AgileCamp San Francisco

Scrum is excellent at helping surface team and organizational dysfunction, but dealing with dysfunction can be uncomfortable. As an agilist, how do you help your team work through these newly voiced challenges?

Court jesters have a long history of helping give voice to uncomfortable truths, often speaking words that would have others killed. In the 1300's when the French fleet was destroyed by the English at the Battle of Sluys, the French king's jester told him that the English sailors "don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French". This session will help you become an agile jester - speaking difficult truths through humor.

During this workshop you'll get hands-on experience using practical tools drawn from improvisational comedy, the art of magic, and clowning. Every agilist should have these tools in their bag of tricks.

"People don't want a 1/4 drill bit. They want to make a 1/4" hole" - Clayton Christensen. In his best selling book The Innovator's Dilemma Christensen advocates for apply a method called Jobs To Be Done to learn how to better understand what goals your end user's are trying to achieve and how your end users relate to those goals emotionally. Come to this fast past and highly interactive workshop to learn how to use this framework to understand your users better BEFORE designing solutions for them.

Prioritizing? Just stay focused on what’s most important, right? Yeah, this works with errands and laundry. But it quickly falls apart when you’re managing large design teams where the actions of one group affect the timeframes of another group in complex ways—or when you’re in the middle of a major initiative, and all your priorities are “Priority 1’s.” With this session, you’ll walk out the door with a new set of tools to carve out what’s important, and a new way to get everyone out of the weeds and talking about what matters most.

Having trouble with your retrospectives? Are they not leading to improvements? Have you shortened them down to the bare minimum amount of time people will tolerate them to get them to attend?
Come attend a retrospective on your retrospectives and find out what’s missing. Working together, we will explore what is going on and find ways to improve them. By attending, you will gain insight into the design and facilitation of retrospectives and hopefully leave with some solid ideas on how to improve your own.