Many aspiring and practicing coaches (especially Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches) fall into the trap of what I call as "teaching is coaching"

In this short talk, I would share a few tips on identifying myths around Agile Coaching career and TOP 3 tips to build a solid coaching career (especially in Agile and Lean space) along with possibilities in this career.

Coaching leaders is an art and a science. While attempting to coach leaders (especially the CXOs and senior leaders), it is very important to assess the coachability aspects of the leaders before proceeding.

In this hands-on workshop, I would be sharing a few tips on assessing coachability aspects. I would also demonstrate LIVE, a few coaching conversations with leaders (participants need to volunteer to be coached).

In addition, participants can practice what they learn through coaching simulations with peer participants.

Many organizations today, struggle to switch from traditional project mindset to product mindset. The reason is NOT the lack of knowledge/skills about product management. It is because of lack of awareness and orientation on "Product Thinking & Discovery" for everyone involved in the entire value stream. What makes the implementation more complicated, is the lack of ability & execution skills to do customer & product discovery in real world context. Most challenges are rooted in the questions like "what does Product Thinking & Discovery mean for me?", "how does it impact my day-to-day work?" and "what additional skills/competencies are needed to do continuous product discovery?"

In this experience-based presentation, I plan to delve deeper into heart of this topic and share real-world experience of creating organizational structures that embrace product thinking and defining/refining various roles needed to do product discovery and development with agile and lean approaches. I would be clarifying the real meaning of buzz words like collaboration, ownership and agility in the context of a large-scale transformation involving global roles and distributed teams.

This talk is an experience sharing session about what it takes to realize business benefits in a large-scale (beyond 100 people) agile transformation. Having driven more than 4 large-scale transformation initiatives (of scales 160 to 700 people) over last 5 years, I would be sharing a couple of case-studies where I worked recently and I would discuss various challenges of implementing large-scale transformation and possible approaches to handle them. Participants would be engaged through interactive discussions on mutual experience sharing with a focus on key dimensions of agile execution.

As the title reveals, the talk would focus more on execution challenges and approaches to handle them at all levels of stakeholders involved in a transformation. Levels include developers, architects, managers (project/engineering), senior management (delivery/program management, directors) and CXO's. More details in Outline section. 

The key dimensions to be covered include

1. Building and sustaining learning culture (approaches include Community of Practice, Guilds and Joint Workshops)
2. Causing the mindset shift in engineers (different approaches for developers, architects and engineering managers)
3. Enabling managers to create and nurture agile engineering culture (approaches include effective metrics about quality of code, tests, application and build)
4. Inverting the Test Pyramid (approaches include test automation strategies, BDD, dealing with Legacy using Strangler pattern, Component Guardian pattern)
5. Leadership Agility (approaches include catalyst style of leadership, risk driven decision making, leading the change)