The research has identified five elements that need to be addressed to create a high-performing team:

• team leadership, 
• mutual performance monitoring, 
• backup behavior, 
• adaptability, 
• team orientation.

In addition, there are three coordination mechanisms: shared mental models, closed-loop communication and mutual trust. During the workshop, we will explain these eight concepts and show how to work with them in practice. We will show the perspectives of a Staff Engineer and a Scrum Master. The workshop consists of a short theoretical introduction followed by practical exercises. As a result, we will create a plan for working with a team described in a case study.

Adaptive organizations are optimized to maximize value delivery and the ability to respond to changes in its environment, as opposed to efficiency and predictability. This has been the goal of the agile development movement. Unfortunately agile often ends up in organizations as a shallow process change without having a big impact. Agile processes do have it’s place but in order to achieve adaptiveness organizations have to create simpler organizational structures.

 This session will go over the seven organizational design principles to create simpler organization. Some examples will be shared for each principle usually taken from the LeSS organizational design system. The outcome of this session is an insight in the reasoning behind LeSS or an inspiration to make your organization simpler and more adaptive.

A unique experience can be a key strategic differentiator if you want to stand out in the marketplace.

I take that back.

It should become a key component of your strategy.

Internal research from one of my clients, a large financial organization, shows that emotional experience is responsible for up to 40% of Net Promoter Score (NPS). In this workshop, I invite you to dive into the “Umami” approach to defining an experience strategy that will make your customers really like you, and maybe even love you. We won’t be able to do everything, but I hope to show you some key elements that will help you develop such strategy.

We will dive into some ideas that have been trending in top management circles recently, which actually hinder organizational agility. We will explore, in a thought-provoking way, why these ideas might not be as great as they seem and how to challenge them with solid arguments.
Topics we will explore include:

In this talk, Blazej will challenge the recently trending approach to designing organizations while engaging the audience interactively. Learn what better organizational design patterns you can use to improve your company’s agility in the era of rapid introduction of GenAI tools for software developers. Get ready for an exciting exchange of ideas and insights!

“Never had a huge Pull Request that didn’t look good to me”.

We’ve all been there. A PR is so big you don’t even bother properly reviewing. It’s already too late to build the quality in, so you make a sad face, comment “Looks good to me”, and click approve. That’s still the case in lots of teams, but after a long time our industry, on average, learned the value of small batches idea from Lean applied to PRs. And that’s a step in the right direction. We do a bit of coding, raise a PR and then ask for feedback. People are more likely to engage on smaller PRs, it takes them less time to review, and they feel that they can course-correct if something goes astray. PRs go sooner out of the door, and we feel productive as a team.

But, here’s the surprise. What if I told you that teams doing small PRs (with async code reviews) actually have way lower throughput than teams doing big PRs. “Wait, what?!” Yes.

I got this surprising systemic insight from analyzing more than 40,000 PRs, and in this talk, I’ll present you with the results of that study. On the bigger PRs side of the spectrum, we tend to lose quality, while on the smaller PRs end of the spectrum we lose throughput. We’re forced to make a trade-off.

But! There’s a parallel universe of ways of working where you get to have a cake and eat it too. Where you can have both throughput and quality. That universe is called co-creation patterns (Pair and Mob programming).

Join me on a journey where I’ll show you the data invalidating the assumption that two or more people working on the same thing, at the same time will hurt a team’s throughput, and why the opposite is actually the case.

Most time spent in the software development process is spent to understand exactly what and why we need to develop (or fix if we got it wrong). therefore knowledge acquisition and sharing is one of the most important assets a high-performing team may have.

This talk addresses key aspects:

• How deep (or shallow) should team members share the knowledge?
• Is it more effective to learn from others?
• Why do people avoid sharing knowledge?
• Why are mental models so important?
• What is transactive memory?

During the presentation we will discuss how you can work in a structured way to improve your team’s learning and sharing culture. All this from two complementary perspectives – a developer who happens to act as a Staff Engineer and a Scrum Master.