Kalina Vassileva

Agile teams have been a concept for over 20 years, with the Manifesto for Agile Software Development formalizing the principles in 2001. While most organizations understand and empower self-organizing teams, the current trend is to apply Agile practices across the entire organization, not just in engineering or product development. This trend is evidenced by recent updates to frameworks such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe version 6.0), which now emphasizes further the foundation of Business Agility. Successful Agile engineering teams are no longer considered new or cool, and it is largely passé for many companies that have already mastered these practices. The next step is to expand and implement these practices in other functions of the company, such as HR, business operations, procurement, etc. Operating an "Agile organization" is becoming the next discriminator for companies that want to acquire and sustain a competitive advantage in this ever-changing market.

Most probably, nowadays, there is no methodology or framework which doesn’t emphasize the practices needed to “unlock” agility. We know about Product Backlog, Product Owner, and Product Increment at the end of the Sprint, MVPs, or MMPs. The problem is that we still get lost, and sometimes during development, people feel like building something from a Lego box without instructions or, even worse- without a single photo. There are some critical unanswered questions: - Why do we lose direction? - How do we create that magical product backlog? - How do we know we are doing the right thing? The session summarizes the major hacks on how to tweak mindset, move from Project to Product Thinking, and from Outputs to Outcomes when we design our Roadmaps by providing practical examples and easy analogies with something everyone is familiar with - cooking or going to a restaurant.

- Where is the knowledge in the puzzle of motivation, or do you learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book? - Who learns faster: kids or students, and why? - Social learning vs. Academic learning - How to create а culture of knowledge sharing without mentioning "leadership"? - The Еra of Еverything Culture, but do business leaders understand it right? - Where does belonging stay after covid-19, and was it there before that? - What is knowledge hiding behavior and what to do - Engagement or compliance – what do we really want as leaders?