Lean, Agile and Large-Scale Product Development (LeSS)

This session will be co-led by:
•Bastiaan van Hamersveld, The LeSS Company CEO
•Gene Gendel, Certified LeSS Trainer, Coach and Mentor
•James Carpenter, Certified LeSS Trainer, Coach and Mentor

Who is this for?
The LeSS Coach program serves practitioners who want to deepen their capability to guide organizations toward LeSS adoption:
•Scrum Masters ready to expand beyond team-level work into organizational coaching
•Agile and technical coaches who want structured mentorship from senior LeSS practitioners
•Head of Product/Engineering/CTO/Executives leading change efforts based on Lean principles
Whether you’re employed within an organization or running your own coaching practice, the program meets you where you are, and helps you grow from there.

What is LeSS Coach?
A LeSS Coach is someone who can meaningfully guide an organization toward simpler, more effective product development. The certification demonstrates your ability to apply LeSS principles, rules, and thinking in real organizational settings—helping teams, managers, and executives work together more effectively and deliver better outcomes.
Becoming a LeSS Coach is a journey toward deep mastery. You strengthen your understanding of Lean, systems thinking, organizational design, technical excellence, and Scrum, and learn to apply them in complex environments. Along the way, you gain access to the global LeSS community, the quality of the LeSS brand, and opportunities that expand your professional impact—such as offering Certified LeSS Basics trainings, contributing to LeSS adoptions, and progressing toward becoming a LeSS Mentor or even a Certified LeSS Trainer.

Before the session, you are advised to familiarize yourself with the following information:
•Becoming a LeSS Coach
•For Coaches
•For Scrum Masters
•For Executives
•The Benefits
•The Comparison
•The Pre-Requisties
•The Process
•The Investment
•The LeSS Mentors

Summary:
Over twelve years, Celeste has grown within an ever-evolving organization, helping nurture the systems, culture, and practices that support creative work. Her leadership is rooted in empathy, clarity, and trust.

In this talk, Celeste shares lessons on leading teams through uncertainty — from staying focused amid shifting goals to keeping people motivated when direction changes. Attendees will walk away with ideas for navigating internal challenges, fostering alignment, and leading with steadiness and care through times of transition.

Bio:
Celeste Rose - Director of Product Design with 12+ years at Vimeo leading design strategy, execution, and team growth across Viewer, Publishing, Analytics, OTT, and Collaboration. Known for building high-performing teams, delivering intuitive product experiences used by millions, and translating user insights into measurable business results. Recognized for balancing strategic foresight with hands-on leadership, fostering alignment across product, engineering, and design, and driving outcomes that impact engagement, retention, and ARR growth.

Summary:
At a insurance company, we noticed it was taking too long to get new ideas into production. Our IT director believed that fostering a stronger engineering culture could make a real difference — but for that to happen, leadership needed to step back and give teams the space and support to improve things themselves.
We set up a dedicated enablement team to support development by building internal tools, sharing knowledge, and removing friction. The impact? We went from releasing once a month to up to eight times a day. Operational work dropped from 70% to 25% — and it's still going down. Most of these improvements came directly from the teams themselves.
By the end of 2024, those same teams started asking: Can AI help us move even faster?
That’s when we started experimenting. We rolled out GitHub Copilot in VS Code, hired a few AI engineers, and ran small experiments to automate repetitive or time-consuming work — supported by people like Patrick Debois and teams at Microsoft.
Some of those experiments stayed small. Others evolved into stable, production-ready tools. For example, we’re now using an AI-based code reviewer that checks whether code follows our internal guidelines.
In this talk, I’ll walk you through what worked, what didn’t, and what was just “meh” in our AI transition.
I’ll also compare our experience with that of a development company where we’re running the same experiments to understand how AI is really impacting the development lifecycle.
These experiments will continue during the preparation of the talk — so new findings and insights will be added along the way.

Bio:
Pascal Dufour - Agile (test) consultant with a passion for People and Experiments. Who likes technology that makes sense. Currently working on PST and a side project http://scrumrows.org/home and http://productpracticescanvas.org
World Champion Software Testing 2016.

Topic:
Tim Arkell has been helping multiple business enterprises change to more agile and adaptive ways of working for the last 18 years. As a developer, team lead, agile coach and trainer, and in more recent years as a technology leader, he’s been in the thick of it to do this.

From knowing when to massage individual egos to get the best out of them, to ripping up established SDLC processes, and even full-on clashes with C-level executives and founders, this talk reflects on his experiences. He’ll cover how his approach has evolved over the years with real examples and anecdotes."

Bio:
Tim Arkell has over twenty years of experience in technology as a leader, coder, and coach. Throughout his career, he has helped organizations and teams develop responsive and adaptive ways of working in complex environments.
In his current leadership roles, Tim focuses on enabling teams to deliver exceptional business value by embracing Agile and Lean principles and applying them effectively at scale. His passion lies in helping organizations evolve — fostering collaboration, improving delivery practices, and driving continuous learning and improvement.
Tim is deeply committed to sharing his knowledge and experience with others. He works with organizations, teams, and individuals to strengthen both the technical aspects of software development and the process disciplines of value delivery, bridging the gap between strategy and execution with clarity and purpose.