Meet the Speakers for 2023!

From the trenches: Agile Design

The most impressive designs don’t just appear out of nowhere. Design/Innovation happens because people spend time and effort on it.

Agile processes such as Scrum can help in this regard, but they can also hinder product design if applied too rigidly.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked hands-on on the Minecraft team as a gameplay designer and developer.

Before that, I was closely involved with Spotify and LEGO’s design processes.

My keynote will cover how design and prototyping can be carried out in an agile context and critical patterns and pitfalls to avoid.

Versatile Organisation Design with the unFIX Model

As an author, speaker, and founder, Jurgen helps creative organisations survive and thrive in the 21st century.

He offers concrete games, tools, and practices so that you can introduce better management with fewer managers.

He also offers the unFIX model for designing versatile organisations focused on continuous innovation and a better human experience.

Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he’s a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, or… a Dutch guy.

Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker.

Bright future ahead!

Mirette Kangas oversees KONE’s global Lean and Agile operating model and promotes agile thinking, leadership and ways of working across the company. She is also a member of KONE’s Strategy Transformation Office.

Mirette is the founder of KONE Way Lean and Agile DEMO events and toolkits for KONE’s people. As one of Finland’s leading experts and pioneers in Lean-Agile business culture (such as OKRs), Mirette holds high credibility.

She founded Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company)’s Lean-Agile Culture Accelerator. At Yle, she influenced and led the transformation from traditional to Lean-Agile for over ten years.

Nitor has honoured her as Agile Influencer of the Year 2020. In 2016, the Finnish Lean Association awarded her the Lean Award of the Year. Mirette’s work has inspired dozens of companies across industries to adopt an agile corporate culture.

She is well known in Finnish and international circles as a speaker and workshop facilitator. In addition, Mirette co-founded Yle Areena, which has won numerous awards for its work in the digital space. Furthermore, she has experience as a project director and manager for various digital service design companies, including Nokia and Sanoma Group. An amateur violinist, a musician at heart.

Practice Makes Better – What Repeating Shortening Times to Release Taught Me

Maaret Pyhäjärvi works at Vaisala as a DevelopmentManager. She has worked with testing, quality and productivity themes for 25 years in various Finnish companies, in various roles.

In the last seven years, she has become an internationally recognized keynote speaker and author, while also learning how to improve product development in her job.

Maret has been selected as Tivi 100 most influential people in Finland for the last 4 years, as one of the rare individual contributor title holders on that list.

Aside from that, she has been honored with the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award, the Agile Testing Days Most Influential Testing Professional Award, and the Software Testing Finland Tester Worth Appreciation Award.

A principal test engineer at Vaisala for three years, Maaret is now taking product development responsibility for a product with a few teams in the company.

One year of building a product, four releases. From 27 days to 19 minutes release lead time. Despite this being Maaret’s latest team, it is not the first she has walked through a practical transformation with.

In this talk, you will learn about transformations of release speed (with known quality) that impact productivity in teams. It is surprising, Maaret says, how often we are stuck with old ideas of how testing – and development – is done, particularly in projects that already think they are doing Agile ways.

Take part in the discussion of what continuous improvement looks like in practice.In other words – agile as if you meant it.

How to teach agile through a comic strip?

Aimed at educating through entertainment – to edutain – Luxshan and Mikkel illustrate, exaggerate, and discuss the magical, paradoxical, or unfortunate situations that arise when agility meets reality.

By making you reflect on how you adopt agility in your company’s context, we hope to reduce the likelihood of frustration if it doesn’t work well for you.

Ultimately, we aim to motivate you to make the needed changes for your organisation to fully harvest the wonderful benefits of working agile. We do that by creating comic strips with accompanying advice and giving entertaining and provocative talks.

How to teach agile through a comic strip?

Mikkel Noe-Nygaard holds an MA in Architecture but has always worked with user experience in software.

He has 20 years of software enterprise experience, designing both hyper-complex cloud-based expert tools and simple mobile applications across industries such as public health care, tax and property registration and sustainable energy at Vestas.

In his spare time, Mikkel has found a second calling as a cartoonist at Comic Agilé.

How to teach agile through a comic strip?

Luxshan Ratnaravi is the writer of Comic Agilé, holds an M.Sc. in Software Engineering and is an Agile Coach with the Danish financial software solutions provider Bankdata.

Luxshan’s professional mission in life, which for the last 12+ years has taken him through jobs as IT Business Analyst, Product Owner, Release Train Engineer and Agile Coach, is to teach the world about agile by exposing what happens when agile meets reality.

50 Shades of retrospectives: Stepping up your continuous improvement game

Chris Stone is the Managing Partner of Virtually Agile, known professionally as The Virtual Agile Coach. A speaker, podcaster, blogger, and Enterprise Agile Coach, he has a wealth of experience. 

As a human-centric leader, he is passionate about continuous improvement, retrospectives, making time for fun at work, and personal growth.

Having worked with some of the world’s largest organizations, including smaller and leaner enterprises, Chris has fostered an environment for high-performing teams and organisations through agility for over a decade.

Through his work as The Virtual Agile coach, he strives to make innovation frictionless, regardless of location. Therefore, he firmly believes in enabling agility when working virtually.

Chris’ mission is to help people continually improve themselves and have fun while doing it.

What it takes to transform large companies into 100% agile

Olli Salo is a Partner at McKinsey & Company, which he joined in 2007.

Since 2015 he has focused solely on Enterprise Agility – reimagining large organisations comprised of 100s of autonomous, high-performance teams with a stable backbone (culture, processes, structure, etc.).

He has served dozens of large companies across industries, including banks, telcos, retailers, oil companies, airlines, insurers, healthcare providers, and mines throughout Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Americas.

The top team typically leads these transformations, which cover 1000s of people and the entire operating model (strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology).

Olli is not only a practitioner but also the author of numerous articles that address agility and its performance in the workplace. Also, he has trained 100s of senior C-suite leaders on how to drive change across their organisations successfully.

Collaborative Lean Portfolio Management

Morten Elvang works as a European Business Agility Lead at Accenture. Having seen that agile is in a rethinking phase, Morten wonders, “How will agility evolve over time?” He is passionate about managing large projects, leading people and designing organizations.

Morten uses Agile and Lean to develop products, services, and technologies. In his work, Morten assists leaders in deciphering the mysteries of lean and agile, tackling one project at a time. Besides holding a Master’s degree in software engineering, Morten also holds a PhD.

His approach’s basic tenets are: “We treat each other with exemplary care and collaborate openly and sustainably” and “We seek out better options when things get tangled.”

Following Morten’s reading of Cynefin, this summer’s birthday book, he thought of what a chapter about technology portfolio management – or Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) – might look like! While Googling “Cynefin portfolio”, Morten came across people using Cynefin for intake triaging. Besides, he has not found anything to qualify as a proper chapter besides general references to dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Though Morten might have got it all wrong, he still had fun and thought he was onto something!

Collaborative portfolio management, as he calls it, was first documented in November 2022. A curious individual by nature, he wonders: “What happens if you take Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and Cynefin out to play?” What is more, “How do you bring LPM back into the wild?” His LinkedIn article Taking Lean Portfolio Management out to play with Cynefin will explain this concept.

In a modern organisation of some size, Morten increasingly sees portfolio management as the key to keeping things connected. He encourages you to bring awareness of this issue to your organisation!

Curing TANS: a corporate mindset that is hampering your value

Sander Dur is an agile consultant and trainer at Xebia and a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org. Additionally, he hosts a podcast called Mastering Agility, which hosts high-profile guests such as Mike Cohn, Lyssa Adkins, Jeff Gothelf, and Maarten Dalmijn.

Along with speaking at the Atos DREAM Conference, Sander has spoken at Agile Leadership Days in Zürich, Switzerland and Vianen, Netherlands. He is also a regular speaker at different meet-ups and a workshop moderator.

His other interests include writing primarily for Serious Scrum on Medium.com. Sander’s primary focus is on the human side of complex domains. Therefore, he places a high priority on ensuring psychological safety. In complex domains, organisations can only survive by innovating.

For innovation to occur, the right balance must be struck between low social friction and high intellectual friction; despite most organisations knowing how to apply Agile frameworks, he continues, most organisations still struggle to deliver value. As this evolution continues, Sander passionately desires to help organisations achieve psychological safety.

Among his top-tier organisations, including Nike and ASML, he gained experience as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, and Leadership Consultant. As well as being enthusiastic, open-minded, and ambitious, Sander is also highly motivated.

Regarding team dynamics, he finds interpersonal relationships and intrinsic motivations very significant. Apart from working, Sander enjoys time with his family, sports, healthy eating, barbecuing, riding his motorcycle, and travelling.

In his talk, Sander addresses the following: Does your team often spill over work into the next sprint? Do you ever pause to think about what matters most right now? If the answer is no, you might suffer from TANS: There’s Always a Next Sprint.

Work almost aimlessly spills into the next sprint without considering why there is a spillover and whether the work still holds value.

This talk presents case studies of where this happened and what has been done to fix the mindset to deliver more value and reduce the fluff. This talk addresses the underlying drivers of decreased focus, like the engagement of stakeholders, budgeting, and progress toward long-term goals.

Throughout his talk, Sanders offers solutions he has observed working in other organisations. As most of his solutions revolve around mindset changes, there is no cost to get started!

Radiate information with Jira Automation

Fred Deichler works at Field Nation as a Senior Agile Coach. He adopted Agile principles and Scrum values throughout his career, even before he knew them.

In his 20-year career in technology leadership, Fred has guided numerous teams through their Agile journeys. Passionate about continual improvement, he strives to balance people, processes, and tools. Moreover, Fred tells us that his journey is equally meaningful to him.

Fred’s talk will describe how he implemented Jira Automation in his organisation to support ten engineering teams. Through assessing how their work flowed, Fred identified significant friction points and developed solutions before questions arose. Consequently, Cycle Time decreased, awareness increased, and the relationship between the tools and the teams improved.

Coaching in Complex Environment: How to Build Proper Skills and Strengths for the Agile Coaches?

Ari-Pekka is the author of books that deal with the Philosophy of Mind, Complexity in organizations, and Contemplative Practices. He is an Organizational Psychologist and Jungian Psychotherapist.

Ari-Pekka has worked with organizations for more than 20 years. Currently he works as a Lead Agile Coach at OP Financial Group.

Ari-Pekka will share insights from his experiences of training and coaching Agile Coaches working in complex environments:

• In today’s business agility environment, what kind of skills are required for Agile Coaching?
• What can Agile Coaches do to prepare themselves to work in a complex (VUCA) environment?
• How to tap into the motivation and strengths of individuals and where does the path to becoming an Agile Coach really lead?

Ari-Pekka has experience of training more than 100 Agile Coaches working in large organisations. He also draws insights from Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology and Carl Jung’s theories of personal development.

Teach outcome orientation to yourself and your organisation

Antti Tevanlinna works at Nitor as an Agile coach. He is a long-term agilist and product thinker who gets excited about new perspectives on value propositions.

He gets excited when we find novel ways of slicing, dicing, and putting customer value back together in a creative way. Antti believes agility and creativity are core ingredients for fostering product thinking.

Outcome orientation is a trend and we’re constantly being told to focus on outcomes. This however is not straightforward nor actionable for many practitioners.

In his talk, Antti will show 5 mind tricks that consistently get your brain thinking outcomes. The mind tricks are both proven and easy to impart to others.

Antti’s talk distills super-practical and low-cost methods that you can instantly apply and share with others. They have been found easy to learn for both beginners and more advanced practitioners.

The methods form the backbone of the Nitor Product Owner course. Antti also applies these to daily product development with his customers.

Being able to tune your thinking and seeing the world from the customer’s perspective is needed to get to outcome orientation.

Once you see the world in an outcome-oriented way, our experience tells us that you will never step back. The tone and style of the talk are designed to be slightly playful. You will play with perspectives and frame the world through specific lenses.

Empathy@Work: the dance between truth and care-or how to speak up with courage while caring for the whole

Aki Salmi works at Wonna as a Lead Developer. Rather than believing in magic, he makes things happen. As a programmer with a lot of experience in testing, design, and making code fun to work with, he accomplishes a lot of things. A wise man once said, ‘Reading Aki’s code is like reading a good book.’

As well as the techy side, he is also well known for his empathetic skills – his listening skills are well known, and his Empathy@Work talks, workshops or trainings are highly sought after.

As a Software Crafter around the world, he is able to share his technical skills and emotional intelligence. This is something Aki does at many unconferences, including the one he runs himself – Codefreeze.

Aki Salmi and Sofia Katsaouni will lead this talk. Empathy@Work: a talk, a workshop or a training aims to explore what happens in the workplace and to regain awareness about the choice we have all the time.

This space is where we can explore what is truly true, what is happening within us – learning to connect with oneself and listen to oneself so that we know what is important to us and what keeps us going.

As a result, we learn to decide whether to listen emphatically to the other or to express ourselves in such a way that maximises the odds of staying in touch.

Studies (Nicole Forsgren et al., Brené Brown, Project Aristotle, etc) indicate that trustful relationships have a strong positive correlation to organisational performance.  And that trust is built in the smallest of moments through paying attention, listening and acting in a manner that shows genuine care and connection.

Based heavily on NVC, Empathy@Work leads to trusting relationships and meaningful conversations and does have a strong positive (yet, second order) correlation to organizational performance.

The core learning Sofia and Aki want to convey is ‘to be inspired to speak up the truths one has access to with the greatest care one has capacity for. Because that is what moves individuals, teams and organisations forward.’

Empathy@Work: the dance between truth and care-or how to speak up with courage while caring for the whole

Sofia Katsaouni works at BRYTER as an Enterprise Agile Coach. Sofia is a coach who cares about people. She always places people and their needs at the center of her attention; when needs are met, people can form effective teams that deliver high customer value.

Since Sofia is passionate about people systems rather than electricity systems, she transitioned from an electrical engineer to an Agile coach full time early in her career. Her electrical engineering background has helped her develop analytical, problem-solving, and empirical thinking skills.

Sofia recognizes that trusting relationships and psychological safety are the basis of human-centric and performance-oriented cultures. Throughout the past few years, she has worked closely with individuals, engineering teams, and leadership to enable startups and scale-ups to create such environments in their organizations.

When discovering the world of NVC Sofia started learning more and more about empathy and empathic listening, and practicing it in private life as well as in coaching sessions.

Soon she realised the tremendous impact that it had on her and the people around her and thus wanted to spread the word of empathy further. In this capacity, Sofia began delivering Empathy@Work sessions at various companies and conferences throughout Europe.

Aki Salmi and Sofia Katsaouni will lead this talk. Empathy@Work: a talk, a workshop or a training aims to explore what happens in the workplace and to regain awareness about the choice we have all the time.

This space is where we can explore what is truly true, what is happening within us – learning to connect with oneself and listen to oneself so that we know what is important to us and what keeps us going.

As a result, we learn to decide whether to listen emphatically to the other or to express ourselves in such a way that maximises the odds of staying in touch.

Studies (Nicole Forsgren et al., Brené Brown, Project Aristotle, etc) indicate that trustful relationships have a strong positive correlation to organisational performance.  And that trust is built in the smallest of moments through paying attention, listening and acting in a manner that shows genuine care and connection.

Based heavily on NVC, Empathy@Work leads to trusting relationships and meaningful conversations and does have a strong positive (yet, second order) correlation to organizational performance.

The core learning Sofia and Aki want to convey is ‘to be inspired to speak up the truths one has access to with the greatest care one has capacity for. Because that is what moves individuals, teams and organisations forward.’

Workshop – You are being cheated by your brain all the time

Sari Alander is a Senior Lean-Agile Coach at Nitor Delta in Finland. She helps companies transform, modernise, and develop ways of working to become Future Ready Digital companies. She also has the role of DASA Ambassador in the Nordics. In this role, Sari drives commitment and actively advocates the development of high-performing teams through DevOps and Agile.

Passionate about Agile, she is an active member of Agile Finland Ry and an organiser and participant in Agile collaborations and events. People and their behaviour fascinate Sari; she loves helping them achieve their goals and succeed. However, regardless of the situation or team, she understands there is no single approach or solution to solving challenges.

As Sari says, “Neither the strongest nor the most intelligent species survive. The one that adapts to change and works cooperatively against common threats prevails.”

We all know that the world, as we know it today, is changing rapidly. The world is rushing towards digitalisation and automation. New technologies and working methods are changing organisations’ and individuals’ jobs. Thus, there are even more expectations on individuals in the new world, and they must learn how to be (even more) self-directed.

This workshop will pay attention to how you can first recognise when your brain is tricking you and how you can use your brain better to understand the world more clearly – so as not to be fooled by your brain.

You will understand some of your brain’s limitations and how you can work around them. Further, Sari will show you how to embrace the limitations you cannot avoid.

As part of the workshop, you will learn some tips on improving your brain power and understanding yourself better. What do you do? Why do you do this? What causes you to feel the way you do? Why do you react the way you do?

Sari’s workshop includes 5 parts, each with an introduction, example, and/or practical exercise.

• What do you think that you see?
• What do you think you remember?
• What do you think that you feel?
• What do you think that you think?
• Personality

By the end of the workshop, you will have a full new understanding of your brain!

Workshop – The Power of Example Mapping

Kiruthika Ganesan works at Deko as Head of Quality Assurance. Kiruthika, or Kika for short, is passionate about testing and approaches testing with a holistic view. Over the past 17 years, she has worked as a tester, developer and trainer for the IT industry.

Kika believes in the power of people and collaboration to create a safe working environment where teams can thrive and produce high-quality software. Besides teaching, she participates in community activities such as speaking at conferences and delivering workshops.

Also, Kika is an active member of Synapse QA and a tutor at the Coders Guild. Moreover, she is a global ambassador for WiT initiatives, also known as Women in Tech. Aside from writing short stories, Kika enjoys spending time with her family.

Who writes the acceptance criteria for your stories – Product owners, Business analysts, or the whole team?

Given-When-Then scenarios already written and presented to the team limit their creative thinking. Also, it may lead to preconceived notions. As a result, responsibility is also shifted to one stakeholder, which can be dangerous. In that case, what would be the alternative?

Learn how to harness the power of example mapping in her workshop!

Workshop – How Can We cultivate Healthy Working Relationships?–using cultureQs

Eric Lynn is the creator of cultureQs®. Moreover, he is the author of the widely acclaimed book Dancing with Change: Cultivating Healthy Organisations.

With over 30 years of experience, Eric is an Organisation Development Consultant, Facilitator, Coach and Provocateur for Cultural Integration, Change and Leadership. His primary focus is on (Re-)Shaping workplace culture.

He adheres to this professional principle: Good Purposeful Work with Good People. From a young age, Eric’s life was shaped by change and crossing cultures. Working in English and German, he has lived and worked on 4 continents, including 8 years in Asia, and Eric currently resides in Southern Germany.

CultureQs is a unique approach to Cultivating Relationships that Matter in Situations that Matter… fast. Using powerful questions within a Bohmian Dialogue framework inspires participants to reflect on the foundations of their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.

While engaging in profoundly meaningful conversations, people connect quickly, enabling the invisible borders that hinder collaboration to fall away.

Wasteful conflict is reduced; people (re-)focus on the personal and professional questions that matter. The innovative potential is released, and performance is enhanced.

In this highly participatory impulse workshop, you will experience the power of the cultureQs approach in enabling people to open up, be themselves, share their experiences and generate a trusting environment with one another.

Workshop – How Can We cultivate Healthy Working Relationships?–using cultureQs

Paul Anumudu is a Senior Agile Coach and Product delivery expert at Roche whose work experience has been mainly focused on large and complex Digital Transformation programmes.

In recent times, organisations have favoured tech professionals who possess a given set of traits. This has become evident in Software Engineering job descriptions with a preference for individuals with attributes like: Team Player, Outgoing, Excellent Communicator as we also witness interview panels favouring those who are able to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously and can stay calm in a high pressure/complex environment.

This has sometimes led to the unconscious exclusion of those who do not fit into this box. As a result, individuals who are autistic, dyslexic, introverted or those with ADHD, are highly impacted by and suffer the brunt of this neuro-marginalisation.

This talk seeks to demonstrate how tech organisations can accelerate productivity and inclusive product design, by exploring the benefits of having a neuro-diverse workforce. It will provide real world scenarios that highlight the advantage of combining Agile, the Scrum Values and Neuro-inclusivity.

Workshop – Complex Facitation

Jaakko is an experienced agile coach who has a passion for helping individuals and teams achieve their goals in complex and challenging environments.

With a background in education and project management, he brings fresh perspective to his work in the financial sector at OP Financial group, as a Senior Agile Coach.

He is known for his ability to facilitate collaboration and innovation among diverse teams. As an advocate for better communication, sense-making, and expectation alignment, Jaakko believes that success comes from empowering individuals and fostering a positive team dynamic.

His approach to agile management is different from the norm and he tends to go beyond the limits of what is expected.

Jaakko Jokipii and Uula Muoniovaara will lead this workshop. Leaders and agilists should have a solid understanding of facilitation techniques. Through practice, we sharpen our skills every day, workshop by workshop.

Sometimes, we become so comfortable with our skills that we don’t notice when we hit the glass ceiling.

What is the “next level” of facilitation that we can enter, and how do we break the invisible barriers? That’s what we are about to find out in this session.

Workshop – Complex Facitation

Uula Muoniovaara is an Agile Coach with a background in creative communications and service design.

His key drivers in everyday work and life are curiosity, humor and food. Colleagues describe Uula as an outside-the-box thinker, but Uula is convinced that the box is just a social construct.

Jaakko Jokipii and Uula Muoniovaara will lead this workshop. Leaders and agilists should have a solid understanding of facilitation techniques. Through practice, we sharpen our skills every day, workshop by workshop.

Sometimes, we become so comfortable with our skills that we don’t notice when we hit the glass ceiling.

What is the “next level” of facilitation that we can enter, and how do we break the invisible barriers? That’s what we are about to find out in this session.