LeSS Newsletter - November 2018 - LeSS Conference

LeSS Conference New York

Times flies. It is already more than a month ago we had the LeSS Conference in New York City. It was a lot of fun and I'm already looking forward to the next year LeSS Conference. This newsletter is dedicated to sharing some of the sessions and output of the LeSS Conference. Many sessions were videoed and some of these are available already and we'll share the ones that aren't available yet in the next newsletter. Most presentation material is available though.

Summary

The conference was located in the beautiful space of the Angel Orensanz Foundation. This was an old Synagogue built in 1849. It was a comfortable space and definitively created the first wow effect when people came in. This conference was going to be different.

The conference started with Tero Peltola sharing his experiences of leading the 4G LTE Basestation group in Nokia Networks. This was a LeSS adoption with thousands of people running over an eight-year period. Tero tried to give the perspective of the head of product of such a large LeSS adoption. The video of this talk is already available.

After the opening keynote, Alexey kicked off the self-designing team workshop. Just like the previous years, this year we followed the team-based conference structure. We published a blog post that describes this year's self-designing team session and conference review bazaar. The Open Space was next! Unfortunately, the Open Space wasn't as active as it ought to be this year. This was most likely due to the number of parallel sessions that were ongoing. Probably an area for improvement next year. We did write a quick summary of the Open Space.

The rest of the first day contained many parallel sessions on coaching, visualization, games and a lot of great experience reports. The BMW experience report was the most popular as it even had to be moved to a larger space at the last moment. The material of the BMW case study is available and the video will come later. The first day ended with a panel discussion where LeSS trainers answered questions from the audience. Panels are usually quite boring, but the feedback of this panel was quite positive. Also the video will be available in the future. At the end of day one, the people gathered in a pub and split into smaller groups for the social evening activity. Those with jet-lags went to sleep :)

The second day was kicked off by a keynote from Craig on cognitive biases. The presentation contained some wonderful stories on how biases influence our thinking and that is important to realize, especially as a LeSS coach. The rest of the day was filled with experience sessions and lots of practical sessions, from Product Definitions to explaining test-driven development. One of my personal favorite sessions was from Angela Johnson who shared the story of a LeSS adoption in a company that manufactures robotics systems for the agricultural industry. The presentation was full of chickens and ducks. Unfortunately it wasn't videoed, but still the presentation material is available.

The day ended with the teams working on their conference experience and the review bazaar. More info about that in the related blog post.

Material and more info

Most of the presentation material is online and some of the videos are online. We'll get more videos later. For now, below is more

• Program with all presentation material
• Blog post on the presentation material
• Video of the LeSS Huge at Nokia keynote
• Blog post on team-based conference and review bazaar
• Blog post on Open Space
• Experience reports from Ram Srinivasan, Anya Feingersh, and Mark Uijen de Kleijn
• Photos of the LeSS Conference
• Summary of the conference twitter

LeSS Conference 2019

So... what about next year? Well... we'll be back in Europe and decided to go to.... Munich! It'll be 12-13 September. Registration should open soon. Perhaps see you next year!