Maarten Dalmijn is a consultant, speaker, and trainer at Dalmijn Consulting. He is the author of the book Driving Value with Sprint Goals. Maarten helps teams to beat the feature factory all over the world. Millions of practitioners have read his best-practice articles on Agile, Scrum, and Product Management. He specializes in helping companies to build empowered teams that can discover better ways of delivering value. Maarten is a frequent speaker at Fortune 500 companies and international industry conferences. He has worked with many award-winning start-ups and scale-ups. He is an ambassador and editor at Serious Scrum, the largest Scrum publication on Medium.
Title of Presentation:
Humble Planning: How To Make Your Plans Suck Less.
In this talk, I will introduce the concept of humble planning and why it's crucial for succeeding with an Agile way of working and building products of exceptional value. When faced with uncertainty, risk, and complexity, our natural response is to focus on what we know and to spend more time talking, analyzing, planning, and predicting. As a result, our plans become filled with speculation and rooted in our imagination. Our plans as an anchor stifle the ability to respond to changes. We become locked into plans that prevent collaboration, learning, and discovery. In this talk, I will show why instead of starting with overconfident plans, we should start with humble plans. How can we encourage our teams to begin with humble plans and what do teams need to adapt their plans as they discover and learn what’s necessary while doing the work? The talk will cover concepts like friction, the three gaps model of Bungay, intent, intent-based leadership, humble planning, sprint goals, the fog of beforehand, and the fog of speculation.
Esther Derby draws on four decades of experience leading, observing, and living organizational change. She works with a broad array of organizations. Her clients include both startups and Fortune 500 companies. Based on experience and research, her approach blends attention to humans and deep knowledge of complex adaptive systems. Esther has been called one of the most influential voices within the agile communities when it comes to developing organizations, coaching teams, and transforming management. Her work over many years has influenced coaches and leaders across many companies. Esther started her career as a programmer. However, over the years she’s worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant, manager, and team leader. From all these perspectives, one thing was clear: individual, team and even organizational success depends greatly on the work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, she’s spent the last twenty-five years helping companies shape their environment for optimum success. Her formal education includes an MA in Organizational Leadership and a certificate in Human Systems Dynamics. She’s trained as a Satir Mentor Coach. She’s also the host of the popular podcast, Change by Attraction.
Title of Presentation: Leaders at All Levels.
Traditional definitions of leadership focus on charisma and position. But most people in any given organization don’t have formal leadership. Most of us aren’t brimming with charisma, either. Does that mean you can’t be a leader? NO! In fact, you can exhibit leadership no matter where you are in the organization. (No, this does not mean sucking up to your boss.) In this talk, Esther will explore a definition of leadership that doesn’t rely on either role or rah-rah. And she will talk about what that sort of leadership looks like when you are a member of a team, a manager, or at the top of the hierarchy.
Tony is a customer-obsessed, people-centered, strategic product management leader and change agent with over 22 years of progressive experience delivering growth and innovation at the intersection of consumer businesses, technology, and analytics. Tony's passion is developing amazing teams and creating the conditions where we make a difference every day in delivering every customer a VIP experience. Tony is also internationally experienced building digital organizations within global companies such as Boeing and Hasbro, while accelerating the strategy and ecosystems of global products with multi-million dollar budgets that deliver experiences to millions of users around the world.
Featured Speaker ProductCon 2019
Featured Speaker Product World 2020
Chief Product Officer Summit 2022
Multiple Time Keynote at over 50 Universities in the US
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-pagliocco
Page: https://www.pagliocco.com
Title of Presentation:
Transforming a Region - One Team at a Time.
Tony's experience moving from the US and conducting Agile transformations in the Middle East (MENA). During the talk, he will explore the why in the region, Agile values are critical, but more importantly, what was learned, what challenges we faced, and what we did to succeed.
Cheryl Hammond, a.k.a. @bsktcase, has a couple of decades of experience as a software developer in the private and public sectors. She led her team's successful adoption of Scrumban for a mission-critical regulatory compliance project under multi-agency state and federal government oversight; mentored former COBOL devs into true-believing unit-testing XP evangelists; and turned a threatened software product at risk of litigation into a lean, revenue-generating flagship offering in nine months, all of which led her to believe that anything is possible. She is not sorry for her many biases, including strong preferences for servant-style leadership and team-based, holistic problem-solving and a strong aversion to agile zealotry. Whether consulting or in-house, Cheryl endeavors to make life suck less for software delivery organizations and the humans who inhabit them.
Title of Presentation: Using Agile Self-Organization to Help Your Team’s “Return To Office” Suck Less.
Whether you’re excited to collaborate in person or you dread having to wear shoes again—or both—it’s clear the great Return To Office is a big adjustment for you and your teams. In the past 2-3 years, we tried to tailor our home office environments to help us work at our best. Now we must re-learn how to share space with others whose working styles, communication styles, needs, and preferences are very different. In some cases, our companies’ Return To Office policies is creating new problems that we might not be able to fix right away.
Teamwork and self-organization are the heart of any agile practice, and this fast-paced session will teach you several concrete techniques for resetting team norms in our new normal. We’ll talk about working agreements and conflict resolution that can help fully co-located teams as well as hybrid teams. Return To The Office might be challenging, but if your team can pull together and help each other through the transition, you’ll be set up to tackle any problem that comes next!
David is a passionate Product Leader with ten years of product management experience. Over the last few years, David led many product teams in successful endeavors. His mission is to help product teams deliver REAL value faster and unlock their potential. Therefore, David helps companies and teams untrap themselves and overcome the multiple traps ahead of them. His biggest fear is the comfort zone. His motto is, the faster we learn, the faster we succeed.
One of David’s hobbies is writing articles. David shares his ideas on LinkedIn and Substack and he loves learning from everyone.
Title of Presentation: Untrapping Product Teams.
Product teams are drowning in anti-patterns. It’s time to help them untrap themselves and create value sooner.
Challenges. Anti-patterns. Deadlines. The lives of product teams have never been more challenging. With ever-increasing pressure, delivering value becomes daunting. Product teams become feature factories and end up maximizing features nobody needs. That’s not what Product teams are supposed to be.
It’s time to help teams untrap themselves and create value sooner! I will share with you what you can do from today on to transform your scenario and become a value maximizer instead of a feature factory.
As the co-founder of The Liberators, Barry liberates teams and organizations from outdated working modes. He creates space for everyone to be involved in shaping the future and making a positive impact on their organization.
Barry highly enjoys providing (Scrum) training and workshop facilitation. As a trainer & facilitator, he helps teams and groups to do their best thinking and to find local solutions to persistent challenges. Barry's toolkit is packed with facilitation techniques, of which Liberating Structures are the most prominent. They make everyone feel heard, seen, and respected and help Barry to get the most out of group interactions.
Barry writes blog posts, hosts meetups, and speaks at conferences to share his lessons learned.
Title of Presentation: Unleash (Zombie?) Scrum In Your Organization.
During this session, we’ll explore the following questions:
Join the session and unleash Scrum (and Agile) in the organization!
As a business agility consultant and executive coach, Mun-Wai specializes in creating and maintaining innovative organizations. Her clients learn from and appreciate her pragmatic and people-first systems approach. “Release the potential of your staff and they will release the potential of the business” is what she goes by. She has over 20 years of corporate and agile experience. Started in Engineering, Mun-Wai ended up being Chief of Staff when she started messing around in HR, Finance and Facilities. She works in organizations around the world, from startups to large enterprises, across various industries. Mun-Wai ability to make the complex simple allows her to help the executives understand how their decisions affect the rest of the organization across the globe.
Mun-Wai frequently speaks at global conferences and professional gatherings. She also shares her experience, thoughts, and insights through her podcast, blogs, articles, and monthly Leadership Memos at https://www.munwaic.com.
Title of Presentation: Want to know how to lead and manage in the 21st century?
“Release the potential of your staff and they will release the potential of the business.”
What comes to your mind when you hear that statement?
In the 20th century, the boss was assumed to know best and told the workers what to do. Leadership came from the top. The top was in charge and power trickled down. In comes 21st century, the world changed. People nowadays say leadership occurs at every level. What does that actually mean?
3 years ago, the world changed even more. How are we supposed to lead in this remote & hybrid world?
In this interactive talk, we’ll discuss what is at the heart of our 21st-century business and workplace, and how that affects the way we manage and work.
Gražvydas Šedys is an Agile Coach, Consultant, and Trainer. He is a believer and practitioner of Agile Philosophy over Methodology. This is the mindset he tries to spread to his clients and the companies Gražvydas works with. He has been working with agility for more than 8 years. In the past, Gražvydas had his own consultancy company, working with efficiency, Lean, and Agile topics. Then Gražvydas founded his tech startup, failed with it, and moved to the corporate sector (banking industry) for a few years. He has been working with Fintech companies quite a lot. But throughout his journey, Gražvydas saw very different companies applying Agile (from classical IT, to completely IT-unrelated, from very small to very large), which helped him to build an all-around understanding of this mindset. Now Gražvydas loves to spread and share this knowledge he built with everyone around him. Gražvydas also loves networking, so he will be glad to connect and get to know everyone in person.
Title of Presentation: DeAgile - Easy Way to Build Your Own Agile Framework.
Probably all of us know or at least have heard at least a dozen of different Agile frameworks. We all know Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, SAFe, LeSS, SoS, etc. But while working with Agile for more than 8 years Gražvydas noticed that it is rare that organizations or teams adopt those frameworks fully by the book. And it is natural as different companies work in different markets, and have different histories and organizational set-up. So, exceptions to the rules start to be applied which hinders the adoption of those frameworks.
So, after witnessing quite a few of these kinds of cases Gražvydas decided to create a way of empowering organizations to construct an Agile framework that works best for them. In other words, Gražvydas deconstructed Agile into a Lego-like piece (just following some patterns) and present those pieces to everyone. Now anyone can build up a framework of their own. So, this is what you will do in this session: Gražvydas will try to put those Lego pieces together and help you to construct your brand-new Frameworks. It is both fun and useful as you can bring your own frameworks just after this one hour.
For Gražvydas, Agility is not following a pre-defined framework but adopting it for the best result for the company. So, during the workshop, he will share his experience with DeAgile, what it is, how it works, and how to use it. Then together with participants Gražvydas will work on creating new Agile frameworks for their use cases using DeAgile. The result will be that participants will have a few brand-new frameworks to present to each other!
Tomas consults tech teams and executives on leadership & performance. His primary focus is on technology companies facing high levels of complexity, risk, and ambiguity. Tomas' clients are powerful, passionate, and successful. He helps them grow their people and their business, adapt and thrive in challenging environments, create more strategic clarity, and achieve what’s truly important to them. In the past three years, Tomas has been training and consulting 1000+ managers and high-performers in tech companies. Before becoming a consultant he spent more than a decade building technology products and leading international Agile teams by himself.
Title of Presentation:
Navigating Engagement and Ownership in Agile Teams: How to Control Attention, Prevent Burnout and Protect Momentum.
Building Agile teams is easy. A lot of people could tell you how to do that. But building teams in a way that everyone would get closer to the things that matter to them and perform in an optimal way long-term is a lot more difficult. There is a gap between the current position of a person/business/organization and desired one (the goal achieved, change implemented). You are not the person you were before, but not yet the person you want to become. It's an uncomfortable, messy place to be. This area of unowned, unclaimed, or uninhabited land is where miracles happen but also significant risks are at play.
There is no surprise that the best Agile teams are adaptive, flexible, and creative.
Yet, the most significant risks remain - the human factor and time. We are so focused on formal systems, structures, and frameworks that we often forget this.
In this workshop, we will uncover - how to systematically navigate ownership and initiative in the team, how to increase and decrease the temperature in your team using optimal tools to ensure high engagement when necessary and guard the team against blowing themselves up.