Many would say product managers aren't as common within the IT industry as they should be and perhaps as a result the role is less well understood. 

Martin Woodford talks about what a product manager typically does and why they can make a difference.


Martin Woodford - The Product Manager Role Explained

Aaron McKenna shares insights on boosting strategic alignment with OKRs, emphasising the need for bold, quantifiable objectives to inspire and guide teams. He outlines essential strategies for successful OKR application—focus on clear goals, ensure team-wide alignment, and maintain actionability and transparency. Through real consulting achievements, McKenna demonstrates how OKRs significantly enhance organisational focus, unity, and strategic success.


Aaron McKenna Supercharge Alignment with OKRs

Matthew Turnbull reflects on his 18-month trajectory from QA to development and ultimately embracing the role of Scrum Master. He shares insights on his early tendency to micromanage, which led to an appreciation for the power of coaching and the necessity of fostering self-directed teams. Matthew discusses the challenges of aligning Agile practices with stakeholder expectations and his own struggles with imposter syndrome. He celebrates the fulfillment derived from witnessing team growth in responsibility and flexibility, advocating for a culture of relentless improvement and exploration within the Agile framework.

Matthew Turnbull's Scrum Master Journey

A lack of trust within working groups and organisational teams can have disastrous consequences for many aspects of work that ultimately conspire to produce worse outcomes. Trust is a fluid ever changing thing that is much harder to get than loose. 

Laurence Wood ran an excellent, collaborative session to help discover how trust is formed, how it changes over time and what events or behaviours might reduce trust across teams and organisations.

Laurence Wood - How High Performing Teams Know More About Trust

Everyone involved with software product development can tell you about a project they worked on that they knew was going no where. They could feel the stakeholders' ambivalence or sense the lack of engagement from potential customers. As the team start to feel their work may be wasted, unease starts to build into a sense of foreboding as everyone waits for the inevitable crash.  

So how does that happen? and how can it be avoided? Andy Butcher's pitch for "*The Shit Nightclub Anti-Pattern*" is both funny and insightful as well as providing a cringing memorable metaphor to watch out for. 

Andy Butcher - Knowing When to Stop & The Nightclub Pattern

If you think of top performing teams as groups people who deliver high quality solutions over and over again in a time frame and budget that makes sense within their business context without disputes or drama while still enjoying their work and having a fun time you may also wonder if this can every be practically achieved in real life. 

Kev McCabe here talks about some core protocols that can contribute to high functioning behaviour with a delivery team and help keep delivery rate high while still maintaining respect and humane relationships within any team or organisation.

Kev McCabe - The Core Protocols for Shared Vision

The NHS is a behemoth organisation by anyone's measure. Not only does it move medical mountains but requires IT solutions that support a scale comparable with any Silicon Valley unicorn. Historically many of these solutions have been procured through traditional contracts and relationships with the large outsourcing organisations we hear about in the media together with the vast sums of tax payers money that have been paid. 

These outsourced solutions we often mediocre in performance and in meeting business needs. This public sector culture of outsourcing often creates many problems through inflexible contracts, prescriptive ways of working and difficult to navigate hierarchies of responsibility. 

To move away from this means shouldering far more leadership responsibility than many contemporary public organisations have been used to. It takes management bravery or what some might call good old traditional leadership. Andrew Meyer and Gary Green talk about the change in operational style that has revolutionised recent NHS Digital IT delivery and in doing so begin to forge a new standard. 

 Andrew Meyer & Gary Green - Create a Dynamic & Innovative NHS

Diversity has been talked about a lot over the last few years and is prominent in the news at the moment, we also know the IT sector and particularly software product development organisations are especially guilty of having a lack of diversity and the resultant influence this brings to product development and general team makeup.

The topic is wide reaching, obfuscated by cultural norms and not quick to fix. 

John Le Drew explores some of the issues, points out some personal gotchas and runs an experiment with magicians safe and some confectionery.

John Le Drew - Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking

Change is a big part of the lean / agile culture either in the form of continuous improvement or continually adapting to customer needs or changing market conditions. Because of this we're all agent of change at some level. 

However, anyone who has tried to influence the actions of people around them, from a leadership role or not, will appreciate that resistance to change is alive and well in us all. It may be attractive to regard this as a failing of others, but people do things for a reason and those reasons are often deeply seated and long standing; probably built on past experiences and painful lessons. 

The lessons of our past are not likely to be swept aside easily. Jon Fulton asks us to consider this and question if we, as agents of change can do better and be less frustrated by the reluctance of other to follow our guidance. How can we become more effective as a result.

Jon Fulton - The Agents of Lean Change

Sally Bridgewater - Agile ADHD: How Scrum Saved my Relationship

Gary McAdam - How the MVP is Misunderstood, Misused & Abused

Geoff Bowden - The Future According Geoff Bowden

Tom Hudson - Big Numbers and the 1Hz CPU

Andy Butcher - Agile Architecture at Company SkyBet 

Brian Teeman - Web Would be Better if We All Spoke English

Eva Barabas - User Needs Lead Leadership

James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture VS Agile Delivery

The art of identifying what not to do or “the art of maximising the amount of work not done” as the agile manifesto describes it, is one the key secrets agile teams use to get things out of the door regularly. 

Trying to see the future and engineer things that you think may be useful in the future is one of the key risks that creep into projects. Everyone is guilty of this in some way and it requires honesty and discipline to fight against it. 

Ian Thomas lifts the lid on what goes on and what to avoid.


Ian Thomas - Does Anyone Remember YAGNI?

Agile transformation is a stated goal for many larger organisations, whatever that actually means. But the world continues to turn and the business and technology landscape will always keep changing. 

This necessitates organisations to keep learning and adapting, a changes that is probably even harder to achieve in an institutionalised way. Karl Scotland has been talking about this challenge for many years now both at conferences around the world as well as his own website. 

He visited Agile Yorkshire to talk about some of his ideas and observations.

Karl Scotland - Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

Changing the inner workings of the public sector has proven pretty difficult within the IT sector demonstrated by the succession of speakers we have hosted here at Agile Yorkshire. 

Matt Barnaby talks here to explain this isn’t an issue experienced by the IT community exclusively, but frustration is not failure and change is possible.

Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change with Agile in Public Services

Developers generally love the freedom of building greenfield projects. Unencumbered by past decisions and conventions engineers are free to try new things and take blank sheet approach to overall design. 

However they come with their own problems and new applications take a lot of time and effort to settle down and become both stable and loved by users. Legacy projects are far more common and often come as a tangle of code with an overall structure that may be obfuscated and where the hundreds of subtle fixes and micro business rules that are coded present and working are not obvious on casual examination. 

However with patience and discipline Joe Stead explains how they can be even more rewarding to tame.


Joe Stead - The Trials & Tribulations of Greenfield

Just because someone has sat through a two day workshop and holds a certificate issued by an agile training organisation doesn’t mean they now hold all the views and values that may help a team deliver in blissful harmony for years to come. 

People come in all shapes and sizes and bring the baggage and experiences from their past and being able to spot a few traits will always help understand your situation. 

Gwen Diagram deconstructs some team personality types and reflects on some recent career adventures that will strike a chord with many and help everyone. 

Gwen Diagram - T-Shaped Causing Strange Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

No one wants conflict in a team or organisation but it regularly arises especially during times of change and transformation. 

Understandably different people are invested in different ways within any team and changing the status quo can produce confusion and anger in all kinds of ways that may not have been envisaged. 

Adrian Frost and Ian Franklin bring complementary viewpoints and provide guidance that may help navigate some of these situations. 

Adrian Frost & Ian Franklin - Conflict Doesn't Mean Confrontation

Businesses need to judge how best to spend their money so they need to know costs and timelines. Only when software is finished and deployed does it start to save costs or generate revenue so, in general terms,  the longer it takes to create the poorer the investment. 

Forecasting the cost of software, though essential, is not straightforward. Building software requires lots of unpredictable problem solving and a large part of the agile body of knowledge describes tools and techniques to help with this. 

Ian Carroll walks through some of these issues and pragmatic ways to tackle them.

Ian Carroll - How Long & How Much will it Cost?

Ian Lister provides a brief introduction to the Cynefin framework and how it can be useful as a thinking tool within the domain of software product development. The Cynefin framework can be used to help with decision making and understanding the system we may be working within. 

You aren’t going to walk away from this as a Cynefin expert but hopefully with a little more appreciation and some insights for further investigation.

Ian Lister - Ever Wondered Why the World Works?

Scrum is pretty specific about defining the roll of Product Owner but in real life the roll of Product Owner seems to vary quite a lot across different organisations. 

It’s not clear why this roll is so misunderstood but the effectiveness of the Product Owner has a direct influence on the prevailing risks and the flow of produced value. 

John LeDrew discusses how some of these issues surface within teams and provides more food for thought on this issue.

John Le Drew - The Product Owner is an Agile Anti Pattern

Transformational change is right up there as one of the most popular topics discussed at Agile Yorkshire, it always has been and it probably will be for many years to come. 

Mike Burrows has been a regular speaker at Agile Yorkshire and as a published author on the subject and the founder of Agenda Shift he is someone who definitely worth listening to on this topic. 

Whether understanding top down and bottom up tactics, looking at things from the prospective of a transformer or the transforming his sideways look at things will make you stop and think.


Mike Burrows - What We Know & Where We Must Do Better

Commercial effectiveness with software product development is all about learning fast through user feedback and avoiding building the wrong thing. 

Anything that helps get something in the hands of a user or customer early can help reduce risk, save money and drastically improve project outcomes. 

Stew Able talks through his early experiences with the Amazon Platform as a Service technology stack and it's potential as an enabling set of tools.

Stewart Abel - Using AWS PaaS for an MVP

Reducing the quantity of work an organisation undertakes before releasing to live and starting something new is a foundation stone of agile effectiveness. 

It's the discipline that keeps work in progress low and risk well managed yet it's one of the things that most organisations struggle with. Culturally management teams may like big headline numbers and engineering teams squirm at the thought of reworking features only recently released. 

Never the less "right sized" work items keep the drama low. However breaking a complex product road map down into tiny increments of releasable value requires practice, creativity and willing collaborators. It can often be the single skill that marks out a predictable delivery team. 

Tony Heaps insights into splitting users stories here could literally move mountains - a tiny piece at a time.


Tony Heap - Story Splitting for Beginners & Experts Alike 

Technology speakers have a mixed reputation when it comes to style and impact. 

For many IT professionals communicating abstract concepts is a vital part of their job and being effective as a speaker deserves as much attention as anything else. Developing these skills requires practice but some simple pointers can transform both the preparation and delivery of any technical presentation. 

Tells Stories Not Data is exactly what Ivor Tymchak does in this presentation to emphasise just how important a story is to any topic no matter how technical.

Ivor Tymchak - How to Tell Stories, Not Data

Many companies talk about innovation, some think they are innovative, a few may win innovation awards, but how can a public sector organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of conflicting priorities maintain an innovative culture over time? 

It may seem an unattainable holly grail but as John F Kennedy said "Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan". You've got to keep trying.

Chris Cheadle and Sean Craig are pioneering an approach to IT innovation with the the NHS that would put many smaller, nimbler, private sector organisations to shame. Listen to their story and learn from it.

Chris Cheadle & Sean Craig - A Break From Routine

Dressing up to present at Agile Yorkshire must propel anyone to new levels of respect and appreciation! 

Amy Thomson dons her hat and cape to talk about Scrum and velocity - it's ever popular means of flow measurement. 

Don't miss her theatrical inspiration and solid advice for any Scrum team. 

Amy Thompson - Velocity, The Golden Snitch of Scrum

What Formula One got to do with software development? 

Well, more than you might think. If you believe that building software products is all about design and problem solving and less about the the constraints of manufacturing production then top performing software product development teams have a lot in common with the design race that going on in any F1 factory. 

Jon Fulton here touches on that insight and how data driven decision making lies at the hart of reducing risks and out accelerating the competition.

Jon Fulton - Using Data Like a Formula 1 Team

There is never a single answer to the "how to do..." question in software development. 

So much depends on the context and most appropriate solution often depends on the judgement and experience of the engineering team. 

Abstraction and inversion of control are typical in this respect and here Keith Williams walks through some popular patterns and talks about where dependency injection fits into the jigsaw.


Keith Williams- Dependencies, Injection & Abstraction for Fun

Whether TDD is the most misused term in software or not it surly does get a lot of people paying lip service to it. 

Oliver Shaw gives his take on the subject and delves into some of it's techniques and details together with his wealth of experience. 

If your an expert champion of this approach or a new explorer there is something here for everyone from Oliver.


Oliver Shaw - Test Driven Development, The Most Misused Term

Dave Livesey - Geospatial for Dummies and Why Mapping Matters

David Oakes - Do You Trust Your Dog?

Agile project management introduces new ideas into the economic model of software product development and for many organisations this takes some time to absorb. 

Adam Mitchell talks about his experiences of working with organisations during this difficult period. 

Adam Mitchell - Hello, I'm Your Project Manager

The Agile Fluency Model has been around since 2012 and attempts to chart an organisations transition towards a more adaptive and lean way or working. 

Kev McCabe examines the model, it's origins and how it may be harnessed to help navigate this difficult process.

Kev McCabe - Examining The Agile Fluency Model

Naeem Sarfraz - You Built What I Asked, Not What I Needed

Steve Trapps - Explaining The Problem With Agile IS

Andy Burgin - Hello, this is Windows Support Desk

Adam Mitchell - Why Triathlon is Better than Football

As the UK's first Scrum Trainer and author of The Coach's Casebook: Mastering The Twelve Traits That Trap Us, Geoff Watts knows a thing or two about coaching agile teams.

What you may not know is he is also a practising sports coach and qualified leadership coach so has a depth of knowledge across coaching landscape and can put into perspective what is means to be an agile coach and delve into how it can be effective.

Geoff Watts - Explaining What Really is Agile Coaching?

"Work on working together" is a foundation principle for many lean / agile organisations and transformation methods and alongside that the phrase servant leadership often crops up. However while it's easy to say what it actually means may be less well understood. 

Victoria Cassells talks about servant leadership, it's association with the work on Robert Greenleaf, what being a servant leader means and as importantly what it doesn't mean.

Victoria Cassells - Servant Leadership for You and Your Organisation?

What does it mean to truly listen, Stephen Mounsey talks about listening skills and testing. 

Of course it isn't just testers that need to do this, everyone involved in the software product development pipeline needs to be aware of how to listen as an essential part of communication at all levels.


Stephen Mounsey - Listening is an Essential Skill for Testers

If you don't know about Conway's Law then James Hull's presentation here is a great introduction. If you're familiar with it already then this is still worth watching to explore the topic more deeply and realise it may be unavoidable.

With a fuller understanding it could even be harnessed for a positive effect. Whatever your conclusion a rounded appreciation of the topic is essential for any product development organisation.

James Hull - We Become What We Behold

Agile tooling is always a hot topic within product development teams with differing views around effectiveness. 

There's a balance to strike between encouraging people to work together and communicate directly and the convenience of data collection plus asynchronous communication often needed by distributed teams and wider stakeholders. 

Toyota use the word "jidoka" meaning automation with a human touch to describe machine automation that can make simple judgements and stop when quality problems arise. They strive for the right kind of automation. The parallels are not exactly the same but a similarity in approach may be appropriate and the impact tooling has on feedback loops for instance. 

Colin Jones is an architect who has been pondering these problems and here, in true agile style, seeks feedback on some of his collaboration tooling ideas. 

Colin Jones - Connecting Agile Processes to Business Strategy

As the CEO of LeanKit Jon Terry has spent a lot of time thinking about the lean / agile development landscape as it exists with modern software product development. Here, he runs through an odyssey of the concepts and how they relate to each other in a refreshing and certification brand agnostic fashion. 

As a grounding in the lean and agile body of knowledge this is a great presentation helped by Jon's deep understanding of the science behind the practices.

Jon Terry - A Pragmatic Intro to Lean Principles

Josh Lynas talks about his work as a business analyst, how it's changed and how he's changed what he does, what's worked and what's not. 

An excellent dive into what happens on the ground in an effective team with brisk throughput.

Josh Lynas - An Alternative Approach to Agile Analysis

A good number people reading this who've tried to make some changes in their workplace to accommodate popular agile practices like visual management, or sitting together will have come into contact with the company facilities department. 

These folk, often referred to as the furniture police, have the thankless job of maintaining a safe, productive and pleasant working environment. However they don't always have a reputation for being keen to listen to the needs of individual teams even if the promise of better outcomes is on the table. 

Ian Ellison talks about his background in corporate facilities and his more recent academic career and doctoral research into working environments and considers workspace versus workplace. 

He covers the different approaches taken by businesses, what people often sight as being important and how they may or may not align.

Ian Ellison - What Matters to People About Workspace?

Servant leadership is a topic that is often mentioned within the agile community but explored in depth less often. It is possibly not as well understood for this reason. Mike Burrows drills into the topic, points out some background resources and applies some analysis.

Mike Burrows - Servant Leadership Unneutered

The concepts of creating business value and the speed at which that happens within an organisation is what the agile movement has been focused on since its inception. 

This idea still isn't universally understood though and Allan Kelly brings his slant on the subject here. 

Allan Kelly - The Concepts of Business Value

Software product development has a historic culture of heroic bouts of hyper productivity. Sometimes it's possible to do amazing things in short periods of time when everything goes right, distractions are absent and concentration seems effortless. 

However, despite the rhetoric, good design is a team sport and great products have good design running through them at every level. For a team to work together in a super functional way, collaborating and exploring every aspect of the design to produce great solutions there has to be unquestioned safety. 

John Le Drew explores what that means, how it may be supported and how to spot when it's missing. 

John Le Drew - Swearing, Nudity & Other Vulnerable Positions

Michael Crane - All About TDD 101 and how Useful TDD Can Be

Mathew Skelton - How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm

Kiran Singh - A Flying Experience at the Agile Yorkshire

Jon Fulton - Metric Driven Kaizen at the Agile Yorkshire

Geoff Bowden - Sketch Noting Agile One Doodle at A Time

Not lean / agile practitioners see themselves as systems thinkers or perhaps may not even be aware of the systems thinking body of knowledge. 

Chris McDermott takes a stroll through what systems thinking is, how it fits with agile software development and a little bit of industrial history. 

Chris McDermott - Systems Thinking, All the Way Down

The technology sector currently has a diversity problem. Ada Lovelace Day happens every year to celebrate the achievements of STEM women everywhere and draw attention to this fact. 

It always falls on Agile Yorkshire's second Tuesday of the month meetup day and we've taken to contributing in some way. 

Amy Lynch made the trip across the Pennines from the Thought works office to share her thoughts on the subject and share some of what Thought works are doing to create a balanced organisation. 

Amy Lynch - Call to Action, Its Up To Us 

David Turner - The One Bad Thing About BDD

Communicating to broader stakeholders what an engineering team is doing and needs to do is tricky. 

The subject matter is often abstract and is far from gripping. 

Tim Chisholm brings his NHS team day performance to Agile Yorkshire to demonstrate their work on the evolving deployment pipeline of one of the biggest websites in the UK.

Tim Chisholm - The Pipeline to Build Nirvana

During Jessica Drakett's PhD research she worked with several members of the Agile Yorkshire community, for Agile Yorkshire 2015 contribution to Ada Lovelace Day she came back to talk about her work and share some of her thoughts and findings.

Jessica Drakett - Just Some Jokes & Gender Gaps

Theodore Levitt famously said "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole" and in a similar vein many would say businesses don't want software development estimates, they want to understand their costs and times to market. 

Ethar Alali talks about the culture of software delivery estimates, what they mean and why there are alternatives that can be more effective. 

Ethar Alali - Explaining What is Wrong With Estimates?

Resistance to change is part of the human condition and overcoming this resistance is part of changing the way delivery teams work together. A large part of the prevailing certified methods are about tackling this problem in a variety of ways. 

How successful these methods are depends on many things and not least the starting conditions and senior leadership support. 

Without this kind of safety net creativity is called for and Tony Heap talks here about his experiences with a less head on approach to influencing things.

Tony Heap - A Step By Step Guide to Agile By Stealth

Learning fast and quantitative decision making are at the core of lean / agile product development and visualising the data you've spent time collecting is something that helps everybody spot trends and react fast. 

Ming Huang talks about some of the techniques and design traits of good data visualisation that his team use to build the dash boarding products they produce.

Ming Huang - Making Use of Good Data Visualisation

TDD is a difficult topic to explain to none engineers but can be a lot more effective if other do appreciate it value. Kev McCabe uses Lego to help explain TDD in this workshop that can be adapted to involve almost anyone.

Kev McCabe - An Evening of TDD with Lego

Making promises you can keep is the nirvana that many IT mangers are looking for. 

Clarke Ching is a popular conference speaker and author of a couple of books on the subject. He talks here about this topic and explains what may help. 

Clarke Ching - Making Rock Solid Promises

Software architecture isn't always talked about deeply by the lean / agile software community. The idea of an traditional architecture team has become less popular; yet quality, performance and speed of implementation are all things that strong engineering teams value. 

The idea of good architecture or design in the large hasn't gone away so much as how to get there and how to build systems that can flex and adapt to changing business needs. 

Ian Cooper talks beautifully about the ideas of Hexagonal Architecture, sometimes called a ports and adapters architecture and where it can fit into a modern engineering strategy.


Ian Cooper - All About Hexagonal Architectures

Susana Lobao - Resistance Transitioning From Waterfall to Scrum

The Agile Yorkshire community formed back 2007 and has been meeting monthly ever since. The agile movement it's self pre dates that by at least ten years and iterative development ideas from people like Tob Gilb by another couple of decades. 

However. despite the commercial advantages we all know many large organisations have difficulty changing their processes and even more difficulty changing their culture. 

Recently the government has moved to change the way it does things in a couple of it's smaller departments with some success and is now attention has turned to the behemoth Department of Work and Pensions. Tom Birch is currently involved in this change and talks about some of the challenges and the approach they are taking.


Tom Birch - Building an Agile Four Digital Hub at the DWP

Steve Trapps - Shares Being in an Awesome Agile Team

Dialogue and debate around No Estimates and the No Projects hashtags have raged across the Twittersphere for a few years now. Only last February Agile Yorkshire hosted an excellent evening with the #NoProjects hashtag founder Alan Kelly. 

While there are a few who have attached themselves to one point of view or the other James Hull elegantly points out at our February 2016 meet up that the real value of the meme has been to spark debate, challenge the status quo and educate the industry that alternative approaches do exist. 

Alen Kelly himself is now using #BeyondProjects in his tweets.

James Hull - The Power of No Estimates

Everyone who's been part of the lean / agile community for long knows how hard it is to change the way an organisation does things. Organisational culture emerges from the way it is lead and how people within it get things done. 

Often individuals want change to happen but a majority are needed to reach a tipping point. Jon Dickinson, a consultant with Equal Experts talks about recent experience with clients and the influence factors that have helped deliver better outcomes. 

Equal Experts have become sponsors of Agile Yorkshire for 2016.

You can find Jon's presentation deck on Slideshare.

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