Have you ever wondered what a teacher, pilot or economist could teach you about software delivery?

As technology leaders, we often lean on heuristics and truths that we collect throughout our career. For example: start small and scale up later, iterate and ship often, good enough is good enough. These are actually pretty powerful insights that can be applied in other areas and not just in software development projects.

What if we flip the script? What if we look at other disciplines, like teaching, personal training, economics and aviation? What do people in these industries and professions just “know”? And can we apply it to our roles as Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Tech Leads?

This is an exciting question, because delivering the right thing at the right time for the right cost requires a lot more than just technical skills. It also requires an understanding of the behaviours and contextual factors that can drive success of the project. This intuition and understanding can take years to develop. We’re going to do it in an hour.

So if you’ve ever asked yourself or your team questions like:
- Should we continue along this course of action or pivot and try something else?
- How can we better evaluate our alternatives?
- How can we facilitate a continuous improvement culture in the team?
- How can we deal with unforeseen events in a more methodical way?

Then you are going to get a lot out of this talk.

I’ll be using my experiences as an economics major, powerlifter and aviation enthusiast to lead you to the necessary “ah ha” moments years ahead of schedule.