"Agile customized to meet your needs, reflect your values, and support your business."
Keynotes & Presentations
Workshops for Meetups, Agile Conferences, Community Groups, and Lunch & Learn Sessions
The Art of Agile Living (keynote)
Conquer Procrastination, Hit Deadlines, Reduce Stress
An engaging presentation introducing Agile values and techniques applied to everyday life at home. In it you'll learn how people visualize tasks, prioritize, and manage their workflow to reduce stress and enhance productivity no matter what they are doing, at work and at home.
Agile's Forgotten Secret (keynote)
The Ultimate Human Hack
Agile’s most powerful strategy for organizing people and creating positive change, and making work dramatically more fun remains, remarkably, mostly a secret, almost entirely unknown in the business world and mostly forgotten by the agile community.
Beliefs (a mini-presentation)
Believing to See
Most people say "I won't believe it until I see it." But I say to you, you have to "believe it to see it." This is not true only for entrepreneurs fostering innovation, it is true for everyone seeking to positively change anything.
Explore this paradox in a very brief mini-presentation, and discuss what it means practically for those seeking to create lasting positive change. ​
Beyond Agile Transformation (keynote)
Stop Convincing People to Change
Folks almost always revert to bad habits after outside change agents leave. Discover why, and learn the fastest and easiest way to create positive change that lasts. We equip you with:
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Step-by-step instructions for creating lasting positive change
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The single greatest secret for make change self-replicating
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Why amost every other change initiative unwinds and reverts over time​
Billion Dollar Agile (keynote)
Brutal and Exhilarating
What is it like to run an Agile coaching operation in an organization spending over ten billion dollars a year on software development? Brutal. Brutal and ehhilarating.
Discover what it is like to deliver enterprise agility at scale from somebody who did it. In the process learn seven essential tips for being agile with billion dollar budgets.
How to Detox from Stalled Agile Transformations (workshop)
Agile Change Congruent with Agile Values
One of Agile’s biggest struggles is we don’t “behave in a way that is congruent with the new way.” That is, the way we teach agile, mentor agile, and coach agile isn’t well… agile.
If your agile transformation is stuck or stalled, I can guarantee a reason is the transformation itself never was agile. (Note: Coaches using Kanban boards to track training doesn’t make the transformation agile.)
This is the problem I’ve been working on with friends and clients for the past ten years. And we have an exceptionally good answer.
Personas (workshop)
A Study in Magic
Personas are central to design thinking, innovation, story mapping, marketing, and sales. Yet most teams create horrible personas if they create them at all. This free immersive lecture teaches how to think about personas, how to create great personas, and why creating them is so valuable. If you have doubts about the value of personas before the workshop you truly must attend!
This is a workshop we've given every semister for over seven years at the University of Michigan.
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"A highlight of my product development class."
-U of M Entrepreneur Student
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The Secret to Writing User Stories (mini-workshop)
Story Mapping
Story Maps transform the way teams build products by focusing the conversation on user interactions. This ensures the software is both intuitive and user-driven and facilates making intelligent tradeoffs.
This hands-on session teaches:
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Three rapid techniques for capturing new problems as stories
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Five critical benefits of Story Mapping
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The crucial first step which makes everything else easier—the Value Stream Map.
Walk away with the confidence and tools to make Story Mapping a game-changer for your team!
Solving the Technical Debt Crisis (presentation)
Using AI Enhanced Workflows
​Do you have large, bloated, unwieldy code bases? Is everything taking way too long to get done, costing too much money? Do your programmers have code they “dread” entering?
Good executives, managers, and software developers are painfully aware of the technical debt crisis. Technical debt makes every change, new idea, or bug fix painful and expensive. It stifles innovations. And technical debt is now seen everywhere… all the time… in billions of lines of code.
This session covers secrets to solving the technical debt crisis using AI enhanced workflow. Doing cleanup and refactoring work in days or weeks which previously would have taken months or years… and hence was never done!
There is a Book in You! (mini-workshop)
Let's Help Get it Out
Transform yourself from passive listener to active contributor! Your stories can have a positive impact on the agile community, your organization, and yourself.
It is not enough to “uncover better ways” of working, we also need to share what we’ve uncovered! This session is designed to inspire you to document and disseminate your stories
The Value Cycle (presentation)
Backlogs the Easy Way
The Value Cycle is a simple proven system to create great agile backlogs fast. More importantly, great backlogs which are totally aligned with the business structure and vision. We used this system to create eight different agile backlogs in just three days, winning our client a 30 million dollar grant.
The Value Cycle contains four simple steps which can be completed in as few as three hours. An iterative approach to investigation and delivery which embraces change.
Winning the Agile Certification Game (presentation)
Hack Learning Agile
There are five major providers of Agile certification, but which one is right for you? Are you curious about Agile/Scrum training and certification? Discover:
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Who are the respected Agile certification organizations
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Which Agile certification is right for your role
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How to reduce certification costs as much as 90%
Includes our special system to earn a top quality agile certification FAST... without any special training!
"You guys were a TERRIFIC team today... you conveyed eye popping ideas in an enjoyable, digestible, accessible, engaging manner... you REALLY drew them in... TERRIFIC is the word that comes to mind... YUP, you guys were TERRIFIC!
Thank you, thank you!
-Elliot Soloway , Professor University of Michigan