Kim, sometimes referred to as “Unconventional” for her creative tactics to generate transparency and encourage self-development or as the “People Whisperer” for her street-savvy style of coaching that brings out the best in people. Kim’s fusion of real-life stories and her conversational techniques connect her with people of all walks of life on an intimate, intense and individual level.

Kim served as Co-Chair for Scrum Alliance's Global Gathering 2017. She has over 10 years of Agile experience and 15 years’ experience in Information Technology planning, implementation, and execution. She is skilled in building interaction and collaboration among organizations to drive change, support key business objectives, and maximize value creation across enterprise environments. She has experience in creating a shared vision among the enterprise and build a strong, united leadership to empower organizations to achieve a successful Agile transformation.

Change your game to impact; Find your shovel & dig

They say no two people are alike, however, one thing we all have in common is we constantly look for change and we want it now! We find ourselves trying to continuously discover the latest and greatest way to change the way we eat, change the way we live, and change the way we work. All these fast attempts to change become exhausting and lead to stress. Then once the crisis is over it's back to how it was and people become deflated. This keynote will take you through a deeper sense of finding your purpose when making a change. Through storytelling and humor, Kim will share strategies to help you improve your game to become a game-changer and inspire the builders of tomorrow.

Brendan serves Ramsey Solutions as CTO and works alongside nationally syndicated financial expert Dave Ramsey in the development of FinTech products which educate consumers on how to live a debt free lifestyle and build wealth. He brings 25 years of entrepreneurial experience to his team of +250 engineers, product managers and project managers. Brendan is best known within the agile community for his online video course Starting Kanban. He lives in Nashville with his wife Stacy and son Maxwell.

Overcoming Uncomfortable Conversations

A central behavior of all great teams is the ability to engage in healthy conflict. Yet conflict continues to be one of the least modeled leadership skills. This talk addresses head-on why most everyone dislikes conflict and how to overcome the powerful temptation to avoid it. It offers a simple plan that anyone can use to effectively initiate an uncomfortable conversation, directly address unwelcome behavior and clarify what must change—all while maintaining safety and dignity.

Fueled by their shared passion for people-centric organizations that achieve business results, Kris Taylor joined Joe Indiano to found Apeiron, where professionals join together in an abundant, entrepreneurial community to grow sustainable businesses by collaborating together. Bringing together highly skilled consultants across functions, Apeiron is creating the “workplace of the future”, where talented professionals come together to service clients with an agile, collaborative approach to tough business problems.

Kris is also the founder of Evergreen Leadership in 2004 and has worked with over 80 companies across the US to develop customized leadership development programs focused on 21st-century skills.  Evergreen Leadership is known for its high-impact retreats, coaching, and learning programs, specializing in fostering agility, collaboration, relationship building, accountability, creativity, and innovation. 

Make Today’s Energy Evergreen

Too often at conferences and summits, we come away with energy, ideas, and new connections, and then fail to follow through, Those new ideas never get implemented. Those new connections fail to grow into deeper relationships. The excitement fades and the energy ebbs.

You face the same dilemma when you present new ideas, techniques, and methodologies in your organization. The energy created in the moment dissipates quickly in the rush of everyday work demands.

In this interactive keynote presentation, Kris Taylor will share six proven techniques to distill key takeaways from today’s conference and move them from idea to action. Drawn from practices Kris uses in her high-impact retreats, group coaching, and training, you will come away with focus, clarity, and motivation to yield a lasting benefit from today’s conference. 

Even better, Kris will share “behind-the-scenes” facilitation techniques so that you, too, can incorporate them into your work, creating higher impact, deeper engagement, and fostering progress and commitment.

Brett Buchanan is the CEO at Pathfinder Product Labs and Chief Product Officer at CarNext. He is a proven product leader with experience working at the inception of startups to fortune 10 companies. He has built products from scratch and grew existing businesses that are used by millions of users.

Using Data to Create your Product Strategy

The way businesses are being built is shifting right before our eyes. Hyper-growth start-ups are driving established companies out of the Fortune 500 and disrupting entire industries. Establish enterprises are completely rethinking their business model. How strategy is set and deployed is key to success.

Betsy Irizarry is an Agile Coach who works with teams and organizations as they pursue better customer outcomes and improved ways of working. She has a proven track record of working cross-functionally as a facilitator, trainer, and coach who helps align people, systems, and processes to achieve challenging goals. In 2017 she founded FreshTilt, an agile consulting firm providing coaching, transformation, training, and workshop facilitation services. Outside of FreshTilt, Betsy worked in various ‘traditional’ and agile roles at Wash U in STL, AT&T, Mastercard, and Wayfair.

The Dictionary Game: Hands-On Fun with Flow!

Do you ever feel like you and your team are really rocking it… but somehow, something consistently goes wrong with the ultimate delivery of customer value? Are you frustrated or flabbergasted by why your agile practices and continuous improvement efforts fail to measurably improve outcomes?

Join us for this fun, interactive workshop where we will play a hands-on game to explore some fundamental features of flow. Along the way, we will collectively reflect on how common flow anti-patterns show up in our organizations today.  By the end of the game, you might find ways to look at some of your current challenges with a fresh perspective – and walk away with some flow improvement ideas to try in your own workplace.

Kim has proven expertise in delivering solutions by leveraging Scrum, Agile and Lean methodologies. She has consistently adopted innovative approaches to solving complex corporate problems throughout her 20 years’ career.

Through training and coaching, she enables clients to solve problems while delivering outcomes and strategically focusing on solving big corporate problems. The knowledge she brings includes Agile training and coaching, change management, e-commerce, medical and drug card claims, ERP, order processing systems, work scope planning, EDI transactions, product management, business analysis, and project management.  Kim is a Transformation Coach with Agile Velocity.

How to Wrangle a Transformation

Wrangling an Agile transformation can be a daunting task. Leaders know they want the benefits of agility, but don’t know how to get there or what is involved. In this session, Kim Antelo will teach you how to enable transformation leaders to take ownership of their Agile transformation. You’ll learn how to help leaders build a transformation backlog based on what business outcomes the organization wants to achieve and how to measure transformation progress against those outcomes. 

When Matt is thriving he is transforming organizations, serving as a community catalyst, crafting learning experiences, enabling team and leader journeys, and holding space for others online and in person.  He has founded several user groups, speks and coaches worldwide.
A founder of Cerber, a coaching and training organization with the ambitious objective to bring clarity and knowledge to agilists across the globe, Matt partners a pace with technology leaders to create nimble purpose driven environments.  He is a Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach (CTC) and Training from the BACK of the room trainer

KPIs to Nowhere: The String Point Game

I was presenting on KPIs at Global Scrum Gathering in Portugal earlier this  when I found out that somebody had done a similar talk the previous day of the conference. In my quest to come up with a KPI talk that is different, yet original and practical I came up with an in-person game where in 1 hour we create a mock corporation with different audience participants representing different leaders and teams within an organization. We use large stick-it notes to annotate the roles and create sample OKRs for each role/team. Then we connect all roles with a string held by different people.  Much like the ball point game, I manipulate the flow of the OKRs by cutting the string, moving roles around, and overlapping OKR string with business strategy and HR policy string - provoking the audience and participants to think of solutions.  This demonstration goes from people chuckling in the first 5 minutes to nodding hands as soon as dysfunctions and contradictions start flowing in.  Lessons and suggestions like OCM needs, descaling, ghost roles, etc. start flowing in. When I did this exercise I received feedback like: "I realized the diagnostic nature of OKRs and see them as such for the first time"

Hi, I'm Dr. Chuck. I am a Professional Scrum Trainer through Scrum.org, a former steward of the Professional Scrum Product Owner course, and a trainer of nearly all of the Scrum.org course catalog. I’m also an SPC (SAFe). I have over 30 years of experience in education and software. I have has taught nearly 7,000 students in Professional Scrum classes and hundreds of students in noncertified classes ranging from highly technical programming classes to executive classes on process engineering.

Not only do I teach, but I consult with a variety of large organizations. I focus on helping organizations realize the benefits of agile principles and
practices through better business and IT alignment. I've earned a Doctorate of Computer Science, an MS in Computer Information Science, and a BS in Computer Science from Edinboro University. I’m also co-author of the Springer book “Parallel Agile - faster delivery, fewer defects, lower cost.”

Scrum Commitments – Product Goal, Sprint Goal, Definition of Done

In 2020, the Scrum Guide introduced commitments, one for each artifact: the Definition of Done, the Sprint Goal, and the Product Goal. Of the three,
Sprint Goal and Definition of Done have been around for quite some time, and the Product Goal is new. These three commitments become the “why” behind their related artifacts. This presentation will present examples (positive and negative) of each of the commitments. Techniques for crafting and applying impactful Scrum commitments will also be explained. At the end of the presentation you will not only understand the Scrum goals, but you’ll be able to create and use them.

Kim McGill has been an Agile practitioner in one from or another for over 15 years. She believes in giving people space to be great and in applying creativity and problem solving with critical thinking and data to make ideas come to life. She has a passion for both understanding the ‘why’ of people and using that to unlock the potential of those around her. But most importantly, she believes that life it to short not to find ways to bring passion, joy and fun into all we do and strives to live by that everyday.YES

Burned out on Burndown: The Journey to Meaningful Metrics

For years, Agile teams have used metrics like velocity and burn downs to measure their effectiveness. While those metrics have a place in team building and team maturity, most common Scrum metrics paint an incomplete picture of the overall delivery effectiveness and the actual value delivered. In this conversation, we will present a set of quantitative and qualitative metrics that, when combined, can tell a more complete story, improve the ability to see a more holistic view of opportunities and guide us to meaningful, measurable areas for improvement.

Co-Author of 'Creating Your Dojo' and 'Coaching for Learning (Winter, 2022)', Joel Tosi has been researching and working with teams and organizations to learn - learn practices and techniques build better products, but also better teams and better organizations.

Growing a Learning Organization

How do you grow a continuously learning organization? If certifications and wikis were enough, organizations would be crushing it.

This session is an evolution of our talks around growing Dojos (though awareness of dojos is not necessary for this talk).

In this session we will look at the challenges facing organizations and people today trying to learn new skills (committment, context, multitude of needs).

From there we will look at how we learn exploring explicit vs tacit knowledge.

We will wrap up with tangible ways you can start growing an organization that continuously learns - looking at addressing the whole value stream to provide context and growing an organization that has internal coaches and teachers (along with models for that).

Our upcoming book (late summer 2022) will be based on coaching for learning.

Nate is an Agile lead within the Vaco Digital practice, and leads the company's agile transformation efforts. A relative newcomer to the Agile scene, he is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Delivery Lead. After more than a decade as a Lean practitioner and ITSM process designer, consultant, and manager, he transitioned to Agile in order to fulfill his desire to impact customer products earlier in their lifecycle. His eclectic background offers a unique ability to condense and breakdown sophisticated concepts into easy to consume ideas.

Stop getting nowhere fast

Have you ever been a part of a failed Agile Transformation? Perhaps you’ve even seen the same company fail more than once. This most likely started with creating a bunch of new teams, swearing allegiance to the Scrum Guide, and most importantly, overusing the word Agile. In the end, companies are often forced to start over having lost valuable time and credibility simply because core elements were never established.

In this session, I’ll discuss three pre-Agile tenants that you can leverage as a foundation to your transformation and avoid running on your own hamster wheel.

Rich helps organizations crush their goals by breaking down silos, increasing communication and improving their Agile approaches. His energetic and fun presentation style challenges leaders and their teams to transform “good teams” to great ones by creating authentic, caring, and growth-infused environments. Audiences love his practical approaches, stories, and the vulnerability that makes it real.

Rich played football at Miami University, worked at Procter & Gamble, and then led the Agile and digital transformation at a large non-profit. He started The Noble Foundry 4 years ago to bring it all together and improve the way large organizations create value for their customers through coaching and transformation strategy.

Quickly Creating Psychological Safety During Team Change

What if your team blazed past the stress of the pandemic, complexities of remote work, and the great resignation without missing a beat? What if they went beyond efficiency & simply being nice to each other to truly challenging each other? You’d get more innovation, better relationships, increased productivity, and more resilience. All for free. 

This talk introduces a critical framework for how psychological safety develops. With this framework, you can develop it more quickly and take it further than you ever thought possible. You can create a team who has the courage to challenge each other while unlocking both innovation and productivity.

We’ll talk about what must be in place at each stage of developing safety. We’ll use the scenario of adding a new person to a team to help understand the full lifecycle of developing safety. We’ll talk about how trust starts low and builds over time. We’ll define psychological safety, share why it matters (it’s not what most think), and provide an array of practical tools for talking about and increasing psychological safety on your team(s).

Whether you’re adding or removing people, facing a team that won’t talk, or just looking to take your team to the next level, you’ll identify new ways to help them grow.

Stef Hogan is the Scrum and Delivery Lead at GoCart, an exciting start-up out of Denver, Colorado. Stef has been working in software development for over 10 years, with the last 8 working as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. A thought leader and fierce collaborator, Stef specializes in working with remote teams and leading them to high performance. Her passions around efficiency, continuous improvement, and empathy create an environment for agile teams to thrive. Outside of all things agile, you can find Stef outdoors with her dog or focusing on whatever new hobby she’s picked up.

How to build high performing, remote, agile teams

The world is different since Covid and now more than ever, it is important to understand how to build high performing teams that are also remote. I’ve worked a majority of my career with remote teams across different time-zones and have learned quite a bit on how to succeed despite the challenges of being remote.

Dan Rice has global responsibility for Broadcom’s AOD Focus Partner strategy. With 28 years experience in consultant, product development, advisory and leadership roles in Enterprise and Retail Software, Web Services (AWS), Aviation, Telecommunications, Insurance, Automotive and Retail verticals, Dan advises enterprises in the areas of business agility, value stream management and digital innovation.

Dan has consulted with some of the largest organizations in the world to apply effective enterprise agile processes to ensure they realize the full value of their investment in agile. Dan has coached 100s of teams and many leaders in his career.

Fun fact: In 2021 at Age 50 Dan completed Ironman Indiana in just under 13 hours.  Whatever you put your heart and mind into you can achieve.

Value Stream Management organize and execute for successful outcomes

Imagine delivering on your company's strategy, disrupting your competition, leading in the markets you serve, and delighting your customers. In this talk, we’ll explore success patterns of value stream management, allowing you to organize around value, steer based on data and delight your customers and stakeholders.  Your competitors are Google, Amazon, and Apple, whether you realize it or not.

Liz Rettig is an accomplished Scrum Master and is the founder and CEO of the Art of Scrum, LLC.

You can find Liz working with healthcare IT scrum teams. She spends her time facilitating retrospectives and coaching teams and product owners related to the many facets of implementing scrum. Liz believes that implementing some form of Agile can fundamentally change the way people feel about their work and the outcomes you see in a positive way. She is driven by the many successes achieved by the scrum teams. One of her greatest thrills is talking to past team members who share how they are taking the things they have learned from her and applying them in their new jobs.

She has a CSP-SM from Scrum Alliance and PSMII certification from Scrum.org. Liz also has a master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Cincinnati, as well as a Clinical Laboratory Science degree from Wright State University and a Medical Laboratory Scientist certification from the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.

Outside of work, Liz enjoys boardgames, gardening, biking, and hiking with her two little girls and her husband.

Build your Sprint Sundae- From Product Backlog to Sprint Goal

One of the hardest things to do for a new Scrum Team is figuring out a Sprint Goal.  Sure, that may sound easy, but many times with a new team, their Product Backlog is still being ordered and the Product Owner is still figuring out how to create an ordered backlog that just makes sense.  There are several things that go into actually being able to make a good spring goal.  The analogy I like to use is “we are building a sundae” in Sprint Planning.  In a sundae a good portion of it is a scoop of ice cream, this is your sprint goal, everything else you put into your sprint is just toppings.  So, when we sit down to our planning, we can ask ourselves “What’s our scoop of ice cream this sprint?”. 

 To get to your scoop, we need to consider the Product Goals, the order of the backlog, how we are planning our sprint, and the structure of the sprint goal.  

I'm a renaissance man trapped in a specialist's body. I started my career as a biologist. That's why I became an IT guy. I love science but it doesn't pay the bills. I've been an IT professional for many years. I used to be a software developer with an elegant language for a more civilized age. I became a Quality Assurance Analyst because it's better to give than receive. I have been a process improvement specialist because it's easier to negotiate with a terrorist than a Methodologist. I've been working as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. Agile is a philosophy, not a methodology. Lately, I've been focusing on writing and speaking at conferences about agile & IT issues. Interview questions often ask how long you've been agile? My answer, always. I just didn't know what it was called before.

Hold My Beer – We’re Going ScrumBan!

What does it mean to blend two frameworks such as Scrum and Lean Kanban? Does it even make sense? Hold my beer – we’re going Scrumban! We’ll identify reasons you might consider a blending, discuss the foundational principles to keep in mind if you do and explore how you might overlay Lean Kanban attributes on your Scrum team. It’s going to be a wild, hybrid framework ride.

Hybrid methodologies are often an exercise in cherry-picking or happenstance. It’s problematical at best. The basis of this discussion is to identify foundational principles of both Scrum and Lean Kanban and explore the specific considerations you might consider for a blending. When considering changing dynamic and complex processes it’s vital to first understand what foundational principles are being impacted. It’s similar to coaching a professional sports team. First, you start with the fundamentals. This will not be an in-depth discussion of what it means to be Scrum or Lean Kanban but rather a survey of both frameworks with an eye towards their blending.

Thomas is presently serving as a Test Automation Architect. He leads a team of testers, ops engineers, and production support analysts in the adoption of DevOps practices. Previously, he led the enterprise automation support of 73 applications at Huntington National Bank that encompassed testing, metrics & reporting, and data management. Thomas has a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT.

Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos

Example Mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop between development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed Example Mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and questions about outcomes or dependencies are documented for future refinement. The end result are requirements written as user behavior with a shared understanding among all roles on an Agile team. The audience will participate in a live Example Mapping session and learn how to implement the workshop within their own team.

Rita is a Business Agility Leader with over 20 years of experience leading large scale organizational change initiatives with Fortune 50 Companies leveraging a unique style that targets culture and mindset shifts, blended with a pragmatic approach to foster innovation from strategy to idea generation to product delivery. Rita believes in a ‘human first’ approach to product development and change leadership.​ In partnering with business leaders at all levels of the organization as a Product Strategist, she specializes in the full product lifecycle to ensure alignment to organizational strategy and goals while hyper-focused obsession with Customers to achieve highest value outcomes​.  Rita’s portfolio spans a myriad of industries including retail, oil & gas, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and biopharma.

You’re the problem: Re-wire your brain in time for the next change initiative

It should come as no surprise when even the most exciting initiatives are met with opposition, skepticism, or worse, ambivalence.  Bottom line: Change is hard.  Perhaps you’ve spent countless hours on strategy, change management plans, and communications. Still to face the ultimate angst of impending resistance.  Consider the following, what if you are the problem? 

In this session, we will break down the neuroscience behind how the brain’s response to uncertainty manifests itself into actions and behaviors. Then through self-reflection, dive into your leadership style and blind spots that may be thwarting your ability to influence and drive change.  Resistance is neither futile, nor a battle to be won.  Its an opportunity to adapt, innovate and learn.

With more than twenty years of project delivery experience, Faye Thompson serves as a consultant coach, product owner and scrum master. With a focus on an agile mindset and continuous improvement, Faye has had a positive impact in the financial services, healthcare, advertising, marketing, automotive, retail and aviation industries. Passionate about using innovative solutions to drive business value, she trains, mentors and coaches workgroups as they transform themselves into highly engaged and energized teams.

Faye also enjoys serving on the board of directors for the Central Ohio Agile Association, on the Core Program Committee of the Women in Agile Launching New Voices initiative, and as President of the Women in STEMM Alumni Society of The Ohio State University. She spends her free time volunteering as an emergency medical responder and public affairs coordinator for the American Red Cross.

Roadmap for a Product Career

Looking for your next career challenge, and not sure in which direction you should head? Let's explore some of the paths available in the business analysis and product world.

In this interactive workshop, we will use a career planning canvas to identify where we are today, and to begin to consider where we might like to go next. Then we'll discuss typical roles associated with these disciplines, the skillsets needed for each, and some ways to grow and strengthen those competencies. Participants will leave with a starter roadmap of next steps to take toward fulfilling their career aspirations.

Bob is an experienced consultant, writer and speaker; currently an Agile Coach at Accenture, where he advises Fortune 500 companies on their agile journey. He was a contributing author to How Successful Organizations Implement Change. He was an Executive Project Manager with IBM, where he specialized in leading software initiatives following lean/agile techniques. Bob’s career began in the U.S. Navy where he served for seven years. He has earned numerous certifications, most recently the SAFe Program Consultant (SPC5). Bob holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Illinois and an MS in Business from Johns Hopkins.

What is Systems Coaching and Why Do We Need It

Coaching is a popular technique in agile. Anyone with a little experience as a Scrum Master can call themselves a coach, but successful coaching requires much more. This presentation will look at the tools and techniques of Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC™️) and why coaching the system is important in agile transformations.

For this presentation, I will explore the tools and techniques of systems coaching. As a fully trained ORSC coach, my training and experience will allow me to introduce this emerging technique to the audience. I will discuss why it is important to coach to the system and look at the tools and skills that are part of the ORSC landscape.

I am a Senior Scrum Master with Kroger Technology and Digital. I have been with the company for almost 15 years. I recently gave this presentation at Cincy Deliver and it was a huge success.

How to Host a Kick A$$ Retrospective

I want to provide some data gathered from the 15th Annual State of Agile around Retrospectives. First, I want to point out where agile ranks the retrospective meetings. I then want to go into an exercise with the audience through a retro-type experience to bring home the importance of a retrospective meeting and how to take them to the next level. We don't want retrospectives to be where improvement ideas go to die but rather a space to document the action items and then create an improvement backlog of experiments.

Over the past 40 years Scott has served in wide variety of roles in the IT industry. Scott has been championing and learning agile ways of working since before the Agile Manifesto was signed.  He began his career as a software developer and architect building enterprise class systems for companies like Digital Equipment, Cincom Systems and Quest Diagnostics.  More recently he has filled early every agile role including Agile Program Manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Team member and RTE.  For the last ten years Scott has been serving as an agile coach supporting teams in private industry and Federal Government working for AgileX, EIS, Leidos and CGI.

The Seven Date Driven Sins

Date driven behaviors are common in many pre-agile organizations. They are as bad as sin and produce bad outcomes when considered through a long range lens. This presentation targeted to managers and leaders in organizations in the early stages of agile transformation. Scott will lead an entertaining and provocative look at how classical date driven behaviors often produce outcomes that are the opposite of what those leaders ultimately desire. Scott will suggest an experiment to focus on the virtue of frequently delivering incremental value as an alternative to those date driven sins.