Better Software West 2018 - Product Owners & Mangers | TechWell

Conference archive

Better Software West 2018 - Product Owners & Mangers

Monday, June 4

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MH

Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven/Behavior-Driven Development

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Monday, June 4, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done are often areas of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items, living in our defect tracking systems, can be traced to our difficulty performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)/behavior driven development (BDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD/BDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. By decreasing re-work, ATDD/...

Pete Oliver-Krueger
LitheSpeed
MJ

Fundamentals of Lean Startup

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Monday, June 4, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Is your industry being disrupted? Is it getting more difficult to keep your customers—or to find new ones? Agile and DevOps form the foundation of best practices for how to build products, but they work just as well when applied to the right—or to the wrong— products. We need a different process to help us distinguish between the two. Lean Startup drives to the source of the problem and helps us answer the question—Should we build it? This year more than half of the participants at Lean Startup Week were from enterprise organizations. If you’re not using the Lean Startup way of designing...

Ryan Riplley
Independent Consultant
MK

Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level

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Monday, June 4, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...

Tuesday, June 5

Doc Norton
CTO2
TG

Chartering Agile Teams: Conditions for Success

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Team charters are essential, but there's no specific formula for how to effectively create them or what to include. Each element of the team charter is specific to each team. There can be a framework for developing the charter, but it must be a collaborative effort of—at a minimum—the members of the team. Join Doc List as he shares his often-used framework, the key steps in crafting a charter, and the activities that are a must for the process. Explore aspects of setting specific constraints or criteria for the team, particularly Definition of Done and Definition of Ready, and see examples...

V. Lee Henson
AgileDad
TH

Advanced Backlog Refinement and Estimation Techniques

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...

Jeff Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TI

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...

Francie Van Wurkus
AB2 Consulting
Claudia Marquette
AB2 Consulting
TJ

What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Maybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all the customers who derive value from it, you can make smarter...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
TM

Building the Right Thing by Focusing on the Customer

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

This tutorial is for product creators who are passionate about delighting their customers by solving their true needs. Join Catherine Louis as she walks you through Design Thinking, Build- Measure-Learn loops to validate assumptions, and Scrum to deliver as table stakes for building the right thing rather than building the wrong thing faster. In this highly interactive workshop, you will be “learning by doing”. Some of the topic we’ll explore include practical Product Discovery tools and how to effectively en-Vision your products. We’ll use User Story Mapping as means of defining and...

Wednesday, June 6

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
AW2

When Continuous Improvement Feels Like Constantly Failing – An Introduction to Design Thinking

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Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Do your Retrospectives feel like a repeat of the last one? Are they moan and groan sessions? Want to try something new to give your team a boost? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users. Why not try using known design principles during your retrospectives to get that "wow" factor for your teams! In this session Catherine Louis will provide a Design Thinking overview. You’ll roll up your sleeves up and try it...

Kalpesh_Shah
IntraEdge Inc
AW3

Outcome Over Output: Don't Be a Backlog Lumberjack

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Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As agile goes mainstream, many organizations are only focused on mastering different elements of agile frameworks. Progress is measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts. These metrics can turn agile teams into backlog lumberjacks! Teams, ScrumMasters, and leadership must realize that while speed to launch is crucial to delivering software, speed to learning is even more important. To accomplish this mindset shift, product owners need to learn to change their focus from mastering the art of writing user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products...

John_Cutler
Independent Consultant
AW6

Beating the Feature Factory Mindset

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Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features...

Melissa Petak
Onlife Health
AW8

Creating an Innovation-Rich Culture

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Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

It's important to create a culture that inspires and infuses your development team with great ideas. But ideas are not action. Ideas in and of themselves are nothing more than unrefined, random thoughts, and worse, most ideas never get implemented. Even when you do follow through on some of the best ideas, they can cause great harm without proper planning and execution. While creativity is an asset, unbridled creativity where disparate ideas abound outside a sound decision-making and execution framework will create distraction and chaos. In this session, Melissa Petak will show you how to...

Tim_Guay
AgileWorks Inc.
DW5

Proving Out Your DevOps Pipeline Using a Minimum Viable Product

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Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

In the rush to be more competitive, an organization is often tempted to do an across-the board, "big bang" implementation. However, taking a big bang approach to implementing a DevOps pipeline carries with it a myriad of risks and challenges that can result in a failed DevOps implementation. Many of these risks and challenges can be mitigated or even eliminated by developing a DevOps minimum viable product (MVP). Join Tim Guay as he discusses how to apply an MVP concept to DevOps. You'll understand how to effectively test the end-to-end functionality of your DevOps pipeline and provide...

Thursday, June 7

V. Lee Henson
AgileDad
BT1

Agile 3.0: The Five Secrets Advanced Agile Companies Know

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Now that organizations have opted to morph agile into their own homegrown Agile Center of Excellence, many have missed out on simple advanced practices that would allow them to be even more aligned and ready to embrace a more practical agile application. Join seasoned agile coach Lee Henson as he shows you how to leverage internal and external agile service agreements to help guide your teams to a more solid agile footing. He will explore setting a clear vision and strategy by building an “agile press release” and how to embrace estimation excellence for stories, releases, and entire...

Nablia Safdar
Do it Best Corp.
AT1

Fuel Agility with Transparent Expectations

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 10:00am to 11:00pm

Do you know how your work is aligned to tactical and strategic goals? Success is rooted in a productive and cohesive team-centered culture. When culture and execution are misaligned, failure is almost certain. Everyone on and around the team must understand their role in defining, delivering, and growing value. It sounds easy, but the discipline can be tough, which leads to disappointments and unwelcome surprises. Nabila Safdar focuses on curating transparent expectations by the following six core practices. First, foster candor and respect. This leads to unity. Second, have fresh...

Natalie_Warnert
CA Technologies
AT3

Stop Guessing and Validate What Your Customers Want

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In agile, everything we do is an experiment. Product development is no different. We think we know what the customer wants, and the customer thinks they know what they want, but it turns out we're all wrong! To get to validated discoveries about our features, we must understand how to write a better hypothesis for our development experiments. This session focuses on challenging the mindset that we are validating options during our experiments. Natalie Warnert will show you how to eliminate options that don't work with data and feedback by looking at your product hypotheses as tests that...

Stefana Saxton
Black & Veatch
BT4

Innovation: The Art of Being Wrong

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

So, your company wants to be innovative. Are you comfortable with failure? The word failure is littered with negative connotations. Elon Musk financed three failed SpaceX rocket launches. Edison designed more than 2,000 light bulbs that did not work. The Wright brothers crashed dozens of planes and gliders before one took off. And the Americas were discovered through failed circumnavigation. Some failed small and learned. And some failed big but survived and thrived. The lesson is that organizations must embrace failure to accelerate innovation. Join Stefana Saxton to learn how to...

Faye Thompson
Cardinal Solutions Group
BT5

It's All In Our Heads: Using Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Understanding how our brains take shortcuts to process all the data they take in can help us recognize when its happening, take measures to correct our course, and use that information to build stronger teams. This talk sprang from my curiosity about the intersection of neuroscience and organizational behavior. It is my hope that attendees will leave with the ability to recognize when they and their teams are using processing shortcuts, as well as some techniques for mitigating their impact. Learning Objectives: - Identify several ways in which our brains short cut processing in order to...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
BT6

Using Behavior Driven Development and Acceptance Test-Driven Development to create GREAT requirements

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, business analysts, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulties encountered while performing these initial requirements activities. Ken Pugh introduces behavior-driven development (BDD), also known as acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), and explains how it works in creating detailed requirements. He outlines the different roles that team members play in the...

Steve Spearman
Agile for All
AT5

Let's (Re)Learn about Agile and Scrum in One Hour!

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking...

Katherine Campbell
Ticketmaster
BT9

The Five Biggest Mistakes Your Team Is Making in Requirements Definition

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Google pioneer Alberto Savoia offered this sage advice: Build the right "it" before you build It right. But few software companies take the time to define, much less build, the right "it." The problem starts with a poor requirements definition process. In this session, join Kathryn Campbell as she examines the five most common mistakes that software companies make during requirements definition—and how to avoid them. First Kathryn defines thinking too small as a huge problem and shows you how to broaden your perspectives. Next, she exposes being stuck in the past, with legacy systems...

Jamie Lynn Cooke
Both Hemispheres, LLC
AT9

Building the Perfect Product Backlog

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." This quote from Peter Drucker identifies why even the most productive agile teams may not always deliver the most successful business solutions. The agile team depends on the product owner to correctly identify the business requirements with the highest values, to clearly describe each feature at the right level of granularity, to provide the necessary supporting documentation, and to continuously adapt the product backlog to meet the emerging needs of the organization. Otherwise, the team could be measuring its...

Toiya Jones-Current
Kaiser Permanente
AT11

Waterfall to Scrum: It Only Goes Up from Here

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
AT12

Essential Product Ownership: It takes a Village

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Scrum surfaced in 1993. So, the role of a Product Owner has existed for 20+ years. Surely the whole idea is well understood by now. Right? And the role is a simple one. There is a single product owner per product team or teams. Defining and accepting the work to meet the clients’ goals. Always mucking around the backlog. Again, simple and clear. Right? Well, in my coaching travels and observations it’s not that simple. I still see literally tens of organizations and hundreds of teams that struggle with the notion of product ownership. So, let’s go over it...

Anu Smalley
Capala Consulting Group
K5

Agile Lighthouses: Navigating toward Successful Products

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Thursday, June 7, 2018 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Directional awareness in product development is one of the most challenging aspects of building things—whether applications, services, or true products. Gaining a true north in your journey and having a light to show you the way are often the difference between success and failure. But what is your compass? Where is your lighthouse? It’s your customer, and your challenge is determining how to effectively engage the customer. Agile product management provides a distinct mindset with techniques and patterns useful in navigating these often-convoluted courses. And Anu Smalley is an...

Friday, June 8

Jessica Soroky
NextGear Capital
SMT1

Limitless by Choice: Unlocking Your and Your Teams’ Potential

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Friday, June 8, 2018 - 9:00am to 10:00am

Agile, Waterfall, and everything in between starts and ends with teams. No matter what role you play on the team you have the power to unlock the team’s real potential. No – this isn’t a talk on how to get a higher velocity while working less. This session is the practical view into HOW to become or inspire high performing teams. Join seasoned agile and leadership coach Jessica Soroky as she shares the secret to unlocking your own personal power first. Sick of talking conceptually? Don’t worry this session is all about giving you real tools and techniques you can start using today to take...

SMT2

Agile in a Regulated Environment – Advice from a “Blues Traveler”

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Friday, June 8, 2018 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Implementing Agile practices in a regulated industry has its own set of unique challenges. Learn what worked and didn't work at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) and WellCare Health Plans as they adopted Agile practices in product and software development within their regulated organizations.

Join Leon Sabarsky as he shares his advice and lessons learned on implementing Agile at the Blues and other healthcare organizations. Some or their particular challenges included scaling up, connecting with non-agile PMO’s, reconfiguring our traditional testing processes, and...