Speakers

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Results

This talk will discuss the critical traits and behaviors of many of our industry's best product teams. I've had the extremely good fortune to be able to work with many of the very best technology product teams in the world. People creating the products you use and love every day. Teams that are literally changing the world. What I've learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don't mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.

For those that have not yet had the opportunity to participate in, or observe a strong product team up close, in this talk I wanted to try to give you a glimpse into some of the important differences that distinguish the best product teams from the rest.

About Marty

Marty Cagan is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG). Before founding SVPG to pursue his interests in helping others create successful products through his writing, speaking, coaching and advising, Marty was most recently senior vice-president of product and design for eBay, where he was responsible for defining products and services for the company's global e-commerce trading site. Marty is a guest speaker at conferences and major tech companies around the globe, and is the author of the book INSPIRED: How To Create Tech Products Customers Love.

Certified Agile Leadership® (CAL)

2-Day Certification Course

Taking this class will increase your leadership effectiveness and help you become a better leader, no matter what your role. CAL is a great choice for executives, managers as well as for coaches & consultants. The common thread among CAL students is the desire to enhance their workplace (and/or clients' workplace) with Agile values, practices, and metrics. Participants in CAL will receive their Certified Agile Leadership® (CAL) credentials. The CAL program is a practice-based program that develops Agile leadership competency and maturity.

Course Topics & Learning Objectives:

Merge Agile approaches into your leadership style. Whether your organization applies Agile at the team level or you're just getting your feet wet with an Agile framework, this Certified Agile Leadership® course will help you improve your ability to:

• Describe the origins of Agile and how it helps organizations thrive in the midst of complexity
• Apply an Agile approach to change
• Secure your competitive advantage in a continually evolving national and global marketplace
• Structure your organization according to principles of organizational agility, instead of silos, to better align efforts

For more information on this CAL course taught by the Agile Arizona training partner Agile for All, click here.
For the CAL certification information provided by the Scrum Alliance, click here.

Note: pre-work is required for this course.
Note: Project Management Professionals can receive 18 PDUs for this CAL course.

About Peter

Peter Green is an Executive Agile Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Speaker. He helps leaders take full advantage of their gifts to thrive in complex times. Peter combines individual leadership development with his research in next generation organizational models to help executives lead engaged, high performing Agile organizations. As the Agile Transformation Leader at Adobe Systems, he helped the company make the critical business transition from perpetual desktop products to the subscription-based Creative Cloud. Now the Principle Leadership Coach for Agile For All, Peter is a CST and co-creator of the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership program.

Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO)

2-Day Certification Course

Taking this class will provide you with the Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO) credentials. People who are comfortable with the "business side" of projects, are often the right person for the Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO) certification. While the Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) helps the Scrum Team work together to learn and implement Scrum, the CSPO creates product vision, orders the product backlog, and makes sure the best possible work is delivered to delight the customer.

Course Topics & Learning Objectives:

Immerse yourself in the major skill-sets and practices you need to succeed as a Scrum Product Owner. Throughout this CSPO course, you will learn:

• Scrum history, theory, principles and values
• Scrum framework basics and practices
• Planning for sprints, releases, and portfolios
• The role of the Product Owner in the Scrum Framework
• Advanced techniques such as:
  • Working effectively with stakeholders
  • The mindset of an effective Product Owner, especially how to think about complexity and change and the impact on projects, products, and planning
  • Key practices and tools for Product Owners not covered in Scrum, including what's required to build and maintain a good product backlog

For more information on this CSPO course taught by the Agile Arizona training partner Agile for All, click here.
For the CSPO certification information provided by the Scrum Alliance, click here.

Note: Project management professionals can receive 14 PDUs for this CSPO course.

About Richard

Co-owner of Agile For All, Richard Lawrence trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. From his diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science, he helps people think more deeply about humanizing workplaces and collaborating effectively with each other on complex work.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and a Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the Training from the Back of the Room accelerated learning method. His book Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber will be published later this year by Addison-Wesley.

Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM)

2-Day Certification Course

Taking this class (and passing the test) will provide you with the Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) credentials. As a CSM, you'll be prepared to help Scrum Teams perform at their highest level. CSMs also protect the team from both internal and external distractions. Through the certification process, you will learn the Scrum framework and gain an understanding of team roles, events, artifacts and rules.

Course Learning Objectives:

By the end of the training, you will be able to:

• Describe the Scrum framework to others
• Explain the difference between the Scrum framework and other processes and systems
• Be a successful Scrum Master for a Scrum team
• Help a Scrum team plan successfully
• Create a personal plan for the future

For more information on this CSM course as taught by the Agile Arizona training partner Agile for All, click here.
For the CSM certification information provided by the Scrum Alliance, click here.

Note: Project Management Professionals can get 14 PDUs for this CSM course.

About Steve

Steve Spearman is a Trainer and Agile coach with over 30 years of experience in corporate software development settings. In his last corporate role, he was the sponsor for his business unit's transition to Scrum. Steve is a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) with great passion for Scrum but who is pragmatic enough to engage with you at different levels of transformational maturity. Steve's varied experience as an engineer, architect, project manager and leader at Bell Labs, Lucent, Avaya and Cisco systems helps him relate to your real world transformational challenges. Steve's other certifications include:

• Certified SAFe Program Consultant® (CSP)
• Certified LeSS Practitioner
• Certified Project Management Professional® (PMP)
• Certified Agile Project Management® (ACP)

Build Your Own Scrum: Train the Trainer Workshop

Years ago, I almost killed a scrum team with PowerPoint.

Tasked with introducing my team to Scrum, I did what any "reasonable" person would do: I googled "Scrum PowerPoint" and download a deck. I then proceeded to subject my team to slide after slide about the scrum framework for two hours.

They were not impressed.

A month later the organization asked me to do a full 1-day workshop on scrum with the same group. While we needed to review the framework, I knew doing it with PowerPoint again would lead to death (probably mine). In a panic, the night before the workshop, I invented Build Your Own Scrum (BYOS), which lets you teach the scrum framework without a single powerpoint slide. Armed with paper, glue, scissors and my new Build Your Own Scrum worksheet, my team gained a deep understanding of scrum through conversation and collaboration.

They were impressed.

After some refinement, I released my materials to the agile community, along with an in-depth facilitation guide. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have learned scrum without a boring lecture via BYOS.

In this workshop, you'll learn:

• How to use BYOS to teach the scrum framework. Not only will we go over the original facilitation guide, you'll get the secrets I've discovered over the last 7 years that ARE NOT in the manual.
• How to use the BYOS worksheet in a coaching context to help a team that is already doing scrum figure out how they can improve their work together.
• How to interview new team members, scrum masters, or coaches using BYOS to uncover their actual understanding of the framework. Use BYOS to discover who really subscribes to agile principles & values, not just who has the best interview answers.

Best of all, the session will be recorded so you can review what we went over when you're back at the office. You'll even get free access to the upcoming online Build Your Own Scrum: Train the Trainer program I'm putting together based on the video we'll shoot in the workshop and additional content we won't have time for in our 4 hours together.

About Adam

Adam Weisbart's humorous approach to the serious work of organizational change helps teams and individuals break out of old patterns and discover new ways to improve. His belief that hard work need not be a somber affair infuses everything he does.

Adam started his career as a software developer and went on to build a successful web development firm in the early days of the web. Later, as an engineering manager in Silicon Valley, he came to terms with the fact that he was a relentless control freak (and sometimes micromanager). Thankfully, he discovered agility and liberated his teams. He has focused on mentoring high performing self-organizing teams ever since.

Today, Adam uses his personal experience of making the leap from traditional management to Scrum to help organizations make the same transition. He is the creator of Build Your Own Scrum, an innovative approach to teaching scrum and improving existing implementations, which is used by hundreds of Agile coaches and trainers around the world. He's the creator and curator of the Agile Antipatterns Project, which helps teams identify and defuse common impediments to Agility. His popular video "Sh!t Bad Scrum Masters Say" has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times - showing us all what NOT to do when adopting Scrum.

Adam is a Certified Scrum Trainer who teaches both Certified ScrumMaster and Product Owner courses around the world, regularly speaks at conferences, coaches teams, and helps people he hasn't gotten a chance to meet yet through his podcast Agile Answers.

Intro to Agile Workshop

What is Agile and why does it continue to be so popular? This workshop is an introduction to Agile, rather than a specific Agile methodology (like Scrum or Kanban). Through an interactive simulation (aka game), attendees will learn how the principles of the Agile Manifesto can be applied at the team and program levels.

During the workshop, participants will learn the power of visualizing knowledge work by creating an Agile task board. Participants will also have the opportunity to use multiple common visualizations (time in process scatter plot and distribution) for delivery date predictions. Additionally, by understanding Little's Law and net flow, participants will learn to describe their confidence in those historical-data-based predictions.

Workshop Outline:

• Intro to Agile (history and Manifesto)
• Intro to common Agile methods and movements (eg Scrum, Kanban, DevOps)
• Featureban simulation/game
• Debrief, retrospective, and action items

After experiencing the Featureban simulation, attendees can recreate and modify the game for their specific use (Featureban is Creative Commons licensed).

At the conclusion of this workshop, attendees will be ready to evaluate different Agile methods for best fit and begin experimenting with the practical application of Agile principles.

About Cat

Cat has experience applying Agile and lean principles in a variety of settings: from startups to large enterprises, warehouses to web, etc. She is passionate about increasing diversity in tech. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about Bitcoin, hiking, and reading feminist literature.

Lessons from the Dojo: Level-setting a Team Without Boring Them to Tears

In the Agile Dojo, with new teams coming in every eight weeks, we had to learn how to quickly and effectively level-set a team with Agile/Scrum/Kanban basics without tears of boredom and avoiding death by PowerPoint. We have discovered and honed play and experiential-based learning techniques that we have used dozens of times to help teams all get "on the same page" with regards to what it means to Agile. These techniques provide the fundamentals of Scrum and Kanban frameworks, story mapping, INVEST, estimation, working agreements, and so on, all in a few hours. We call this Dojo Sprint Zero. Join us in this workshop and experience a little bit of Dojo Sprint Zero for yourself! We will lead participants through the core of the games and exercises we use, much as we would for a team coming into the Agile Dojo.

At the end of this workshop you will have had a taste of the Agile Dojo, experiencing fun and exciting ways to engage a team in Agile fundamentals in a short period of time. You will gain a solid understanding of Scrum/Agile basics (if you don't already have that!) and will have a solid beginning for building your own "tool box" of training games and activities.

Among the activities on the Menu (participants will help select which activities we run):

• Scrum in 10 minutes
• Pocket Principles
• Story Mapping
• Agile Manifesto interactive quiz
• Build your own scrum
• The Role Donut
• Name Game

About David

David is a senior Lean/Agile coach with SolutionsIQ, an Accenture company. His passion is helping teams and individuals be the best possible versions of themselves. He has over ten years' experience coaching Agile teams and organizations and over thirty years software experience as developer, manager, project manager, process architect and Lean/Agile coach. David has spent the last two years helping to establish dojos in various locations, coaching teams, and developing other coaches for his client.

About Nicole

Nicole is an Agile Coach who provides guidance, support and coaching to teams, individuals and leaders in all agile roles to reach their highest potential. 15 years of Nicole's work experiences have been in Financial and Educational industries where she specialized in large ERP implementations and integrations. She has experiences with leading waterfall to agile transformations and has deep knowledge of agile principles and frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban and SAFe.

Visualizing project health through dashboards - making data driven decisions

How do you measure your teams effectiveness? With all the choices available, it can be overwhelming as to which measures and tools might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment. As a technology owner, this session will give you suggestions on how to gauge the health of your product and project teams. As a product owner, you will gain ideas on determining appropriate velocity and quality measurements to balance with your delivery needs. Join Jennifer as she explains the relationship of the DevOps cycle, your environment, and how a hub and spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She identifies opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand tool optimization using open source options
• Learn how to evaluate tools for your environment
• Explore dashboard samples to integrate data sources

Workshop Outline:

• Data
  • History of data
  • Using "Big Data" in decisions
  • Exploring data activity
• Tool Optimization
  • Open source options
  • Tools evaluation
• Dashboards
  • Hub and spoke model
  • Data sources integration
  • Data analytics

Jennifer will review ways to collaborate and show results in a way that clearly shows progress and how to present a visual dashboard to your leadership and stakeholders in the organization. Most importantly, Jennifer provides tips to improve your skillset - and your mindset - so you will eagerly embrace the application of test data analytics in your test engineering practices for your organizations.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In a recent engagement for one of the world's largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world's top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint. She recently has been helps companies larger and small adapt to the age of IoT and connected system of systems engaging in next generation solutions and helping companies adapt to the ever changing business landscape.

Mastering Product Management: Great Discovery with Rapid Prototyping and User Interviews

Quite often product teams go straight from an idea to delivery without spending the time needed to discover the problems they need to solve for their business and their customers.

Planned and methodical product discovery is critical to evolve your products, but actually executing on this promise is often difficult to implement. To be effective, it takes not only an understanding of prototyping, but also well-developed customer discovery skills to gather the insights needed to move forward in the best way possible.

In this workshop you will learn to:

1. Discuss learning needed to execute on one feature in a story map
2. Build a rapid prototype with these learnings in mind
3. Formulate concrete questions you have regarding your prototype
4. Run user interviews to get quick feedback on your prototype
5. Refine your prototype based your learning from the interviews
6. Write a dress rehearsal script, including your new hypotheses
7. Facilitate a dress rehearsal to learn about your hypotheses

Upon completion of this hands-on workshop you will leave with practical skills and critical product discovery techniques that will help you master the art of product management!

About Kalpesh

Kalpesh is a Culture Hacker, Speaker & Enterprise Agile Coach with IntraEdge Agile Solutions with experience in creating and working with different shapes and sizes of Agile teams. He has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups, helping them make the transition to Agile way of working, implementing Agile at Scale, employ Lean Product Development approaches and instill Lean Startup mindset. As a monk on a spiritual journey, he is also on a journey of discovering, learning and implementing different agile techniques to create happier teams which in turn create better products, his version of enlightenment! His latest passion is Culture Hacking through continuous experimentation which will promote innovative thinking, extend openness, embody rationality, and bring design thinking into teams.

About Sean

Sean has worked in product management for 19 years with a variety of technology companies, primarily in the K-16 education market. He also spent two years on mobile app and mobile platform product management at Workiva, which is where he first started using dual-track agile methods. His work there involved frequent interactions with prolific Product Management consultants, Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton, which accelerated his understanding and implementation of great discovery and delivery methodologies. At his current company, Integrate, Sean is leading both the product management and software design teams. His focus is building great product teams to deliver great products resulting in a rapidly growing marketing technology company.

Coding Challenges Workshop - In the end, it's all about working software

Let's get into the code in this workshop. What are your biggest challenges in your dev team? Legacy code that needs refactoring? Duplicate/dead code? Poor quality code making it into production?

In this workshop you will be able to get your hands on the keyboard, we will work as a mob (group) on some code (old and/or new) and apply the agile practices of small iterative cycles. We will address common coding challenges with: TDD, Refactoring, Clean Code, Design patterns and provable refactorings to hone and sharpen our technical skills.

Detecting and removing duplication effectively is the cornerstone of emergent design and refactoring. Yet we are *never* taught or trained on how to do this. In this lab, we will use a combination of teaching techniques to learn to recognize coding problems and resolve them. All hands on exercises will be available in in these languages: java, javascript, c#, c++ or python.

About Llewellyn

Llewellyn Falco is an independent agile coach. He discovered strong-style pair programming. He is creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests (www.approvaltests.com). He spends most of his time programming in Java and C# specializing in improving legacy code.He is the co-founder of TeachingKidsProgramming.org & co-author of Mob Programming Guidebook

If you would like to get a sample of him, check out his Practical Refactoring talk.

Llewellyn can calculate the cube root of any perfect cube under 1,000,000 in his head, as well as pick a standard lock. He can rollerblade down a flight of stairs, backwards. While studying drafting in high school, he started fire eating, sleight of hand magic, and once rode a unicycle 6 miles. He has taught swing dancing, and loves to salsa. He is also an accomplished speed chess player. He has been scuba diving over 20 times, become a guitar hero, and broke his personal record of paddle balling over 200 times. Llewellyn attributes his success to the large amount of caffeine he has consumed, and enjoys computer programming in his spare time. He is proficient in many programming languages including: java, javascript, c#, c++ or python.

Building Great Teams: Culture and Core Protocols

Your team can be ten times better. The Core Protocols are one way to make your team great.

Your team can be ten times better.

What does that mean? That means your professional team can accomplish 10x more work, do it with 10x more quality, 10x faster, or with 10x less resources. Your family can be 10x happier. Your school can be 10x more effective at helping people learn. Your community group can be 10x better at making life better for the people it serves. Even you yourself can be 10x more effective at getting what you want.

In other words, you can be great. Your team can be great.

Greatness

Can you say these things about your teams?:

• My projects are completed effortlessly on schedule and in budget every time.
• Every team I've ever been on has shared a vision.
• In meetings, we only ever do what will get results.
• No one blames "management" or anyone else, if they don't get what they want.
• Everybody shares their best ideas right away.
• Ideas are immediately unanimously approved, improved, or rejected by the team.
• Action on approved ideas begins immediately.
• Conflict is always resolved swiftly and productively.

The Core Protocols are one way to make teams that have these characteristics.

Some of the things you'll learn:

• Results-oriented behaviors
• How to enter a state of shared vision with a team and stay there
• How to create trust on a team
• How to stay rational and healthy
• How to make team decisions effectively
• How to move quickly and with high quality towards the team's goals

About Richard

Richard Kasperowski is an author, speaker, teacher, and coach focused on high-performance teams. Richard is the author of the new book, High-Performance Teams: The Foundations, as well as The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. He leads clients in building great teams that get great results using the Core Protocols, Agile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard's newsletter at www.kasperowski.com.

FAST Agile: Tools for Teams with a Dynamic Work Backlog

FAST Agile is an ongoing experiment that combines: Team Self-selection, Dynamic Reteaming, Open Allocation, Agile and Open Space.

You will hear stories from an ongoing experiment using Open Space Technology as a way to dynamically form teams around work and auto scale a tribe. Our tribe meets every two days and holds a marketplace to decide what to work on next. We let natural leadership and self-organization determine team makeup to execute on a two-day iteration.

The FAST Agile methodology has been compared to a continuous hackathon. Not only is it working, but people also love it! We have heard things like "this is the only way I ever want to work from now on."

In this hands on workshop you will learn how we create and track requirements in FAST. It involves story mapping and a refinement that we discovered called Feature Mapping or feature trees. This technology is fun to learn and is standalone even if you never did anything else with FAST.

Using Open Space as a mechanism for agile at scale raises many questions that we had to work through. We made great strides and great discoveries. Even if you don't go and implement this way of working, you'll come away with A-HAs and some exciting new tools.

About Ron

Ron will tell you his life purpose is to "unleash the human spirit in the workplace." He loves all things software and nurturing business/development harmony in particular.

His agile and Extreme Programming journey started in 2002, and over the years he has built strong technical skills and a deep understanding of agile methods. He has put this to use in several roles during his career: developer, development manager, and agile coach.

In 2014 Ron had an epiphany of a new way of working. A way that makes self-organization inescapable rather than just paying lip service to the concept. This method aligned with his vision and has been his passion ever since.

About Paige

Paige Watson is a Lead Crafter at 8th Light. As an evangelist of XP and Agile work processes, he is ever striving to find better ways to write quality software, in ways that are empowering to developers and companies alike.

Agile Jesters, Magicians, and Clowns: Using the unexpected to move mountains and your team

Scrum is excellent at helping surface team and organizational dysfunction, but dealing with dysfunction can be uncomfortable. As an agilist, how do you help your team work through these newly voiced challenges?

Court jesters have a long history of helping give voice to uncomfortable truths, often speaking words that would have others killed. In the 1300's when the French fleet was destroyed by the English at the Battle of Sluys, the French king's jester told him that the English sailors "don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French". This session will help you become an agile jester - speaking difficult truths through humor.

During this workshop you'll get hands-on experience using practical tools drawn from improvisational comedy, the art of magic, and clowning. Every agilist should have these tools in their bag of tricks.

About Adam

Adam Weisbart's humorous approach to the serious work of organizational change helps teams and individuals break out of old patterns and discover new ways to improve. His belief that hard work need not be a somber affair infuses everything he does.

Adam started his career as a software developer and went on to build a successful web development firm in the early days of the web. Later, as an engineering manager in Silicon Valley, he came to terms with the fact that he was a relentless control freak (and sometimes micromanager). Thankfully, he discovered agility and liberated his teams. He has focused on mentoring high performing self-organizing teams ever since.

Today, Adam uses his personal experience of making the leap from traditional management to Scrum to help organizations make the same transition. He is the creator of Build Your Own Scrum, an innovative approach to teaching scrum and improving existing implementations, which is used by hundreds of Agile coaches and trainers around the world. He's the creator and curator of the Agile Antipatterns Project, which helps teams identify and defuse common impediments to Agility. His popular video "Sh!t Bad Scrum Masters Say" has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times - showing us all what NOT to do when adopting Scrum.

Adam is a Certified Scrum Trainer who teaches both Certified ScrumMaster and Product Owner courses around the world, regularly speaks at conferences, coaches teams, and helps people he hasn't gotten a chance to meet yet through his podcast Agile Answers.

Stop Estimating and Start Budgeting: How to Use Risk-Based Management Practices to Improve Projections and Meet Commitments

"When will the project be finished?"
"Are you on track?"
"How do you know what your team can deliver this year?"

We've all been asked these questions - or variations of them. After all, everyone in your company wants to know what you can accomplish by when. And it's on you to provide the answers your executive team needs in a way they can understand. In an Agile environment, it's imperative to earn and keep management's trust in your ability to deliver.

In this session, we describe how WebPT - a top Arizona-based software company - uses risk-based management practices to accurately project timelines, assess the impact of changing scopes and priorities, improve project visibility, and answer the questions everyone is asking. With this foundation, you'll learn how you can incorporate risk and confidence into your planning process to improve the accuracy of your project planning and monitoring. Come to hear how we delivered 93% of our planned roadmap in 2017 (that's 70 delivered projects across multiple Scrum teams).

About Allison

Allison Luckock joined WebPT in 2015 as Agile Program Manager. Allison has worked in both waterfall and Agile environments, but for the last 9 years, her focus has been on building and improving Scrum and Kanban teams. In her current position, Allison manages a team of Agile Coaches and ScrumMasters across WebPT, responsible for teaching and evangelizing Agile core principles, as well as WebPT's risk-adjusted backlog management procedures. Allison is also a "football mom" and spends her weekends cheering on and supporting her son's youth tackle football team.

About Rob

Rob Rust joined the WebPT team as chief technology officer (CTO) in 2015. An experienced information systems leader, Rob has extensive software development and agile leadership experience with businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Rob embraces a proactive change agent mindset as he implements lean development methodologies, builds highly effective teams, scales operations, and drives business value through software. Rob holds a bachelor's degree in management information systems from the University of Arizona.

Deploy Early, Deploy Often, Deploy Safely

 Session Slides

Modern CI/CD pipelines should be automatically deploying to your environment on commit. If you deploy to multiple servers, coordinating deploys across them can be a problem, especially if something fails. Building a centralized deployment framework masks infrastructure complexity for your development teams and ensures all deploys meet your deployment standards. Andy discusses how Allstate has built a core deployment framework that supports blue green deploys, automated rollback, and does security and reporting checks on each deploy. This improved our compliance controls and lowered our security risks while simplifying the deployment process for our development teams. All this combines to allow our development teams to spend time focused on their product and less time focused on infrastructure.

About Andy

Andy leads teams in Allstate's Automation Engineering organization, with a focus on automating away the toil that goes into building and running successful product. Andy has worked as a developer and product leader at a range of companies from small startups to Fortune 100 companies. He has a passion for finding ways to get software to do the boring, tedious, yet valuable work that has to happen, so people can focus on more interesting things. Andy enjoys spending his weekends not deploying software and wants to help others do the same.

Common SAFe Pitfalls and How to Recover from Them

While Agile is proven to be great for smaller teams and organizations, it can struggle at scale. Several approaches to this issue exist, such as Scrum of Scrums (SoS), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). The most popular is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). As with any great tool, when not wielded carefully, it can cause more harm than good.

Bob begins his talk with an overview of the key points of SAFe and how it differs from other Agile scaling frameworks. He then dives into common ways SAFe can go wrong, and how to recover from missteps. Bob also explores the importance of the relationship of Agile Teams to ARTs, and how cross-functionality is vital, plus he lays out the relationship between Agile sprints and Program Increments. Finally, Bob talks in-depth about the importance of training all levels of the organization to foster the cultural shift required for a successful SAFe transformation.

About Bob

Bob Wen is an Atlassian Support Engineer with Isos Technology. His extensive background as both a hardware and software engineer in telecom, defense and healthcare make him especially adept at helping Isos Technology's clients overcome their technical hurdles.

But Bob's interests don't just lie on the technical side. He's also a self-proclaimed "process geek". Possessing both Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) certifications, Bob readily shares his knowledge both through structured training and informal discussions. His insight is invaluable in any agile or DevOps discussion.

When not helping clients or spreading process knowledge, Bob can often be found at a poker table or working his way around a kitchen.

AGILE at Play - Using LEGO® Serious Play® to Accelerate the Value Cycle

"The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."
— Peter Drucker in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959)

Whether your Agile team develops hardware or software three elements are crucial to successful knowledge-based value creation:

• Communicating effectively - both externally with stakeholders and end-users and internally among the design team members
• Making informed design decisions - i.e. testing assumptions through prototyping
• Matching methods with the type of knowledge task - ensuring that incentives and activities support your goal

In this session you will learn about a novel model for understanding knowledge-driven value creation processes called The Wheel of Knowledge (WoK), which provides a framework for navigating the development process and a language for discussing next steps for accelerating the value cycle. The different stages of the model reflect how all knowledge-based value originates from tacit knowledge (e.g. an idea). Next, the challenge is to make the knowledge explicit so that it can be shared between individuals and developed into a solid solution. Finally, once a satisfying solution has been reached it is time to bring it to scale and to market. Different facilitation methods serve different purposes that are conducive to high engagement in different stages of the process. Knowing which type of approach to prescribe to a given knowledge conversion challenge is a key contribution of Dr. Jensen's research.

Next, you get to be playful! Dr. Jensen will demo LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® activities that you might want to adopt to help accelerate the different stages of the value creation process for your team.

About Camilla

Camilla Nørgaard Jensen, PhD is the founder of InterPlay LLC, a company of professional facilitators, designers, engineers, and scientists applying the power of serious play to accelerate knowledge co-creation, sharing, and innovation for corporate, startup, and educational clients grappling with complex problems. Dr. Jensen has been certified in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) facilitation method since 2012, and in addition to being a dynamic and engaging facilitator of the method, she is also a licensed trainer capable of certifying other LSP facilitators.

Improving Flow with Skills Liquidity

Does work grind to a halt whenever your team's star developer goes on vacation? Do some work items spend a very long time waiting for input from senior members of your team or program? Does your team struggle with highly variable flow of work? Did The Phoenix Project's Brent problem sound a little too familiar?

A skills liquidity matrix can be used to help a team self organize around work and skills matchups. Additionally, this simple tool can help leaders plot a course for maturing the performance and Agile practice of a team or value stream.

This session covers how and why to create and use a skills liquidity matrix to smooth the flow of work and increase the ability to absorb variability.

About Cat

Cat has experience applying Agile and lean principles in a variety of settings: from startups to large enterprises, warehouses to web, etc. She is passionate about increasing diversity in tech. In her leisure time, Cat enjoys making jokes about Bitcoin, hiking, and reading feminist literature.

Our journey in running an entire company with agile methods

In 2011, Tiempo was number 348 on Inc magazines fastest growing private companies list. As we planned our future, we saw leadership as a key impediment to sustainable growth. We could hire outstanding engineers but leading a fast-growing company that provided agile based teams of engineers was a major challenge. We needed a framework that would allow us to not only establish our strategy and goals but enable leadership to execute quickly.

Our clients loved the results we achieved building software using agile methods and we thought we could implement a similar model for running our company. At that time, we were only able to find a few companies trying to implement agile concepts into business management. We ended up using Vern Harnish's Rockefeller Habits (now Scaling Up) as a basis but converted it to an agile model.

I told the executive team that on January 1, 2012 we would do a control alt delete and reboot the company on a new operating system. We spent the last quarter of 2011 preparing and then launched into what has turned out to be a very long journey with no apparent end to it. The result is that Tiempo has been on Inc Magazine's fastest growing private companies list six times, a feat that only 6% of the companies have accomplished.

In this presentation, Cliff will present the highlights and lessons learned from seven years on the journey.

Tiempo has about 400 employees, most of which are software engineers on agile teams. Those teams are currently creating software for about 40 companies. We leverage a lot of their learnings and experiences back into how we run the overall business.

About Cliff

Cliff is a serial entrepreneur building and selling numerous high-performing technology companies. He is presently founder and CEO of Tiempo Development, a world-class nearshore agile development company that deploys high-performing teams that design and develop custom software to solve many of the most complex problems companies face today.

Cliff describes the Tiempo journey as epic and exciting. "We've improving the lives of our employees and clients – that's what makes Tiempo special".

To learn more about this really cool, fast growing company, visit www.tiempodev.com.

Information Radiators and Information Vaults

Novice teams often feel that maintaining information radiators in their team area represents duplicate effort on top of keeping their project management tool up to date. In fact, the two types of tools have quite different purposes. Let's clarify the purpose of each and the differences between them.

Learning outcomes:

• understanding of the differences between volatile and stable information
• understanding of the types of tools that best help teams manage each type of information
• understanding the content and level of detail appropriate for information radiators as opposed to systems of record

About Dave

Dave Nicolette has been an IT professional since 1977. He has served in a variety of technical and managerial roles. He has worked mainly as a consultant since 1984, keeping one foot in the technical camp and one in the management camp. As a lifelong learner, he has always been interested in exploring better ways to deliver business value through information technology. Dave is focused on bringing together the best of tried-and-true methods, and the best of leading-edge methods, to help businesses realize the maximum return on their IT investments and efforts.

DevOps ICU: (Correctly) Integrating UX, Product Design, and Agile

UX is driving you crazy, a black throwing off timelines and killing ideas. They're too siloed and not collaborating well with engineering. UX doesn't seem Lean, and popular Agile methodologies haven't figured out how UX fits in.

UX is throwing your Agile train off so much that you want to throw them under it. Can't anybody make wireframes? Can't we circumvent or exclude these people? Can't engineering and Agile Teams design the product themselves?

Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-Centered Design process are good investments that more than pay for themselves. This session explains how the UX process fits into Agile, saves companies money, augments DevOps goals, and increases customer satisfaction. Learn how to save time, money, and sanity when UX does research, designs, builds rapid UX prototypes, conducts and interprets UX testing, and iterates… before developers write a line of code.

About Debbie

Debbie Levitt, CEO of Ptype UX & Product Design Agency, has been a UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a "serial contractor" who lived in the Bay Area for most of this decade, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Oracle, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, "Mary Poppins," because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.

Her newest training program is, "DevOps ICU," a 2-day workshop that teaches non-UX roles how to measurably improve DevOps results by correctly integrating UX practitioners and processes.

Outside of UX work, and sometimes during UX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave. She's now a Digital Nomad splitting her time between the USA and rural Italy.

Leveraging Kanban to create the Agile Organization

 Session Slides

As Agile is more accepted as the way to develop software in organizations, some software teams and groups within IT are also becoming Agile, but with using Kanban as their chosen Agile methodology. By leveraging Kanban in addition to Scrum, other groups in the organization like marketing, legal, finance, sales, etc... are also embracing Agile by using Kanban boards to improve the way their business processes flow across the organization.

Dimitri shares his vast experience to illustrate how organizations have introduced Kanban across levels and functions of their organizations. You will learn Kanban and walk away with real examples/techniques that you can implement immediately within your organization.

About Dimitri

Dimitri Ponomareff is a passionate coach, facilitator and public speaker. He has the ability to relate to people from all walks of life and at every level within an organization. He can motivate and energize individuals, teams or entire organizations. Dimitri is consistently recognized as an effective and successful change agent who is able to mobilize people on a path of continuous improvement. Dimitri is a certified coach and "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" facilitator and uses his vast experience to build highly-focused, productive and happy teams. Dimitri has coached for such organizations as American Express, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Choice Hotels, Best Western, JDA Software, LifeLock, First Solar, and Infusionsoft.

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow

Does unplanned work compete with your planned work? Do conflicting priorities turn your day upside down? Invisible work blindsides people, leaving teams unaware of mutually critical information, until it's too late.

Intertwined with these problems, is the question, how does one plan for, or allocate capacity for the invisible? It's tough to analyze something you can't see. Incognito work doesn't show up in metrics. Hidden work stalls and blocks important priorities and masks dependencies. Risk accumulates from work started late and delivered late.

The solution is to make work visible in a compelling way that allows others to see problems. In this session, Dominica provides countermeasures to expose time theft due to unplanned work, conflicting priorities, and dependencies, allowing them to be seen and measured. Come discover how you can become the voice of reason in your organization by exposing time thieves.

About Dominica

Dominica DeGrandis is Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop, where she helps customers improve the flow of work across value streams. Responsible for introducing customers to flow-based aspects of digital transformation, she guides IT teams and business teams to understand and adopt new ways of working to improve performance.

Dominica is the author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. She is a huge fan of using visual cues to inspire change and spur alignment across organizations. Dominica lives in Seattle with her husband and extended family. She blogs at tasktop.com and ddegrandis.com. Follow her on twitter @dominicad.

Teaching Our Culture New Tricks

We are a Business and Vendor Management Team within American Express Technologies. Our team had very few people with any Agile experience, and we were lagging behind our Technology and Business Partners in the Agile space. We set out to improve the agility within a very seasoned team.

We'll discuss the challenges with our culture that we faced in rolling out PI sessions, stand ups, agile methodology, capacity, and tool usage all within a primarily non-development department. Our culture has changed in a year during our Agile Transformation. We are breaking down silos, providing opportunities for employees, and helping provide more value to our customers. We are measuring automation and cost savings and creating key performance indicators for our teams.

We can help bring agile practices to life in your work place - regardless of the culture!

About Ellen

Ellen Nielsen is a Director at American Express within Business and Vendor Management (BVM) responsible for IT Labor Payments. In addition, Ellen is helping to bring an Agile Transformation to the BVM Team. Ellen is a CSM and SPC-4 certified. She was previously a Release Train Engineer (RTE) within the Amex Corporate Card department delivering products to new geographic markets. The ART covered many disciplines and had over 50 scrum teams participating on these revenue generating products.

Ellen has been at Amex over 22 years - in various roles and business units. She holds an undergrad in Accounting from Illinois State University, a MBA-Finance from DePaul University in Chicago, IL and a Master's Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University. She is married with 2 children and 2 dogs. Her spare time is limited with her kids' sporting activities, but she likes to ski, travel, and help coach sports.

About Sabra

Sabra Mannan is Vice President of Technology at American Express. As head of Business & Vendor Management, Sabra oversees a global team charged with providing fiduciary, contractual, performance and compliance oversight of American Express technology vendors. Sabra is passionate about process improvement and automation. She started her career as an aerospace engineer and she builds on that foundation every day to help drive business transformation.

Using Improv to Improve Agile Teams

Learn improv techniques & try out some silly (& fun!) games to help your teams collaborate, build trust, & become more adventurous.
Warning: If you do not like fun and games, this is not the session for you. If you're still reading, here's what we will cover:

• We will learn about the first principle of improv -- "Yes, and." This principle is crucially important as it helps teams build trust and creativity
• We will create a few improvised scenes and embrace our failures by "wiping" the scene
• We will see how the ideas of the group are WAY better than the ideas of a single person through collaborative storytelling and doodling
• Last, we will try out a few quick games that bring fun and variety to events like the Daily Scrum and Sprint Retrospectives

About Erika

Erika Flora, CSM, CSPO, CSP is an advisor, instructor, and Agile coach. She started her career as a Microbiologist turned Project Manager and has always had a passion for improving how companies manage work, deliver great products and services, and better serve their customers. In 2006, she founded BEYOND20, an IT consulting, training, and software development company based on Scrum and other "best practice" frameworks. Erika holds a Masters Degree in Microbiology from the University of Florida and served as an adjunct professor of Project Management for San Diego State University. She is a skilled blogger, presenter, and the author of, Demystifying Agile, Scrum, and IT Service Management. When she's not at work or on social media (@erikaflora), you may find her performing with her indie improv troupe, Swoonface.

BDD/TDD/ATDD/Shift-Left and Agile Teams. No Testing Team Members. What does it all mean?

One of the more current trends within Agile and software engineering organizations is to automate continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) through embracing DevOps culture. This has powered the Shift-Left of testing and overall quality culture, where more testing responsibility moves earlier in the process, basically the full stack software engineer is accountable for all types of testing. Some companies are significantly reducing the professional tester role. Practices like Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, and Acceptance Test Driven Development along with more sophisticated test automation technology is powering the capability to Shift-Left. However, creating and maintaining test data is still a challenge. So what are we learning and what is the future?

Come learn how some companies are making this transition, their journey characteristics, how they are using new practices and tools, and the next level of thinking within TestOps and Agile.

Value / Learning Outcome: You will be exposed to the different testing practices, new team structures, Agile practices impacts, and how these new practices and team structures can be integrated coherently. You will also learn some new technology solutions within TestOps for Cloud and On-Premise platforms.

About Gervais

Gervais (Jay) Johnson is a first generation Agilist with 18 years of implementation experience within large to small companies across multiple business sectors. Currently serving as Director, National Agile Practice at MATRIX, Jay has more than 31 years of business and technical experience utilizing cutting-edge technologies to deliver innovative ideas, products, and services. Jay is currently working with several companies and associations to introduce and evolve Agile. Jay has worked at many of the Fortune 500 companies and several startups starting them on their Agile Journey over the last 18 years, including developing and applying advance practices and platforms. Experience applying and certified within XP, Agile Coaching, DevOps, Service Design, Design Thinking, Scrum, Lean, DA, SAFe, LeSS, and Scrum@Scale. His 16-year tenure at IBM provided insights across organizations and industries that led to transformative outcomes using Agile.

About Jeremy

Jeremy Wood leads the Phoenix market and serves as a Sr. Agile Coach and Delivery Manager at MATRIX since the first quarter of 2017. Jeremy has over 15+ years of management, consulting, and academic career spanning from small companies to Fortune 10 organizations. His expertise spans from his diverse background encompassing manufacturing, retail, higher education, non-profit, K-12 education, and airline industries. His passion for creating tailored solutions for each client is largely based on his passion for the Agile mindset. With a focus on outcomes and overall business agility to adapt to ever changing market changes; he leverages best practices from popular Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and XP to scaling solutions including SAFe, LeSS, DaD, Nexus and Scrum at Scale. He emphasizes the importance of adopting an Agile mindset across the entire organization, not just IT; where true business agility exists.

Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication to Customers

Ever sit in a strategy review session and get little or no participation from others? Or feel like you left a planning session with a different understanding of what was agreed to?

If you feel there must be a more effective way to communicate important information around your strategy and plans and you want a better way to document it so your stakeholders will both understand and engage in providing useful feedback, Jennifer Bonine has a solution for you.

Join Jennifer as she describes mind mapping tools and techniques and explore how mind maps can help increase team velocity and communication. Download—on your tablet, phone, or laptop—a free mind mapping tool to try, learn how to use the tool, take a real-life problem and solve it using the tool, and discuss the benefits of mind maps for solving problems and communicating information inside your teams and organizations. Take away a working tool to improve velocity in your sprints, development cycles, and planning sessions.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In a recent engagement for one of the world's largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world's top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint. She recently has been helps companies larger and small adapt to the age of IoT and connected system of systems engaging in next generation solutions and helping companies adapt to the ever changing business landscape.

Building a Business Case for Agile Transformation

 Session Slides

Time and time again, the organizations that we partner with are challenged to financially justify their transformation to Agile. The advantages of Agile are well documented but those benefits need to be translated to a business case that can drive the financial investment required to successfully transform an Enterprise. During this session, Will Davis and Joe Poblock will guide attendees through the basics of business case development; identify, evaluate, and quantify costs and value drivers; and review a sample business case to support enterprise Agile Transformation.

About Joe

Joe has a background in finance and healthcare, and professional experience with asset management, project management, business case development, and actuarial science. His history of guiding business implementations to completion is attributable to his ability to break technical concepts down into clear language. As such, much of Joe's project work has centered on working as a liaison between stakeholders, including with remote teams. Joe is a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) Charterholder.

About Will

Will has spent his time in consulting partnering with clients to establish vision, drive change and deliver results. Prior to consulting, Will was a Captain in the Air Force where he was a mission manager and developmental engineer for multiple satellite and suborbital launches. After leaving the US Air Force, Will has worked with a variety of clients, providing him with extensive experience in strategic planning, roadmapping, and market research across industries. Will works to drive strategic improvements in how clients manage, prioritize, and deliver their most important initiatives, with a strong emphasis on the application of agile principles across the enterprise.

Measuring Customer Success: I paid you to solve my problem, not give me features!

Customers are not paying for your product, they are hiring your product and are paying for positive outcomes and impacts. Agile was marketed with promise of faster value delivery to customer but as it went mainstream many organizations focused only on mastering different elements of agile frameworks and progress is being measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts, leaving customer success sideways.

Organizations and teams must realize that while "speed to launch" is crucial, "speed to learning" is even more important as they deliver features and products. How we respond to these learning's can drive a radical change in focus from "Velocity of Story Points" delivered to "Velocity of Learning" gained and answering the fundamental question of "Is our Customer Winning?". To accomplish this mindset shift, Product Managers and business analysts need to learn to move their focus from mastering the art of writing perfect user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products and the "problems & challenges their customers are trying to solve". Taking teams to the next level of making the customer successful through continuous delivery of valuable product requires an alignment between the product managers, analysts, engineering team and their customers. It requires the product managers and analyst to understand the difference between product success and customer success.

Join Kalpesh as he shows through storytelling and practical techniques on how connecting teams to customers and their problems can move them from "feature factory" to collaborative partners in driving customer success.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Attendees will learn how "Empathy" is a crucial element of product creation
2. Attendees will learn the importance of understanding what "jobs" the user is trying to accomplish using their product and what "winning" means to the customer
3. Attendees will learn the difference between Product Success and Customer Success and how they need to focus on both these elements
4. Attendees will learn what metrics they need to focus on in order to focus on customer success
5. Attendees will also be introduced to three techniques that help them and their team focus on customer success

About Kalpesh

Kalpesh is a Culture Hacker, Speaker & Enterprise Agile Coach with IntraEdge Agile Solutions with experience in creating and working with different shapes and sizes of Agile teams. He has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups, helping them make the transition to Agile way of working, implementing Agile at Scale, employ Lean Product Development approaches and instill Lean Startup mindset. As a monk on a spiritual journey, he is also on a journey of discovering, learning and implementing different agile techniques to create happier teams which in turn create better products, his version of enlightenment! His latest passion is Culture Hacking through continuous experimentation which will promote innovative thinking, extend openness, embody rationality, and bring design thinking into teams.

Practical Steps to Ensure a Successful Agile Transformation

Agile transformations are delicate things, but they can be game changers for organizations looking to improve how they manage and deliver complex products.

In this talk, Larry shares why Agile is amazing for the development of all types of products, not just software. Though Agile is powerful, Larry touches on why Waterfall isn't going anywhere, because there are still places where this approach works very well. He also delves into how the farmer (Waterfaller) and cowman (Agilist) can be friends, despite their differences.

Additionally, Larry illustrates how the needs and values of different tribes can be bridged to find effective, even wonderful, ways to work together.

Larry wraps up this talk by outlining where agile transformations can hit pitfalls, ways to spot the pitfalls beforehand, and how to solve them.

About Larry

I work at Isōs Technology as Senior Atlassian Consultant. In this I role help product development teams get the most out of the Atlassian platform through discovery and training workshops. I love this role because it combines two of my passions: (1) product development and (2) collaboration.

Prior to becoming an early adopter of Agile in 2001, I had been managing software projects with highly complex "waterfall" methodologies. I readily welcomed the leaner power of, at that time, index cards and what would eventually become Scrum.

Using my understanding of how teams creatively and effectively deliver products to market, I've been helping teams optimize delivery for a very long time.

On being an Agile Technical Coach

Coaching Technical practices is a bit like being a fitness coach. In the end it's not about what you are doing while you are there, you need the team to get (the code) in better shape. This is more about shaping behavior while you are gone than teaching or instructing while you are there. While I've been Agile Technical coach for over 10 years, I've only started to realize that my job is about optimizing behavior when I'm gone, rather than when I'm there, for the last 4 years. In this talk I'll share my practices, stories and what I've learned.

About Llewellyn

Llewellyn Falco is an independent agile coach. He discovered strong-style pair programming. He is creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests (www.approvaltests.com). He spends most of his time programming in Java and C# specializing in improving legacy code.He is the co-founder of TeachingKidsProgramming.org & co-author of Mob Programming Guidebook

If you would like to get a sample of him, check out his Practical Refactoring talk.

Llewellyn can calculate the cube root of any perfect cube under 1,000,000 in his head, as well as pick a standard lock. He can rollerblade down a flight of stairs, backwards. While studying drafting in high school, he started fire eating, sleight of hand magic, and once rode a unicycle 6 miles. He has taught swing dancing, and loves to salsa. He is also an accomplished speed chess player. He has been scuba diving over 20 times, become a guitar hero, and broke his personal record of paddle balling over 200 times. Llewellyn attributes his success to the large amount of caffeine he has consumed, and enjoys computer programming in his spare time. He is proficient in many programming languages including: java, javascript, c#, c++ or python.

Improve Your Customer Quotient

Value Proposition Canvas - Designing a more valuable product.

 Session Slides

Are you working hard, but failing to wow your customers? Learn how to set aside your assumptions and design solutions that will create more value for your stakeholders. In this hands-on workshop, you will build a Value Proposition Canvas that will help you better understand your customers and the value that you could create for them. This talk will also include how CBRE is using the value proposition in its design thinking pilot.

About Madeline

Maddie Grejda is passionate about Scrum and the success of the people she coaches. She works as an agile coach, helping an 80,000-person company navigate the adoption of Scrum and other agile practices. Her approach is based on a deep connection with people, supporting their self-discovery and transformation. She supports her local agile community as an organizer for the Dallas Agile Leadership Network.

11 Tips for a Successful Scrum Implementation

Let's talk about reality. This session will show you how to get started, discuss the 11 tips for a Successful Scrum Implementation and then give you actionable outcomes to use in the real world when you return to your organizations.

Please feel free to view the presentation and learn more at agile-az-2018.mvizdos.com.

About Michael

Michael Vizdos is an entrepreneur, CST (Certified Scrum Trainer) with the Scrum Alliance and the Scrum Master in Residence at Virginia Commonwealth University.

He has been a supporter of local user groups and past conferences in Arizona. Learn more at www.michaelvizdos.com.

Creating a Culture of Learning

 Session Slides

What percent of the week do you want your teams to spend learning to get better at what they do?

Learning as a team promotes: Team Cohesion, Team Emergence (Rising Tide Effect), Increased Innovation, Team Ownership of Ideas, Psychological Safety, and Increased Productivity

Let's talk about why your team should be learning together and how to make it happen.

About Paige

Paige Watson is a Lead Crafter at 8th Light. As an evangelist of XP and Agile work processes, he is ever striving to find better ways to write quality software, in ways that are empowering to developers and companies alike.

Mindful Group Facilitation & Coaching

When you're up in front of a group as a facilitator or coach, every moment presents choices. What question do I ask next? Is this time to use a particular facilitation tool? Should I share a model or a bit of knowledge now or trust the group? Most people, however, miss most of the these opportunities for choice. They stick to a plan or simply react.

In this session, Richard and Peter demonstrate and teach how different choices take group interactions in different directions and how you can mindfully make choices in each moment to create more engagement and better group outcomes.

About Peter

Peter Green led a grass roots Agile transformation at Adobe from 2005 to 2015, starting with his own team, Adobe Audition. His influence includes the teams behind such software flagships as Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro, as well as dozens of internal IT and platform technology teams and groups like marketing and globalization. His work was a major factor enabling Adobe product teams to make critical business transition from perpetual desktop products to the subscription-based service, Creative Cloud. His hands-on Scrum and Agile training and coaching at all levels of the organization including executives, helped lay the groundwork to shift teams from two-year product cycles to frequent delivery of high-quality software and services. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST), instructional designer, coach, facilitator, and a popular speaker at Tech, Agile, and Scrum conferences.

About Richard

Co-owner of Agile For All, Richard Lawrence trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. From his diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science, he helps people think more deeply about humanizing workplaces and collaborating effectively with each other on complex work.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and a Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the Training from the Back of the Room accelerated learning method. His book Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber will be published later this year by Addison-Wesley.

The Surprising Links Between Jazz and Agile

This session provides a creative look at collaboration and teamwork through the lens of a live professional jazz combo. During the session, we alternate between live performance and discussions with the musicians about how they approach collaboration, communication, listening, mastery, tradition vs. exploration, and the boundaries between art and business. If you're in the mood to hear some great music from one of Phoenix's best jazz groups, while exploring master level collaboration, come on by! You're sure to see Agile from a fresh perspective!

About Peter

Peter Green grew up in the Phoenix area and was a full-time musician for the early part of his career. Today, he is Principal Leadership Development Coach with Agile For All, a consulting firm that helps leaders and organizations thrive in complexity through the application of principles and practices grounded in the Agile movement. As a speaker, Peter is particularly skilled at taking complex and disparate information and distilling it down to clear, memorable, actionable points.

Peter spent 12 years at Adobe, where he led the Agile transformation that enabled the business model shift from perpetual license, long release desktop software products to subscription, frequently released Creative Cloud products. During that time, he trained and coached hundreds of teams and leaders in Agile approaches like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean Startup, including such flagships as Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere Pro.

High-Performance Teams are Masters of Mindfulness Meditation

High-performance teams are masters of mindfulness. The individual team members have high self-awareness. They know who they are, how they feel, and what they want. They always know the right thing to do or say at the right moment. They are aware of the impact of everything they do or say to each other. Teams in this state have high group awareness - as a team they know who they are, how they feel, and what they want together. Some teams get into this state by accident, and others are intentional and get there on purpose.

To get into this state of mindfulness and high performance on purpose, Richard incorporates elements of the work of Jim and Michele McCarthy and the Core Protocols, Woody Zuill and Mob Programming, contemporary meditation teachers, and his own work with meditation and Core Protocols.

In this session, we practice ways to get into a state of group mindfulness, including Core Protocols such as emotional check in, personal alignment, investigate, and group alignment. We also practice some short guided meditations. Attendees leave with embodied knowledge of activities to bring more mindfulness to their work teams.

About Richard

Richard Kasperowski is an author, speaker, teacher, and coach focused on high-performance teams. Richard is the author of the new book, High-Performance Teams: The Foundations, as well as The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. He leads clients in building great teams that get great results using the Core Protocols, Agile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard's newsletter at www.kasperowski.com.

Your Customer Doesn't Want Your Product (and that's ok)

 Session Slides

As people who make products, it's easy to get excited about the product and to assume everyone will love our baby just as much as we do. But customers don't actually want our products, no matter how wonderful they are - customers want what they want, and they'll use our products if we help them get what they want. Good product management, then, requires a focus on what customers want. In this session, Richard teaches you how to use customer profiles and customer problem interviews to understand your customer's goals and needs so you can build a product they'll be thrilled with.

About Richard

Co-owner of Agile For All, Richard Lawrence trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. From his diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science, he helps people think more deeply about humanizing workplaces and collaborating effectively with each other on complex work.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and a Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the Training from the Back of the Room accelerated learning method. His book Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber will be published later this year by Addison-Wesley.

FAST Agile - A Radical Disruption and New Method to Scale Agile

 Session Slides

Premera Blue Cross of Washington tried a radical experiment in self-organization - at scale. At it's largest, we had two tribes of around 50 people. In theory, you can grow a tribe to 150 - with one just one agile coach.

On the whole, it was a success, and we will share what worked and didn't work. Essentially, we combined Open Space with team self-selection and open allocation. We worked on a two-day cadence and allowed for dynamic reteaming.

Working this way, we had to tear down a lot of agile taboos and "best practices". It might sound unintuitive, but then so does pair programming and test-driven development - and yet they work. So we weren't that surprised to find this radical approach to scaling agile effective when it started to work and heard people say things like "I never want to work any way other than this".

About Ron

Ron will tell you his life purpose is to "unleash the human spirit in the workplace." He loves all things software and nurturing business/development harmony in particular.

His agile and Extreme Programming journey started in 2002, and over the years he has built strong technical skills and a deep understanding of agile methods. He has put this to use in several roles during his career: developer, development manager, and agile coach.

In 2014 Ron had an epiphany of a new way of working. A way that makes self-organization inescapable rather than just paying lip service to the concept. This method aligned with his vision and has been his passion ever since.

Practical Product Tools to Facilitate the Journey of Ideas in your Organization

In this session, we'll examine the journey of product ideas in various types of software organizations. This will allow you to compare and contrast your company to others in our region. In addition, I'll introduce a series of tools that can help to nurture (or discard) ideas that are vying for your product teams' mindshare, time and investment. These tools are ideal for managing stakeholders and creating shared understanding around each product idea that your company is considering.

About Sean

Sean has worked in product management for 19 years with a variety of technology companies, primarily in the K-16 education market. He also spent two years on mobile app and mobile platform product management at Workiva, which is where he first started using dual-track agile methods. His work there involved frequent interactions with prolific Product Management consultants, Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton, which accelerated his understanding and implementation of great discovery and delivery methodologies. At his current company, Integrate, Sean is leading both the product management and software design teams. His focus is building great product teams to deliver great products resulting in a rapidly growing marketing technology company.

What Is the Urgency Index? The Power and Limits of Agile Metrics

 Session Slides

Are you struggling to demonstrate - or drive - better outcomes with the many metrics your agile methodology produces? Sure, adopters of scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or other methodologies get a whole array of measures to analyze: velocity, predictability, cycle time, variability and many (many) more. These metrics can help an organization incrementally improve, focus on the right work, and produce better outcomes - or they can be useless, drive the wrong outcomes, or kill morale. So how do you get it right? The Urgency Index is an example of a new way to look at "agile" metrics - and a reminder that they are only part of the story of success.

Those who join this session will walk away with a new way to tell stories with metrics from team to enterprise level. We've got this! This session is fun and interactive and always includes lots of engagement and participation. It's not a lecture, it's a discovery session.

About Travis

As an enterprise transformation guy, I use lean-agile principles, tools, and practices to build high-performing teams, programs, and portfolios at top banks, health care giants, manufacturers of every day consumer products, and hospitality leaders. I'm a team builder, a systems thinker, a devops enthusiast, and a change agent. Recently, I've specialized in leading teams of agile coaches to drive measurable business improvements for my clients - both Fortune 50 enterprises and small businesses. I also likes to take photographs.

Prosperous Metrics: Solving the Scenarios we Struggle to Measure

 Session Slides

Imagine yourself sitting down in a director's office with a nervous feeling. "So, about those agile metrics I asked from you…", she says. Your stomach churns and pulse quickens.

How will you show progress of transformation with agile? How will you measure improvement in teams and people? And how will you avoid the threat of harm from popular metrics like "say:do ratios" and "velocity"?

Whether you're a manager, on a software team, or consultant, you've likely experienced conflict over metrics with agile. Traditional metrics which emphasize personal productivity drive negative behaviors, encouraging us to stay busy over working together to achieve goals. Meanwhile, leaders feel dissatisfied with popular "agile metrics," such as velocity and burn-down charts when they fail to provide the insights desired.

Come join what's sure to be a lively discussion and decode the complexity of measurement with agile. Through an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, discover outcome-oriented metrics which solve organizational needs for performance, quality, and change. Clarity and prosperity between agile and metrics is not out of reach. Come find out how!

About Zach

Zach Bonaker is "benevolent trouble-maker" based in San Diego, California, USA and has more than 10 years of experience assisting software organizations with improving working conditions and results. With experience guiding Fortune 500 companies to multi-million dollar startups, Zach builds relationships to help transform people, systems, and structures towards safer and collaborative ways of delivering high quality software. Zach is an international conference speaker, frequent podcast guest, and contributor to the global agile community. When he isn't thinking about next-generation agile ideas, Zach can be found enjoying the sunny California weather and connecting with people all over the world.