Speaker:  Cliff Berg
Track: Keynote

Description:

Agility is needed more than ever. So why is Agile struggling? 

It is struggling because it acquired a fixed mindset.

We are stuck in the frameworks, particularly Scrum and SAFe. Each time those are updated, we rush to the website and parse the changes.

Yet agility is an emergent ecosystem property. It does not come from a framework. Agility comes from how people react when things change. It’s fundamentally about leader behavior, and that includes anyone in any kind of leadership role. 

We need to get unaddicted to the frameworks, and ask ourselves what generates true agility and effectiveness, because agility without effectiveness is useless. 

We need to figure out what questions to ask, instead of what practices to follow. Learning is about questions. It’s about the cognitive journey, the acquisition of judgement and wisdom over time. It’s not about following someone else’s practice. 

The right question to ask ourselves is, What’s the question? 

Speakers: Mary Thorn & Katrin Schulz
Track: Embracing AI

Description:

Enterprises often struggle with how to incorporate AI and machine learning in a repeatable, sustainable manner.

In today’s competitive landscape, AI is no longer just a trend but a necessity. Generative AI has quickly become an essential tool for businesses—and with companies expected to explain its usage and justify any lack thereof—organizations are looking for ways to leverage AI at scale.

This session provides a strategic roadmap to unlock the full potential of AI within organizations, focusing on cultural readiness, enablement, ethical considerations, and addressing biases. Attendees will gain actionable insights and frameworks to effectively and ethically operationalize AI.

Learning Objectives:

•  5 ways to Operationalize AI at scale

Speaker: Lisette Zounon
Track: Embracing AI

Description:
Are you ready to elevate your intelligence to thrive in the new Agentic Era of Generative AI and intelligent agents? As artificial intelligence transforms the way we work, learn, and solve problems, tapping into and enhancing your natural cognitive abilities has never been more essential.

In this engaging one-hour session, you’ll discover actionable insights and techniques to unlock your full potential. Together, we’ll explore:

Whether you’re a student, a professional, or a lifelong learner, this session is designed to help you thrive in an AI-driven world. Equip yourself with the knowledge and tools to unleash your super-intelligence and stay ahead in the game.

Join us and become the architect of your intelligence in the era of AI!

Are you ready to take your intelligence to the next level?

Learning Objectives:

• Mastering Your Mind: Practical strategies to improve memory, focus, creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making.
• Augmenting Human Intelligence with AI: How to seamlessly integrate AI tools to amplify your cognitive capabilities and expand your problem-solving repertoire.
• Future-Proofing Your Skills: Why combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence gives you a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.

Speaker: George Harter
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:
While Scrum Masters keep the team on plan operating efficiently, Product Managers should ensure it always works on the “next most important thing.” But Product Managers are constantly bombarded with feature requests and ideas from users, customers, coworkers and executives. 

This session discusses how to:

• Ignore the clutter
• Identify the problems the should be solved now
• Communicate and justify priorities in a way that resonates with every stakeholder

Learning Objectives:

Attendees will understand:

• The difference between Strategic, Technical Debt and Customer Satisfaction work
• How product managers often manage incoming requests and why that process is damaging to the team and the product
• The best process for identifying and justifying feature priorities.

Speakers: Erick Jefferies & Leslie Hobbs
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:
This session will look at Leadership Skills, Systems Thinking, Empathy, and how they work together to help solve the things ‘keeping leadership up at night’.

Learning Objectives:

A conversation around how helping with leadership’s most pressing concern(s) moves the business forward.

• Identify Leaderships most pressing challenge
• Leverage Systems Thinking
• Move the business forward
• Match Leadership’s Language
• Accelerate value delivery

Speaker:  Richard Knaster
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, Value Stream Management (VSM) is gaining momentum as a must-have strategy for businesses striving to maximize their digital transformation investments. Every organization is essentially a value delivery system, creating and offering products and services to customers. Yet, many businesses lack awareness of their value streams or an understanding of how value flows through them—often causing digital transformation efforts to fall short despite significant investments.

Please join Richard Knaster, Chief Scientist, VSM, author, principal consultant, SAFe Fellow, and SPCT, to learn what’s driving the surge in VSM adoption and explore how you can leverage it to realize the full potential of your continuous improvement journey.

Learning Objectives:

• What is Value Stream Management?
• How does Value Stream Mapping differ from Value Stream Management? Can one work without the other?
• Why are Agile and DevOps insufficient for accelerating digital innovation alone?
• How can VSM boost your delivery of value
• Is VSM relevant outside of IT?
• How do you get started with VSM? What if your organization isn’t fully Agile—can VSM still help?

Speaker: Catherine Louis
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:

The tech industry has been struggling with diversity and inclusion for decades. In the mid-1980s, women made up a significant proportion of the tech industry. However, by the end of the decade, their numbers had declined dramatically. What factors contributed to this decline, and how does it affect product development?

We’ll explore the various factors that played a role in the disappearance of women from the tech scene. We’ll examine the cultural and societal biases that existed at the time, the lack of support and mentorship that women received, and the impact of technological changes on the representation of women in tech.

We’ll explore the impact of disappearing tech women on product development. Research shows diverse teams lead to better products. When women are underrepresented, this can lead to blind spots and biases that affect products. We’ll explore how diversity and inclusion improve product development and how to create more inclusive teams.

Learning Objectives:

Attend this session to learn-

• The various factors that contributed to the decline of women in tech in the mid-1980s
• The impact of cultural and societal biases on women in tech
• The role of support and mentorship in retaining women in tech
• The impact of technological changes on the representation of women in tech
• How the disappearance of women in tech affects product development
• The importance of diversity and inclusion in improving product development

Join in for an important conversation on the intersection of diversity, inclusion, and product development. Discover the various factors that contributed to the decline of women in tech and learn what we can do today to promote diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and improve our products.

Speaker: Tanner Wortham
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:

Leadership in the U.S. Marine Corps isn’t just about strategy and tactics; it’s about adapting to change, making quick decisions, and driving results no matter the circumstances. In this session, you’ll learn how military principles for decision-making, prioritization, and execution can radically improve how teams can perform under pressure.

We’ll explore how confronting problems head-on, crafting decentralized decision-making models, and experimenting obsessively can transform the way teams work, helping them deliver more effectively and more efficiently.

This talk will challenge how you think about agility and give you actionable insights that can be applied immediately. You’ll walk away with fresh insights that challenge traditional thinking and focus on delivering real, measurable outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Face toward the problem. Learn how to create a culture where mistakes are a stepping stone, not a setback. You’ll walk away with practical ways to embrace your missteps, correct course, and keep your teams moving forward.
• Prioritize with clarity and precision. Discover how the Marine Corps’ rule of three can build authority on demand into the hierarchy, keep your team focused, and drive better results for short- and long-term goals.
• Experiment relentlessly and learn continuously. Discover how to build a team culture that’s always iterating, improving, and experimenting—because success in the tech world, just like in the Corps, is about constantly refining and adapting. And sometimes surviving.

Speaker: Gary Cohen
Track: Accelerating the value of delivery

Description:

In fast-paced, ever-changing landscapes, clinging to the illusion of certainty is no longer viable. Bob Johansen, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, highlights the importance of clarity amidst uncertainty. Many product development practices, metrics, and artifacts remain rooted in assumptions of predictability, often leading to suboptimal outcomes.

Are we truly embracing transparency, or are we undermining it with outdated approaches? How can we better distinguish between areas where certainty is essential and those where humility and adaptability are key?

Explore balancing clarity with the reality of uncertainty across the product development lifecycle. We’ll examine practical ways to adapt our methods to the realities of uncertainty, enabling better decisions and superior outcomes in product development.

You’ll gain insights on:

• Product development cycle stages where certainty is critical
• Embedding continuous discovery for learning and clarity
• Building flexible teams that thrive in ambiguity
• Leveraging OKRs to drive focus without rigidity
• Reducing the cost of accelerated progress

Learning Objectives:

This session is designed to achieve the following learning outcomes for session attendees:

• Distinguish where in the product development cycle we need to act with certainty and where we need to acknowledge what we don’t know 
• Apply techniques that promote learning and clarity in the face of uncertainty

Speakers: Tom Gilmore, George Hack
Track: Beyond Agility

Description:
Agile is often misunderstood and seen as a mere change rather than a true transformation. Historically, transformation success rates hover around 30%, but Agile implementations see only 10-20% success. This low rate is due to the confusion between change (adopting frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe) and transformation (a comprehensive, multidimensional shift).

Implementing Agile frameworks without a complete transformation portfolio leads to disillusionment. True transformation involves a complex mix of interdependent initiatives, such as baselining organizational culture and behaviors, redesigning organizational structure, applying change management, and shifting from training to continuous learning.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will understand the difference between change and transformation and can explain it within their organizations.
• Participants will recognize the importance of baselining organizational culture and behaviors before starting a transformation and why these are critical.
• Participants will be able to outline the key initiatives in a transformation, their interdependencies, and intersections.
• Participants will comprehend why the benefits and values from Agile, DevOps, or Business Agility transformations occur at the transformation level, not just the change level.

Speaker: Ashish Bhojane
Track: Beyond Agility

Description:
In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, traditional Agile practices are no longer enough to stay competitive and responsive. True agility requires a culture of continuous experimentation – one where teams are empowered to test ideas, embrace uncertainty, and learn quickly from successes and failures. This hands-on workshop, Beyond Agile: Building a Culture of Experimentation, is designed to equip participants with practical tools to foster an experimentation mindset within their teams. Through engaging activities, including group-designed experiments and interactive feedback sessions, attendees will learn how to turn ideas into small, safe-to-fail experiments that drive real insights. By the end of this session, participants will have developed actionable strategies to implement a culture of experimentation, pushing beyond Agile frameworks to foster innovation and adaptability.

Learning Objectives:

•  Understand the Principles of Experimentation in Agile: Participants will learn the core principles of agile culture, including hypothesis-driven development, fast feedback loops, and safe-to-fail experiments.
• Develop Skills to Design Effective Experiments: Through group activities, participants will gain practical experience creating small, focused experiments that validate assumptions, measure impact, and support continuous learning.
• Apply Customer-Centric Metrics to Evaluate Experiments: Attendees will explore key customer engagement metrics and learn how to apply these in their experimental setups to measure the effectiveness of new ideas.
• Cultivate a Learning Culture: Participants will leave with strategies for fostering a team culture that values learning and adaptation, going beyond Agile practices to embrace a mindset of continual improvement and flexibility.

Speaker: Dr. Patrick (Mack) McConnell
Track: Beyond Agility

Description:

The discourse on the relevance of Agility took a bleak turn in 2024, with a number of ‘thought leaders’ and some large organizations declaring that, “Agile is dead.” If it is, let’s have a criminologist-lead discussion of three likely suspects responsible for its demise. And along the way we’ll also lay out some hope for the future of Agility and some ideas for rescuing adoptions that may be teetering on the brink.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will leave with an understanding of three of the most common causes of agile transformation failure, counterarguments to deal with naysayers, and ideas to salvage outcomes in organizations that may be questioning the relevance of Agility going forward.

Speaker: Charlotte Fouque
Track: Beyond Agility

Description:

In contrast to the tech hiring boom of the pandemic, the field of Agile Coaching looks and feels grim today. Mass layoffs of Agile roles, a much reduced hiring outlook, and dramatic “Agile is dead” headlines might paint a picture of a world where Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and other Agile leader roles no longer have a place. But is it really the end of the road? Should we pack it in and get our PMPs to ride the new wave of project management?

This talk will address what’s changed, what team/organizational needs remain for determined Agile practitioners to continue fulfilling, what skills and tools can serve us in the new landscape, and how to weather the storm by leaning into the values and principles at the root of Agility.

Learning Objectives:

• Understanding of how and why Agile coaching approaches of the past may no longer resonate with teams and organizations
• How coaches at all levels can adapt to meet the needs of their organization “where they are”
• Overview of skills, tools, and suggested reading for coaches, Scrum Masters, and other Agile leaders to thrive in the unknown of what comes next!

Panelists: Kimberly Andrikaitis, Rhiannon Galen-Personick, Catherine Louis, and Mary Thorn

Moderator: Bob Galen

Track: Beyond Agility 

Description:

In this panel discussion Bob Galen will ask Kimberly Andrikaitis, Rhiannon Galen-Personick, Catherine Louis, and Mary Thorn to reflect on their careers to-date as Agilists. They’ll share pivotal moments in their journey, what has inspired them and provided them direction in their careers. They will also share times that challenged them and how they met those challenges. Finally, they’ll share their hopes and dreams for the future. Come to this session to be inspired AND to consider your allyship with these and other women Agilists in your own journey.

Learning Objectives:   N/A