We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. The easiest way to have a two-way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful conversation. They are usually thought-provoking and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful Questions, if asked in the right tone and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say! Don't you agree?

Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.

As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.

Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

Everything we do carries some amount of risk, from getting out of the bed in the morning to skydiving. Even writing software is risky! How do we handle those risks? Are common approaches to risk management still applicable in the Agile world?

If you've ever struggled with how to handle risk on an Agile program then come join us to see why our brains make is react in a mostly risk adverse way, what we can do about it, and how Agile specifically addresses many aspects of software risk. Also, we will look at how an Agile program can live in harmony with enterprise risk departments.

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that they are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?

Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.

In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.

Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.

Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.

Are you the one who is aspiring to achieve success in your career? Are you the one who is trying to change the role or want to have a promotion? Are you too busy to be a successful professional? So, you have two options in life: strive to achieve your dreams, or keep dreaming. This session is for those people who strive to achieve their dreams.

For a while, Industry is improving as per market standards so as the employees working in those corporates. People focus a lot on their technical skills and assume this is the means for further development and growth. That is true but not the only way to achieve success.

Personal development is not only about improving technical skills but also soft skills. At the same time become a better person, team player, and a leader. You can achieve great success if you have self-awareness of how you are performing.

Self-awareness works at different levels: emotional, tactical and edge behaviors. Let’s explore together different techniques that will help you to achieve your goals.

You’re a project manager and you’ve just been given an Agile project to look after. You ask for reports and you get burndown charts, velocity graphs, and cumulative flow diagrams. What in the world are these, and why do you suddenly have a migraine headache?
Metrics are different in Agile, but the questions remain the same. Come and see what your brain needs to understand the tracking of products built in an Agile way. We’ll build an Agile dashboard that you can take into your next meeting.

Kanban is often described as something you layer "on top" of your existing process in order to stimulate improvement. So, what would that look like if your existing process is Scrum?

The term "Scrumban" has been used to describe this kind of combination, but it's much more than simply "Scrum with WIP limits". It's not about picking and choosing "the best of both", but the full application of the Kanban Method to a challenged Scrum implementation, to help it move beyond what's currently causing it to stall.

Kanban is "a way of seeing"; in this session we will "see" Scrum through the lens of Kanban, and explore how those insights can be used to re-ignite the inspect-&-adapt cycle to create a highly customized process that is better suited for your particular context.

Playing games is one of the most effective tools for teaching. It is hand on, active participation, engaging and fun for the audience to name some characteristics. However, it could go wrong very easily. Let's explore it together as a game!

What are the factors you need to consider when running a game? How about even before that and when picking a game to run? What elements do you need to consider running a game? How would you make it about teaching and not getting lost only playing? How would you capture the ROI for the game? How would you sell the idea of playing games to leadership?

If those are what boggles your mind, please join me for a session on Game. I will be sharing my experiences, successes, and failures on what to do with games. I will share with you tips on what to look for when picking, running and finishing up a game. How to embed a game within your training, and which part of it to use. I will share some examples that I used (and others created) on how to use already designed games for your goal. If you can’t find any, I can share some tips on how to design a game. This talk is focused to deliver value for the coaches, team leads, enterprise leaders and whomever that want to teach others from a very simple message to a very complex concept.

Have you ever struggled to take your product owner's vision and translate that into a product backlog?

This workshop will provide you with hands-on experience in taking a simulated product from a high level vision down to a product backlog ensuring that nothing is missed and the negotiation process around release scope is collaborative rather than being destructive.

Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

If you hold any form of leadership position, whether as a manager, scrum master, or coach, you will find that you will be at times offering guidance or advice. What unfortunately happens though is that your observation of the need and conversation to help fill that need can get tangled with your biases. Want to improve your coaching conversations? Then this workshop is for you.

To help you work through the arc of your conversation and understand how these biases come into play, we're going to discuss the GROW conversation model and the Satir interaction model. This workshop will open with an anchoring activity. We'll then use an exercise and focused discussion to review each model and see how these played into the coaching received.

You are in charge of a whole organization or several teams. Your ultimate want is for them to become more productive, which translates into effectiveness and/or efficiency for your organization. You would ask yourself which is a golden key here, Kanban or Scrum? Is it an either/or question? Shall you start by practicing Scrum for a while and switch when matured? Is there a golden ratio of Scrum practices v.s. Kanban that make your transformation successful? Do you find yourself in Scrumfalls? Is Kanban the magic solution? You are telling yourself: It's time to switch to Kanban. Others have done it, so it must be a magic solution. If that describes you, most probably you are investing time and money on a new "methodology" while barely moving the needle.

Kanban is the new Scrum these days, or is it? Join me on this session and let's look at the failure modes of adopting Kanban deeper. What are the conditions needed for a Kanban method to flourish and find its roots in an organization? What can lead to a successful Kanban introduction compared to Scrum? Are there any fundamental differences between them? How can you make sure if you are moving from Scrum to Kanban, or having the thought of it, to become successful? What are the pitfalls that you want to avoid?

I will share with you my experiences and perspective as both Scrum and Kanban coach helping organizations with their Agile Transformation. I will be sharing lessons learned and coaching techniques to help organizations and leaders realize the true potential regardless of which you chose.

The Agile manifesto tells us to value individuals and interactions. Given we are talking about human interaction, conflict is going to be a normal part of the interactions.

It is often the absence, not the existence of conflict which prevents teams from improving. Plenty of companies pride themselves in their harmonious culture. However, harmony comes at a price and can often be a sign people don’t trust each other. High-performing teams and organizations embrace conflict for the sake of improving, growing and doing great things.

In this session, we will explore how conflict is a normal and healthy part of any team environment. We will explore what causes conflict, and how to work with the conflict for the sake of better outcomes. You will learn what to do when teams cross the line into unhealthy conflict. You will leave with several simple tools to make it safe and easy to talk and increase conflict on your team.

Using the game "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", we'll explore and highlight teamwork, communication, developing shared language, creating a shared understanding, and much more. This session will be an interactive session for a small group, with other observing, however with multiple rounds, anyone and everyone who wants to participate will be able to! This is a very practical team activity, which easily scales beyond the team, and while it works well in-person, it's even better with distributed teams as we explore the ways we interact and communicate when not co-located.

Raise awareness of how memories form, demonstrate these through examples and exercises
Discuss practical examples that can aid the memory formation of the message that we want to get stick.

One common mistake by new Agilists is to think that the product backlog is a linear list with the highest priority item on the top. As it's often the case, the reality is different. Prioritization is neither binary nor linear. Your team will be asked to work on several competing priorities, like meeting the new regulation while working on the next product milestone (the product is the company lifeline) - and your product owner will insist these are both top priority!!

In this workshop we are going to explore different tools, to ensure that our teams are working on the highest value backlog items: from Eisenhower Method to Cost of Delay, CD3 and modified Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF).