Agile RTP (ARTp)

What happens when a Test Engineer becomes a Software Engineer, then a Product Manager—and eventually starts experimenting with AI-driven software development?
In this talk, I’ll share my journey across three very different perspectives of software development and how each one changed the way I think about building products.
We’ll explore what Agile looks like from the trenches, how Product and Engineering teams evolve as organizations grow, what has worked, what hasn’t, and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also discuss the unique perspective a technical background brings to Product Management and how it can help bridge the gap between business, Product, Engineering, and QA.
From there, we’ll look at where things may be heading next: spec-driven development and AI-assisted software development with Claude. What is spec-driven development? Why does the quality of our specifications become even more important when AI is involved? And what happens when Product specifications begin to play a much more active role in driving implementation and validation?
This will be a practical, experience-based conversation rather than a prescription for how teams should work. I’ll share what I’ve learned, what I’m still figuring out, what I’m trying next, and resources for anyone who wants to explore these approaches themselves.
Topics will include:

• The journey from Test Engineer → Software Engineer → Product Manager
• Agile and how development teams evolve
• Lessons from approaches that worked—and those that didn’t
• Bridging Product, Engineering, and QA
• Spec-driven development: what it is and why it matters
• Claude and AI in the software development lifecycle
• What I’m experimenting with next
• Practical resources for getting started

About your speaker:
Noelle Tolve is a Product Manager with a technical background spanning software testing, software engineering, and product development. Her career began in Test Engineering, where she developed a strong foundation in quality, requirements, and understanding how software behaves in the real world. She later moved into Software Engineering, gaining hands-on experience building the systems she had previously tested, before transitioning into Product Management.
That journey has shaped her approach to Product: she brings an engineering mindset to understanding problems, collaborating with technical teams, defining requirements, and balancing customer needs with technical realities.
Today, she is particularly interested in how Product, Engineering, and AI are changing the way software is built. She is exploring spec-driven development and the use of Claude and other AI tools throughout the development lifecycle, with a focus on creating clearer specifications, improving collaboration, and helping teams move from ideas to reliable software more effectively.
She enjoys sharing the lessons, challenges, and experiments that come from working across the boundaries of Product, Engineering, and Quality.
My side career is in Search and Rescue since 2019, where I have been working for 5 years with my current canine Gracie and my pup Gabe.

Building software got much cheaper and faster with AI agents. Everything upstream and downstream of the software build portion has not. Instead of solely focusing on coding speed gains, we’ve spent the past year working on different bottlenecks in the value stream: faster decisions on what to build, writing better requirements, improved validation, and cutting out things we used to do just because that’s how we did it.
I lead engineering at a logistics technology consultancy running client engagements with increasingly smaller teams and shorter iterations. I’m convinced that evolving technology requires evolving practices. We continue to use Scrum, but I’ll explain why we dropped some of the surrounding exercises and practices that no longer seem valuable to us.
This is an experience-based talk on my findings rather than a framework discussion. I'll cover a number of things that didn't go well early on: AI-written backlog items, pull requests touching a hundred files, no review agent in the loop. I'll also touch on a prediction I got wrong about a role I assumed AI would eliminate first. It didn't.
Topics will include:

• Where the delivery bottlenecks transitioned to after coding got faster
• What we got wrong when we first put AI into our SDLC
• Why continuous delivery practices like working in small batches, trunk-based development, and fast rollbacks matter more than ever
• What we kept and cut from our agile practices
• Spec-driven development, and whether it fits teams like ours

About your speaker:
Kevin Jenkins is VP of Engineering at Metafora, a logistics technology consultancy building custom software for the transportation and logistics industry. He leads a fully remote engineering practice delivering client engagements across freight rating, carrier integrations, and transportation management systems.
He's been building software for 25 years across e-commerce startups, healthcare, advertising, and the music industry, and has led a couple of waterfall-to-agile transformations along the way.

Abstract:

### Agile Is Dead? Three Science-Based Trends to Master Today

Agile isn’t dead. But some Agile jobs may be.
AI is collapsing development cycles, shrinking teams, and commoditizing expertise at extraordinary speed. The ability to facilitate change is no longer enough—the market increasingly rewards people who can help produce outcomes.

Drawing on 25 years of research into how organizations and professionals reinvent, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva reveals three science-based trends reshaping Agile work—and what you need to do about them now.
Come ready to challenge what you think your role is, discover where your value is moving, and walk away with practical ways to reinvent before the market does it for you.

About our speaker:
Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva was twelve years old when her country disappeared. Growing up in the rubble of the collapsed Soviet Union taught her that volatility is normal — and that the people who know how to move when everything is in flux are the ones who get to shape what comes next.

She has spent 25 years studying why some organizations thrive in permanent disruption and others don't. Founder of the Reinvention Academy and originator of the Chief Reinvention Officer role, she runs the biennial Global Reinvention Survey — the world's only longitudinal dataset tracking reinvention velocity. She spent 14 years as a mining executive, and since 2012 has served as a fractional executive for Eurasian Resources Group (67,000+ employees across Europe, Asia, and Africa).

A former Coca-Cola Chaired Professor at IEDC-Bled School of Management, she earned her PhD at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. Her clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola, IBM, Cisco, and L'Oréal, and her work appears in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. Her previous book, The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook, won the Axiom Business Book Award and a Kirkus Star. The Reinvention Advantage publishes with Wiley on November 24.