Building Great Teams: Culture and Core Protocols

Richard Kasperowski

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, and
• How to move quickly and with high quality towards the team’s goals

Mastering Product Management: Move your skills to the next level

Kalpesh Shah, Sean McKeever

You've all heard the stories about amazing product teams at the best software companies, but how do you work in these amazing ways while leading your product teams in new directions? This hands-on workshop will help you to take your product management skills to the next level!

You'll be learning about modern product management principles and immediately applying your learning during small group working sessions. Our hands-on activities include playing the role of product managers for popular products that we all use on a daily basis, so you will learn by doing instead of being lectured.

By the end of the workshop you will be able to:

• Run dual-track agile (discovery and delivery) with your product teams
• Create rich and effective story maps to represent your customer needs and informs the solution to be delivered
• Discover exactly what should be in the MVP solution
• Facilitate a design studio session with your product teams
• Identify and define key metrics that matter to positively influence your outcomes

Lean Startup Workshop: Experiment-Driven Development

Michael Hall

As an Agile team member, you have a responsibility to ensure that the right product is being built. Warning - you can still build the wrong product using Agile! In Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup, he poses the question "What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?"

Lean Startup is designed to ensure we build the right product. This popular Agile method is applicable to all companies and projects, not just startups.

Join us for a fun hands-on workshop to explore the main Lean Startup principles such as hypothesis-driven project vision, experiment-driven development, validated learning, build-measure-learn loops, pivot/persevere decisions, small batch size, minimum viable product, and others.

The workshop concludes with a "marshmallow challenge" project simulation contest utilizing the Lean Startup principles where teams will attempt to break the current world record for highest marshmallow on top of spaghetti sticks.

Whether you are new to Agile or a mature "agilista", you will leave the workshop armed with new techniques that can be applied immediately on your Agile projects.

At the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

• Evaluate and apply Lean Startup principles to your Agile projects
• Differentiate between experiment-driven and assumption-driven development
• Organize project efforts with high levels of innovation and experimentation
• Effectively de-risk development efforts through validated learning

Leadership starts with listening: Coaching techniques to amplify your impact

Heidi Helfand

In this workshop you will learn about the difference between coaching and giving advice. You will understand and practice deep listening and how to draw out the other person by asking open-ended powerful questions that empower them to serve up their own answers. We’ll go over how bring the people you coach to meaningful accountability that encourages action or changes in the way that they want to "show up" in the world. We’ll also talk about the art of mentoring and giving advice. That too has it’s place especially when we are working with teams to apply a certain philosophy such as Lean and Agile development.

Agile Approaches to Change in your Personal and Organizational Life

Peter Green

We all know change is hard, both personally and organizationally. This workshop will introduce some of the most powerful tools I've come across to help encourage meaningful change. We'll look at the four ground conditions that must be in place, the psychology that holds us back when we really want to make a change but struggle, and two powerful techniques to help us break through resistance and start to make incremental, positive changes in our lives and our organizations.

80/20 Product Ownership: Slicing at Every Level of Detail

Richard Lawrence

Learn how to slice projects into high-value early features, features into good user stories, big stories into small stories, and how to manage it all with a continuous backlog refinement approach.

One of the most powerful skill-sets for Product Owners and Agile teams is being able to find the thin slices in every big idea, every feature, even every story that will deliver maximum impact with minimum time and effort. The 80/20 principle suggests that most of the value in every project, feature, or user story (the 80%) comes from just a small slice of it (the 20%).

Are you sure you're spending your team's time on what matters most? The average Scrum team in the US costs over $5,000 per day. Odds are, you're wasting hundreds or even thousands of dollars every day on the low-value parts of your projects, features, and stories.

There's an old saying in poker: "If you're at the table 30 minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, get up—you're the sucker." The same sort of thing applies here. If you don't know what the low-value part of a project, feature, or story was—the part you intentionally cut out—you spent money building it.

Agile practitioners everywhere are struggling with this. But it doesn't have to be hard. You can learn to split stories faster than you probably estimate them today.

Scrum In the Real World -- Focus. #deliver

Michael Vizdos

In this workshop, you'll work with Michael Vizdos and other participants in learning how to Focus and #deliver using Scrum in the Real World. We will quickly review Scrum (to set context) and then spend the time during the session addressing real world problems, issues and concerns that you can apply when you return to your real world Scrum teams. This workshop is for all levels of experience and requires active participation (nothing physical!).

Transitioning to Agile Leadership

Jennifer Bonine

The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in an “agile” world is to know what skills you need to be effective, and in turn help your team navigate change.  This session will be focused on providing you with a toolkit for agile leadership.  We will explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help people adapt to changes.  We will provide exercises that enable you to learn your leadership style and understand your blind spots as a leader.  What metrics should you be baselining and measuring against as you adopt agile development methodologies instead of a traditional SDLC? Leave with ideas on what will work for you and your organization.  Explore with other leaders during hands on activities how to influence and promote ideas and change, as well as how to inspire others to follow and invest in your ideas.  Finally, learn how to partner across cross-functional teams and geographies.  After this session, you will have the tools to make sure that you are an agile leader that your teams want to follow.