Agile Manchester 2024

Did you hear about Rafah this week? It may be worth thinking why...

I was very fortunate to attend Agile Manchester last week. I had the opportunity to speak at the same event in 2020 but the organizers, in a very responsible manner, opted to hold it as a virtual conference due to Covid. Being there in person and meeting the community was a gift.

The program was very rich. We had three days full of talks and workshops, sometimes in 5 parallel tracks! Each day had a mix of talks and workshops, so every day we had plenty of opportunities to move between rooms and to choose between short sessions versus long, interactive workshops.

The conference program was very balanced between product management, technology and processes that help with agile (small A). There were no sales pitches from vendors or sponsors though I have met so many people from Booking.com and Co-op :)

Major Theme: The Human Aspect

I may be biased but almost every talk emphasized the human aspect of running or being a part of an agile project. I have heard multiple versions of the following themes, all articulated very well and based on real projects:

• If your work makes someone look bad, it's your responsibility to think about the personal effects in advance. Be candid, but know that you may be hurting someone's feelings. Based on their status at work, being objective and data-driven without concern about how you make them look, how you make them feel can be bad for your career path. Think about alternative ways to suggest moving in a different direction.
• You don't need to do everything all at once. You shouldn't expect other people to move mountains overnight either. Move with small, deliberate, discrete steps. Be patient. Take a rest, shift down gears when you need to. It's OK to work on a long-term vision, or to dream about a fantastic success story in the future, but come back to now and do what you can, together with your peers and customers.
• Constantly check whether you are being a bottleneck for someone else - especially for people that may be moving in a reasonable direction at a reasonable velocity. Don't put the focus on yourself, think about your whole organization. Create spaces for humane, useful conversations that move everyone to a better place.
• Everyone makes big decisions that impact the success of whatever you are working on - but they may not be aware of that. Junior developers make architectural decisions, product managers make experience decisions, designers make product positioning decisions... Some of these are good because they come from people close to the product itself. Some of these are bad because they miss the larger context.
• Managing expectations is a part of everyone's job, and it creates good moments. A big part of managing expectations is well-meant human conversations, over and over and over. Those who manage expectations through lying and manipulation give interpersonal expectation management a bad rap. There is nothing wrong with cultivating human connections at work as long as you are candid about your purpose. Genuine human connection is the best part of working with other humans, which we will miss once AI overlords rule the planet.

The Talks

Here is a quick summary of the talks I was able to attend. I have two favorites, and I will share them at the end.

Rewilding Agile by Dave Snowden was a delight. He talked about how rewilding doesn't mean that we will hold on to a nostalgic vision of what agile should be, but to adapt it to the current realities.

Holly Donohue talked about her mistakes in a product leadership role. It was full of good examples about managing stakeholders while trying to deploy good product practices.

Samuel Cann and Liam Dewes talked about a large replatforming effort at Booking.com. They shared how they tried to influence a loosely-aligned but massively fragmented organization.

Emily Webber talked about how remote, on-site and hybrid work is the norm now and shared tips about connecting in remote and hybrid settings. One really interesting factor that binds teams together: Commensality - eating together. It turns out that eating together over video works too!

Karl Scotland proposed playing with the fidelity of a solution, rather than its quality, to be able to deliver it within time, budget and scope constraints.

Jitesh Gosai gave a really nice talk about feeling safe about contributing, even when things aren't going well or when there are issues that no one is talking about.

Cansel Sörgens talked about misconceptions about OKRs and suggested 5 simple things to consider when using OKRs. This was a good contrasting talk because Dave Snowden lightly slammed OKRs in his keynote :) Cansel shared tips about moving OKR efforts beyond making rolled up sophisticated todo lists.

Sharon Dale delivered a very colorful, interactive talk about neurodiversity and what it means to work with people with different cognitive abilities and limitations.

Paige Watson gave an excellent talk about using simple, deliberate techniques to improve development work. While the particular examples were sourced from technical work, his points were generalizable to many domains. I am quite excited to apply some of these to design work.

Valerie McLean's talk was so chill that it felt like a hug. We talked about our human nature and how we sometimes fail to recognize little but important nuances within ourselves and others. My favorite exercise from the talk was drawing our Bruno: how we perceive ourselves when we are threatened.

Ian Hodgkiss talked about a big transformation project at the UK Passport office. The most striking part of the project was the use of the actual examiners as subject matter experts to direct the scope of the project at times. The examiners co-located with the team doing the design and technical work; it was a great case study to hear.

Vimla Appadoo shared details about her move from service design to product. I loved her humble narrative - especially when she honestly thought that working in product would be easy because she came from a service design background. It wasn't, (surprised?) and her adaptation story was very insightful.

Chisara Nwabara and Federico Nardini gave a very clear talk about coordinating the work between SRE, DevOps and Infra teams with a product mindset. It was back to back with another great talk about the same trio. John Steward and Evelyn Goodall talked about how they coordinate between these teams in a fluid way in the Government Digital Service (GDS).

Two Favorites

I learned a lot from these talks, but two talks that really made me think about what I do and how I do it in the teams that I work with.