Learning is a key part of both Lean and Agile. Learning about customer needs and how to most effectively meet those needs. But as well as learning how to solve today's problems, we need to be able to solve tomorrow's problems, and next weeks, and next years. We need to learn how to learn. And we want all that learning to be aligned towards the addressing the same critical challenges or opportunities. That requires leadership to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged. This talk will explore how Strategy Deployment can be used lead lasting learning and introduce some tools and techniques which can help achieve that goal.

Extreme programming kickstarted a lot of what we consider the modern agile movement, but many of its practices often fall by the wayside due to the high discipline required to implement them. This talk looks at the "you aren't gonna need it" principle and how engineering teams often find themselves walking the fine line between gold plating and unstructured bloat in their delivery of software. Using real-world examples from recent work, we will look at how YAGNI can help (and hinder) our efforts to deliver the best software for our customers.