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Tutorials

ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.

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MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

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TK Mobile App Usability and UX for Developers and Testers
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Many enterprises  today are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis, although there are currently no formal models describing UX. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, UX becomes paramount. Phil Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving UX on the mobile platform. To build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX, Phil gives examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW3 Your Agile Prioritization Process Is Probably Wrong
Tom Gimpel, SofterWare, Inc
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

Of course we know what customers want, right? Product owners have the roadmap. Sales teams know what sells. Support talks to customers every day. So if we really know what our customers want, why is 65 percent of all software functionality rarely or never used? Why aren’t our customers delighted with the products we ship? Stop guessing what customers want and start delivering it! Tom Gimpel discusses the challenges of feature prioritization and determining what your clients really want and what they really need—and why they’re not the same thing. Learn how you can employ the KANO prioritization model to delight your customers by giving them functionality they value without the fluff they won’t use. Learn what’s wrong with most feedback surveys and build your delivery process to maximize customer satisfaction. Take away valuable tools for prioritization including an Excel-based scoring model that actually chooses the “best” possible combination of features that you can ship.

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AT13 Applying Lean Startup Principles to Agile Projects
Michael Hall, Improving Enterprises
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

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 would it matter if we did it on time and on budget? We often assume the Product Owner is smart enough to define the right product. But what if we are wrong? Michael Hall shares lean startup principles and how they can be applied to ensure that the product we are building is righteous. Learn new agile concepts such as hypothesis-driven project vision, knowledge broker personas, learning maps, minimum learning product, experiment backlogs, experiment test iterations, validated learning, and pivot/persevere decisions. Case studies and Michael’s first-hand product experience emphasize the learning points. New and mature agilistas alike will leave the session armed with Lean Startup agile techniques that can be applied immediately on their agile projects.

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