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.

In all development projects, you run into problems and boring stuff. How can you solve the problems, and in the process make them more fun? In this lightning talk we will touch subjects like why using a debugger is wrong, how to help your team mates be more passionate and the importance of having a plan.

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.

Perhaps the most vital aspect of building great software is finding the 20% of features that represent the 80% of functionality your customers really want. The planning and prioritization of these features can truly set a team - and a company - apart from their competitors. In this session, we cover several games from Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games ® specifically designed around feature discovery and product prioritization. We’ll then play two of the games - Buy a Feature and Prune the Product Tree - and finally discuss tips on how to implement these games in your teams and organization.