Webcast: A Conversation with Kent Beck and Eric Ries

Register: http://bit.ly/1hGcsQP

Speakers: Eric Ries and Kent Beck

Eric Ries will speak with Kent Beck, a creator of Agile software development, about facilitating the work of engineers and product teams. Few people have as much insight as Kent Beck–a creator of Agile software development–into how product teams work, and how they can work better. They will get to the heart of how product groups work—and how they can work better.

Eric and Kent will share lessons not only for engineering leaders, but for anyone attempting to introduce Lean Startup to their company. What strategies succeed or fail in altering entrenched patterns?

In this webcast conversation, Kent and Eric Ries will talk about change:

• how to make your work more valuable as a product team leader or team member, and

• what succeeds and fails in getting people to adopt new ideas.

This session is most directly relevant for engineering teams but will also has useful ideas for any product group. Kent and Eric’s conversation will be followed by live Q&A with the webcast attendees, so come with your questions in mind.

About Kent Beck

http://m2.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/3/000/009/0e3/048a1a4.jpg

Currently at Facebook, Kent has pioneered effective software development, co-authoring the Agile Manifesto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development), which modernized product development, and writing a slew of books (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kent+beck) with practical advice for engineering teams. Extreme Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming) (XP), a method that Kent created, is based on the idea that some methods familiar to Lean Startup practitioners—like test-based development and technical collaboration—lead to more successful software, such that teams should pursue them, as Kent has put it, “as intensely as possible.” Indeed, rapid cycles lead to very short release times and low costs of change. But it’s not easy to implement this kind of approach, and product groups using fast iteration will need different structures and practices than those working in long-release cycles. http://www.linkedin.com/in/kentbeck

About Eric Ries

http://oreillynet.com/images/people/154/eric_ries2.jpg

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business (http://theleanstartup.com/book), published by Crown Business. He graduated in 2001 from Yale University with a B.S. in Computer Science. While an undergraduate, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com (http://there.com/), leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. He later co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. In 2008 he served as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers before moving on to advise startups independently. Today he serves on the board of directors for Code for America and on the advisory board of a number of technology startups and venture capital firms. In 2009, Ries was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. In 2010, he was named entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and is currently an IDEO Fellow. The Lean Startup methodology has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, Fast Company, and countless blogs. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Tara.

This webcast is produced by The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 - 11 in San Francisco. Visit http://leanstartup.co/ for more information.