Keynote Speakers

These keynote speakers are some of the most highly regarded thinkers in Agile and beyond! They will join us from across the globe and Australia to share their thoughts on Learning and Leading.

Esther Derby

Esther Derby started her career as a programmer, and has worn many hats over the years including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing became clear to her: our level of individual, team and company success was deeply impacted by our work environment and organisational dynamics. As a result, Esther has spent the last 25 years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success.

Esther has written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. She writes about management, leadership, collaboration, organisations and change. Esther is an original founder of the Scrum Alliance and the AYE Conference, and has served two terms on the Board of Directors for the Agile Alliance. Esther holds an MA in Organisational Leadership and a certificate in Human System Dynamics.

SESSION: Leaders at all levels | Deep Dive

Neal Ford

Software Architect, ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford is a Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks. He is also the designer and developer of applications, articles, video presentations, and author and/or editor of an increasingly large number of books spanning a variety of subjects and technologies, including his most recent Presentation Patterns and Functional Thinking. Neal’s professional focus includes designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. Neal is also an internationally known speaker, speaking at over 700 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 3000 presentations.

SESSION: Deep Dive

Sami Honkonen

CEO, Tomorrow Labs
Sami Honkonen is the CEO of Tomorrow Labs, a digital product house. He’s also the host of Boss Level Podcast and blogger at blog.samihonkonen.com, both of which cover topics such as systems thinking, complexity, leadership and tech. In his spare time Sami is the vocalist for death metal band Embreach.

SESSION: Building a responsive organisation | Deep Dive

Jez Humble

CTO, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC
Jez Humble is co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010), and Lean Enterprise, in Eric Ries’ Lean series (O’Reilly, 2015). He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He is currently researching how to build high performing teams, and helping to create a cloud platform for government. He works at 18F, teaches at UC Berkeley, and is co-founder of DevOps Research and Assessment LLC.

SESSION: Continuous Delivery sounds great but it won’t work here | Deep Dive

Barry O’Reilly

Barry O’Reilly works with leading global organisations on continuous improvement using Lean and Agile practices and principles. He has been an entrepreneur, employee and consultant. After several startups, his focus shifted towards larger enterprises where he has explored the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organisational design and culture transformation.

He is a co-author of Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organisations Innovate At Scale, the latest addition to the Eric Ries Lean Series with O’Reilly Media, 2015, and a Harvard Business Review must read for would-be CEO’s. He is an internationally sought after speaker and frequent writer for The Economist.

Barry is Founder and CEO of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and Antennae, its mission to help technology led businesses innovate at scale.

SESSION: Lessons deploying Lean Enterprise | Deep Dive

Melissa Perri

CEO, ProdUX Labs

Melissa Perri is a Product Manager, UX Designer, speaker, and coach. Working with product development teams around the world, Melissa helps them create strategies that satisfy users and drive business goals. She coaches Product Managers to answer two important questions – “Should we build this?” and “Why?” Her clients include Capital One, Spotify, Rovio, Valtech, Plated, Wayra UK, and Levo League.

After successfully integrating concepts from Lean Startup, Agile, and Continuous Improvement into her own role as a Product Manager, Melissa began teaching classes and workshops. She wrote and taught the Product Management curriculum for General Assembly worldwide. A frequent speaker, Melissa has had the pleasure of addressing audiences at conferences such as QCon, Mind the Product, Lean UX NYC, Lean Agile Scotland, and Agile 2015. Before becoming a consultant, she worked as a Product Manager and UX Designer at Barclays Capital, OpenSky, Capital IQ, and Conductor. Melissa has a degree in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University.

She has just completed a book, Managing Products, (published by O’Reilly). She is also launching an online Product Management school for individuals and enterprise teams called Product Institute.

SESSION: The Build Trap | Deep Dive