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

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.

Summary:
Austrian Post started its scaled agile journey in 2019 with SAFe. For a traditional, process-heavy organization, it was a helpful first step — but after three years, the structure had become overly complex: overlapping roles, bloated meetings, and long, centralized planning cycles. The framework designed to bring agility had, in our context, started to limit it.

That realization led us to PRIME – the Post Rolling Refinement Model. PRIME isn’t a new framework; it’s a lightweight, LeSS-inspired way of working that emerged from stripping away unnecessary layers and giving teams back ownership.

We shortened the planning cycle from five to three sprints and replaced the big-room PI Planning with continuous rolling refinement, increasing flow and feedback.
We reduced roles to just four key ones (Teams, Train Coach, Head of Product, Head of Engineering), creating clearer accountability.
We realigned trains along real value streams, cutting coordination overhead.
And we made participation trust-based, not mandatory — inviting autonomy while maintaining transparency.

The results were encouraging: after a short dip, our success rate rose well above previous SAFe levels, and feedback showed higher ownership and motivation among teams. PRIME has since also proven effective in our AI Center of Excellence, where quick experimentation and adaptation are crucial.

Bios:

Victoria Pichler
Victoria Pichler is an Agile Coach at Austrian Post with over ten years of experience supporting teams and leaders on their agile journey. With a background in project and portfolio management, she combines a pragmatic mindset with a deep understanding of organizational change. As a co-driver of Austrian Post’s agile transformation and its in-house approach “PRIME,” she focuses on creating environments where teams can grow through autonomy, purpose, and trust.
Martin Eder
Martin Eder is an Agile Coach at Austrian Post with over fourteen years of experience in agile environments. After seven years as a Scrum Master, he now supports large teams in navigating scaled agile frameworks and strengthening autonomy at scale. As a co-driver of Austrian Post’s agile transformation and its in-house approach “PRIME,” he focuses on creating environments where teams can grow through autonomy, purpose, and trust.

Tomas Herda
Tomas Herda is an Agile Coach at the AI Center of Excellence within Group IT at Austrian Post and leads the ‘AI and Agile’ conference initiative. He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Informatics from the Slovak University of Technology. His expertise focuses on integrating Generative AI and Agile practices within software engineering. He contributes through R&D on multi-agent AI systems, co-authors papers, speaks at events on AI and prompting, and actively supports agile transformation. He is the author of Prompting Blueprints, an open-source playbook on GitHub with reusable prompt patterns, AI tool tutorials, guides & use cases, and served as Workshop Chair for ‘AI and Agile Software Development: From Frustration to Success’ at XP2025.