Antonio Cobo

Agile Coach / Delivery Manager

Bedford, United Kingdom

Antonio is a seasoned Agile Coach with a wealth of experience in delivery management across the UK. With a foundation as a Java Developer early in his career, he excels in bridging communication gaps between development teams and business stakeholders. Having worked in diverse environments spanning three countries, Antonio has honed his ability to appreciate varying perspectives and cultivate cultural awareness
He usually speaks about Agile, DevOps and Mental Health across Europe and US.

Awards

Area of Expertise

Information & Communications Technology
Business & Management
Media & Information
Health & Medical

Topics

agile
devops culture
Mental Health
Impact of Change on Teams Coaching and Agile Mindset
Building tech team
Agile Mindset
The Agile Mindset
DevOpsCulture
DevOps Agile Methodology & Culture
Agile Games
Agile and Culture
Agile Retrospectives
Software Deveopment
Software Development
Software Engineering
Ethics in Software
Agile People
Agile Coaching
Agile Methodologies
Agile Transformation
Agile software development
Scrum & Agile
agile culture
Business Agility
Agile Management
Agile Leadership
Agile Lean
Scaled Agile
Agile Testing
Agile Engineering
SRE
DevOps
DevOps Transformation
Agile Architecture
Learning and Development
Accessibility and Mental Health
Retrospective
Mental Health at Work
Mental health in tech
Teamwork
Leading Remote Teams
Team Communication
Team Building
team coaching
building teams
Teams and Organizations
Building Remote Team Engagement
Growing a Team
Diversity in Creative Teams

My journey discovering Agnostic Agile

Since the introduction of Agile, a lot of companies have tried to impose the same framework at a big scale without suiting the framework to customer context and to a wider strategic vision. Agile has never been about frameworks or locking your customers into one way of doing things. I’m tired of certifications wars and frameworks wars, let’s focus on our customers!

I will show examples of bad Agile practices and why Agnostic Agile is needed – One size does not fit all!

I will introduce Agnostic Agile and review its twelve principles, citing real life examples for each.

Agile is not the final goal, it is only the mean to reach the real goal.

Karaoke Ignite talk

20 slides, every 15 seconds the slide will change and I won’t know the content of the slides before any of you! Let’s see how I can share with you my experiences in IT in that short space of time!

Impostor syndrome in the IT world from a conference speaker's perspective

Have you ever compared yourself with other team members and felt like a fraud? Have you ever felt unworthy of your job promotion? Have you ever doubted of your successes? Do you know someone who could have answered “Yes” to any of those questions?

These might be symptoms of Impostor Syndrome; it affects most of the people working in IT. It affects conference speakers as well. I will share with you my with struggles public speaking and how I fight impostor syndrome on every conference. Hopefully this talk will help you to fight impostor syndrome on your day job and help others who might be suffering in your area of influence.

How to overcome your fears to become a conference speaker

Have you ever thought about speaking at a conference?
Have you ever wondered how the speakers managed to get into the conference?
I am afraid of public speaking, I usually speak fast and I'm asthmatic. None of that stopped me to accomplish my dream of sharing knowledge and give to the community as much as I have gotten from the community. I will share with you how I managed to speak at events across Europe and US, and how thanks to the advice from other speakers and mentors, I manage to overcome my fears and limitations.
Hopefully you will leave the session wanting to share your knowledge with others!

Leia VS Galadriel: Exploring your inner leader

Join us for Post-it note wars and help Leia to defeat Darth Vader armed only with a Sharpie. Will Galadriel find and defeat Sauron only with post-it notes?

What makes a good leader? What makes a bad one? Explore attributes of influential leaders in this fun and collaborative, fully hands-on workshop. This creative session invites you to translate deeper understanding of behaviour traits into leadership contexts.

This is for people interested in discovering their leadership styles and what they have in common with influential leaders from movies, books or the real world!

I’ll need lots of sticky notes and sharpies, people will be working on groups, for each group we will need a wall where we can place lots of sticky notes, around 8-10 rows of sticky notes X 10-12 columns of sticky notes. We will need sharpies to write on the sticky notes. Depending on the amount of attendants I might need volunteers to help facilitating it.

Lessons learned after more than 20 years working in IT

When you arrive at a point in life when you have work colleagues whose dads are in the same age bracket than you, it’s time to reflect on the beginning of your career and think all the learning you have cumulated and all the advice you would have loved to hear on each stage of your professional career.

For each stage of my career, I will share with you the things I learned the hard way, so you don’t have to follow the same path full of dragons. I will cover my time as Junior Dev, Senior Dev, Team Lead, Project Manager and Agile & Transformation Consultant.

From Hero to Zero: practical guide to destroy your best employees

All of us have attended lots of talks with the premise “from Zero to Hero…”, but what does it take for a real Rock Star, a real Ninja, a magical Unicorn, a superhero to become a complete Zero?

How can we destroy those heroes in a way that every supervillain on every film has dreamt about every day?

This requires discipline, dedication and an elaborated plan.
How can you get those Heroes wishing they never used a keyboard?
Join this talk and become the real nemesis of every hero!

Work visualisation: an enabler of continuous improvement

Various development and knowledge workers teams have different types of workflows. This work depends on their organisation context and type of software and its interaction with other processes.

This talk explores how teams with above variables can visualise their work based on learnings from “Making Work Visible” by Dominica DeGrandis. Our work with organisations also then enables teams to build a continuous improvement opportunity portfolio from which they can choose to run experiments to deliver value to their users or end customers. This work also assumes the cause and effect relationships established by DORA research between improvements on technical, process and cultural capabilities and organisational performance & employee well being.

Takeaways:
- How visualisation of the work helps with continuous improvement
- A culture of enabling people is key to continuous improvement
- How to run flow visualisation exercises, identify which opportunities could be worth exploring sooner
- Customer-centric goals help teams that want to continuously improve

DevOpsDays Geneva 2024 Upcoming

From Hero to Zero: practical guide to destroy your best employees

May 2024 Genève, Switzerland

Latam Tribu Talks

Sindrome del Impostor desde los ojos de un speaker de conferencias de software

February 2024

NDC London 2024 Sessionize Event

January 2024 London, United Kingdom

DevConf 2023 Sessionize Event

November 2023 Łódź, Poland

SRE Day London 2023

Talk="Lessons learned after more than 20 years working in IT"

September 2023 London, United Kingdom

Agi'Lille 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Lille, France

DevOpsDays Birmingham (UK) 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Birmingham, United Kingdom

Codemotion Madrid 2023 Sessionize Event

May 2023 Madrid, Spain

DevOpsDays Warsaw 2022

Talk = "Dos años de pandemia para nuestra salud mental: ¿y ahora qué?"

October 2022 Warsaw, Poland

SRE Day London 2022

Talk = "Impostor syndrome in the IT world from a conference speakers perspective"

September 2022 London, United Kingdom

Codemotion Online Tech Conference Spring - Spanish Edition

Talk = "Dos años de pandemia para nuestra salud mental: ¿y ahora qué?"
Closing talk day 1

May 2022 Madrid, Spain

DevOpsDays Birmingham (UK) 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022 Birmingham, United Kingdom

Codemotion Online Tech Conference - Spanish Edition

I was one of the 3 MC's of the conference the 3 days

December 2021 Madrid, Spain

DevOpsDays Bogota 2021 - ONLINE

Talk = "Sindrome del impostor desde los ojos de un ponente de conferencias de software"

November 2021 Bogotá, Colombia