How can executive management build customer-driven product teams?

Agile product development practices provide a pathway to realize the co-creation of desired product outcomes between customers and development teams. Quickly and frequently obtaining feedback on real products directly from customers give them a direct voice into their own value stream. However, orienting your teams and leadership to build and react to quick feedback iteratively is a significant challenge to any organization taking this on. This presentation will provide an overview of core fundamental techniques that bring customers and teams together. 

Many scrum masters will use metrics to help guide their teams. Measures such as velocity, burn downs, burn ups, cumulative flow can provide useful for planning and feedback on how a team is progressing. However metrics can do so much more, they can help the team tell their story, influence decisions beyond their immediate reach and provide creative insights on how the team works and what makes them unique.

Even those who are certain that teams should do Scrum in its entirety might give a team some flexibility on their first day. This activity will kick off a new team - that isn’t necessarily new to Scrum - with the practices that they choose to start with. Over time, you can create the environment where they see the benefit of embracing more. 

We introduce the team’s way of working with a workshop that gives a team autonomy. Instead of “eat everything on your plate”, start with the elements they already value. Rather than debating or enforcing every detail, you will know where to focus your efforts. Hold your expert card for the practices that really matter.

This activity will also give you insight into the team’s misconceptions. There are aspects of Scrum that they may not realise are included. There are also well established practices that aren’t Scrum at all. Some are useful, some are not. 

First, let’s find out what they are not intending to do. Then figure out why. Is a team avoiding practices because of unique characteristics of their work or work environment? Does the system need to change in order for this team to practice Scrum? Or have they just jettisoned the aspects that are too hard to understand? If they have tried something in the past that “didn’t work” why was that? What did success mean to them?

Are the team’s variations reasonable adaptations or do they contradict Scrum values and purpose?The Scrum Guide is really short and teams will benefit from doing everything in it. This activity will help you get there. 

The aim of this interactive session will be to challenge participants’ thinking about diversity, accessibility and inclusion and provide some practical tools and approaches to help address barriers and biases and make their teams truly inclusive. While Catherine and Brady have a particular interest in disability inclusion, the approach we will be taking you through will be equally applicable to all types of diverse teams.

Catherine and Brady are both active members of Telstra's Employee Representative Group, Telstrability, as well as having experience as coaches and in the accessibility field.  

Teams who roll into Sprint Plannning with a whole bunch of unshaped work set themselves up for pain - but how can you create a relaxed funnel of preparation ahead of the sprint without falling into the trap of waterfalling it? Join this session to discuss common techniques that might help!

The Scrum Master and Product Owner roles (along with the developers) are well understood and described in the Scrum Guide. As organisations begin to mature and scale, a lot of anti patterns start to emerge with these roles, as well as adding traditional roles (such as change, release and project management) and additional agile roles (such as Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer). Given the simplicity of the three roles in the Scrum Guide for a single team versus the challenges of scaling, do we need to take another look at the key roles to help solve the confusion that so many organisations continue to face?

Join us as we ponder the question of whether we have outgrown the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner or whether we just need more clarity on what these roles actually mean in the context of true business agility. 

Facilitation is both an Art and a Science. The Science is the logical preparation and delivery, with the Art being how you navigate and adapt that delivery to the participants in the moment.  Sam will share his ten simple steps from his 20 years of facilitation experience on how to prepare for and deliver a memorable facilitation experience. Expect an interactive, fun session that we set you up for success working both virtually and face to face

Over several quarters I asked hundreds of developers three simple questions about their product owners.

1. Would you recommend them to another team?
2. What's one thing they are doing well?
3. What's one thing they could do better?

With thousands of qualitative and quantitative responses I have data that shows what scrum teams most want from their product owners. 

Coaching and scrumming across cultures can present both challenges and opportunities. Trust in a Scrum Team binds together the three pillars of Scrum:  Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation (ref: What is Scrum? | Scrum.org). Being integral to Scrum, trust helps the scrum values of Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness to thrive. How often do you think about how culture and trust intersect?  "Trust is important because it is the foundation around how human relationships revolve" (Build trust with Scrum | Scrum.org) and it is built on experience gained ie empiricism. 

The aim of this session is to explore, when working in distributed and hybrid multicultural teams, across different geographies and time zones, how can you ensure trust continues to be built by understanding culture.

• How do you know what is building and what is eroding team trust?
• How often do you ask the team what cultural differences can build team understanding?

Drawing on feedback, from Australian and Indian-based coaches and scrum leads, we will share experiences and thoughts on how we can improve our scrum practices when working with hybrid teams.  Team retrospectives, sprint planning, and stand-ups all provide opportunities to continue to build team connections by better understanding the people and places where we work 

As a result of a collaborative learning pod, based on Lyssa Adkin’s “Coaching Agile Teams”, we became aware that team conflict and a breakdown of trust may come from a lack of cultural understanding.  As a result of this, we conducted a survey with coaches and scrum leads to gain insights.  

We will show how scrum events can be improved by continually building trust and connection by understanding each other’s culture more.