Agile Brigade

Most Agile teams execute well. Sprints get completed, velocity gets measured, retrospectives happen on schedule. And yet, somewhere between the backlog and the business outcome, something gets lost.

This session explores the strategic layer that sits above the SDLC, the work that determines whether your team is building the right thing, not just building things right.

Dutch brings 30 years of experience across military, federal, and enterprise environments to a conversation Agile communities rarely have: what happens before the first story gets written, and who is responsible for it.

Attendees will walk away with:

• A clearer picture of where Agile ends and strategic product leadership begins
• A practical way to think about the three layers of product work and where your team fits
• Questions you can bring to your next sprint planning that shift the conversation from output to outcome
• A new appreciation for why the best product leaders guide through influence, not authority

No frameworks to memorize. No certifications required. Just a fresh perspective on a gap most Agile teams feel but rarely talk about.

About the Speaker

Dutch Devries is a strategic product leader, consultant, and author known for helping organizations turn bold ideas into successful, market-ready products. As a fractional Chief Product Officer, he partners with companies to sharpen product strategy, accelerate growth, and strengthen product leadership.
Often known as “The Product Philosopher,” Dutch shares practical insights on product strategy and leadership and is the creator of the Quartz Open Framework, a structured approach to managing products across their lifecycle.

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Meeting ID: 842 0588 6265
Passcode: 661203
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As LLMs radically change the way teams work, the role of the Scrum Master changes too. And this doesn't mean just using the intelligent tools in Miro to group stickies, devise fun new retrospective formats, make a sentiment analysis of retrospective comments, help arrange the backlog, enable sprint planning, or help support the creation of metrics for presentations. The Scrum Master role must evolve with the development process, upskilling and embedding themselves much more deeply with the team.

A core principle of the Agile Manifesto gains new meaning: individuals and interactions over processes and tools. As many organizations are chasing LLM coding as the New Shiny, and even mandating developers use LLMs a certain percentage of their time, the essential Scrum Master skills of team-building and human connection become even more important. It's too easy for devs to become disconnected, even isolated, in their new management role, orchestrating and running agents solo.

While Agile principles and values won't change, the shape and nature of Agile events and how they're carried out must. How can Scrum Masters evolve to meet this powerful moment? By adopting many of the behaviors and tactics of the Toyota Team Leader. Scrum Masters must reclaim their purpose as True Leaders, as Toyota Team Leaders do.

About the Speaker:

Fortune Buchholtz began as a Scrum Master in 2005 after working as a front-end developer. Over the years, she has also participated in a number of agile transformations, large and small, across diverse industries, ways of working and team types as a Scrum Master, an Agile Coach, a Sr. Enterprise agile coach, and recently, Head of Agile. Today she is an ICE-EC certified agilist, deeming herself "Toyota All the Time." Originally from San Francisco, CA, she now lives in Nottingham, England with her husband, a professor of computer science.

Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 875 4118 2950
Passcode: 024751
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