Reducing the gender gap in technology companies is a critical goal for fostering diversity, promoting equality, and unlocking the industry's full potential. Despite significant progress in recent years, women remain underrepresented in technical roles and leadership positions. Diverse teams bring different perspectives, creativity, and innovation, leading to better problem-solving and successful businesses. By working together, we can create a future where women are equally represented and empowered in all aspects of the technology sector.

Target Audience: Leaders, C-Levels, Technical Leaders, Managers
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
The technology industry, a rapidly growing and influential sector, has made significant strides in innovation and progress. However, the underrepresentation of women in technical and leadership roles still needs to be addressed. This gender gap has far-reaching consequences, including limiting diversity in problem-solving and innovation, fostering a hostile work environment for women, and missing out on the untapped potential of the entire tech workforce.
A multifaceted approach is necessary to address this issue and build a more inclusive tech industry. For this, some actions can be performed, for example: Mentorship Programs: Establishing mentorship programs specifically for women in tech can be immensely beneficial. Having experienced mentors who understand the challenges and opportunities in the industry can help women navigate their careers, build confidence, and foster a sense of belonging. Addressing Unconscious Bias: Conducting unconscious bias training for all employees can lead to a more inclusive workplace. Tech companies can create a culture of equality and fairness by raising awareness of implicit biases and providing tools to challenge them. Retention and Support: Implementing retention programs focused on supporting women in tech careers is essential. Companies should prioritize creating an environment where women feel valued and respected and have equal opportunities for growth and advancement.
By collaborating and investing in these strategies, we can work towards a future where women are equally represented and empowered in all aspects of the technology sector. Embracing diversity and gender equality is the right thing to do and a crucial step toward driving innovation and progress in the technology sector. During this lecture, we discuss the global panorama, show some actions that have shown promising results, discuss the benefits of reducing the gap, and define joint actions that can be promptly implemented in their companies and teams.

A successful start-up was acquired and needed to scale to at least three times its size. Leadership, processes, tools and mindsets were not ready, nor aligned on how to make that transition. Through our work supporting them, the company changed, scaled and grew. The company did so well, that the leadership team eventually had the choice to leave, knowing their creation would thrive.

Target Audience: Leaders, Managers, Coaches, Decision Makers, CTO, Engineering Managers
Prerequisites: Basic Leadership experience
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
As the company was still on the brink of scaling up and the CTO was very hands on and in control, our primary mission was to take him out of the process.
Because as good as he was, he was only one person. Which doesn’t scale and he set himself up to be THE bottleneck in the system.
So how could we leverage his skills and know-how, without making him an even bigger bottleneck and at the same time empower the team?
The company was fast paced, releasing software several times per day. They were extremely customer focused and gaining traction in the market at a high speed.
When we joined, we also became part of the rave party, building, testing and shipping so quickly. It was exhilarating
The problem was that the CTO acted as a final safety check. We got hired to make this scaleable: How?

• We identified the current situation, next steps and goals.
• We made strategic hires.
• We removed waste that kept us from our goal.
• We showed progress through useful data.

We like to call this ”Overcoming The End Boss”. Together, we learned his weapons, his moves, his strategies and devised ways to master them.
Step-by-step, the team grew in numbers and so did the quality of their work. So much so that the CTO at some point told us ‘It’s the first time in the 4 years since creating this start-up, I had time to mow my lawn.’
That’s when we knew our job was done.
In this talk we’ll take you on our journey from Quality Audit to making ourselves redundant. Our wins, our failures & our learnings.

This session will provide you with insights into the core skill of slicing work and how it is crucial to business agility. Using real-life scenarios, we'll explore the different dimensions of how slicing affects work, including ease of delegation, adapting scope, quality control, measuring and assessing progress, and improving using feedback.
This session will give you inspiration and practical tips for how to slice your projects differently.

Target Audience: Decision Makers, Managers, Project Leaders, Product Owners
Prerequisites: None
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
If you love to see and hear lots of real life examples that help you understand and communicate what agility in business is about, this session is for you.
Using real-life scenarios, we'll explore the different dimensions of slicing work, including delegation, scope, quality control, and feedback, and provide practical tips for how to do it effectively. We'll also examine how unpredictability can affect measuring progress and provide strategies to help you adapt. By the end of the session, you'll have a clear understanding of the art of slicing work and be able to apply it to your work for improved business agility.

Your Key Take-Aways:

• Understanding how slicing work affects adaptability, delegation, quality control, responsibility, effectiveness, and tracking of progress
• Learning several strategies to slice work that you can apply at your workplace
• Inspiration from several real-life examples

In this session, two co-creators of Org Topologies™, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm, will share a method to design, assess and improve your organizational ecosystem.
They will do that by familiarizing you with a set of organizational archetypes that are easy to spot. Hopefully, you will have much better clarity on which organization ecosystem you want to build and which behaviors you expect it to exhibit.
You shall be able to take this tool home and use it as a map in your ongoing, never-ending transformation journey toward agility.

Target Audience: Decision Makers, Transformation Team Members, Coaches, Leadership
Prerequisites: Challenges with scaling agility
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
The legacy of the original lightweight barely sufficient Agile ideas (namely XP and Scrum) has been impeded by the difficulties of applying them beyond a single team without losing the key principles and the promised gains.
Over the last decade, that challenge has led to a rose in heavy-weight methods, especially SAFe™, which has become a go-to place for "everything agile". It provides the user with a profound variety of specific tools and techniques for "scaling agile". Many enterprises are on the path of "rolling out" these ideas by the book with the help of trained coaches. But will we eventually get the promised gains of agility once we fulfill the requirements of the framework in our enterprise? Is such a prescriptive approach agile itself? And more importantly: will we own the change and know how to keep improving beyond the rule book?
In recent years, we have seen the emergence of other methods: framework-agnostic org design DIY toolboxes. In this family of modern ideas, Team Topologies™ and unFix™ stand out from the crowd. Their approach is to offer us a "lunch buffet" to pick structures and processes that suit our situation. It is a flexible approach with a lot of freedom of choice. It offers a fresh path for some of us trying to avoid the burden of frameworks. But the freedom of freely picking org elements implies that we possess a clear bigger picture and won't get lost in the night-gritty details of the puzzle pieces. As leaders, managers, and coaches, how fluent are we in org design, queuing theory, and systems thinking? How can we be confident that we won't lose the plot by trying to put together those puzzle pieces? And more importantly: will we get long-term gains, or will we inflict more unforeseen problems by focusing too much on the small building blocks rather than the whole system?
Difficult questions. Org Topologies™ doesn't have all of them answered for us. But being a framework-agnostic approach for designing agile ecosystems where business and technology would work as one, it can provide us with a solid basis on which all other decisions can be grounded. Essentially, Org Topologies™ moves us from the dualism of frameworks vs. DIY methods into the realm of ecosystems - a unity of interdependent organizational parts that together exhibit well-recognized behaviors.
In this session, two co-creators of Org Topologies™, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm, will share a method to design, assess and improve your organizational ecosystem. They will do that by familiarizing you with a set of organizational archetypes that are easy to spot in any organization. Hopefully, by the end of the talk, you will have much better clarity on which organization ecosystem you want to build and which behaviors you expect it to exhibit. Eventually, you shall be able to take this tool home and use it with your leadership group as a map in your ongoing, never-ending transformation journey toward agility.

The Product Owner role in Scrum is vital, but lacks comprehensive guidance. This talk presents the SMIQ Method (Single Most Important Question), derived from the "48 hour book method," empowering Product Owners and Managers to translate customer needs into software requirements. It simplifies complex techniques into user-friendly steps for effective requirements engineering. The speaker's success in using this method for writing books, organizing conferences, and developing software highlights its simplicity and effectiveness.

Target Audience: Product Owners, Product Managers, Requirements Engineers, UX, Project Managers
Prerequisites: Scrum, Product Owner role in Scrum, beginner level knowledge of User-centered design
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
Product Owner is one of the most critical roles in the Scrum Framework. However, beyond “the backlog” and “prioritization”, there’s very little guidance as to what that role entails. This talk presents a method (The SMIQ or Single Most Important Question Method, discussed in the “48 hour book method”) that guides Product Owners, and Product Managers in their discovery work, and helps them translate customer needs into Software requirements. It’s a simple method, but it offers the opportunity for in-depth understanding and effective requirements management. The method achieves it’s simple format by codifying some complex techniques into a simple set of steps that anyone can use, and this speaker has used to write books, create conferences, and develop software.
Key Learnings

1. The challenge of understanding the customer, and what is required to succeed
2. How to translate real life into software requirements, reliably, and quickly
3. Concrete practices and techniques to implement the method suggested
4. Practical application of the SMIQ method in the conference room, with the participants
5. How to bring the SMIQ method to our work as Product Owners and Product Managers

Stoic practitioners know they cannot control circumstances, other people or rather... they know they cannot control anything outside of the realm of their own choices. So as a Stoic Product Leader you should stop focussing on outcome (!). Outcome is always outside of your control. However the CHOICES you need to make the product vision and goals ARE within your power, within your control. So the best thing you can do as a (product) leader is improving the quality of your decisions and teach your teams how to do that too.

Target Audience: Project/Portfolio Leaders, Product Owners, Product Managers, Leadership, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: None
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
Stoic practitioners know they cannot control circumstances, other people, behaviour of other people in their teams, or simply: they know they cannot control anything outside of their own mind, the realm of their own choices.
So as a Stoic Product Leader you should stop focussing on outcome. Outcome is outside of your control as a leader. Your own choices are within your control. The choices you need to make in the long run (product vision) and the ones you need to make that are right in front of you (iteration goal).
So the best thing you can do as a (product) leader is improving the quality of your decisions and teach your teams how to improve their ability to make better choices.
(Sustainable) product leadership is far more like poker (with uncontrollable circumstances and emerging events that influence possible outcomes) than like chess (if you think long and hard you could predict what is the next best move).
* Learning goals

1. know how to move from outcome focus to focus on improving decision quality
2. know how to implement habits that will improve your decision making as a product leader

This session will help you make better, more sustainable product choices

Leaders should be passionate, think strategically and influence their people (a.k.a. followers).
How is that possible without empathy, self-consciousness & resiliency?
How is that possible without emotional literacy?
Spoiler: It isn’t!
But - god forbid - nobody wants to be labelled as “being emotional” at work, right?
Join me to leverage your emotional data as the true assets they are. Expand your horizon with serious psychological background and get some of my real-life rants on top for free (some of them I wish would better be fiction).

Target Audience: Developers, Architects, Managers of all flavours, Leaders of all kinds, curious human beings
Prerequisites: Curiosity and some work/project experience is beneficial
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
I have to confess, the "true rants" will only be a side dish in this session.
You also will be learning - mainly about R.A.N.T.-based leadership, of course:
RA - I’ll showcase why Relation & Acceptance is the core of sustainable leadership.
N - You will learn why 'the Now' matters that much - and how to leverage your presence as a (seasoned) leader.
T - Because in the end, we all want to get the things that matter done. Together! Don’t we?

The voyage from transactional to transformational management often appears as intricate as navigating the intermingling of rivers and the sea. In estuaries' shifting currents, represent challenges, especially at the management level, entrenched in orthodox practices.
A fusion of two perspectives was our compass. It allowed us to interpret the undercurrents of change, discern the underlying constraints and constructors, and evolve a smaller, productive team from a larger non-functional gathering of agile coaches.

Target Audience: Architects, Developers, Project Leader, Manager, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Openness towards lean-agile paradigms and new ideas
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
In a world where business complexity is the new norm, the voyage from transactional to transformational management often appears as intricate as navigating the intermingling of rivers and the sea. This presentation offers a candid account of such a journey, steered by two diverse captains - an external 'hired gun' and an internal female coach - each lending a unique perspective to the transformational odyssey.
Diving into the deep waters of a highly customized SAFe transformation led by novices, our narrative begins in a domain adrift in a broader orthodox landscape. Bereft of an actionable vision and understanding of value streams, the task seemed daunting. Yet, armed with the principles of a 'learning organization' and lean-agile practices, we made headway at the team level.
But, like estuaries' shifting currents, our path was strewn with challenges, especially at the management level, entrenched in orthodox practices. The success we found came in surprising ways - liberating structures, team self-selection - hinting at a transformational undercurrent within the transactional tide.
Our unique pairing, a fusion of two perspectives, the male business-value-oriented external contractor view and the female internal Agile Coach with tons of experience from other companies, was our compass. It allowed us to interpret the undercurrents of change, discern the underlying constraints and constructors, and evolve a smaller, productive team from a larger non-functional gathering of agile coaches. Our distinct lenses, enriched by gender, background, and role diversity, empowered us to chart a path toward winning over the leadership.
Join us as we share this insightful journey, filled with lessons on harnessing the power of diversity in transforming orthodox management cultures into agile, learning organizations. Our narrative transcends our specific enterprise context to offer universal insights into the crucial paradigm shift to transformational management in digital transformations. Discover how you, too, can navigate the estuarine landscape of enterprise transformation, guided by the beacon of diversity, agile leadership, and a shared commitment to deliver business value.
In today's digital age, traditional management frameworks are increasingly insufficient to navigate the complexities of enterprise transformations. Agile leadership, combined with an understanding of transactional and transformational management, is not just beneficial - it's a necessity.
Our session, "Embracing Diversity in Enterprise Transformation: Navigating Change Through Estuarine Mapping and Agile Leadership", isn't just another tech talk or a repetition of known frameworks. It's a riveting journey through uncharted waters, guided by two different captains.
In a sea of sessions, ours stands out for its unique storytelling approach, applying the concept of Estuarine Mapping to understand the journey of transformation. We dissect a highly customized SAFe transformation, revealing the currents that steer the course of change and the guiding beacon that leads the way.
Our presentation is also an exploration of diversity - diversity in gender, roles, and experiences. Attendees get an intimate view of how different perspectives and skills converge and diverge, shaping the landscape of transformation and opening new channels of thought.
What You'll Take Away?
Attending our session will leave you with much more than just theoretical knowledge:
A New Lens: The application of Estuarine Mapping and Cynefin Framework in an enterprise context will provide a fresh perspective to view and understand organizational structures and transformations.
Diverse Insights: From the viewpoints of a male external consultant and a female internal coach, you'll gain unique insights into the challenges and triumphs of enterprise transformation.
Practical Strategies: Learn practical strategies to implement Agile Leadership and shift from transactional to transformational management, all backed by real-life examples.
Interactive Learning: Our presentation isn't a one-way street - you'll engage in discussions, exploring how these concepts can apply to your own use cases.
Inspiration: Hear a real-life success story highlighting the power of perseverance, innovation, and diversity in overcoming obstacles to change.
In a sea of options, choose a session that doesn't just teach - it inspires, challenges, and equips you to drive change in your organization. Choose a journey that ventures beyond the horizon of known waters into the uncharted depths of enterprise transformation.

Keeping up is the ultimate challenge for employees and companies within fields of massively fast-emerging trends shaping how to work and deliver. Learning and spreading expertise is also key to success while householding the knowledge of older technologies to maintain systems efficiently. The classic learning approach needs too much time to scale understanding and to adopt new technologies, especially remotely. It needed to be extended to a more self-defining and community-driven model with the ambition of being highly interactive and hands-on.

Target Audience: Engineering Manager, Agile Coaches, Employee Engagement, Senior & Executive Leaders
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
In our talk, we examine a case study on a three-year journey of creating, establishing and organically scaling a continuous learning community within GFK SE. The community started with two people and an idea – and is now an online event with hundreds of participants, from all over the globe!
But the talk doesn’t start with the solution! The story we would like to show you started in the darkness of two COVID-19 home offices occupying an MS Teams call. As was for many other people, the rash switch from mostly in-person, physically-centred collaboration to an environment that eradicated the physical elements of collaboration and made us all equally miserable, exposed a lot of practices that were not so visible before. So was the reality of learning in our company – people learned a lot from each other, but very localized, on a very small scale. Knowledge-sharing, workshops were done in groups of ca 5-10 people at most and were happening completely ad-hoc, all over the place, and as a result, topics would often be done multiple times even in the same physical location, with varying contents, recommendations and quality. With two words – it was all fragmented and invisible. On the other hand, as we went remote, it became really hard to do the same thing, so people, especially trainers, started complaining that it was so complex and time-consuming to do all this now via MS Teams. This is where the recognition started, that behind training content itself, there is so much more that impacts a successful or awful training experience.
Over the course of a few months, we gathered data, started a trainer community and came up with a lofty idea and a vision of what we wished to achieve.
When we started, we had three goals in mind:

1. Spread knowledge and skills efficiently to avoid reinventing the wheel
2. Contextualise learning – make not just the topic relevant, but take the examples, case studies and context for the sessions from our own “GFK kitchen”
3. Grow even more trainers and leaders – we ask trainers to come with a less experienced co-trainer who can in this way easily learn and practice how to be a trainer, gaining leadership skills

In addition to that, we also envisioned some benefits that would come from the unique synergies of the format – building trust, expanding people’s networks into other locations and work contexts through participating in a safe, learning-centred environment; breaking down functional silos more and more through continuous exposure into different areas and problem spaces; employee retention through an opportunity to recognize, grow and engage employees that were very interested in being trainers or mentors.
We were two people, and immediately everyone around us said it can’t be done. As we are in a talk about our success story, obviously we faced mountains of issues and our enthusiasm and idea almost died at one point, but we did it and are here to share with you all the nitty and gritty details, drama and recipes on how to make this happen!

After years of contributions, there is still a disconnection at the boundary between the leadership development world and agility. On one side, there are proposals on the role of the leader. On the other side, “frameworks for scaling”.
Especially at scale, agile leadership is the art of integrating modern collaborative leadership concepts and sound emergent strategies for organisational development.
In this interactive session, we will discuss the overarching structure of agile leadership and how to apply it to your organisation effectively.

Target Audience: Leaders, Scrum Masters, Coaches
Prerequisites: Generic understanding of agility and leadership. Ideally experience in a leadership position
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
Agility and Leadership development: two parallel worlds that address one part of the problem each, but neither provides a holistic approach.
As part of our work on ScaleAgility, a framework-free set of principles for agile at scale, the authors have also developed a way to integrate the two disciplines: what does leadership do in practice? How can they combine the ideas proposed by leadership model X [add your preferred model here] and the need for an organisation to evolve healthy agile and collaborative structures?
In this interactive presentation, we will propose our concept for agile leadership at scale, indicating a concrete implementation path agnostic to a specific leadership development model or scaling framework. Yet, it gives pragmatic structural elements that will allow you to effectively implement a sound agile leadership concept or use it to “plug in” your preferred models.

Most engineers know that improving their presentation skills would be good for their career but feel naturally uncomfortable on stage. So how do you improve this skill? As a former opera singer turned software engineer, Anna McDougall runs regular public speaking workshops for her colleagues. In this session, she explains how to encourage your team (or yourself!), provides a demo coaching session with Software Engineer Ellina Nurmukhametova (who will present an AI quiz feature), and demonstrates how to get comfortable on a stage.

Target Audience: Developers, Project Leaders, Managers, Architects
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Managers and leaders worldwide struggle to decide between projects A, B, or both. Traditional estimation techniques fail because humans can't predict the future. This talk proposes a simulation-based approach inspired by investment strategies, industrial management, and poker playing. By leveraging AI, forecasting, and computing power, simulations offer a reliable and adaptable portfolio planning strategy. Rather than relying on human estimation, simulations streamline decision-making and provide reassurance.

Target Audience: Portfolio Managers, Product Leaders, CPO, CEO, CTO, Product Managers, Product Owners
Prerequisites: Beginner level probabilistic forecasting, familiarity with portfolio level decisions
Level: Basic

Extended Abstract:
Right now, around the world, managers and leaders are scratching their heads to try and answer the question “Should we take project A, B, or both?”. The techniques they are using, are woefully inadequate to answer their question because they rely on a skill humans don’t possess: predicting the future!
Estimation as a portfolio and risk management strategy relies on our ability to predict the future. But we don’t have that skill! What can we use instead then?
In this talk, we explore how we can learn from the world of investment (risk management), industrial management (process control), and poker playing (thinking in bets) to create a powerful simulation strategy that will streamline and reassure your portfolio planning team. Unlike humans, simulation can take as many ideas as you can throw at it, and can come up with the most likely winning scenarios quickly, repeatably, and is infinitely adaptable to future surprises.
Why rely on estimation when we can rely on AI, Forecasting, and the near-infinite computing power we have in even the most humble of spreadsheet programs?
Key Learnings

• Basics of simulating portfolio decisions
• Comparing simulation vs estimation for portfolio level decisions
• Examples of simulation use in complex scenario assessment, with N >> 1 options for decision
• How to effectively support decision making with simulation.

As Agile product people we are in a unique position to influence a sustainable value chain for the development of our products. What we do matters, how we build things and what we build, matters. Or what we don’t build. In this talk we will dive into some principles of circular economy and the (radical) economic theory of Degrowth and how to apply these principles and ideas in our daily work as product people. Principles like refuse (to build something new), reuse and recycle in our whole product value chain will be discussed. You will walk away with concrete suggestions to start working at work the very next day.

Sustainable success for agile in the large needs leaders to shift their focus from managing people to managing the system so that people can thrive.
This session builds on our successful OOP 2023 session ("Pragmatic Scaling to Business Agility: Crafting Organisations for Innovation where People can Thrive") by:

1. Focussing on how leadership should be different in an agile organisation.
2. Sharing experiences of applying the model with real clients.

Participants will assess their own leadership and identify "nudges" for developing further.

Target Audience: Leaders, Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Managers
Prerequisites: Practical experience with one or more agile frameworks
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
This interactive workshop presents a pragmatic approach for scaling agile. The approach is based on five shifts needed in typical organisations to get agile to work well at scale. It guides how to find the right balance for each shift, using the current context of the organisation. In this way it not only presents the end state, but also the possible steps to implement each shift.
At OOP 2023, we facilitated a successful interactive 90-minute session entitled "Pragmatic Scaling to Business Agility: Crafting Organisations for Innovation where People can Thrive".
This introduced 5-shifts that organisations can make to help agile to thrive. Participants assessed their organisations against the shifts and identified "nudges" to develop their agile approach.
This proposal builds on that session by:

1. Zooming in on how leadership should be different in an agile organisation.
2. Sharing experiences and stories of applying the model with real clients.

The workshop will provide participants with insights into the future of leadership and leadership in a scaled agile environment.
They will also apply the model to their own context or a context they are familiar with and identify options for their future growth as agile leaders.