Conversations as Catalysts: Empowering Agile Teams for Better Business Outcomes

It's right there in the Agile Manifesto - "Individuals and Interactions"! Bringing people together and having conversations can lead to some magical outcomes. In this session, we will discuss five types of cross-functional and cross-organizational meetings that ensure that critical conversations take place, maximizing teamwork, alignment, customer value, and business outcomes. In fact, only one of these five meetings is directly described as an official event in the Scrum Guide.

The five conversations that will be highlighted are product discovery activities, refinement sessions, sprint reviews, program status meetings, and metrics-oriented discussions. We will focus on how our relationship with customers changes when they are engaged in product discovery and sprint review. We will discuss how product discovery and refinement conversations drive better solutions. Finally, we will suggest how program status meetings and metrics-driven conversations can be reimagined to create a much improved relationship between teams and organizational leadership.

We hope this session sparks ideas for how people can incorporate powerful conversations beyond the Scrum team to enable great business and customer outcomes.