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My personal experience with innovation in product team

This is the story where I was against hacking in team but after 1 year became the innovation champ do push it across the company.
I got my new product and team who was willing to do hacking. As a product manager with full of backlog, delayed delivery and high pressure from managers I was against of any new distractions. But that how it started. After long journey and many complicated experiments we ended up with fantastic outcome. Lot of internal improvements, many new customer features in live and patent taken for one invention.

BIO: more than 20 years on IT field and last 6 years in Skype

Defining and executing a portfolio strategy

How to come up with a successful portfolio strategy and how to execute it?
How does a Chief Product Owner turn the company strategy into a portfolio strategy and build a suite of products and services to satisfy new and existing customers? What are some common pitfalls in aligning the organisational structure, governance, budgeting and legal issues and what to do about it?

In a perfect world everyone in our organisation knows what and why it should be achieved, has clarity around which decisions need to be made by whom and has the necessary competence, information, resources and authority to do it. Usually this is not the case. I will share practical examples, tools and models that I have used to help organisations make progress in executing their portfolio strategy.

The agile journey of Telia Estonia: experiments and discoveries

How to deal with 150 projects on a waiting list, if they are on the same level of importance and urgency? How to help business overcome the fear of building only small part of their grand vision? How to grow intrapreneurship in the hierarchic and matrix organization and support the people in their new roles?
In this talk you’ll hear what experiments we had, what we learned from these, where we failed and where we succeeded.

BIO: “I have 16 years of experience in software development, I’ve been a developer and a project manager. For 11 years, I’ve also been a lecturer in Tallinn University of Technology.
For the last 2,5 years I’ve been responsible for IT development process improvements in Telia Eesti. In my view, improvements in IT development cannot be enforced, they can only be sold out to the leaders, managers and teams. I think this can be done by a Lean-Agile evangelist who will train, mentor and coach people.
My favourite topics are: Lean thinking, principles and practices; startup mentality in the enterprise; agile Product Ownership and scoping (eg story mapping); DevOps & continuous delivery.”

BIO: Alek Kozlov Product Success Catalyst and Designer. I love to see how people uncover innovation by finding very simple and elegant solutions. But even more I love to see how these innovations help to understand and spin new business models.

From Tayloristic to Agile organization

What is common to Ford factories around 1900 and the collapse of Nokia Mobile Phones 2011? What leads most corporations towards Tayloristic organization? What is the other path to success?

“What is common to Ford factories a hundred years ago and Nokia about 20 years ago? In our session we explain the logic that takes the vast majority of leaders and corporations towards Tayloristic organization. We will also show the necessary and adequate changes to move from Tayloristic to Agile organization. Agile Adoptions tend to fall back to the old status quo. This happens for several reasons. First, a partial adoption introduces changes, which make the socio­techno­-economical system inconsistent and uneconomical. Second, partly because of the previous, the old status quo remains more comfortable for the individuals, and the new practices do not sustain. Third, the fundamental leadership assumptions have been cemented in the culture.
We will shed light on Taylorism versus Agile using several approaches: Ouchi’s theory of organizational control, Hackmann’s research on High­Performance Teams, Lean product development, Large­Scale Scrum, Complexity theory, history of Leadership, and our 20+ years of experience.”

BIO: After studying structural mechanics Ari built fault tolerant embedded real time systems for ten years. He has been full-­time organizational therapist since 1997. He has deep experience in organizational and group dynamics. He likes to explore and publish about patterns and unconscious phenomena in organizations. Ari is working with international Large­Scale Scrum (LeSS) adoptions, and contributing actively to the framework. In private life Ari listens to strange classical music (now playing), lifts iron, runs after the ball and tries to sit quietly in zen meditation.

Hear ye, hear ye – after a short break Agile Saturday is back and it’s almost here!

So clean your schedule for April 16th and see you at the Agile Saturday XII at Hotel Euroopa!

Register at Eventbrite

Creating Value with Software: A Blueprint for Continuous Experimentation

Finding the right scope for product development in order to build products that customers want is crucial for success. An important approach for steering development towards the right scope is to continuously conduct experiments. Insights from such experiments directly influence frequent iterative deliveries. Success cases from industry show that such an approach helps companies to gain competitive advantage by reducing uncertainties and rapidly finding product roadmaps that work. However, defining and conducting the right experiments can be challenging:

How can we identify the relevant questions we need to answer for making good product decisions? How can we find the right hypotheses to test? How can we define metrics that inform product decisions? How can we justify the efforts for experimentation? How can we link the experimental findings with product decisions and dynamically change a product roadmap? This talk answers the questions above and provides a step-by-step blueprint to put continuous experimentation into action.

BIO: Jürgen Münch is a Professor of Software Engineering at Reutlingen University, Germany, and a Research Director in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in software engineering, in particular data- and value-driven software development, product management, agile engineering, and innovation. Results are documented in five books and more than 150 refereed publications. Jürgen has been a principal investigator of numerous research and development projects. He regularly teaches product management courses and helps companies to develop innovation capabilities and new digitally-enabled products and services.

Register now to the next Agile Saturday  http://bit.ly/1Ybv3oK and see you already on the 16th of April!

Hello all Agile Saturday fans, friends and speakers!

We are glad to tell you that after a short break we are back! So book the date in your calendar (16th of April) and submit your abstract or several abstracts as the Call for Papers is now open!

We invite you to share your experience (good, bad and ugly) and submit an abstract or several abstracts to present on XII-th Agile Saturday in Tallinn, Estonia on 16th of April.

The Submission will close on the 17th of March.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask – team@agile.ee.

 

 

Code DOJO

What is it?

Dojo is the Japanese term for “place of the way”, but it mostly describes a training place for
martial arts. For us, it is a training place to learn more about writing good quality code and
gaining tremendously valuable insights into the way other people solve problems.

Who is invited?

Code Dojo is open to everyone. Regardless of your skill level or your job description in
Outlook email signature, you are welcome. This includes junior testers, senior architects,
project managers, analysts, lead programmers so well versed in their craft that the only
challenge they have in their daily work is the tough decision which flavor of syrup to add
to their coffee on this particular morning, programmers yet to discover the joys of Extract
Method refactoring shortcut key and you. Especially you!

Why do it?

To become better, practice you must! Two hours in a Code Dojo will teach you far more than
a month grinding out one Model-View-Controller after another. Solving seemingly simple
problems in different ways and under different restrictions will challenge your mind, seeing
how other people steer their solutions to glorious victory through the rocky Red-Green-
Refactor cycles will broaden your own approach and improve your skills. You are guaranteed
to walk away with multiple invaluable insights.

How do we practice?

We will solve a kata, a simple programming challenge using Test-Driven Development
methods. You are free to come and practice alone. I strongly encourage you to bring a friend
or find a partner in the Dojo and work on the kata together as a pair. To make things even
more fun, we also try randori, free-style practice where multiple people line up to solve the
kata on a single computer. The first person writes a failing test, the second person makes the
failing test pass and then writes the next failing test before passing the turn to next person in
line.

I have never used Test-Driven Development. Can I still participate?

Yes! You should definitely come. If you are not familiar with TDD, you can try solve the kata
without it, but be warned, you will be missing out on a lot of fun. I recommend pairing up
with someone or taking a turn in the randori line when you think you have gotten the gist of
it. Test-Driven Development methods used in Code Dojo are very easy to learn.

Which programming languages do I have to use?

You can use any programming language you are familiar with. Unit testing frameworks exist
for most languages (Java = JUnit, C# = NUnit, JavaScript = Jasmine, Scala = ScalaTest, Ruby
= Test::Unit, etc.) and for nearly all of them IDE support is available. So you can write your
tests in your favourite programming language (or the one you want to practise) and run them
in your favorite development environment.

MVPs – how to build as much as needed and as little as possible

Building software that fulfills its true purpose can be easier than you expect. Most requirements are premature and are only validated by real-world feedback. The easiest way to solve any problem is to realize you don’t need to solve it at all.

The acronym MVP gets thrown around a lot, even outside the startup world. What does it really mean to build a minimum viable product? Does it mean we can sacrifice in quality? Join me on a hackathon to find out how much product we can ship in 45 minutes.

BIO: Peep leads one of the product engineering teams at TransferWise, constantly looking for ways to make life better for customers, the business, and engineers.

Agile is a bad strategy or 5 things every Agile practitioner should know about strategy.

Many people confuse strategy (the “what”) with operations (the “how”) and as a result spend time spinning their wheels without getting anywhere. Actually Agile is not a strategy at all, its an ongoing operational priority.
Agile might help you get to your destination faster, but if the destination is wrong the last thing we need is to get there sooner.

Sometimes business executives or customers come to us with vague images that are short on the what and why and rich on the how. Company strategy, product strategy, Agile strategy, strategic agility, key growth strategy, business strategy. Strategy this and strategy that. In order to help them and yourself you need to think at a higher level of abstraction.

Come and find out what strategy is and how to implement it. As a result you will know how to think strategically and help executives do the same.

Teaching young hackers

I bet we all started with games, mods and trying to make the environment around us cool/fun/interesting. Now we are going to schools and trying to make everybody learn “programming” – this trend must stop NOW. What are the cool activities that might require IT skills – from solving puzzles to building robots & better paper airplanes? And how to turn these activities into “formats” that can become viral among teachers and students? Peeter has been speaking to teachers after helping to localize some Codecademy courses and would like to bridge the gap.

BIO: Peeter might have been the first in Estonia to talk about agile in mainstream media – back in 2005. Likes blending together code, design & usability, but could be best in selling really expensive stuff to very large clients. With vision. Is often feeling depressed (and unemployed) by the fact, that he has never had a chance to work in real development.

Introduction to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) – Good, Bad, Ugly

You can find in the Internet a lot of voices raving against this approach, as a try to commercialize Agile.

On the other side a lot of big companies are very into this model and they find it very helpful in understanding how one Agile Company should be structured.

I have reviewed SAFe model and in my session I will share pluses and minuses that I have found in it. Overall I satisfied with they way how Dean Leffingwell been systemized the “”How”” one enterprise can work in agile setting. I have some smaller concerns to share with you and, in my humble opinion, one big architectural flaw that should be changed/addressed.

Come and discuss these topics with me and take away understanding about how does this model can be used in your settings.

Typescript sugar with nuts 

You will learn how to write compile time safe JavaScript code and be confident in it. In TypeScript you can use classes, enumerations, modules, describe nested structures and still be able to use dynamic nature of JavaScript And the most attractive is that you do not have to learn new language!
The world where you come from, does not matter: Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby… TypeScript is friendly with everyone and all popular IDE-s support that.

Introduction: what, when by whom, strongest “selling” parts of TS.
About me.
What project did I remake to use TS language.
What are the problems with JS?
TypeScript can be just JavaScript.
Demo: How to start using TS in VisualStudio.
Demo: Remaking small JS code piece to TS code and benefits.(VS)
Other IDE-s supporting TS.
How to set-up TS support in JetBrains WebStorm.
Small comparison with other frameworks which compile to JS.
TypeScript pluses.
Compiler is open source.
Some theoretical dive into TS constructions. (I will reduce the amount comparing to DevClub)
Demo: Generics
Demo: External type definitions
Demo: WebEssentials. The same in NodeJS by it’s nature.
Small demo: tricks with Any and Structural Typing by mocking function, object and constructor.
Resources.
Questions.”

 

BIO: From childhood had three passions: physics, IT and theatre. Got good results in state physics contest. For a long time played in amateur theatre before and after university.
Studied Physical Information Technology and Applied Physics in Tartu University. Now studying Computer Systems in Tallinn University of Technology.
Working in IT almost 10 years. Started from test automation and now trying to do everything as senior developer in Fits.me.
Physicists need to explore and see picture of nature very thoroughly to do conclusions. I think the same approach should be in IT industry.