The Science of Choosing Which Dumpster Fire to Tackle First

Everything is on fire, every stakeholder is clamoring for their thing to be prioritized first, and every leader wants to know why theirs isn't. There are lots of ways to prioritize a backlog but the weighted shortest job first (WSJF) method offers ways to find the "low hanging fruit" that delivers the most value to the stakeholdes in the shortest amount of time.

Together we'll discuss the components of the technique and how to walk your stakeholders through the prioritization process. We will analyze both the strengths and limitations of this technique. Finally, we'll explore what to do when even that doesn't give you a definitive answer.

How I found my voice: from individual contributor to influencer

You have something to share with the world, but maybe you haven't figured out exactly how to share it. This talk is about discovering what you want to share with the world, and how to do that in a way that is uniquely you.

Finding your voice in big and small ways
Setting yourself up for success
Pro tips for better presentations.

We don't all have to be developers: exploring tech adjacent careers

Developers are just one important part of a team, but not all of us are cut out to write code or even want to. And they can't produce everything the clients want all by themselves. Good thing the rest of us have other important skills to contribute! In this session we will explore business analysis, quality assurance, product ownership and other roles as viable tech-adjacent career paths within an IT team.

The Art of Just Enough: Practical Business Analysis for Small Businesses

Running a small business requires constant decision-making, yet many entrepreneurs lack structured methods for analyzing problems and choosing the best course of action. Without good tools, they might revert to making decisions based on instinct, leading to missed opportunities or costly mistakes.

In this session, we’ll explore how to scale down business analysis practices for maximum impact in small business environments. We’ll examine core techniques that offer big value with lower effort when resources are scarce. We’ll also discuss how to adapt them to the realities of small business decision-making.

By the end of this session, you’ll be equipped with a streamlined, high-value BA toolkit designed for small business. Whether you’re consulting, mentoring, or embedding business analysis into a small-scale operation, you’ll gain actionable insights on how to apply "just enough" business analysis.

Five Powerful Questions for Getting the Answers You Need

What is the secret to getting the type of answer you need to solve your latest challenge? Whether it is acceptance criteria, requirements gathering, coaching or knowledge sharing, getting meaningful answers to your questions can help clarify problems, opportunities and situations in your mind so that you can confidently choose your next step.

In this session, you will learn what to look for in emails, interviews, and other information gathering techniques to understand the needs and achieve better outcomes.

1) Discover flexible ways to modify the question to fit the situation
2) Identify the components of a meaningful, useful answer
3) Techniques to sleuth out meaningful answers from nonverbal information.

Thrown in the deep end - finding your footing from mid-project

Imagine you are about to be up to your eyeballs in a project you weren't around for the beginning of. Maybe you just inherited a product or code base from someone who is no longer around. The project clock is ticking, and you need to get up to speed quick.

In this session we will explore a framework of knowns and unknowns to help you identify your first critical action items:

1. Known Knowns
2. Known Unknowns
3. Unknown Knowns
4. Unknown Unknowns

This is a great session for and early to mid-career professionals who are intimidated by next-level projects, who want to get traction faster, or just haven't learned how to admit, "I don't know yet."

3 Rules to Live By

The developer / BA relationship can be tricky. In this talk, you will learn specific steps you can take improve outcomes by developing a positive relationship with your developers, based on three pieces of advice Tamara received early in her BA career.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Techniques for Change That Go the Distance

What does it take to support a multi-year, multi-national change effort—and still be standing at the finish line?

No matter your role—business analyst, product manager, change lead, or otherwise—this session provides practical tools for handling shifting priorities and organizational complexity while avoiding burnout.

Change management should be part of your initial strategy; this session will show you why and give you techniques to reduce organizational trauma during transitions.

Ideal for professionals supporting change in large or distributed environments, this session blends strategic insight with battle-tested tactics.

A Product Owner's Guide to Taming Your Backlog

Whether you just inherited a hot mess from someone else, or your own backlog just got a little out of hand when you weren't looking, this session is for you! In this session we'll discuss three techniques for evaluating, prioritizing and organizing your backlog so the team can forge ahead to deliver the Most Valuable Features.

This topic can be formatted as a presentation or as a workshop with user interaction.

Business Process Redesign: What to Know Before You Commit

If your organization constantly adds technical bandaids to solve its business problems, or if processes have become so complex no one remembers what they were trying to accomplish in the first place, business process redesign may hold answers, but it’s not for the faint of heart. In this session you'll learn what BPR is, what it isn't, and what your organization should be ready to commit to. If you want to go from reactive to proactive and get back on top of your business process game, you won't want to miss this.

Building Effective Professional Networks

What makes a healthy professional network? How do you build one? How do you know if it's effective? Networks, like good gardens, must be cultivated. They do not spring up fully formed overnight. In this session we will talk about what we must do to contribute to the larger professional ecosystem, while we build a network of professional contacts that works for us.

We can do hard things: letters from the transformation trenches

What does it look like to undergo both an Agile transformation and a business transformation simultaneously? Tamara will share what she has learned as a product manager and business analyst during her organization’s biggest business and technology transformation in 15 years. You will come away with specific approaches and techniques to consider for your own company’s initiatives.

Project fundamentals for project teams

Your project manager has just gone on extended leave, and your boss asked you to manage it in their absence. Do you have the skills to step in and smoothly keep the project on track?

This workshop introduces a practical, shared approach to project fundamentals, focused on clarity, consistency, and follow-through rather than method.

Participants will learn how to articulate project scope and success criteria clearly, translate goals into right-sized plans, and use common language and lightweight templates to communicate progress, manage risk, and handle scope change. We emphasize defining decision authority, clarifying ambiguity, and preventing or mitigating common breakdowns that occur between planning and execution.

This session is designed for professionals who contribute to or lead project work as part of their role and who want practical tools they can immediately apply.

Allies in Change: How PMs, BA's and Change Managers Collaborate to Enable Transformation

The project manager, business analysis professional, and change manager all have important but distinctly different roles to play as change agents. In this session, we explore where these roles intersect, how they reinforce one another, and where misunderstandings can create friction. Participants will gain practical tools to navigate role ambiguity, collaborate more intentionally, and strengthen their influence on change outcomes.

From Search Bar to Thought Partner: Getting Real Value from AI

The gap between professionals who get genuinely useful output from the AI tools they leverage and those who get polished-sounding nonsense isn't the tool; it's the interaction. This two-hour workshop is built around an uncomfortable truth: most professionals are using AI as a search engine, not a thought partner. That approach leaves the majority of AI's analytical value on the table.

In this session, you'll spend most of your time doing, not watching. You'll rewrite weak prompts in real time and immediately see the difference in output quality. You'll run the same prompt across multiple AI tools and learn to read the results critically, because different tools are better at different things. You'll practice building a structured workspace around a feature or initiative, using notebooks and conversation folders to create something you can actually return to, build on, and share. You'll learn how to keep short-term conversations separate from long-term iterative work, and what to look for in the terms of service to protect your IP and that of your company.

By the time you leave, you'll have a personal prompting framework that works for your needs, a mental model for organizing AI-assisted work, and a clear sense of how to protect your intellectual property and that of your company. No prior AI experience required. Bring your laptop and a real initiative you're wrestling with — you'll use it. Let's dive in!

Project Management Fundamentals for Business Analysts

As a BA, your analytical skills are essential — but do you ever wonder why projects still struggle despite your best work? This workshop pulls back the curtain on what your project manager is navigating: competing stakeholder demands, resource constraints, and the invisible work of keeping a project on track. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where your role ends and the PM's begins, practical ways to make your collaboration more effective, and the context to anticipate what your PM needs before they ask. Better projects. Less friction. More impact.

This is a 4-hour workshop format