adapt is incredibly powerful. However, at the outset it can be quite daunting. Even after going through Certified ScrumMaster training, new practitioners may be a little lost as to what exactly to do next.

Over the years, I've built up a set of simple, concrete practices that I use both to get teams started and to help existing teams that are having trouble. Recently, I helped three teams get up to speed in quick succession. I wrote down these practices as a playbook. While I look forward to the day when these teams grow beyond my playbook and throw it in the trash, I have seen great results from starting with a small set of concrete practices. Come to this session and walk out with simple, specific things you can do to get your team flying.

This fast-paced and energizing post-lunch session looks at six team-based improv & collaboration games that help teams embrace "failing successfully." Rather than glorify failure, we should understand that its power is not in failing alone, but rather the learning that emerges from it and the power that such learning has to unlock otherwise unforeseen opportunities. Our goal is to relinquish our fears of failure, break us out of our comfort zone and accept the prospect of failure with the ultimate goal of using it to better understand what success looks like, and how the struggle and pain of failure, and the learning that accompanies it, opens our mind to new possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise seen. These games create comfort with failure and build up our actionable learning muscle (insight synthesis, etc) that should accompany every unsuccessful attempt at success. Failure and learning for the win!

Quarterly Planning is an important ceremony for many agile groups since it helps creates alignment within a team and organization by creating short term targets for everyone to rally around. This ceremony can be especially important when you have many teams working towards the same objectives since it requires coordinating schedules and creating goals within each team that drive toward the same mission. As product owners and managers, it is our responsibility to bring the customers’ perspective into planning events to ensure that the right work is being prioritized. But gaining alignment and helping our teams develop and execute these plans can be challenging, which means we have a lot of work to do in pre-planning and during planning events to help make things successful. In this talk, we will be covering the key activities around PI Planning plus some of the best lessons we’ve learned from coordinating actions around risks and dependencies to facilitating prioritization conversations to communicating how team goals contribute to business objectives.

A common question - "How do we even begin to change our traditional waterfall approach to Agile?" – may invoke responses such as, "we just need training", "create self-organizing teams", "setup a transition team", “SAFe”, etc. But those don’t get to the heart of the question. We need to get leaders to understand the “Why” and the "How" in order to help insure a successful transition and provide the proper support for their teams.

This session directly answers both the “Why?” and "How?" questions, by focusing on 2 key concepts and concrete practices, that leaders/managers need to learn and apply.

To do this, we start by helping them understand the context for agility and equipping them with new "agile glasses" that change the way they see and think about Agile. We equip them with 2 new "lenses" through which they can:

1. Visualize the problem domain(s) that exist in their environment and understand the relative level of complexity and uncertainty represented in their projects or product delivery efforts, using the Cynefin framework and VUCA modeling. Understanding these can help to provide better context for decision-making and mitigate the risk of taking a "one size fits all" approach to product or project delivery.
2. Visualize a multi-dimensional planning model, often referred to as the "5 Levels of Planning", that breaks the pattern of big up-front planning and wasteful change control processes, common to waterfall, by reinforcing the practice of continuous planning. This centers on getting them comfortable with key techniques associated with an adaptive approach, rather than a predictive approach to planning.

Many leaders view Agile as simply something that their teams need to learn and/or something that training alone will solve. The reality is that most agile initiatives fail due to a lack of leadership engagement (connection) because leaders aren't given the knowledge or tools to help them adapt.

If this describes you or your managers/leaders, then this session will help answer the question of “how do we get started…?”

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.

Implementing a product roadmap in an Agile way can be tough. Roadmaps are often written as a document that isn’t easily accessible. This leads to a variety of issues. A good agile roadmap should allow for agile practices such as daily standups and planning. They should create high visibility and transparency, operate with low overhead, and provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

In this talk, Chris will share how he’s implemented a Roadmap Wall. He’ll show how to incorporate the roadmap components into a highly visible and actionable format. The roadmap wall has multiple benefits and will:

• give leadership and executives visibility into how their business objectives influence features, story backlogs, and priorities
• leverage delivery teams to understand technical feasibility tradeoffs
• show the options available to satisfy competing customer needs
• demonstrate a clear picture of how business objectives link to customer needs
• provide near real-time information for decision making

To realize these benefits, we’ll leverage a variety of familiar tools. Chris will show you how to use a kanban system to manage business objectives and OKRs. You’ll learn how using an opportunity solution tree clarifies the customer’s need when roadmapping. He’ll show you a new way to use story maps when detailing features, improving communication and planning.

In the end, you’ll walk away with a new method for visualizing your product roadmap, giving your team better decision-making information.

You have created a story map with your business partners and defined an MVP. Your development team has started discussing architecture and how the system might evolve. You define spikes to answer some questions and validate your assumptions. How long does it take to build the walking skeleton and validate your spikes? Is your system designed to be able to give you the answers you need to see if the desired outcome has been attained? Are the models used to build the solution space useful? Is the resulting architecture effective? Does it bend?

This talk, targeted at all development team members, will provide methods for creating rapid prototypes of even complex systems to explore how useful the models are and how effective your architecture is. We will show how to use Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), templates, and code generation to rapidly create prototypes and test systems to enable accelerated learning.

Psychological safety. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson first coined the term in her research on the effectiveness of teams. And from Google’s re:Work research into what makes their supercharged teams truly stand apart, it turns out on that “Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact and structure their work.” Creating highly effective teams is a hallmark of agile teams, and we’re hearing more and more about how teams that truly trust each other and feel safe to take risks together go on to become high performers we all want to work with.

But creating safe teams takes more than just being able to tell people about psychological safety. What are the next steps? What can you actually DO to create team safety?

This talk will introduce the topic of psychological safety and walk through three exercises that anyone can take away to build team cohesion and trust. We’ll also cover one bonus tracking technique for monitoring team health over time. Attendees will walk away with actionable tips and techniques they can use with any team, whether agile or not.

The rules of this game have certainly changed! Studies indicate that by the year 2030, half of jobs will be ones that don’t exist today and half the jobs of today will no longer exist. The volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity ushered in by our current Age of Acceleration extends not just to our environment, politics, and communities; but to our organizations as well. In response, organizations are undergoing a massive transformation in technology, structure, culture, and values—fundamentally changing not only what we work on, but how we work, and who we work with.

Where does this leave our careers? If answering the question, ‘Where do you see yourself five years from now?’ leaves you feeling stuck, uncertain, confused, and/or anxious, you are not alone.

Join us for “Career Paths in the Age of Acceleration”. In this interactive session, a look back at your career and look ahead at organizational and cultural trends, and new and emerging roles will build the awareness and confidence for you to take control of the wheel. Design your north star to navigate a fulfilling career aligned to the future of work and guided by your Ikigai (reason for being).

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.

Conflict is inherent in human interactions. How we manage this determines how well we work together to create mutually beneficial outcomes. Agile, by its very nature uncovers differences in approaches to solving problems. As a result it provides many opportunities to practice conflict management and dispute resolution skills. Teams and team members who do not mange conflict effectively are far more likely to be less successful. Understanding the nature of conflict and how it can be approached and managed can make individuals and teams more effective. The benefits include better communication, more dynamic and interesting work environment, more and better ideas, increased confidence in the team members and the team as a whole.

Stop building stuff people don't want! Develop empathy for your customer and delight them with a high value product they love. Let go of assumptions that lower the value of the product you deliver. Leave this workshop with a framework that you can go and implement TOMORROW!

We will use the Stanford d.school's Wallet Project to teach you design thinking concepts through a fast-paced exercise where you will take a product though a full design cycle. Build empathy, ideate, & move to action by building a prototype. Get feedback by testing your solution and ultimately create a product that is useful and meaningful to your partner!

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.

Your strategy (that unfortunately no one reads or remembers) is killing agility in your business.

When no one understands or remembers your strategy, people in your organization don’t make decisions that serve that strategy. When you have too many pieces or projects to your strategy, people prioritize the pieces they like, and forget the rest. Unfortunately, we are describing most of the strategies we see, regardless of company or program size, from local startups to Fortune 50. In this session we’ll leverage a simple strategy framework to practice articulating a strategy that is memorable, succinct and provides the clarity needed to create real alignment and business success.

We need to rethink how we educate our students. Most students are not prepared for the demands of the 21st century workplace. While they may have some technical knowledge, they lack the soft skills (communication, collaboration, and creativity) to hit the ground running in a team environment. This presentation will demonstrate how a group of students used Scrum to manage and prepare their academic research papers, multi-media presentations, and the lessons they learned along the way.

Many Agile testers feel like we never have enough time to fully test in a given sprint, cycle or other timeframe. We plan for the best case scenario, but, undoubtedly, something happens with our best-laid plans that cause us to feel like we "just didn't test enough." In this session, we will talk about the five areas that may be causing inefficiencies in your overall approach - to include test planning and duplication of testing to the left of QE. Melissa will discuss these five areas and you'll have a chance to share yours with the outcome to be practical solutions that can be implemented quickly. Once we have the plan to reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies, we'll talk about areas you may be able to spend more time in or add to your overall testing strategy – effectively adding more time to do what you do best!

Most organizations want to build cohesive, aligned teams who remain engaged over time and in turn, deliver excellent results for the organization. Unfortunately, many are still buying ping pong tables and beer coolers as an attempt to develop cohesion among their workforce. What science tells us is that true team cohesion is derived from alignment, shared values and the right blend of personalities and skills.

As experts in psychology and organizational culture, we use scientifically validated tools to assess culture, personality and team dynamics. Assessment is the first step. Taking action to (re)build your team is next and unfortunately, often mishandled. Join us to learn how teams can align and define themselves, as well as select for fit.

Facilitating distributed team meetings can feel like having one arm tied behind your back and one eye covered, but you can free yourself of these virtual constraints using other agile practices. We struggle with meeting tools and keeping people engaged online, but what if we collaborate with our teams to get the most value out of their meetings? If we leverage pairing, mobbing and other practices, we can co-facilitate successful outcomes with our teams.

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!