ProductAgility

Meet an Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI speaker Julia Västrik (Estonia), with a talk “The Whole Team Approach to Innovation.“

About the talk:

Who is responsible for innovation? People with a word “Innovation” in their job title, like Innovation managers in Corporate Innovation Hubs? Well, definitely they might be great catalysts of innovation.

At the same time, the vast potential of very intelligent, creative, and educated people, who could contribute to the company’s innovations on an everyday basis, stays mostly unused. Usually, these people have a Software Engineer job title.

Over the last two decades agile way of working became prevailing within many cross-functional teams in the software development industry. Still, most of those teams can be called cross-functional just so far, as what they are mostly doing is just transforming a set of requirements, received from outside, usually from stakeholders, into working software.

In more progressive product companies decision-making regarding product has moved from stakeholders to product managers and eventually it is moving to the whole cross-functional teams, still this mindset shift is not that common.

During this session we will explore what are the benefits of placing product discovery inside the cross-functional team using the great potential of all its members, including Software Engineers, and how to start in practice with embracing the whole team innovation mindset. 

About Julia:

Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI will take place 15th of April 2023 and you can register through Eventbrite.
More information about Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI.

Meet an Agile Saturday Tallinn XVI speaker Petri Heiramo (Finland), with a talk “The World’s Most Expensive ‘Hello World!’ “

Topic: The World’s Most Expensive “Hello World!”

About the talk:
In an Agile project in 2008, at the Sprint Review of the first Sprint, the Team demoed their first increment – the text “Hello World!” in the top left corder of an otherwise empty browser window – and everybody celebrated. 

Why did this apparently simple result elicit such a powerful response? What was the point of spending two weeks of time, and the effort 8 people working on the project, for this apparently trivial outcome?

This story takes us to an exploration of “learning value”, and how it can affect the planning in an Agile project. In fact, learning value often trumps business value in the very first Sprints. We will look at some exercises that allow us to explore our Backlog in a few different ways, and then use that knowledge to sort it collaboratively into a meaningful release plan, seeking to optimise our chances of success.

Petri about himself:
I’ve been an Agilist since 2005 when the “lights turned on”. Since late 2008, I’ve done over 400 certified Scrum course as a Certified Scrum Trainer by Scrum Alliance. I’ve worked quite internationally and with both small and big organisations.

In Agile, I’m most excited about the human element – team formation, motivation, self-fulfilment – and I see them as platforms for everything else. Sure, we need also good ways of working, but if we can get the people to really work together and want to do a good job, everything else becomes possible.