This talk will give you a brief aggregation of my experiences about what to focus on to get the distributed team functioning well. I´ll also tell the story about the ladybird and how to catch it right :)

Writing good user stories and planning effective product releases is difficult. Simple story templates and prioritization heuristics offer short term relief, but teams still struggling under mountains of stories of questionable quality.

In this short workshop you’ll gain a deeper understanding of why the simple idea of stories can be so difficult. Armed with deeper understanding you’ll learn not to write stories, but to discuss your product and plan its release while creating an organized story backlog as a natural outcome of conversation.

The secret to high performing XP teams is unfettered communication. And where there is communication, there’s bound to be conflict. Be it meetings or discussions around the table, when views collide we all notice conflict. This said why do some groups deal with conflict better? How can facilitators and team members ensure constructive dialogue in the face of conflicting perspectives?

Stealthholders appear at the final demo and destroy your project without warning. Shapeshifters are different people every time you talk to them. And Sergeants won’t take no for an answer. In this action-packed workshop, we’ll demonstrate and practice ways of managing these challenging, but regrettably common, types of client without sacrificing the principles that make agile projects work.