08.00
Registration desk opens
09.15
Agility without Humility has no Humanity
In this session I will invite audience participation in exploration of the human impact caused by the lack of humility within agile teams and their organisations. We will contemplate the lack of humility within AI and why human humility issues survive psychological safety improvements. I will wrap up by sharing a deceptively simple tactic to encourage humility while assessing team confidence around a piece of work.
11.10
Continuous Delivery! It is not what you think it is
Over the years, I have interviewed and observed a considerable number of organisations. Many shared confidently that they “do Continuous Delivery”. I’m often suspicious. When asking targeted questions, my suspicion is frequently confirmed. Tooling is in place, but the mindset is lacking. They automated “stuff”, not even bottlenecks, just things, and so, they are missing the benefits. Cutting-edge will not make it without mastering the boring basics that make the difference.
Here is a surprising paradox: the more teams focus on “speed” (via tooling), the slower they often go. True Continuous Delivery is not about how quickly we can push code, but how confident we are to deliver. While research confirms that Continuous Delivery increases organisational performance and, most importantly, reduces stress, burnout, and fatigue, and increases staff satisfaction and retention. These benefits only kick in when we stop treating it as a technical upgrade and start grasping the principles and ideas behind Continuous Delivery. It is a cultural shift!
The session will walk you through the three foundational pillars of effective delivery (Team Accountability, Definition of Done, and the Pipeline Pattern), not as a checklist but as a map to navigate out of the tooling trap. By the end, you will understand why Continuous Delivery is not a destination we reach with tooling, but a state of continuous readiness we maintain through discipline.
11.55
Sketching Inclusivity: Unlocking Collaboration and Leadership Through Visual Thinking
At this year’s conference, Sam will explore the profound impact and many benefits of sketch-noting as a tool for collaboration, inclusion, and leadership development. Her session aims to inspire teams and individuals to harness visual storytelling to unlock creativity and foster greater understanding in their work environments.
14.10
Talk to my agent: Scaling product & flow expertise with AI
Improving product and flow in organisations sounds simple. In reality, it means answering the same questions repeatedly, correcting misconceptions, translating theory into practice, and being constantly available. People say new ways of working are too theoretical. They don’t know where to start. They can’t find the right information. The same metric gets interpreted five different ways.
In this talk, I’ll show how I addressed that by building an AI agent: the Product & Flow Advisor.
The agent combines delivery theory with live organisational data and internal documentation. It answers questions consistently, surfaces risk, accelerates analysis, and reduces reliance on a single expert. This is a practical case study in scaling product and flow expertise with AI.
14.55
The Challenge of Keeping Things Up-To-Date
When you build a system to solve a business problem, you hope it’s going to be a success and that means the code you’ve written will run in production for a long time. But there is a challenge in keeping your system up to date:
• making sure that the software it depends on gets patched and upgraded
• responding to changes in the software landscape that offer you new opportunities
• recovering from decisions you made that it just turned out were not the right ones, or are not the right ones any more
You have to learn how to manage change and get good at migrations. You also need to get the balance right: you want your product development teams to be building new features and new products but they can’t do that if they are spending all their time on maintenance and tech debt.
Keeping things up-to-date can become a long and tedious grind, sapping the joy for teams. Sarah will talk about how, if you invest in your ability to manage change, you can make this considerably less painful for everyone.
16.05
The Human Edge: Use It or Lose It in an AI World
In an AI-driven world, we are automating tasks, accelerating decisions, and generating content at unprecedented speed.
But as we invest more in AI, many individuals and teams are unintentionally losing the very capabilities that make them effective.
This is the risk of cognitive debt.
When we rely too heavily on tools, we stop practising the human skills that enable us to think clearly, communicate effectively, and work well with others. Use it or lose it.
This interactive session explores the essential human capabilities that cannot be automated, drawing on the latest research into the skills that matter most and practical “Power-Ups” from No One Is Coming to Save You.
We will explore how emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, and communication enable better judgement, stronger collaboration, and meaningful impact.
Because while AI can generate answers, it cannot replace the human ability to make sense of complexity, build shared understanding, and turn ideas into action.
16.50
Panel Discussion
Q+A with a selection of the day's speakers.
