Refactor your Work Board for Better Flow of Value

Backlog (or flow) management ensures that your team focuses on the most valuable and relevant work, aligning with product goals and stakeholder expectations. But many people in product roles have never had a deep dive into board design, the importance of validation, or modern prioritization techniques. This practical session helps by reviewing examples of work boards and covers 10 "healthy board design" attributes, and guides participants in a series of simple "board refactorings" for their own work boards. Participants will leave not only having learned what flow-enabling boards look like -- they'll have refactored their own boards to improve flow before they even return to work.

Automation with a Human Touch: (Re)discovering Jidoka for the AI Era

Though AI may be a novel technology, the key to the way we engage with it is anything but new. Jidoka -- automation with a human touch -- has been a key pillar of lean thinking for decades. This talk explores the mindset and ways of harnessing AI to complement rather that supplant human work. Tracing the concept from its origins when Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota) invented a textile loom that stopped automatically when any thread broke, to today's AI-fueled possibilities, we will explore examples in and application to product development. As with other big historical advances in technology, we will discover how to eliminate the need for operators to continuously monitor the machines and lead in turn to the large productivity gains that AI promises.

Agile at the Crossroads: Navigating a Post-Framework World

In an era of increasing complexity, traditional Agile frameworks have become rigid constraints rather than adaptive ways of working. This keynote challenges practitioners and leaders to transcend certification-driven methodologies and rediscover the true essence of agility: responding to complexity with human creativity, complexity thinking, and genuine value delivery. Looking at real-life examples, we're diving deep into why traditional Agile approaches are failing, how big companies are systematically crushing innovation, and what it truly takes to help organizations reimagine agile as a dynamic, generative approach to navigating unpredictable landscapes.

AI is powerful. That's why we're (still) doing XP.

AI tools promise dramatic shortcuts in coding, testing, and delivery. The temptation is strong: drop the "slow" or difficult practices of Extreme Programming and let the models do the heavy lifting. This session argues the opposite. Precisely because AI accelerates so many steps, the core XP practices become more valuable, not less. Without them, teams risk losing the tight feedback loops, shared understanding, and continuous validation that keep quality high and products aligned with real needs.
Drawing on real-world experience in an organization that both ships impactful software products and builds capability through a "teaching-hospital" model for software-development teams, we’ll examine four practices through an AI lens:

Pairing: How collaboration prevent the silent accumulation of opaque, low-quality code
Test-Driven Development: How TDD keeps code clean, enforces YAGNI, and remains the most reliable way to keep AI-generated code honest
Cross-functional/whole-team approach: The necessity of keeping product, design, and engineering in the same feedback loop when AI can generate large volumes of work in isolation
Small incremental releases and rapid product validation: How rapid AI output makes frequent, validated slices of functionality even more critical to avoid building the wrong thing at high speed

Attendees will leave with a clear rationale for applying (and adapting) XP practices in an AI-augmented world, plus practical ways to integrate AI tools without sacrificing the quality and learning loops that XP enables.

Thriving (Not Merely Surviving) the First Year: Redesigning the Onboarding Experie

Given the rapidly changing competencies required in technology and market influences that make talent harder to find, how does an organization shape its workforce to not only be able to deliver its current offerings but become resilient enough to deliver the offerings of the future? By focusing on business outcomes like improved time-to-readiness, better engagement and higher retention, ThoughtWorks redesigned its global onboarding program using modern research into how people learn. This experience talks about how to incrementally and iteratively improve the onboarding experience for employees, given challenges of global scale, a legacy approach and the ever-changing set of competencies and roles. Topics include competency-building strategies, spaced and just-in-time learning, mentoring, flipped classroom and transactional vs. relational onboarding.

The Service-Delivery Review: The Missing Agile Feedback Loop

In today’s digital-service economy, IT organizations need not only the ability to change but to change in the right direction. That is, they need to be able to sense and respond to feedback in order to continuously recognize and measure gaps in their understanding of the customer’s view of their fitness for purpose.

Though the standard agile feedback loops -- product demo, team retrospective and automated tests — provide valuable awareness of health and fitness, many teams and their stakeholders struggle to find a reliable way to understand an important area of feedback, including their level of agility: the fitness of their service delivery. This session introduces the service-delivery review as the forum for this feedback. Participants will learn the basics of how to conduct a service-delivery review and the benefits, as well as typical fitness metrics. The context will be for software-delivery teams but the lessons will be applicable for any team, group or department that provides a service.

The Generative Scaling Game

Considering or already part of a scaling effort? Heavyweight scaling frameworks are increasing their market share, but they don’t always deliver what they promise and sometimes even leave an organization worse off. Inspired by Luca Minudel's Agile at Scale Generative Principles, this workshop addresses today's needs for teams and organizations to be able to accommodate scaling concerns in a generative way so that people can continue to do their best work and reduce the friction of more heavyweight, prescriptive approaches to scaling. If you're keen to scale while retaining or improving agility and empowering the people closest to the work, join this hands-on game to experience how to apply lightweight, generative scaling principles. We'll be solving children's puzzles; after all, how hard can scaling be?

Psychological Safety and Remote Work

Over the last four years, the world has seen an unprecedented shift to remote and hybrid work environments. This poses questions for those who are interested in promoting psychological safety, because remote workers have fewer opportunities for spontaneous, casual conversation and more difficulty picking up non-verbal cues, and they are more likely to feel anxious and alone. For instance, 60% of workers in a recent survey said they're feeling less connected to their colleagues due to work from home.

With collaboration from Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen, this session presents original research on and explores the relationship of remote environments and psychological safety, including questions such as:
* What effect does an all-remote environment have on team members' psychological safety?
* Which factors, such as previous in-person relationships, impact safety in a remote environment, and how much?
* How might we design, support and lead teams and organizations to foster safety, given the likelihood of continued remote and hybrid environments?

NoEstimates Workshop: Forecasting with Less Effort and More Accuracy

[Description] Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice or why you would want to try NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz or read Vasco Duarte’s book. Maybe you simply want to understand how you can spend less time estimating and more time delivering working software—all while providing your customers with some understanding of predictability. If so, this group boardgame-based workshop will help you understand what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. Join this session to learn how to move from upfront intuition-based estimates to create a data-based probabilistic forecast that provides a more reliable way to talk about when stuff will be done—and expend less effort to do so. Learn to forecast when things will be done -- with less effort and more accuracy!

Level Collapse (and How to Rise Out of It)

Without knowing how or where to provide higher-level vision, strategy and flow management, leaders often find themselves working at the operational level, or, using the metaphor of “flight levels,” in a state of "level collapse." Smells for this include: micromanagement, creating work-item tickets, attending team-level meetings and and a lack of vision and strategy.

It's a double-whammy of productivity killing because it strips people working at the operational level (Level 1) of their autonomy and empowerment, but it also impoverishes the coordination and strategic levels (Levels 2 and 3), where end-to-end and intent-based leadership and is desperately needed in order for operational activities to thrive.

In this session, you will learn how to recognize and overcome "level collapse" behaviors in leadership. Discover strategies to transition from micromanagement to provide higher-level vision, strategy, and flow management to optimize end-to-end flow and connect your teammates to strategy, in turn empowering your team and making your own job more about why you got into tech in the first place.

Culture Add Over Culture Fit

You’ve probably heard of the culture-fit interview and maybe participated in one. Organizations and teams rightly want to know not only does this person have the skills and aptitude for the job, but also “will this person work in our particular environment?” Prospective employees also want to know that. But by emphasizing culture fit — the assimilable qualities of the person — we may lose sight of an important benefit of bringing new people into our organizations: the person’s additive qualities — new ways of thinking and working, external experiences — that bring energy, creativity and improvement that we can’t simply bootstrap ourselves into from within. This session explores how to emphasize culture add to balance the goals of helping new people to fit into the organization and and helping the organization to create engaging space for new people.

Henko Kantan: Making Change Easier (Models, Enablers and Hacks for Modern Change Agents)

Why is organizational change often like pushing a string? Why do we not experience the outcomes we desire? In this session, we’ll consider ideas from the Greiner model, SCARF, Kanban Culture Mantra, Cynefin and, of course, Machiavelli to understand the context in which change happens. Join us and discover a handful of principles, enablers and practices for modern change agents in order to practice henko kantan, “easy change.”

Leadership at Every Level: Intent-Based Leadership Practices

What does it mean to have leadership at every level of an organization? How do you create aligned autonomy in your team or organization? This talk connects the philosophy of intent-based leadership with practices that enable you to realize the benefits of aligned autonomy, regardless of where your name is in your org chart. By discovering virtual safety nets and vision balloons, you’ll learn how to pragmatically establish safety and alignment of purpose, two of the core traits of high-performing teams.

No (Lab) Jacket Required: Designing Experiments for Learning

Hypothesis-Driven Development is thinking about the development of new ideas, products and services – even organizational change – as a series of experiments to determine whether an expected outcome will be achieved, so we need to know how to design and run experiments properly.

This session helps participants understand the importance of using experiments to help teams and organizations learn and improve, while giving hands-on practice in designing experiments to yield measurable evidence for that learning.

More than Cards on a Wall: Introduction to the Kanban Method

Many people think of kanban simply as cards on a wall. However, the Kanban Method is a powerful framework for respectful, safe, outcome-oriented change involving much more than merely making work visible. This interactive workshop gives an overview of the method’s values, change-management principles, service-delivery principles and general practices. The workshop will also touch on topics like the kanban cadences and the kanban lens.

The Agile Leadership Team

Klaus Leopold states that if you have only one agile team in your organization, it should be the leadership team. But how do we do that? From limiting organizational WIP to sustainable pace and retrospection, this talk covers the challenges, hallmarks and outcomes of the “agile leadership team.”

From Andon to Yokoten: Japanese for Agilists

Kanban, Andon, Kaizen — we’re using these words in our English-speaking knowledge workplaces, but what do they mean? The fact that many of these Japanese terms originate in manufacturing complicates matters. We’ll discuss what they mean — and why they’re important — in knowledge work today and go beyond the simple buzzwords. To help us remember not only the words but — more importantly — the concepts, we’ll use our own version of the popular “Point It” traveler’s books so that participants can have a little fun learning. Proper Japanese pronunciation not guaranteed!

Reinertsen's Lottery: The "Unfair" Advantage of Feedback and Options

In an age of disruption, teams that learn and adapt their plans quickly will thrive. Inspired by the front-loaded lottery thought experiment from Donald Reinertsen‘s book The Principles of Product Development Flow, this session helps participants learn (via a simplified version of the lottery) about the importance of fast feedback in product development, discover optionality and, as Reinertsen says, “truncate unproductive paths quickly.” We'll also apply optionality to create "option maps" that depict more realistic outcome-based road maps and link small, leading indicators to lagging, mission outcomes.

Participants will learn about feedback, specifically to 1. Know what “winning” is (outcomes) and 2. Be able to validate whether we’re “winning” (measure right things), as well as optionality, specifically to be able to cut our losses with the 1. option to say that's enough and 2. option to not even start.

See related blog post at https://mattphilip.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/talk-reinertsens-lottery-and-other-product-management-lessons/