This talk is about how I, as a Product Owner, can supercharge any scrum team by providing them with purpose. I'll talk about the tools and techniques I've learnt through experience and how you can use them to boost your teams performance.

As a product consultant I've had the privilege to work with over 50+ companies. Through my work I've observed teams at all levels and learnt the traits that separate the good from the best.

A strong culture enables the team to perform. Creating a culture of enablement means playing as a team. With transparency, trust and purpose. I'll talk about how to create a strong culture within the team with these these points:

* Vision & Purpose: Understanding not just where to play but how to win, is critical. 
* Trust & Psychological Safety: Nobody should fear getting involved, having a voice or an opinion and expressing disagreement.
* Accountability: In order to perform as a single cohesive unit, individuals must be diligent and disciplined in the role they play and its responsibilities.
* Co-creation: There are many ways to solve a problem, the best way is together.
* Celebrations: A motivated scrum team and the value of reward and recognition.

I'll be talking about the importance of storytelling, problem framing, crafting a compelling vision and prioritising techniques that take into account both business and customer value.

With this talk you'll learn 5 key ways to supercharge any scrum team through purpose:

1. Create alignment through vision and strategy.
2. Ensure a culture of psychological safety. Trust to empower teams.
3. Co-create and build together as one team.
4. Drive accountability and diligence in work.
5. Celebrate outputs and outcomes.

We all dream of that utopian sprint goal. You know the one that is focussed on customer impact, shippable at the end of the increment, and created collaboratively with the team?

In this workshop, I'll share with you my approach to collaboratively crafting killer sprint goals with your teams, and provide you with my canvas to facilitate it.

No matter where your team is on the maturity scale, this workshop will show you how to continuously improve your sprint goals, keep your team focussed on the customer, and measure that improvement over time.

A fundamental and critical skill for any agile coach or leader is the pursuit of the fine art of "Zero F***s Given" ZFG. In contrast to how ZFG is often described on the interwebs, ZFG does not mean "I don't care"! ZFG is a mindset that embraces a myriad of concepts: fear, empathy, objectivity, neutrality, bias, drama, emotional intelligence, and more! Understanding the philosophy of ZFG will empower you to embrace this powerful skill so that you can become a more effective agile coach and leader. 

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.  

Can you remember the last time you were courageous? Was it at work?

How are you as a servant leader, helping your teams to have conversations that matters, promote the flow of ideas and spark innovation?

In this workshop we will:
- Explore what courage is all about and why it's a core value in the Scrum Guide
- Learn pro tips that you can use straight away in your teams and conversations
- Get a chance to practice using Celebration Grid (https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/) to facilitate a courageous conversation

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. 

The number of organisations adopting agile continues to accelerate - with agile being the 'default delivery method' for teams in many organisations. However what is less clear is why so few organisations have managed to scale beyond agile delivery into agile organisations. Unfortunately scaling beyond 'delivery' is critical to realise the benefits from scaling agile. Through this interactive conversation, hear some of the key lessons learned as we took agile from a teams through to thousands of people and teams. Join us as we explore the constraints, challenges and ideas that inhibit us moving agile beyond the teams of teams to organisations.

Do you start initiatives in a complex domain by attempting to answer “what are we going to deliver and when”? Do internal stakeholders negotiate a scope and date agreement with development and then expected teams to keep “on track” to deliver the agreed deliverables by the agreed date? Do developers cut corners in order to achieve this?

In this session we will explore how the scope and date-based “Contract Game” is misaligned with Agile as well as Scrum. Also how game theory can help us raise awareness how this competitive game results in many negative outcomes – most of which are opaque to stakeholders – when reality does not go to plan (inevitable in a complex domain).

We will also outline how to lead your organisation to the co-operative game aligned with Agile methods. This includes short experience summaries on organisations who have done this.

You can expect to walk away with new language and a practical Scrum-based approach for eliminating the Contract Game so that empiricism and agility can thrive.

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. 

It's a cautionary tale of fear and lust and pride
Based on actual events where people died (no one died)

- Mean Girls (the Musical)

Many of our industry leaders talk and write about the "passion" of product, from Jeff Patton to Marty Cagan, but how much is too much?

In this presentation we'll learn about the challenges of passionate people in work, and life, and how Product Owners can (and should!) harness that energy for good with product evangelism.

Traversing theory with story-telling & memes, the session will then culminate with an exercise to bring out your inner evangelist.

The covid pandemic has arguably been the most significant global crisis of our time, and continues to affect lives and livelihoods all around the world today.

Through this we hired teams, we learnt how to work remotely, we lost loved ones, and we struggled with those early phases of team bonding that we had in person before. For those of us working with customers who were acutely impacted, we built products like never before.

We ran marathons, like sprints.

Under this pressure and out of necessity, we had to change. Then something magical happened.

With a mix of theory and story-telling, and a healthy smattering of memes, in this session you’ll discover how through the Scrum framework you can:

• move from ‘creating certainty’ to ‘creating comfort with uncertainty’ as a PO
• design a product without a designer
• enable your team to prioritise and manage priorities, in the absence of a PO
• get right back to basics in a complex, enterprise environment for the good of the team
• reduce feedback loops with customers
• build awesome products with the team, and the customer, front and centre

Sometimes team members are very focused on their point of view. And you might struggle to communicate the bigger picture.

Good communication starts with building connections. How do you leverage small talk to build authentic relationships? 

Regardless of how you communicate, establishing protocols is important to make the most out of the time you are spending together. 

But, even with the best of intentions, bad communication habits creep up over time. Managing them while having a conversation is a crucial skill to learn.

So, do you feel you are sometimes on a different wavelength with your team? As if you are listening to many radio stations all at the same time! Join us in our interactive presentation to learn a few tips and tricks on communicating in a hybrid world.

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.