Using Liberating Structures to Conquer Complex Challenges

This presentation explores liberating structures like: "1-2-4-All" and “What I Need From You" as powerful tools for enhancing alignment, understanding and collaboration within organizations and product development teams. By dissecting the framework and its application, the workshop exemplifies how this approach can empower engineers and product leaders to gain deeper understanding of their stakeholders and customers to ultimately foster more effective and harmonious working relationships.

Product Mastery: Immersive Learning for Discovery and Delivery

A safe space to practice dangerous things; this is the idea behind a dojo. Understand how Discovers Technology Academy has used immersive learning dojos on technology teams, with a specific focus on how they have accelerated our value delivery by dedicating the time to embrace product centricity head-on and emphasizing a generative organizational culture. Immersive learning dojos provide a unique environment for hands on learning, collaboration and skill development - enabling teams to slow down and take time to be thoughtful about their ways of working, products and technology. This session delves into the tactics employed and learned within the dojos that have empowered product owners to enhance their effectiveness and efficiency at delivering value, driving innovation, and empowering their technical counterparts. Attendees will gain insights into real word examples, lessons learned, and tangible strategies that can be applied to help assess their own organization and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Product Centricity and Agility: Mega Powers combined

In software development two themes run rampant which are complementary yet distinct: Product Centricity and Agility. Even specialists of these areas might not be familiar with how they are different, what their divergent priorities are, and how to align when trying to decide on where to fall on the continuum between the two. Hear about how these Mega Powers can either work together or explode! Learn how organizations like Discover use dojos and academies to helps product leaders and agile coaches align to drive innovation and continuous improvement while staying true to product vision and organizational outcomes.

Which technical practices naturally foster a culture of trust and accountability?

Learn about how technical transformation and dedication to excellent DevOps practices precede any organizational revolution when looking to change with purpose. Although cultural pillars of high performing teams like trust and accountability are widely sought after, certain DevOps practices help lead to these tendencies more naturally, enabling leadership to quickly see the fruits of their support and engineers to work autonomously, avoid toil and be able to rely on each other to achieve the best outcomes.

The art of getting to less - Embracing the agile principle of simplicity

Come hear about applying one of the trickiest Agile principles: "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential"! This agile principle is frequently overlooked when organizations and teams create or improve products. Why do humans love to add in order to improve? This gets in the way of faster, smoother and better delivery. Hear about the psychology behind why we do this. Learn how organizations like Discover use dojos and academies to helps teams improve.

Our Reliability Revolution - How we built a culture of SLO driven decision making

Tools don't solve reliability problems, people do! Ensuring we have effective processes and a shared understanding of our reliability goals are more crucial to creating a holistic assessment of your products reliability than the tools used to observe it. Despite a wealth of available monitoring tools, leaders can lack a common framework for defining reliability, balancing investments, and setting expectations. By applying Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles like Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to create a structures, data-driven approach, Immersive learning experiences and embedded coaching, product leaders and engineers gained practical skills to help set baselines, use error budgets for prioritization, and automate monitoring with InnerSource practices. Join us to explore how we standardize reliability expectations within large organizations and help transform reliability from an abstract goal into an organizational practice.

Desired Learning Objectives:

• Analyze how SLOs and error budgets enhance decision-making in balancing reliability and feature delivery.
• Understand how to create baseline SLOs and derive actionable error budgets for their own products.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of immersive learning and embedded coaching techniques in driving SRE adoption across different roles.