Madison’s got a world-class agile conference that’s in its second year running: Scrum Day Madison. Speakers came from all over to our little corner of the world and I was lucky enough to be one of those speakers. I met some amazing people and learned quite a lot about delivering valuable products. Here’s a bit of an overview of the conference and some of the talks I went to.
Delivering Valuable Products
Scrum Day’s theme this year was delivering valuable products. After having just read Marty Cagan’s latest book, Transformed, about the product operating model, I couldn’t help but feel that theme was extremely topical. After all, what’s the point of using any type of agile framework if we’re not using it to deliver valuable products? Mary Iqbal of the training company, Rebel Scrum, almost single-handedly pulled together speakers from all over the world. From Gunther Verheyen of Brussels, author of Scrum – A Pocket Guide, to Claire Sudbery an agile trainer from Manchester, UK, to Troy Magennis originally from Australia, we had speakers from everywhere. I enjoyed every single session I went to, so here’s a bit more about what I saw.
Self-Selection for Teaming
My talk was about using self-selection to allow people to choose their own teams and projects. I’ve run dozens of these events over the years and believe strongly that if you want to build successful products, you should start with building strong teams with self-selection. BUT, I wasn’t the only one talking about it! The morning keynote given by Mary Iqbal and Michelle Brud mentioned a self-selection event that WPS Health ran to kick-off their agile transformation. Speakers Jeff Bubolz and Chad Beier were also in attendance and I know they’ve run several successful self-selection events. This process is spreading and I absolutely love it! You can view my slides from the event on my self-selection page. They give you all the details around how to set-up and run self-selection.
Agility – It’s Just Good Business
I always love listening to Jeff Bubolz & Chad Beier from WI Agility. In fact, they both appear as guest speakers in my Capstone course most semesters. They had a very funny and convincing talk about why you might want to move to agile processes just to make more money. Forget about all of the other goodness you’ll get from talking to customers, iterating, and shipping great products. Just do it for the money!
Oh, and Chad is a budding Agile Weird Al Yankovich, so we got to watch a really fun performance later in the day with a few of his songs. This one was about the typical agile “journey”.
The Math of Flow
I was so excited to hear that Troy Magennis was going to be at Scrum Day. At Agile 2015, I saw him mathematically prove that for every dependency a team has, their chances of delivering on time go down by 50%. I’ve referenced his talk again and again throughout my career, as I try to form teams that are as decoupled as possible. He’s quite smart and also somehow makes topics about math hilarious. At Scrum Day, he covered a variety of topics from dependencies to forecasting to how many people you should date before you know the person you’ve got is likely the best one you’re going to get. He’s famous for his spreadsheets, which you can find at his site: focusedobjective.com.
Products Should Be Front & Center
The lunch keynote was given by Gunther Verheyen. The biggest thing I took away from his talk is that 85% of people are not engaged in their jobs (or are actively disengaged). When we don’t put our customers first, and when we forget about our products’ effect on society and the planet, we end up with suboptimal teams.
“85% of people are not engaged in their jobs.”
Gunther Verheyen, Products Should be Front & Center, Scrum Day 2024
Women in Agile
The final session I was able to attend was a set of two talks by new female speakers as part of an initiative to make the agile community more diverse, led by Women in Agile. Women in Agile finds promising new female speakers and gives them a platform and a mentor with which to build their first talk. Just like the rest of tech, most agile conferences are skewed towards white, male speakers. Scrum Day was different. 60% of the speakers at Scrum Day were WOMEN. (Big applause for Mary and her team for pulling that off!!) Our two speakers Wednesday were Sheena Gladden and Valerie Mason-Robbinson. They both did an amazing job and have long speaking careers in front of them.
Scrum Day 2025?
I sure hope Mary continues to host this event. It was incredibly fun to meet everyone and learn about their bright ideas for moving the industry forward. If you aren’t already, subscribe to this blog or follow me on LinkedIn. I’ll be sure to pass along the next Scrum Day announcement when I get it!