Topics

Click on each stream to see who’s speaking and what you’ll learn!

Guest speakers

Perfect is bullsh*t

Ashik Ahmed, Deputy

Ashik Ahmed is the Co-founder, CEO and CTO at Deputy. In this presentation, Ashik will explore the meaning behind one of his companies’ mantras: ‘perfect is bullsh*t’. He’ll discuss the importance of building not just an Agile product, but a company that is Agile all round.

Ashik will talk through the challenges of creating Agile companies in an industry focused around rigid compliance. Additionally, he’ll share the decision-making matrix he uses within his high-growth scaleup. Most importantly, though, Ashik will talk about the role that the ‘Agile-self’ plays in bringing all the moving pieces together.


Ordinary people, extraordinary results

Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

Marty Cagan has had the extremely good fortune to be able to work with many of the very best technology product teams in the world. People who are creating the products you use and love every day; teams that are literally changing the world.

What he’s learned is that there’s a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to what is meant by Agile, to how the organisation thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers impacts on a team’s success.  

In this talk, Marty will give you a glimpse into some of the important differences that distinguish the best product teams from the rest.


The promiscuous PM

Jen Dante, Square

Every time you go to a Conference, there will be a speaker on stage that offers the ultimate framework to cure all your product ills. But when you go back to work you inevitably find that nothing is quite that easy, and practices can be good, but not always best. Jen Dante will explore the dangers of falling in love with a single perspective, and her experiences of mixing and matching frameworks to enhance her work as she moved from Netflix, to Google, and now Square.


Play more!

Mark Dodgson, UQ School of Business – University of Queensland

What will work look like in the future?

There are many from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk who fear that AI and automation will bring massive social disruption, with extensive deskilling and unemployment. The search is on for ways of working alongside these technologies that are productive and meaningful.

In this presentation, Mark Dodgson will explore how important ‘play’ is in creating exciting and purposeful work. Such play isn’t frivolous, but serious. It is through play that we experiment and learn whilst expressing freedom in our work and having fun at the same time. Mark will discuss cases of highly successful ‘playful entrepreneurs’; people who provide lessons on how to adapt and thrive in uncertain and ambiguous circumstances. The implication for individuals and organisations is simple: play more!


Make strategy happen with Hoshin Kanri and Toyota Kata

Håkan ForssLean & Agile Enterprise Coach, Flow Behave FB

Lean and Agile software development can help your organisation deliver early and often, but that is not sufficient. Without clear and transparent alignment on a strategy, the organisation might still end up just keeping itself busy and not achieving the desired results.
Making your strategy happen have two major components that lives in symbiosis; strategy alignment and strategy execution.

Aligning on the right strategy can be a challenge in today’s complex world. Hoshin Kanri is an approach to meeting this challenge by drawing for the collective brain trust in your organisation.
Organisations also need to become laboratories, in which they are constantly running experiments, generating learning, and applying that learning to continually progress towards their strategy.
In this session you will learn how to create this symbiosis of strategy alignment and strategy execution using Hoshin Kanri and Toyota Kata as one system.


The key to high performing tech orgs

Jez HumbleAuthor, Speaker, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC

High performing organisations don’t trade off quality, throughput and reliability. Instead, they work to improve all these factors and use their software delivery capability to drive organisational performance.

In this talk, Jez Humble will present the results from DevOps Research and Assessment’s five-year research program. Jez will also explain the importance of knowing how (and what) to measure, so you focus on what’s important and can communicate progress to peers, leaders, and stakeholders. After all, great outcomes don’t realise themselves.


Just add play!

Hanna Karlsson, The Workshopper

Somewhat ironically, we’ve created a world that makes adaptability and creativity paramount, as well as harder. We need healthy organisations to survive and thrive, where playfulness is a key ingredient.

While the benefits of play have been recognised in fields such as psychology and neuroscience, a resistance still remains. Play is often seen as a frivolous activity, less valuable than ‘productive time’. However, play enables us to increase engagement, create psychological safety and it can allow us to embrace ambiguity and creativity.

In this interactive talk, Hanna Karlsson will speak to the importance of playfulness at work, what play indeed is and how it works it’s magic. Anticipating this will leave you inspired to bring the much needed creativity and silliness into your organisation – play it forward!


The evolution of the Agile coach

Erin McManus and Fiona Siseman, Spotify

Spotify’s Engineering Culture videos highlight Agile Coaches as an integral part of their way of working.  What does that really look like and what does it take to do it successfully?

During this session, Erin McManus and Fiona Siseman will talk about Agile coaching at Spotify: how it is evolving, some of the struggles and pitfalls along the way, how coaches are set up for success and where they believe coaching is headed to ensure the future success of Spotify. You will leave this talk with learnings to apply in your context.


Mindset rules

Emma MurrayRichmond Football Club

Emma Murray will share the key mindset rules she introduced in Richmond Football Club, propelling them to premiers in under 12 months.

Emma’s rules give you an understanding of the machine in your minds: helping you control your attention to achieve more, perform better and feel happier. These rules are designed to stand up under the extreme pressure of high performance, high expectation environmentsgiving you real life tools to apply for immediate impact in your jobs and lives. Emma will share examples and stories from her time at Richmond, individual elite athletes’ journeys and her own life experience with spinal cord injury to give weight to her teachings.


Creating a culture of autonomy

Sharda NandramNyenrode Business University and Buurtzorg

Industries are increasingly experimenting with self-managed approaches, but they’re missing the most important point: the notion that it all starts with having the right mindset.

Drawing on practical experiences, including her leadership role in teal organisation Buurtzorg, Sharda Nandram will define and explore the value of an integrative intelligent mindset. Further, she’ll demonstrate how you can adopt this mindset within your organisation to create a culture where trust, autonomy and self-management come naturally.


Evolutionary architecture

Rebecca ParsonsThoughtWorks

Is your architecture fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world? With business needs and models changing so rapidly, it’s crucial to have an architecture that is responsive to change. Historically, this responsiveness has been sought by anticipating the areas where a system must be adaptable. Recent experiences, however, have shown that current approaches need to evolve, given the pace and magnitude of changes in the technology landscape and expectations for features and performance.

In this talk, Rebecca Parsons will unpack how the traditional approaches of evolutionary architecture are evolving and show you how to:

  • Use fitness functions to govern software development efforts
  • Balance the needs of architects and development teams
  • Implement techniques that enable evolutionary architecture
  • And make the transition to an evolutionary architecture – even in the face of legacy systems!

Ethics of gravity

Ben RimmerIndependent consultant and advisor

Ben Rimmer has been faced with some significant challenges in recent years, leading him to think deeply about the ‘ethics of gravity’ and connections between community, decision makers and teams. Being grounded in real problems is a key feature of new ways of working and offers real hope for teams to engage more effectively. As a senior public servant, he argues the need for everyone to build working practices that involve stronger, more connected relationships to inform better decision making for all that will be impacted.

Come along to this talk to hear Ben’s take on how we should approach the solutions we are building for the constituencies we serve and those that we work for. You will leave with new ideas on how to raise the conversations that matter in regard to nurturing the communities in our workplaces, neighbourhoods, cities and country!


Technical work in the product roadmap

Erica SmithStarRez

Technical initiatives can be tricky beasts. Everyone agrees that the tech is important, but trying to compare a major technical initiative to a new user feature in a roadmap discussion can feel like comparing apples and sports cars. Then, even after you’ve found the time in your plan to start that work, the project is constantly questioned and challenged by stakeholders who are frustrated by its opacity, struggling to see progress towards the company’s goals.

This talk will explain why these issues happen so often, and provide several lenses to help identify and name the business value of technical work, using terms and metrics that make it easy to fit into your company’s road map. It will also include some effective strategies to keep stakeholders engaged in your technical project throughout its entire life cycle.


The team mind

Ali WalkerCentre for Social Impact

Why do we click with some people and clash with others? This talk explores what connects us based on unique human connection and leadership types. Understanding how we connect and lead is the foundation of high-performing groups and teams.


Scaling product organisations for growth

Herry Wiputrahipages

There are many ways to structure your team to deliver greater and faster value to your customers. Yet, more often than not, this actually goes backwards. As an organisation grows, everything becomes slower and the company loses momentum. One of the main reasons this is the case is because people are still adopting Frederick Winslow Taylor’s way of thinking: where managers do the thinking and the people on the ground do the ‘doing’. Almost every big corporate is structured in this way. The result is a huge silo-ed organisation, where everyone is pulling in different directions and management becomes the biggest bottleneck.

In this talk, Herry will draw on lessons from Lean and Edward Deming’s way of thinking. He will focus on the key foundational block for building successful product development organisations: self-organising teams. Rather than creating more hierarchies, organisations should scale and transform by creating more self-organising teams. Herry will cover five different areas of focus in creating high-performing self-organising teams: Culture, People, Structure, Process and Architecture.

Closer to the customer - Adopt a customer-centric focus—delivering experiences to match user needs.

Sherlock Holmes value detection

Diana AdornoThoughtWorks and Richard YoungBankwest

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”  – Arthur Conan Doyle

The art of uncovering the real value can be subtle and needs attention to detail. In doing so, the principles of Sherlock Holmes can work perfectly to help us shape our investigations and conclusions. Careful observation is key, as are informed deductions.

In this talk, Richard Young and Diana Adorno will share how Sherlock principles apply to value detection. They will use real examples where they tested the starting pre-conceptions of the team and stakeholders against what customers really wanted – and will discuss the eye-opening conclusions. Attend this talk to learn how to be a great sleuth!


How NSW is using life journeys

Marina ChiovettiNSW Government

Governments tend to design services for citizens with their siloed blinkers on. We design health services through the lens of a hospital, education services through the lens of a school, and justice services through the lens of police or courts.

What if we designed our services through the lens of citizens and their experiences? Going deeper, what if we designed from the perspective of a citizen going through a particular phase in their life?In NSW, Marina Chiovetti and her team are using Design Thinking and Agile delivery to understand the citizen context through Life Journeysphases in life like: Starting a Family, the Retirement Years, Getting a Job or End of Life. Marina will share the methodology she uses to connect government and non-government services (private sector and NGOs included) to understand the multiple paths and pain points of a Life Journey. Importantly, she’ll explain how this is making life better for citizens. This talk will inspire some and start a provocative discussion with others!


Bugfixing your mental model

Ben Crothers, Atlassian

Are you constantly feeling like you’re doing lots of customer research, yet you still seem to know so little? Does it seem like research results never ‘land’ properly with stakeholders, or you’re having trouble seeing eye-to-eye? Or are you worried about blind spots in your information about customers?

These issues are often caused by different people in the team unknowingly having different mental models of the same thing: your customers. Your mental model is like an invisible product you ship to yourself, informing your decisions every day. And, like all products, it often needs bugfixing and improving. In this talk, Ben Crothers will show you some techniques for using simple drawing that anyone can use to get a common mental model across the team, and to accelerate a shared clear understanding about why they’re doing what they’re doing. Ben will also show how Atlassian’s mental model of its customers has changed over the years, and how to bugfix and tune your mental model together.


Using Agile in filmmaking

David EddyLean Filmmaking & Agworld and Kylie EddyLean Filmmaking

Filmmakers are trained to avoid customers like the plague. In the film industry, they’re not even referred to as ‘customers’, they’re an ‘audience’.Conventional wisdom says that the filmmaker’s vision is more important than the customer’s needs, that you must know all the answers before you start, that the film has to be ‘perfect’ before anyone sees it and that everything is on the line with one huge all-or-nothing bet.

Encouraging filmmakers to get early feedback from customers before they even pick up their camera is an uphill battle. But once they try Lean Filmmaking, even the most die-hard auteurs can’t argue with the results. They appreciate how customers can help them make better decisions and that understanding their audience actually gives them more creative freedom.

In this talk, siblings Kylie Eddy (a filmmaker) and David Eddy (an Agile coach) will demonstrate how they test assumptions, impart lessons that are relevant across industries and share war stories from the Agile trenches.


What is Developer Experience, and why does it matter?

Theresa NeateREA Group

Every team has a customer.

You’ve heard of Customer Experience and User Experience. Now, allow Theresa Neate to introduce Developer Experience!

Your developers and tech staff are customers, too. They are both your customers when you provide services to them such as build and deployment tools, and customers of any external services and tools they use.

They’re also users. They are users of interfaces, tools, libraries and platforms.

As a highly skilled technology staff, do the rules of CX and DX apply to them?

In this talk, Theresa will discuss the growing case for platform thinking, internal platforms and the application of customer-centricity to internal platform teams and their customers. Theresa will also explore the emerging field of developer experience, which draws from UX and CX and human-computer interaction.

Leading change - Initiate change in a small, everyday sense or at a larger scale.

Agile change in government

Jesse BoydDigital Transformation Agency

As the delivery manager for the Digital Transformation Agency’s Content and Brand team, Jesse Boyd is working on driving Agile change within a traditionally reactive and ‘un-Agile’ team. This means almost starting from scratch: bringing all team members along to create a strong base of understanding the fundamentals of Agile delivery, developing definitions of ‘ready’ and ‘done’, planning and undertaking retrospectives, and reworking how ceremonies are conducted.

This talk is targeted at government agencies looking to create an Agile mindset, and directly addresses the difficulties and benefits associated with doing this. Even in an agency that so strongly promotes an Agile mindset, it can still be problematic and difficult to push this mindset down to the team level. Jesse will use his own team’s journey as a case study, reflecting on his experiences leading this change.


The anti-transformation transformation

Mirco HeringAccenture

The transformation towards DevOps and Agile is like no transformation undertaken by organisations before. The principles and ideas are different to previous transformations where an ‘end-state’ was to be achieved. We all tend to agree on what a mature state of DevOps looks like, yet so few of us are able to achieve this when starting from a legacy enterprise organisation. What is holding us back? What traps are set along the transformation path? And how can we avoid those and achieve the goals we are setting for ourselves?

In this talk, Mirco Hering will explore these questions and more on the back of his experiences within many large, complex enterprise organisations. He will deep dive into the problem but will also provide guidance on how to progress. It will be a bumpy ride, so strap in.


Building LARGE Agile teams

Kiran KanchanSpark New Zealand

Scrum does not specifically dictate a number, but it still proposes a maximum team size of nine people. In this talk, Kiran Kanchan presents a case study of how he and his team have worked to defy this mindset at Spark New Zealand.

Spark started its Agile journey in 2014, focusing on transforming the technology teams. In 2018, Spark finally decided to go all in and transform the business as a whole into an Agile organisation. During this transformation, Spark wanted a solution to fit its existing IT Agile delivery, which was running in a hybrid SAFe-LeSS model fit into the Spotify model adopted by the business teams. At Spark, they have now achieved this: not by following the rules, but by breaking them.

The result: Spark has a tribe of 80+ people with five teams, and team size varies from 12 to 24 people. They can now deliver the highest priorities for the business every release and with no defects. Additionally, employee happiness within the teams is high, with an employee NPS (eNPS) score of +68.


Elephants can dance: two contrasting transformations

Sunil MundraThoughtWorks

Of all the organisations that have so far attempted to be Agile, only few have truly succeeded. The primary reasons for lack of success appear to be a lack of understanding of the difference between Agile adoption and transformation, failing to understand that Agile is a mindset and not a collection of processes and that transformation has to do with significant changes to the organisational ecosystem. Evidence is also available that companies have found it much harder to do Agile transformation as compared to Agile adoption.

In this talk, Sunil Mundra will showcase two contrasting case studies, one a failure and the other a success in Agile transformation, to bring out the key variables that determine success or failure. Sunil will offer practical recommendations on enablers for successful Agile transformation.


Picking up the pieces – post-incident reviews

Klee Thomasnib

The world of software is like a basketball balanced on a Jenga game. It’s fine while it’s fine, but all it takes is a misplaced semicolon, a bad database failover or some unlucky road worker cutting a cable and the whole world comes crashing down. Fortunately, when the pieces are on the floor we pull together and get it balanced again. But then what? Examining what went wrong and identifying contributing factors helps us prevent and preempt issues from re-arising.

This talk examines strategies for Post-Incident Reviews. Starting with commonplace practices, Klee shows how leveraging modern monitoring practices alongside ChatOps can identify contributing factors, not just a single cause. These contributing factors give rise to actionable outcomes that prevent the same thing reoccuring and feedback into the incident lifecycle: helping the team detect, respond to, remediate and analyse the next incident.


Focusing on culture to fast-track Agility

Anna El Ali & Jody Weir, THE ICONIC

THE ICONIC focused on culture first and then brought in Agility. With the right culture in place, their Agile practices thrived.

Culture is how we think, what habits we create and what we do when we’re interacting with each other every day. Culture exists at many levels within organisations: from a single team to a tribe/department to company-wide. A cultural movement is a change in your culture that starts small, catches on and builds momentum. In this talk, Anna and Jody will share their ‘3C’s framework’ for successfully creating culture movements that you can use within a team or across your entire organisation to help Agile ways of working flourish. They’ll share examples of this framework in action, including how they enhanced their values-based culture, promoted trust and safety through Psychological Safety, and created a Learning Culture.


Measure (and learn) what matters

Pete YoungAustralia Post

Australia Post’s ‘MyPost’ team was set up in 2015 as a cross-functional (product/experience/engineering) Agile team of up to 120 people focused on the digital consumer experience. This included personalising experiences across web, mobile, retail and contact centre channels. The team quickly established a high level of predictability, consistently completing over 90% of their quarterly target objectives.

They were delivering as an Agile team but weren’t always certain they were building the right thing. The ’measure and learn’ delivery stage was often skipped as they picked up the next piece of work. Their measure of success was often output (objective completion) not outcomes (benefits).

In this talk, Pete Young will share how, in two years, a single metric focus resulted in a 7% increase in first time delivery. Usage of services to drive this outcome increased over 400-700%. This had flow-on financial and customer benefits (NPS was up +6pts). Perhaps most importantly, they just recorded the highest level of employee engagement since late 2015.

The fundamentals - Navigate the foundations of Agile ways of working.

Security for managers

Mario Areias, Lendi

From big enterprise to small startups, everyone is concerned about security these days. Cyber attacks are happening very often and data breaches are commonplace. How can we move fast and stay secure at the same time?

Traditionally, security teams have been a gateway to production. But in an Agile environment – where products pivot, priorities shift and contexts evolve – security needs to change its role. It needs to interact with an always changing environment. On the other hand, Agile practitioners need to embrace security as an Agile core principle. In this talk, Mario Areias will present a different way of engaging security. And, in doing so, he’ll make the case that security can deliver value without necessarily being a blocker.


Continuous improvement: beyond retros

Aurelien BeraudXero

We seem to try to foster a mindset of continuously and relentlessly striving for improvement with mainly one practice: retrospectives. For years, retros have been our default and often our only continuous improvement tool. Aurelien Beraud certainly used to think that retros were the most important ceremony. As a coach, he previously considered them his main tool to drive improvement.

In this talk, Aurelien Beraud prompts us look beyond retros and explore what other tools (Toyota Kata, improvement boards, etc.) and concepts we can explore to foster a continuous improvement mindset. Drawing on his own journey, Aurelien will share experiments he has conducted and is planning to carry outdiscussing what worked for him and, more importantly, what hasn’t and where he failed.


Quality, speed & synergy walk into a bar…

Anne-Marie CharrettTesting Times

If we think of software delivery as a journey to achieving desired business outcomes, quality is the GPS that points us in the right direction. This talk will help you better understand quality and what it means to you, your team and your business partners. Anne-Marie Charrett will look at ways to frame quality in terms of business outcomes to keep you on the right track. She’ll also discuss ways to visualise quality so everyone can see where the team is at on their journey.

Does Anne-Marie believe testers have a place in this future? Absolutely! In fact, she thinks the role of a tester is needed more now than ever, but perhaps not in a way we’ve traditionally seen our roles.

This talk is a must for anyone moving to contemporary engineering approaches.


Deconstructing the MVP approach

Alejandro EstringanaTHE ICONIC

“Yeah, MVP (Minimal Viable Product) sounds great but when it comes to actually working this way, it’s nearly impossible.” This was Alejandro Estringana’s initial experience… and maybe yours too? This talk is a story on how THE ICONIC figured out how to design and implement MVPs successfully and got a huge amount of value from working this way.

During this talk, Alejandro will quickly cover what MVP is and what it means to work this way. Then he’ll share some real-life examples of how we successfully used MVP at THE ICONIC. This will include: What was the problem? What was the MVP approach? What did we learn?

Come along if you’re keen to get ideas for how you might start using MVP or maximise the use of MVP in your organisation.

The learning organisation - Examine how organisations can modify their behaviour to nurture fresh ideas.

Avoiding zombieland in Agile teams

Dave Bales, AgileMe

Rule #34: Know Your Zombie. They look human. Talk like humans. They might even have a board that they stand around and point to occasionally. But don’t be fooled. A closer look reveals that it’s all for show. A once innovative team now reduced to a huddled mass of disengaged undead who no longer think for themselves, have an insatiable instinct to consume, and hold a delusional belief that they are still high performing.

Avoiding Zombieland is a quick tour of the evolution, symptoms and the possible remedies for long running teams that exhibit the first signs of infection.


Upon retrospective: the Board went Agile

Sandra Davey & Alan Kirkland, CHOICE

Someone recently said they’d be dead before Boards and Board of Directors become Agile! But, at CHOICE, they feel optimistic.

A 60 year old social enterprise, CHOICE is largely funded through a digital business that has undergone significant transformation. While much of this transformation has been within CHOICE, it’s been supported by a transformation at Board level. This is a Board that has learned to focus on what the organisation is trying to achieve rather than how, and favours OKRs over traditional business plans. Most of all, it’s a Board committed to continuous learning and improvement.

Board Chair Sandra Davey and CEO Alan Kirkland will talk about their ‘accidental’ Agile journey, and how and why they’re practicing new ways of working. If you’ve ever thought that Boards don’t think about user needs and will never understand Agile, this is the session for you.


Rapid decision making and learning in startups

Nish Mahanty

This talk is a case study of how irexchange launched their startup product into the market in seven months by building alignment on their product road-map, technical architecture, and  prioritisation process.

Nish Mahanty will share how they applied Agile techniques such as User Journey Mapping, Impact Mapping, Product Canvases, and Experiment Cards to build shared learning and alignment and agree on what to deliver to customers. Nish will explore how irexchange built autonomous self-organising teams andensured teams had enough context to make decisions. He’ll discuss the importance of trust in ensuring teams can experiment, learn and fail as they deliver outcomes. Nish believes the best learning comes from mistakes – attend this talk to   hear the mistakes they made and how they course-corrected from these situations.


How I tried holacracy and lived to tell the tale

Sandy MamoliNomad8

This is the story of introducing holacracy at a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave Sandy Mamoli a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.”

Come along and learn from Sandy Mamoli’s successes and failures in her team’s quest to create a truly self-organising organisation. Learn what worked and what didn’t, and find out how the team resolved the question of whether they had joined a cult or actually improved their business.


Event storming our way to success

Kristi SalmiMoneycatcha

In this talk, Kristi Salmi will present a case study of a project she was involved in last year that used the Domain Driven Design (DDD) technique of event storming. The project was the introduction of the National Payment Platform (NPP) requirements. The project had been worked on for a couple of years but hardly any progress had been made in regard to being able to implement NPP. It was clear things needed to change to be able to make it happen.

The decision was made to run the project through an Innovation Lab with Red Hat, which is something they’d done previously. Part of the lab process involved using event storming to obtain a shared understanding between business and technical experts and to develop a common language. This occurred in a very short period of time and the focus was on outcomes rather than solutions. The outcomes from the Event Storming session were then used to drive requirements. After a 12 week period they were able to deliver a working prototype that meet the Product Owner’s MVP – much more than had been achieved in the last two years of the project.  


Bruce Lee honesty and other lessons

Sarah TraynorANZ

In 2017, ANZ announced that it was moving to ‘New Ways of Working’ (NWOW) and introducing Agile practices at scale. Now, ANZ has~9000 people working inNWOW Tribes, Tech Areas and Centres of Expertise. At the heart of this change is their desire to build a culture of learning and to make ANZ a truly great place to grow. 

Sarah Traynor will commence the talk by sharing her experience working in a squad and observing the key ingredients needed for a team to continuously learn and grow. She’ll share anecdotes and examples of things that worked and things that didn’t! You’ll gain insights that can be applied at a micro level – working with a team to build a strong, cohesive culture and a macro level, instituting principles, processes and structural enablers for large-scale cultural change.

Towards technical excellence - Explore the technology and technical practices underpinning Agile delivery.

DevOps: “you build it, you run it”

Roger AlmeidaTyro

How can banks work with software developers to evolve towards full adoption of DevOps?  In developing a strategy to use DevOps and leverage Agile benefits, Roger Almeida presents his insights on how you can evolve your services and organise teams in new ways to break glass procedures, post-mortems and more.


Iterative dashboards and monitors

Carmel HinksAtlassian

Atlassian is all about Agile developmentiteratively developing everything from their code to their processes. However, when it came to their dashboards and monitors, they noticed they had a tendency to define but not refine. In this talk, Carmel Hinks will share how Atlassian applied Agile approaches to solve various challenges surrounding the definition and maintenance of some of their operational tooling. She’ll also provide tips to help you do the same.


Instrument Flight Rules – CyberSec in the cloud

Richard MillerProspa

Today, more and more of our digital assets are moving out beyond the company borders. Flexible working means access from home, public wifi hotspots, airport lounges and now even from 30,000 feet above the ocean. VPN tunnels into the company was all that was required to enable remote access, but today key data resides outside of the company, rendering the VPN tunnel virtually useless.

Cloud technologies provide incredible agility and scale and the ability to roll out new products and services at a pace that was simply not achievable twenty years ago. Those that are not embracing these technologies risk being left behind in the ever more competing landscape. However, as with all new technologies, new challenges arise and cyber security in the new world is no different. In this talk, Richard Miller will look into the differences between cyber defence before and after the cloud. He’ll look into just how much of your data exists beyond the firewall, even for companies that believe they have not yet moved to the cloud. He’ll also look at what can be done holistically to protect your data and discuss technologies that are specifically designed to address cloud security challenges.


Complex is easy, it’s simple that’s hard

Sarah TaraporewallaThoughtWorks

It’s easy to find a complex solution to a complicated problem. But it takes another level of expertise to craft a simple solution. There is a direct relationship between the complexity of a system to its cost of ownership. Complex systems are difficult to understand – they take time for new team members to learn them. Diagnosing critical issues in them at 3am, when you’re half asleep, takes many cups of coffee. However, when we focus on discovering a simple solution, all that changes for the better.

Simple solutions require different approaches than the ones we usually use to create complex systems.

In this session, Sarah Taraporewalla will describe these approaches, which include Domain Driven Design (DDD) and its adoption of Ubiquitous Language; an understanding of how cognitive biases interfere with complexity, and modelling tools which help simplify and aide in communication. By sharing some examples of complex systems she has seen, you will learn the reasons behind the complexity, and what approach she used to help simplify them.


Picking up the pieces – post-incident reviews

Klee Thomas, nib

The world of software is like a basketball balanced on a Jenga game. It’s fine while it’s fine, but all it takes is a misplaced semicolon, a bad database failover or some unlucky road worker cutting a cable and the whole world comes crashing down. Fortunately, when the pieces are on the floor we pull together and get it balanced again. But then what? Examining what went wrong and identifying contributing factors helps us prevent and preempt issues from re-arising.

This talk examines strategies for Post-Incident Reviews. Starting with commonplace practices, Klee shows how leveraging modern monitoring practices alongside ChatOps can identify contributing factors, not just a single cause. These contributing factors give rise to actionable outcomes that prevent the same thing reoccuring and feedback into the incident lifecycle: helping the team detect, respond to, remediate and analyse the next incident.

FUTUREBANK: How banks can embrace better ways of working in their quest to meet consumers' changing needs?

Join a select group of distinguished panellists as they explore the challenges and opportunities arising from disruption, trust in a post-royal commission world, open banking and much more!

Speakers include: 

Deep Dives - Go deeper with keynote speakers with a chance to ask questions in an intimate setting.

Deep Dives are where the audience drives the agenda. Come with your questions and see what unfolds! Please note that numbers are strictly capped at 50 people for all Deep Dive sessions.


Marty CaganSilicon Valley Product Group

Hakan ForssFlow Behave FB

Jez HumbleAuthor, Speaker, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC

Sharda Nandram, Nyenrode Business University and Chair, Buurtzorg

Ali Walker , Lecturer and Research Fellow, Centre for Social Impact

Guest speakers

Perfect is bullsh*t

Ashik Ahmed, Deputy


Ordinary people, extraordinary results

Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group


The promiscuous PM

Jen Dante, Square


Play more!

Mark Dodgson, UQ School of Business – University of Queensland


Make strategy happen with Hoshin Kanri and Toyota Kata

Håkan ForssLean & Agile Enterprise Coach, Flow Behave FB


The key to high performing tech orgs

Jez HumbleAuthor, Speaker, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC


Just add play

Hanna Karlsson, The Workshopper


The evolution of the Agile coach

Erin McManus and Fiona Siseman, Spotify


Mindset rules

Emma MurrayRichmond Football Club


Creating a culture of autonomy

Sharda Nandram, Nyenrode Business University and Buurtzorg


Evolutionary architecture

Rebecca ParsonsThoughtWorks


Ethics of gravity

Ben RimmerIndependent consultant and advisor


Technical work in the product roadmap

Erica SmithStarRez


The team mind

Ali WalkerCentre for Social Impact


Scaling product organisations for growth

Herry Wiputrahipages

Closer to the customer - Adopt a customer-centric focus—delivering experiences to match user needs.

The learning organisation - Examine how organisations can modify their behaviour to nurture fresh ideas.

FUTUREBANK: How banks can embrace better ways of working in their quest to meet consumers' changing needs?

Join a select group of distinguished panellists as they explore the challenges and opportunities arising from disruption, trust in a post-royal commission world, open banking and much more!

Speakers include: 

Deep Dives - Go deeper with keynote speakers with a chance to ask questions in an intimate setting.

Deep Dives are where the audience drives the agenda. Come with your questions and see what unfolds! Please note that numbers are strictly capped at 50 people for all Deep Dive sessions.


Marty CaganSilicon Valley Product Group

Hakan ForssFlow Behave FB

Jez HumbleAuthor, Speaker, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC

Sharda Nandram, Nyenrode Business University and Chair, Buurtzorg

Ali Walker , Lecturer and Research Fellow, Centre for Social Impact

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