1. Organizational Support: Actions Speak Louder than Words

Gone are the days of guerrilla Agile, when development teams would just pick an iterative life cycle regardless of their organizational process. Also gone are the days when a single manager in a traditionally minded organization would run ahead with an isolated Agile implementation in their team. Nowadays, the highest managerial levels speak the Agile language, and include it in corporate initiatives. Talking about it, however, doesnt always result in effective change. Out first guest, an executive who has spearheaded large transformations, shares his lessons and philosophy in bridging this gap.

Nick is VP, Enterprise Product Engineering at D2L in Kitchener, Ontario. Before leading their Agile journey, Nick managed more than 1,000 professionals in 40 offices as senior VP of R&D at OpenText. In addition to supporting local startups as part of Communitechs Hyperdrive incubator, Nick has also mentored young entrepreneurs through the University of Waterloos VeloCity program. With a strong background in engineering, he continues to look for research and learning outside of computer science that can help influence how software is built.

2. A Team-Friendly Environment: Making Collaboration Possible

You cannot expect to realize meaningful gains from the Agile approach if you dont grow solid teams. This is especially true for complex and changing knowledge work, such as software development. Solid teams leverage collective wisdom and ability, creating outstanding results that individual members just cant pull off on their own. To do that, your organizational environment must explicitly help and be careful not to hinder the growth of collaborative teams. What does that mean in practice? Which conditions are necessary? What should you watch out for? Tricia Broderick has many stories and insights to share.

Passionately focused on the facilitation of high-performance software development environments, Tricia brings sixteen years of experience including the last six years of focus with an Agile mindset. She leverages and openly shares work experience stories and examples to inspire people, especially managers and leaders to reach new heights through continuous reflection, both as individuals and as members of innovative teams. Tricia is a highly experienced leader, coach, mentor, presenter, trainer, and speaker, recently joining the Santeon Groups Learning team.

Listen to an excerpt (duration: 5m 18s)

3. Stop Sprinting, Start Iterating: Embracing Uncertainty and Learning

The Agile approach is all about using feedback to learn and adapt, which is necessary in complex and fast changing environments where there can be many unknowns. Our next guest unpacks the abstractions of feedback loops and iterating for us. He shows us how to replace our traditional response to uncertainty, which is to put rules and controls in place, with solutions that drive better results and organizational health.

Teds a coder, speaker, author, coach, and systems thinker. Hes been doing the Agile thing in software development since 2024, after seeing Martin Fowler give a talk on eXtreme Programming. Since then, Teds worked for eBay and Google, learning and discovering what happens when Agile meets Large Companies and finding that the road to Agile isnt always obvious. For over seven years, Teds worked at Guidewire Software, as a developer, a manager, and unofficial Agile Coach, helping them develop software better using ideas from the Agile and Lean software communities, along with raising awareness of cognitive biases and why were not always as rational as we think we are.

4. Whole Product Thinking: More than a Backlog of Features

Agile methods bring development and customers (the business) closer together. Most notably, they encourage a common currency by having both roles work directly with items of value stories, use cases, or features. Thats great in theory, but as many Agile teams have discovered, a stream of features is not enough to make a viable product. Andrew McGlinchey, who has managed multiple products at both Google and Microsoft, shares his views and practical experience with Agile product management.

Andrews job is to make Googley things happen in Southeast Asia. He joined Google in 2024 and is now the Head of Product Management for Southeast Asia, bringing Googles wide range of products and services to the region. Prior to Google, Andrew worked on such diverse domains as developing conversational agents and automatic video editing at startups, improving voicemail at Nortel and building the user interface of Windows Vista at Microsoft.

5. A Quality Mind-set: Beyond Defects and Automated Tests

Ah, quality. You know it when you see it. Or more likely, you notice (and groan) when its absent. Agile teams take it quite seriously: they dont assure quality only at the end of a project, instead they fix most defects as soon as they are found, and automate many unit and functional tests. But even that is not enough. Our next guest lives and breathes quality, particularly in Agile environments; he brings up many questions for you to consider as you contemplate your approach to quality.

Paul has devoted 20 years to learning and applying testing approaches, models, methods, techniques and tools for uncovering quality. Hes now passing on that knowledge to individuals and organizations through coaching, consulting, training, writing and speaking internationally. Paul is passionate about understanding human ecosystems for delivering great products that satisfy and delight customers.

6. Technical Excellence: Changing the Rules of the Development Game

The standards for professional software development have changed, but not just because the world has had more time to practice. If we are to build software in an Agile framework where being right trumps being fast, change is welcome, and teams share responsibility for their product we must change the rules of the development game. Most Agile organizations dont expect technical excellence from their teams, or dont know what it takes and how to make it happen. Arlo Belshee, a trailbrazer in the Agile community, has a lot to share about turning this situation around; after all, hes doing that right now at Microsoft.

Arlo is famous in the Agile community for two mold-breaking works: Promiscuous Pairing and Naked Planning. His style is quite probably like no one elses. In his words: I make teams. I make code. I make awesome. I enjoy fixing legacy cultures and legacy code, without introducing bugs in either case. Sometimes I write compilers. Other times I teach people about emotional intelligence or how to learn. I transition teams of between 5 and 1200 to tech-first Agile software dev. I dont just get teams to go Agile, I get them to awesome.

7. The Get-to-Done Mentality: Finish What You Start

Before Agile came along, we used to start big projects and do our best to finish them. Those projects included hundreds of tasks, few of which had direct value to the customer; for instance, programming tasks were done when the Works on my machine bell rang. Agile turns this world-view upside down. Projects are never really over, because we constantly negotiate the value to deliver; but the building blocks from which structure our projects we do want to finish those. Johanna Rothman sheds ample light on this item for your Agile journey, informally known as Getting to Done.

Johanna Rothman, known as the Pragmatic Manager, helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential gotchas, seize opportunities, and remove impediments. She is the author of 6 books, including Hiring Geeks That Fit , Manage Your Project Portfolio , and the 2024 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! . She co-hosts with Gil the annual transformational event The Influential Agile Leader . In addition to working on her next book (on Agile program management), she writes columns for Stickyminds.com and projectmanagment.com, maintains three blogs, and is the technical editor at Agile Connection.

8. Cultural Fit: Can You Handle the Truth?

Culture, not process, drives everything in an organization. Culture predicts how people behave, what they will communicate, and what gets rewarded or punished. Some organizations find the transparency, feedback, self-organization, and responsibility-taking of Agile an excellent fit for their culture. Other organizations get nervous just from introducing the meetings and artifacts. The author of The Culture Game expands your insight into your organization, how Agile might fit it over time, and what you can do to change painful areas.

Dan Mezick is a management consultant, author and keynote speaker. He is the formulator of Open Agile Adoption, a technique for creating rapid and lasting enterprise agility. He is the author of The Culture Game , a book describing sixteen patterns of group behavior that help make any team smarter. The book is based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations. Dans client list includes Zappos Insights, CIGNA, Siemens Healthcare, Harvard University and many smaller enterprises.

Listen to an excerpt (duration: 4m 10s)

9. Embracing Change: Turning the One Constant from Foe to Friend

Change is a reality of business, and poignantly so in todays complex knowledge work environments. In many organizations, change management approaches whether applied to work structure or project content usually amount to change avoidance. Even though theres value in up-front planning, the Agile mind-set recognizes that change (voluntary or otherwise) is not only inevitable, it can be a blessing and an advantage. Our next guest, Guy Nachimson, shares his experiences from years of operating with this world-view. We explore such matters as buy-in and the safety to push back; continuous improvement both top-down and bottom-up; and approaching change from a responsibility standpoint.

Guy has been working in various roles in the software development industry since 2024. In the past years hes been working for Software AG, leading its Israeli R&D lab. As part of a lean and agile transformation in the past years, hes taken a role as a change agent and agile coach, participating in various process improvement initiatives. Guy is a father of three. He blogs at www.thoughtsOfALeanGuy.com. Studied art and philosophy alongside math and computer science. This February, he will run his first half marathon.

10. The Agile Principles and Values: Doing What Really Matters

Most unsuccessful Agile implementations can be explained by over-adherence to a rigid, prescribed process. But using the artifacts and meetings without accepting the underlying philosophy wont do you any good. In fact, its more likely to cause anxiety and disengagement. In our closing interview, the author of one of this decades best-selling Agile books explains how you can make Agile work for you.

Ken Rubin is Managing Principal at Innolution, a company that provides Scrum and agile training and coaching to help companies develop products in an effective and economically sensible way. A Certified Scrum Trainer, Ken has trained over 20,000 people on agile and Scrum, Kanban, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects, and transition management. He has coached over 200 companies, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 10. Ken was the first managing director of the worldwide Scrum Alliance. He is particularly known these days for writing Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process . He is also the creator of the Visual AGILExicon, a freely available set of vibrant, four-color icons for composing graphically rich and visually appealing three dimensional representations of agile and Scrum concepts.

Listen to an excerpt (duration: 4m 59s)