In most organizations practicing Agile, all the focus is on building more stuff faster - velocity and predictability. And yet, we all know that delivering more stuff faster on time doesn’t guarantee product or organization success. Does this mean Agile doesn’t work? No, I don’t think so. But, I believe we are missing an important piece of this puzzle. It starts with recognizing there are at least two types of work in software development. There’s no way around it.

Enter Dual Track Agile - a method for balancing these different work types. Most of us are familiar with the first type of work: Development. This is what most Agile practices are optimized for. Development tends to focus on predictability and quality. The second type of work, Discovery, focuses on fast learning and validation. The inconvenient truth is that these different types of work require us to work in different types of ways.

In this talk, Chris will define the Dual Track method. He will explain the basic mechanics of dual track and how to get started. Chris will also cover the most common implementation questions:

• Who is responsible for the types of work?
• How should we organize our teams?
• How does it change common Scrum ceremonies?
• How do you plan?

…and more.

You’ll leave the talk with a new method for Agile product development and a plan for introducing it to your teams. Chris has seen this method work across many different companies and domains. Stop fighting your organization's velocity focus and give them a better way of working.

Defining a delivery strategy is difficult. We tend to underestimate the risks, aren’t explicit about our assumptions, and don’t involve the delivery team early enough in the process. I recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea that each delivery is a series of bets with different odds and risks. Each bet or investment could be matched with our corresponding confidence levels. For those bets deemed risky, we improved our odds by placing smaller bets. Delivering in bets helped us remain outcome focused, view our decisions as a portfolio, and express the expected timeframe of payouts. In each case, mindsets shifted and delivery performance improved.

In this talk, Chris will demonstrate how using bets can reshape your delivery approach. He’ll show how using some familiar tools such as Opportunity Canvas, Dual Track Agile, Story Mapping, and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results. He’ll discuss different methods for defining and sizing releases. Participants will leave with a new approach for identifying and forecasting a delivery.

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 know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.  And you know what it means - pictures convey so much more about people or an idea you’re trying to describe than you could ever hope to with words.  So why is it in knowledge work, that some of the most important information and conversations are captured and conveyed with words alone? Whether these words are text in a document or hidden in a tool, we’re settling for less. Our work pleads for visualizations.

Chris will share how using visualization has improved agile projects over the past 10 years. His experiences working with large and small teams in a variety of industries has shown that although people implement popular tools, but don’t know how to leverage them.

Chris will show real examples of visualization methods that you can use to make better decisions and help teams develop a shared understanding. He will give you a 6-step checklist to evaluate and employ visual controls in your context.