Many times teams get too involved in metrics such as story points, velocity, etc. turning into "user story machines" aka "Backlog Lumberjacks" forgetting the real reason as to why they chose to be agile. As the agile movement sweeps across the industry many organizations and teams have started practicing different agile frameworks. As they go through these agile transformations, quite often the focus is purely on implementing the different elements of the framework and using metrics like velocities, story points and burn down charts to measure the progress of the teams and forgetting the core purpose on why they switched to an agile way of working in the first place: turning these teams into user story machines and their team members into backlog lumberjacks.

A successful agile team is not about how many stories they can finish or how frequently they release to production but rather more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

Through story telling I take the audience through a journey that reminds them the true essence of going agile and how not to turn your teams into backlog lumberjacks.

Learning Objectives

• Team members will learn the most important goal of an agile team i.e "Speed of learning" and "applying that learning"
• Product Owners will learn how being a great product owner isn't just about writing perfect user stories or creating a healthy backlog but about bringing teams close to the user or the "problem they are trying to solve"
• Scrum Masters or Agile Managers will learn that a great agile team isn’t measured by story points, burn-downs or velocities but instead are measured by "velocity of learning"
• Leaders & Executives will learn how in an agile organization and for Agile teams its less about managing and more about mentoring

Speaker Bio
Kalpesh Shah public speaker, trainer and agile coach working with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups, helping them make the transition to Agile way of working, implementing Agile at Scale, employ Lean Product Development approaches and instill Lean Startup mindset. His latest passion is Culture Hacking through continuous experimentation which will promote innovative thinking, extend openness, embody rationality, and bring design thinking into teams.