Agile Superheros, everywhere, at Big Appe Scrum Day 2016!

From the caped volunteers, to the zingers in keynotes and presentations, as well as the exercises to foster conversations and competitions, it was easy to come away from BASD2016 feeling like a superhero.

Keynotes and other Speakers

Esther Derby delivered a keynote that resonated with the crowd in many ways. While many practitioners prefer more established Agile frameworks, she asserted that practices have to change because the types of problems development organizations today have evolved. Other speakers answered questions from the audience about how they tackled specific problems. For example, Debbie Madden, of StrideNYC, regularly has one-on-ones with team members over lunch, in order to provide two-way feedback.

Scrum Conversations

Of personal importance to me were opportunities throughout the day for attendees to get and give coaching, or to get and give advice. Part of the exercises consisted of describing our individual “superpowers,” the secret sauce that made us effective as Scrum Masters, product owners, coaches and practitioners in general. Here are some of the favorite answers I heard to that question:

• “Tech Challenge Solver”
• “Chameleon”
• “The Simplifier”
• “Gentle Revolutionary”

6 Degrees of Separation

It was also a serendipitous day. While I was at one of the sponsor tables, one person recognized me while I was speaking to his colleague. We had previously corresponded by email and phone, and here we were, meeting in person unexpectedly. I had lunch with 2 coworkers of a former colleague. Someone else at our lunch table recognized a former colleague of hers form more than 10 years ago.

Sponsors

A couple of startups were among the sponsors. Two of them offered similar products in the product management space, and happened to have their tables right next to each other. (I wondered if they were thrown together deliberately, mischievously.) The Wizeline product seemed geared more towards associating features in the pipeline with their relative contribution to the bottom line. The FeatureMap product also plugs into similar tools used to manage the agile process, but for smaller teams/companies.

Sponsors who provided consulting services tended to be framework and tool-agnostic, willing to use Scrum, or another framework, as desired by, or appropriate for, a given customer. It was also instructive to hear how some of them tackled their own challenges, with both business and technical stakeholders.

Throughout the day, I received as much value as i gave…Time well-spent.