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Agile Track Video
PM Models Track Video
Product Management Track Video
PM Models
09:30 – 10:00
09:30 – 10:00
Registration
10:00 – 10:45
10:00 – 10:45
Accelerating Value Delivery with Value Stream Management
Richard Knasner
In today's fast-paced digital economy, Agile and DevOps are not enough to get the full benefits from a digital transformation. Enterprises must adopt value stream management (VSM) to deliver innovation better and faster than their competitors.

According to Gartner, by 2023, 70% of organizations will use value stream management to improve delivery flow. In this talk, Richard Knaster, Chief Scientist will explain core VSM concepts and how they can accelerate value delivery. Learning objectives include:

  • How to define value and what is a value stream
  • The difference between value stream mapping and management
  • How to organize teams to deliver value faster
  • Key metrics for measuring progress
  • How to get started with value stream management
10:45 – 11:30
10:45 – 11:30
Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business agility at every scale
Mike Burrows
A modern take on a 70's classic, we take some of the tools of modern product and organisation development and plug them into Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, a model that (still) describes organisations of all sizes that have the drive to survive in a changing environment. The result of this exercise will feel remarkably familiar to Lean-Agile eyes, and yet it helps to reveal some of the serious dysfunctions too often experienced with current frameworks, both team-level and larger.
11:30 - 12:15
11:30 - 12:15
P3.express: Minimalism in Project Management
Nader K. Rad
We keep making our project management systems so complicated that they are not usable anymore. Then, we can't use those structured approaches for managing our projects and instead do it intuitively, which is difficult, expensive, and risky.

There's a solution: We need to have a simple, straightforward project management system. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to provide all the possible benefits of a structured approach. Instead, we have to focus on the essentials and keep the system practical.

P3.express is such a solution: a minimalist project management system designed for those who don't have magical powers! People like you and me. In this presentation, I'll give you a quick tour of this non-proprietary system and introduce resources for learning more about it.
12:15 - 13:00
12:15 - 13:00
From Chaos to Confident: The 6 Pillars Project Leadership Framework
Annmarie Curley

Are you overwhelmed by constantly shifting priorities, changing visions and constant interruptions? 


Are you spending too much time putting out fires rather than addressing the root cause of the chaos? 


What if you could confidently lead your team, boost engagement and accountability, increase your influence to create unstoppable momentum, and accelerate outcomes and results for your organization? 


The Six Pillars Project Leadership framework outlines the power skills required to effectively lead teams and projects rather than simply manage them. 


During this session, we will review the core capabilities that project leaders need to develop to confidently lead, empower and elevate their teams. You will walk away with clarity on what you need to do to boost your team’s performance in 2021.

13:00 - 13:45
13:00 - 13:45
Rethinking the architecture of PM
Dave Snowden
13:45 - 14:30
13:45 - 14:30
TBD
TBD
14:30 - 15:15
14:30 - 15:15
Flattening the competence curve
Obi Omoregie
In today’s world there is a plethora of information of the skills and trainings required for project managers and a dwindling light on the competence of the entire project team.

This session unveils strategies to build not just the competence of the project manager, but all touch points in the journey to delivering value. By “Flattening the curve”, the goal is the balance the knowledge and skill level of the project team.
15:15 - 16:00
15:15 - 16:00
Antifragility is the Vision
Mishirika М. Scott
As project practitioners, we’re mostly after one thing: project success. But when ill-defined, success can mean something very different, even to members on the same team. Is it possible for project leaders and teams to become stronger, better, and more efficient during change, ambiguity, and chaos? Absolutely. Antifragile team communication can be a first step in the right direction. Innovation for the future will only be as strong and stable as the teams creating such a future. If project leaders are the head, then teams are the heart of project success. Together, let’s discover new ways to inspire high-performing, healthy teams during tough change.

Learning outcomes:
  • Learn six project documents that can take your team vision from snore to score
  • Learn the value of simple project documents that keep your team aligned with a clear vision of success
  • Learn how to embrace antifragility as your new team culture moving forward
16:00 - 16:45
16:00 - 16:45
TOP-5 mistakes in Objective and Key Results (OKR)
Konstantin Koptelov
16:45 - 17:30
16:45 - 17:30
Help! Managing Projects and Stakeholders from Hell
Benjamin C. Anyacho
In this interactive and action-packed session, participants will learn how to effectively engage difficult stakeholders in complicated projects, hostile and politically charged environments. These principles are based on successful real-life projects, using some of the best research in persuasion science, leadership, and management. It cuts through the clutter with practical applications—utilizes continuous buy-in principles, “Gratitude Altitude,” personal Net Performance Score (pNPS), “Pre-assignment @ charter” and shared ownership, logic-politics, managing up, participatory design principles, and more.
17:30 - 18:00
17:30 - 18:00
Conference Closing
Agile
09:30 – 10:00
09:30 – 10:00
Registration
10:00 – 10:45
10:00 – 10:45
How to Navigate the Messy Connection between Work and Value in your Team
Dave West
Everyone knows that agile approaches are designed to deliver value. The idea of incremental delivery in pursuit of a mission for customers is fundamental to Scrum and the Agile Manifesto. So why is it so hard to decide on a Sprint Goal? And why, when asked about progress, do people talk about velocity and Story Points? Many Scrum Teams’ reality is that their very reason for being is defined not by value but by work. But what changes when teams and organizations look to value instead of work?

In this talk, Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, discusses the interesting, messy connection between work and value. He outlines how changes to the Scrum Guide have shone a spotlight on the challenge that many teams face when delivering more value.

In this talk we will cover:
- Why value is important and what happens when you are missing it.
- How to measure value inside and outside the team.
- What teams and leaders can do to better orient towards value.
10:45 – 11:30
10:45 – 11:30
Developing business resilience in practice
Angel Diaz-Marotto
11:30 - 12:15
11:30 - 12:15
Systems of Professional Collaboration: Life in a Post-Lean, Post-Agile World
Jim Benson
Individuals work in teams to provide value.

In agile we have practices to help teams, in Lean we have practices to increase value. Both Agile and Lean talk about individuals, but can't really figure out what to do with them.

Individual professionals on our teams must have the right environment in which they can form a healthy team and really dedicate time to providing customer value.

Jim Benson has worked around the world in software development, international governance, engineering, architecture, construction, health care, law enforcement, and a host of other verticles. His software company started Agile with a pre-press copy of Kent Beck's XP Explained, in 1997. He is an inventor of Kanban, Personal Kanban, and Lean Coffee. He's used Agile and Lean practices in many verticals and situations.

He's seen the promise of them and the failings.

In this keynote, Jim Benson will talk about that journey and provide real, tangible ways to create a real, professional environment for your team...one that thinks about the individuals, the teams, and the value. One that thinks about management, leadership, customers, and all other partners, as collaborators and not interruptions. One that respects everyone involved.

12:15 - 13:00
12:15 - 13:00
How and why not to scale Agile no matter which framework you are looking at
Artem Bykovets

Agile and Scrum in particular have clearly become almost the gold standard for building software development processes in 70-80% of companies around the world today. But despite the fact that Agile celebrated its 20th anniversary in February, and Scrum celebrated its 25th anniversary last November, quite often at the scaling stage there are very “unique” examples of adapting both the principles of the manifest and a minimalistic framework that introduces and requires only basic fundamental rules: 3 roles, one product backlog, one sprint and sprint backlog + 4 main events per team on a regular basis.


Have you ever seen when someone is a member of several teams at the same time: “In general, he is a member of the “A” team, but 30% more in the “B” team this quarter ...”? And what about the Team that takes tasks from 3-5 backlogs in the Sprint? And what about a team with 5 Product Owners with whom you need to agree on priorities? And what does it all turn into when there are 5-10 teams, and even in different locations?


Unfortunately, I also happened to see various "adaptations for the uniqueness of the context", but fortunately I managed to help such teams and organizations optimize and evolve their processes over time :)


In this talk, we'll talk:

  • about the most common anti-patterns that occur "in fields"
  • about why they might not be the best solution to the problem we want to solve with them
  • about what are the alternatives to these solutions, if your company is “too unique” to take a ready-made scaling framework in the form described by the authors
  • and how these decisions can be reached evolutionarily, and not from a position: “I am an expert and I know how to do it right, but you did everything wrong!”
13:00 - 13:45
13:00 - 13:45
Exposing Uncomfortable Topics: Errors and Omissions with Scaling
Gene Gendel
"Bad scaling is one of the biggest 'agile problems' of modern days for companies.
Bad scaling is one of the three (the other two are : "agile tools" mania and falling a victim to big consultancies' industrial model [see/play Dave Snowen's view here: http://www.keystepstosuccess.com/2020/05/05-05-less-talks-dave-snowden-answering-tough-questions-qa/ ) most expensive mistakes companies make, when they set themselves on a wrong 'agile course'.

Bad scaling is one of the three corners of "Trippe Taxation" triangle:

Bad scaling comes in the form of trivializing agility at is core, weakening agile roles, plagiarizing and relabeling someone else's experiments and calling them 'operating models', copy-pasting Scrum and Scrum roles into Fractal Geometry that look great on paper.

Are there better ways to work? Probably not, if the ultimate goal is to relabel existing enterprise complexity with fancy agile terminology and then call it "enterprise scaling". But there could be better ways to work if an ultimate goal is to simplify existing complexity (de-scale), and by doing so, improve your chances to scale agile ways of working (e.g. do Scrum, by more than one team, working for the same Product Owner, on the same product, out of the same backlog).
13:45 - 14:30
13:45 - 14:30
Getting Beyond Fixed-Price, Fixed-Scope: The Ten Risks That Can Kill Your Project and 10 Agile Contracts to Master Them
Peter Stevens
Murphy was an optimist. Everything that can happen will happen, including the risks that can bring your project to a standstill - unless you take action to ensure that they don’t occur. A digitization project is ultimately a software project. How do the risks of a software project differ from those of, say, a construction project? Scrum and other agile frameworks have been developed to reduce risks and increase the likelihood of success for software development projects. How should Scrum work? What are the most common risks that should be avoided in a digitization project? We'll examine delivery risk, time and budget risk, scope risk, and seven other risks, and how Scrum and other agile frameworks are designed to prevent and mitigate those risks.
14:30 - 15:15
14:30 - 15:15
Post-Covid Office Environments & Team Structures
David Sabine
Work-from-home and work-from-office are part of our future. With rare exceptions, companies will blend the two concepts to create work environments that enable remote-working and in-person interaction as well. Let's explore recent signals in the market that indicate the most likely scenarios as companies re-engage a post-Covid world of work.
15:15 - 16:00
15:15 - 16:00
Diversity in Agile
Nimi Bello
16:00 - 17:30
16:00 - 17:30
Agile Workshop: Choose your Way of Working with Disciplined Agile
Klaus Boedker and Aina Aliieva
Aina Aliieva (DA Ambassador from PMI Toronto - DASSM) and Klaus Boedker (DA Methodology & IP team member at PMI - DA Agile Coach and Instructor) will conduct this interactive workshop that will give you a practical experience on how to pair the freedom to choose from the best of modern agile and lean practices with guidance to understand and narrow your options on an Agile Project.

Using the DA tool kit, we will explore how teams design and evolve a way of working that continuously fits their context.
17:30 - 18:00
17:30 - 18:00
Conference Closing
Product
09:30 – 10:00
09:30 – 10:00
Registration
10:00 – 10:45
10:00 – 10:45
How to innovate smarter and build world-changing products
Radhika Dutt
Methodologies such as Lean and Agile have taught us to harness the power of iteration to innovate faster -- we've learned how to drive faster, but our ability to set the destination hasn't kept pace. When we iterate in the absence of a vision and strategy, our products and companies become bloated, fragmented, and driven by irrelevant metrics. They catch “product diseases” which are often fatal to innovation.

This talk introduces you to a radical new approach to build successful companies and deliver world-changing innovation repeatably. We’ll challenge conventional wisdom about what makes a good vision and talk about where the current mantras for product development fall short. You’ll walk away with practical tools to develop a vision for the change you want to bring about in the world and translate that systematically into reality.
10:45 – 11:30
10:45 – 11:30
How to Get to No: Ruthless Prioritization for Product Managers
Cassidy Fein
This talk is for you if:
  • You’re a product manager at any level of experience, or
  • You work with product managers and want to better understand their perspective
In the face of a crowded market and limited resources, it is a product manager’s job to prioritize what gets built. But it’s hard to get a feature to the finish line when everyone seems to want shiny new features built.

In this talk you’ll learn:
  • How to determine what’s most important and keep your team focused on it
  • How to avoid the dreaded "Swoop and Poop" from exec or your board
  • How to keep sales focused on selling when all they want is more features
Cassidy will discuss how to ruthlessly prioritize, get your team on board while defending them from requests and insertions, and to lose any fear of saying "No"
11:30 - 12:15
11:30 - 12:15
Fireside chat
Crystal Chen
After a year-long sabbatical, Crystal is currently Head of Product at an early-stage edtech startup based in San Francisco and Consultant/Coach to select product teams and product managers internationally. Before moving into Product, Crystal was a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn and had a short stint in Private Equity as well. She then went on to lead Client Experiences, a core product pillar, at GOGOVAN: Hong Kong’s first unicorn startup, operating across Asia. Beyond her roles, Crystal shaped and open-sourced LinkedIn’s Women in Tech Trainee Program, dabbled briefly as an Investor, and continues to serve on the alumni advisory board of an international education foundation.

Join us for this fireside chat to learn from Crystal's experience across functions, industries, geographies, and more, and how it informs her work as a product leader today.
12:15 - 13:00
12:15 - 13:00
Creating Groundbreaking New Products
Marcel Furmie
In this presentation, Marcel Furmie, Director of Product at Quantgene and founder of Fifo Technologies talks about his product design process, from inception to launch.You will hear how he is working at Quantgene to democratize healthcare services to bring early cancer detection to everyone, and how at Fifo he is creating autonomous firefighting systems that can automatically detect and extinguish wildfires.In this frank discussion about the precarious journey that a product can go through, Marcel shares lessons from more than 14 years of experience in technology.
13:00 - 13:45
13:00 - 13:45
Essential Product Management skills
Vibhu Aggarwal
1. Product management – intro and ideation framework
2. How & what to measure, customer funnel
3. Prioritization frameworks
4. Dealing with engineers
13:45 - 14:15
13:45 - 14:15
Conference Closing