How to Create Happy, Empowered and Effective Teams - Amber King & Jesse Huth

How to Create Happy, Empowered and Effective Teams - Amber King & Jesse Huth

How do you create excited, engaged, happy, and effective teams? Start them off right by letting your engineers choose their own teams and projects! Through a proven technique called self-selection, Opower was able to turn a tribe of 40 engineers, many of whom were unexcited about continuing to work on the same old products, into six high-performing teams with engineers who were excited to embark on a new adventure, acquire new skills, and ship awesome code.

In this session we will cover the self-selection process: what it is, generating buy-in & excitement, preparing your teams, running a self-selection event, dealing with concerns throughout the process, and measuring the success of your process. This talk is for anyone who wants to create better teams including Agile Coaches, Release Train Engineers, Program Managers, individual contributors, and other organizational change leaders.

About the Presenters:

Amber King

Amber King is a Senior Manager, leading the Agile Program Management team at Opower (recently acquired by Oracle), the global leader in cloud-based software for the utility industry. Amber works in product operations with hundreds of engineers, product managers and executives to effectively scale Opower and transition Oracle to agile development practices.

Previously, Amber drove the transition from waterfall to agile development at National Geographic and has been leading agile teams in a variety of industries for nearly 10 years. She began her career as a Software Engineer at IBM and is passionate about environmental sustainability and tailoring agile solutions to improve software quality and time to market. She is a Certified SAFe Agilist, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and Project Management Professional (PMP).

Jesse Huth

Jesse Huth is a Senior Agile Program Manager at Opower (recently acquired by Oracle), the global leader in cloud-based software for the utility industry. Jesse works in product operations with hundreds of engineers, product managers and executives to help the Opower R&D org scale effectively and transition Oracle to agile development practices

Over the last year he developed Opower’s innovation strategy and helped drive the formation of self-selecting teams.