Welcome

Community Impact Spotlight: MSF Greece and KETHEA STROFI

What happens when you take a powerful generative AI model and let it out of its box? What happens when you give it context, tools, and autonomy and make it part of your workflow, assigning it tasks and responsibilities?

This keynote is about practical real-life application of generative AI, beyond the hype, and beyond chat bots. We'll look at concrete examples of how AI agents can be integrated into your value stream as proactive collaborators rather than just passive tools. 

I believe the future belongs to organizations that know how to effectively apply this technology, where humans and AI agents work together on a daily basis. The purpose of this keynote is to give you a glimpse into the future, using current technology, and inspire you to start experimenting with AI coworkers in your context.

In the past few decades we’ve made major leaps forward in the way we design, develop, and deploy tech products. Product management, however, hasn’t evolved as much. We still invest time and effort into untested ideas, often on the basis of opinions, consensus, and rank.

In this talk I’ll suggest ways to supercharge our judgment with evidence. We’ll look at evidence-guided alternatives to roadmaps, backlogs, and decision-by-committee. I’ll show you the Confidence Meter — a tool to evaluate ideas based on evidence — and how you may use it to improve the quality of discussions and decisions. We’ll discuss what leadership means when the opinions of leaders carry less weight, and how teams may gain trust and empowerment by using evidence. Finally we’ll touch on the role of product managers in this brave new world.

“You just sit all day” - how many times have you heard that? Is working from a chair and in front of a screen less demanding than physically-challenging jobs? What is the true impact of our work on our health?

My journey began the moment I first sat on a chair. Over the past 30 years I have explore exercise modalities from weights, yoga, gymnastics and CrossFit, eventually leading me to attend a live dissection of a human cadaver, all in pursuit of answering this crucial question:

“What I need to be doing NOW, to ensure I can play with my grandchildren when I’m 80?”

At technical conferences like this one, we spend days dissecting complexities of the systems we build, yet we often overlook the most intricate system of all: our own bodies. This presentation, drawing from anatomy, fascia research and my own experimentation, will:

• Provide insights into how our bodies work and the impact of desk work.

• Unpack common logical fallacies that hinder our long-term wellbeing.

• Offer practical suggestions to invest in a lifetime of ability, free from pain and injury.

Organizational and Technological Change - Impacts Above and Below the Surface delves into the multifaceted effects of structural shifts within teams and organizations. This talk explores how these changes influence both the human dynamics and the underlying technical systems. We'll uncover the ripple effects that can occur in team interactions, code integrity, and system architecture. Additionally, we'll share practical coaching strategies to guide teams through these transitions, ensuring that people are equipped to succeed in evolving environments.

Software and organizational changes needed for a back-office lift and shift project

A brief presentation on Novibet’s journey migrating their back-office to a new architecture and the technical and organizational challenges we faced. By combining best engineering practices with unconventional organizational strategies, this presentation highlights how seemingly mundane tasks can be addressed with innovative approaches to achieve significant improvements.

Scrum can be really great, but it only gets you so far. Team based collaboration and delivering product increments every two weeks is no longer the competitive advantage it maybe once was, it's more or less expected in a modern workplace. Sure, many bigger organizations still struggle with being able to release more frequently and consistently with high quality, but most are well aware of the problem and know where to shop for solutions. In my experience, the biggest difference between great product companies, such as Spotify, and the not-so-great, is that the latter are busy delivering tons of stuff that they don't know is going to make any difference whatsoever. And even worse – they don't seem to care! At least that's what it looks like as their teams are busy implementing requirements and specifications initiated by "business people" and calling it done as soon as the solution fulfills the specification (if even that). Teams simply don't have the tools, the way of working, or the responsibility of making sure they are actually changing user behaviors, creating impact, and delivering business results. On the other hand, in the best companies, teams have all this and they know that most ideas on a typical roadmap are going to fail. This is why the leaders in these companies focus on what objectives they need to achieve, then give the teams the context and information they need, and let them figure out how to actually reach results. You should do this too. In this talk I explain why and share my view and experience of how to make that happen.

Behaviour-driven development attempts to solve the problem of implementing poorly defined requirements. Our client is in the chemical industry. Hence, it was quite difficult for my team to adapt quickly to the corresponding business. To be more precise, in order to build the product, we needed to understand mathematical models, equations and the glossary of chemical terms. BDD was the solution. The management team heard the magic buzzword “BDD” and hoped that it would solve our challenges. However, nobody was following the principles of BDD and BDD became just another “automation tool”. Business users continued to send documents and emails with the requirements, Developers never used the BDD approach, the Analysis team did not follow the patterns to write correct Gherkin syntax as prescribed by the BDD creators etc. The result for the project was just a big mess. In order to address the problems, we had some mini training sessions for all our team regarding the correct principles of BDD. We also trained customers with webinars and showed them how they could write Gherkin files. Also, we have introduced the pre-flight checks concept. Hence, my proposal is this: Do you want to use BDD? Use it as intended or it will just create more complexity.

In this talk, the writer of Comic Agilé, Luxshan Ratnaravi, will take the audience through a visual and provocative journey of agile anti-patterns and misunderstandings, told through his tragicomic strips in a highly entertaining fashion.

The presented content, points and lessons will be relatable to agile practitioners, developers and Management, as they'll center around topics such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Spotify and Product Management – and why implementing these approaches often fail miserably in a sea of bullshit bingo.

During his talk, Luxshan will also emphasize how to avoid the depicted mistakes, so the audience can reflect on their current agile practices and learn how to improve them

Panelists: Abeba Birhane, Henrik Kniberg, Michael Feathers, Diomidis Spinellis

In this talk Konstantinos will share a football story with a very important lesson for every Product professional out there. Really, what can we learn as PMs from a football coach?

In highly uncertain times, it pays to be foresightful, anticipating change and adapting - before it's too late! Where can we enhance Agile approaches to better navigate disruption?

Vision - how to create and communicate a vision and story of change that resonates and that others can be part of

Purpose - what's happening around the world in the way that organisations define and align around purpose - and what can we learn for our own teams

Reimagining the 'usual' - how to think creatively and even disruptively to create radical opportunities for your business

Through stories, examples and practical tools, this session will set you up to understand, debate and exploit the opportunities that present themselves in times of flux.

The past number of years have seen peak excitement, enthusiasm, and inflated optimism around AI, mostly predicated upon yet to materialise “benefits”, “potentials”, and “promises”. Actual deployed systems however continue to fail to live up to their promises, leading to numerous downstream impacts including erosion of public trust in AI. In this talk, we survey current state-of-the-art AI systems and their downstream impact on society and present recommendations geared towards reliable and equitable AI systems as well as mechanisms for accountability.

Luxshan Ratnaravi

Workshop Description

Many organizations can increase the return of their investments in going agile by articulating and removing their agile pains (i.e., misunderstandings, conflicts and antipatterns born out of implementing agile ways of working), as well as becoming aware of the consequences of having them. Agile antipatterns are sub-par solutions to challenges, and they occur when the intentions of working agile meet the limitations of the organizational reality. When the changes required to go agile are too big or difficult, organizations might take “pragmatic” shortcuts that, on the surface, seem appropriate and sensible, but in the long run can decrease the benefits of the investment—thus, the organization creates agile antipatterns (or “agile debt”).

This workshop teaches the participants to identify, describe, communicate and remove  these agile pains by using the humorous format of Comic Agilé strips.

Examples of agile antipatterns:

• #1: Product Owners only prioritize business features and not technical enablers and process improvement initiatives. Consequence: Reduced quality of the product and no culture of continuous improvement.

• #2: Scrum Masters “do” instead of teaching and coaching. Consequence: The team is ineffective because it doesn’t learn self-management and to grow as a team, but keeps being dependant on the Scrum Master to facilitate it.

• #3: Dependencies are not broken, but instead coordinated through a scaling framework. Consequence: It takes longer than needed for each team to deliver value because of the need for  cross-team coordination.

Workshop participants will learn:

• How to identify and articulate the biggest agile pains of their organizations, inspired by the creative Comic Agilé way of thinking, structuring and presenting points

• How to communicate agile pains, and their impact, to decision-makers

• How to remove the causes of their specific agile pains

Take-away:

• Your own Comic Agilé strip (per group) based on an actual, current agile pain from your organization that you can communicate to decision-makers to inspire change.

Workshop Disposition

1. Introduction to the theory behind agile pains, how they can be identified and prioritized based their impact, and how creating them can be an unconscious choice—combined with loads of the instructor’s own experienced agile pains presented humorously through the Comic Agilé format.

2. Workshop where the participants, in groups, identify, break down and articulate their own relevant and actual agile pains in the form of a four-panel comic strip (no drawing skills needed).

3. Sparring with the instructor and each other on the root causes of the chosen agile pains, how their organizations can eliminate them, and how to decide which agile pains to keep for now.

Valadis Novakovits

Workshop Description

Feeling like your team is constantly stuck? 

Many organizations split into teams and adopt microservices with the promise of agility, but struggle to achieve true flow.

During this workshop, we will get our hands dirty and redesign our socio-technical system as co-workers in the same company, going step by step through different milestones.
We will freeze time to surface different problems and break free using, among other principles, Domain Driven Design superpowers that will crush common roadblocks.

This workshop is ideal for developers, architects, team leads, as well as agile coaches interested in unleashing better socio-technical ways in order to accelerate and boost effective collaboration.

Eleni Dimitropoulou & Dimitris Papageorgiou

Workshop Description

In this workshop, you will learn how to apply next-generation developer techniques throughout your software development lifecycle and you will gain practical insights into how generative AI can significantly enhance your efficiency. Through hands-on sessions, you will use generative AI tools to generate high-quality, context-specific guidance. You will also understand how to utilise generative AI to automate repetitive and well-defined development tasks, setting aside time to focus on high-value innovative aspects of your day- to-day work. Lastly, you will have the chance to get acquainted to generative AI tools, using Amazon Q developer directly in your IDE as a developer companion.

In this workshop, you will learn how to apply next-generation developer techniques throughout your software development lifecycle and you will gain practical insights into how generative AI can significantly enhance your efficiency. Through hands-on sessions, you will use generative AI tools to generate high-quality, context-specific guidance. You will also understand how to utilise generative AI to automate repetitive and well-defined development tasks, setting aside time to focus on high-value innovative aspects of your day- to-day work. Lastly, you will have the chance to get acquainted to generative AI tools, using Amazon Q developer directly in your IDE as a developer companion.

Spyros Lambrinidis

Feeling overwhelmed by product requirements and struggling to build a clear direction for your team? In today's fast-paced digital world, leaders need a strategic approach to navigate the sea of possibilities.

This session explores the power of Focus, Flow, and Win as the cornerstones of your product roadmap. We'll delve into techniques for prioritizing requirements, harnessing the power of agile methodologies, and fostering a state of flow within your team.

This session will equip you with:

• A framework for translating business requirements to product requirements

• Filtering and prioritizing product requirements.

• Strategies to cultivate a focused and collaborative team environment.

  Actionable steps to build a dynamic roadmap that drives both business impact and tech excellence.

Leave the distractions behind and unlock the rhythm for success!  Join us and discover how to build a winning product roadmap that fuels both business growth and cutting-edge technological innovation.

Elena Chronopoulou, Byron Georgantopoulos, Vasilis Gennaris, Giannis Theocharis

Workshop Description

The Cynefin LEGO Game is an excellent hands-on workshop for teams to understand Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and its decision-making processes in action.

The Cynefin framework is a sense-making model that helps individuals and organizations understand and respond effectively to complex situations. It provides a taxonomy for different types of problems: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder.

After identifying which domain a situation belongs to, the appropriate response or strategy based on that domain should be applied.

Workshop Structure:

• Introduction, Icebreaker, LEGO game explanation (20 minutes): Brief introduction and an icebreaker activity to energize participants. Present the Cynefin concepts, domains and types of challenges each domain represents. Explain the flow and rules of the game. Participants will work in teams and build different models based on the scenarios provided.

• Game Execution and debriefing (70 minutes): Present various scenarios drawn from the four Cynefin domains (Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic). Formed teams with will build their LEGO models based on the given scenarios. After each scenario, a discussion to reflect on team’s approach, challenges and lessons learned will follow. Teams will present their LEGO model and explain their decision-making process.

Participants will

• Improve their Understanding of the of the Cynefin framework and its practical application.

• Develop stronger collaboration skills through the hands-on LEGO game experience.

• Be equipped with tools and techniques to improve their decision making strategies especially in complex and uncertain situations.

• Generate actionable insights that can be applied to real-world Agile practices within their organisations

Striking a harmonious balance between technical excellence and human collaboration is the cornerstone of success. It is not just about implementing robust architectures or intricate design patterns. We will present a modular architectural paradigm where cross-cutting concerns are elegantly decoupled from core business logic and seamlessly managed across multiple teams working on a shared codebase, employing a combination of layered and vertical slices architecture.

We have used this approach to empower teams to iteratively enhance or replace implementations of cross-cutting concerns without disrupting the core application, all while stream-aligned teams focused on delivering business value within their own vertical slices. We will also demonstrate the alignment mechanism we used, so that collaboration, maintainability and cognitive load are not mere afterthoughts but integral components of the development process.

The workshop will guide you from a simple empty base project to a real-life production system, ensuring each step adheres to the original architectural decisions through the use of ArchUnit, reflection, source generators, and ADRs.