This was my very first time in New York. The 16 hours flight from Singapore didn’t make the conference experience less exciting. I was expecting to see some skyscrapers, however, got something looking like Amsterdam, hmmm. It’s nice that the LeSS conference got to keep its style as always. This keeps my hopes up for the next year LeSS conference in Munich.
The keyword I heard a lot from people describing the conference is “humble”. This is also how I felt. People were sharing their experiences, which were full of courage, failures, surprises, marginal success, and occasional big victories.
I especially liked my ex-boss Tero Peltola’s keynote LeSS Huge at Nokia (Download Materials). Nokia LTE was the second LeSS adoption Tero did. I was involved as an Agile coach for years. It’s great to see the organizational changes from the most critical stakeholder’s perspective. Don’t miss the session video at InfoQ.
Next, I also liked LeSS Huge at BMW from Konstantin Ribel and Craig Larman. It’s interesting to see in such a big company as BMW autonomous driving how changes happen both from bottom-up and top-down. The materials are here. The video will be published later in November.
Craig’s second-day keynote was Blind Spots: Cognitive Biases and Systems, an interesting exploration of human cognition and the impact on organizational behaviour. Download Materials.
One thing I have been doing for a long time, but still find challenging is Product Backlog Refinement Workshop, especially when it takes more than a couple of teams together. This led me joining Nils Bernert’s Large group Product Backlog Refinement in LeSS & LeSS Huge. There I got more tools under my belt and learnt different facilitation tricks for splitting and detailing. Download Materials.
In Greg Hutchings’s Using Innovation Games (™) to compliment LeSS, I learnt about several tools that can help product exploration and also where to find more resources. You may take a peek on Youtube.
On my conference team table, I’ve heard a lot of excellent stories from Anton Bevzyuk regarding their practices. So I skipped his session How technical excellence helps in LeSS adoption and went to Michael James’s Test Driven Development (TDD) on flipcharts, which is a very interesting why of explaining TDD to non-tech people. However, when I finally saw Anton’s slides (Download Materials), I felt I really missed something great. Too bad, next time!
There were 22 planned sessions, together with team-based conference activities, multiple tracks of open space sessions and panel discussion. To download the session materials and watch session videos, please find them in the 2018 New York conference program.
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