• You'll learn why psychological safety is the key to high performance and what you can do to help foster it within your team and organization.
• You'll learn ways to handle challenging situations
• You'll learn about a variety of tools to foster psychological safety in your team or organization.
• You will have a better understanding of what behaviors decrease psychological safety.

Is your culture dominated by fear, blame and other toxic behaviors? Are people protecting themselves rather than pulling together, obsessing over customers and helping your organization succeed? If so, you may have a lack of psychological safety. When it's present, individuals feel safe being vulnerable, safe taking risks, safe making mistakes and safe handling conflict. Long-term high performance depends on psychological safety. It leads to greater transparency, closer relationships, better collaboration and better outcomes. As leaders, it's our duty to develop, model and foster psychological safety. In this talk, you'll learn skills for growing psychological safety in yourself, your teams and your organization.

• How the digital enterprise is shaking up IT’s operating model
• An understanding of the business’ role as digital leader
• How to talk about IT with business people
• How to achieve more productive business-IT collaboration

Effective business value-producing relationships between business and IT are only possible when both IT and business are proficient ‘dancing partners.’ And in practice, the business often has two left feet. How can IT help their business partners to become better dancing partners?

This is of particular importance in the ‘digital enterprise’ – which most private and public enterprises are, these days – where information and technology are integral parts of not only the business processes, but also the enterprise’s products and their customers’ experiences.

It takes two to tango and the digital enterprise requires effective leadership from business managers, as well as efficient service delivery from the IT function.

Interactive (fun!) part: attendees will be invited to share their thoughts on desired behaviour between business and IT, after which their findings will be compared with results from previous sessions.

• How to avoid common estimation pitfalls.
• How to create better transparency and predictability.

Common software estimation dysfunctions, how to avoid them and how that will dramatically improve your software delivery effectiveness.

• You'll learn how safety is a doorway to excellence
• You'll learn how great companies exemplify modern agile's four principles.
• You will learn how to go beyond outdated agile processes with a simpler
• You will understand how modern agile can help all areas of your organization

Genuine agility is enormously effective in helping us achieve our dreams. The trouble is, Agile has grown into a complex tangle of roles and rituals, frameworks and tools, processes and certifications. We need a return to simplicity. Modern Agile is here to help.

Designed for people in many domains (not just IT), Modern Agile is defined by four guiding principles: Make People Awesome, Make Safety a Prerequisite, Experiment & Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously.

Understanding and deeply practicing these four principles will help you get better results faster.

In this talk I’ll share how these four principles power world-famous companies and how they can help you work with greater speed, simplicity, safety and success.

• 12 signs you are working in a feature factory
• The roots of the feature factory mindset
• What is "done"? Redefining done in your organization
• Key actionable steps to advocate for a more outcome-oriented mindset

Do you work in a feature factory? How would you know? Why do we work this way? What can you do about it?

In 2016, I published a brief Medium post titled 12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory. The response was overwhelming. Developers from around the world reached out to discuss the challenges of working in "output focused" development environments. On a human level we crave outcomes and impact, and something about the "build more and more features" approach was leaving people frustrated and unsatisfied.

In this talk we'll cover feature factories, why they exist, how they impact your businesses, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. Churning out features is no longer a competitive advantage (and can in fact harm your business and disengage your team). This talk will try to move us beyond the feature factory...

• How to use probabilistic forecasting to better answer the question "When Will It Be Done?"
• The simple data you need to collect
• A live demonstration of how to do probabilistic forecasting. We will come up with a release plan as a group in 5 minutes.
• An understanding of how to immediately implement some of these practices.

Do your projects seemingly spin up out of nowhere, strike when least expected, and leave a trail of destruction in their wake? Though the butt of many jokes, weather forecasting—and in particular hurricane forecasting—has gotten surprisingly good over the past few decades. This increased accuracy is mainly due to the rigorous application of proven techniques like Monte Carlo Simulation and Continuous Forecasting. In this talk we will explore some of those practices and discuss how you might employ them to make your projects more predictable. We will walk through some real-world examples that will explain how to get you up and running with methods immediately. You wouldn’t want a little thing like bad forecasting get in the way of you delivering your projects on time, would you?

• How a Fortune 500 company used an economic framework across a $100m portfolio to improve prioritisation.
• Why alternatives (like HiPPO
• How to change the focus away from cost and dates onto something that helps the team make better decisions

“Cost of Delay is the golden key that unlocks many doors. It has an astonishing power to totally transform the mindset of a development organisation.”

– Donald G. Reinertsen.

This session will look at Cost of Delay, what it is and how it helps in three areas:

Improving Prioritisation:

Use Cost of Delay to surface assumptions & focus on what's valuable and urgent. CD3 helps you get more of what you want, faster. If you want to move on from prioritisation by gut-feel, MoSCoW hell or HiPPO-driven decisions, you need to understand Cost of Delay.

Making Better Decisions:

Product Development is full of tradeoffs. What are our queues costing us? Use Cost of Delay for better decisions and enable distributed decision-making at all levels in your organisation.

Changing the Conversation:

If the system has little or no information about value and urgency it will optimise for other things – typically cost and dates, which tends to drive the wrong behaviours.

• Understand why the HiPPO is so dangerous in product development
• Learn about 5 things you can try to help manage the HiPPO in your organisation

Have you noticed the impact when someone more senior in your organisation shares their opinion? Meet the HiPPO: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Sometimes it’s subtle and unintended. Other times it’s more direct and intentional. Either way, the HiPPO is a dangerous animal in Product Management.

When we allow the HiPPO to drive decision-making we hide critical assumptions. Value and urgency is buried. MVP scope becomes massive. Roadmap dates become commitments. Options get prematurely closed down and the chances of discovering black swans is reduced. Indeed, the HiPPO is one of the most dangerous animals to let stomp around in Product Management.

Whilst the HiPPO likes to be in charge, none of us want to be responsible for developing products that nobody wants. How can we help the HiPPO to help themselves?

This workshop is a chance to learn and practice a few simple techniques for training the HiPPOs in your organisation.