Speakers

Jon Smart

Jon Smart

Founder, Business Agility Coach and Leader AT Sooner Safer Happier

Jon is a business agility practitioner, servant leader, and coach. Jon is the lead author of the award winning and bestselling 'Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility' (IT Revolution Press, Nov 2020) and co-founder of Sooner Safer Happier Ltd, helping large organizations deliver Better Value, Sooner, Safer, and Happier (#BVSSH) through the application of better ways of working, including agile and lean principles and practices. //

Jon previously was Global Business Agility Lead and Partner at Deloitte. Prior to this, Jon led Ways of Working globally for Barclays Bank, across an organisation of 80,000 people, founded in 1690, supporting teams to triple productivity on average. Jon and team won the Best Internal Agile Team at the UK Agile Awards in 2016. Jon has been an agile and lean practitioner since the early 1990s. //

Jon is also the founder of the Enterprise Agility Leaders Network, a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a member of the Business Agility Institute Advisory Council, a guest speaker at London Business School, and speaks at numerous conferences a year.

Talk: Better Value, Sooner, Safer & Happier

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In this talk, Jon will share key Patterns and Antipatterns for business agility, in the Age of Digital.

These are lessons learnt the hard way, when improving ways of working across large organizations, in order to deliver Better Value Sooner Safer & Happier. Jon will share learnings so that you don't need to make the same mistakes!

Szilvia Nagy

Szilvia Nagy

Senior HR Business Partner AT Morgan Stanley

Fanni Karolina Toth

Fanni Karolina Toth

Karolina, as a young teenager, led a weekly radio program in her native Hungary. Then she was a production intern at the local radio station while she was completing her degree in cognitive science at the University of Evansville. Now she is an internal coach at Coding Sans, a software development agency, while she also hosts the Level-up Engineering podcast, interviewing accomplished leaders in the tech industry from all across the globe.

Joseph Pelrine

Joseph Pelrine

Agile Psychologist

A quiet and reserved researcher and practitioner, Joseph Pelrine is considered by cognoscenti to be one of the pioneers and top experts on Agile methods. He has spent over 25 years defining and refining processes to help some of the world’s most well-known companies improve their ability to satisfy the needs of their customers. As a psychologist, his focus on people and his experience in applying leading-edge techniques from social complexity and psychology to process optimisation goes far beyond the domain of software development, and extends to the whole organisation. Although Joseph Pelrine often works as a consultant or interim manager, his preference is passing his knowledge on by counselling and advising individuals and organisations, often in the role of a CTO/CIO/CDO "whisperer". He conducts research in novel applications of psychology to agile processes, and is also a PhD researcher in psychology and psycholinguistics.

Keve Kutner

Keve Kutner

Senior Engineering Manager AT Prezi

Gergely Hodicska

Gergely Hodicska

Co-Founder & VP Of Engineering AT CraftHub & Bitrise

Gábor Nádai

Gábor Nádai

Engineering Manager AT Bitrise

Richard Dec

Richard Dec

Head of High Performance AT Vega Factor

Rich Dec leads the high performance practice at Vega Factor and is a consultant, executive coach, public speaker and advisory board member. He is an expert at boosting performance and human outcomes for organizations, teams, and individuals. He brings cutting edge science-based approaches to implementing sustainable improvements in performance and culture across the globe. Rich received his B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and executive coaching certification from the Teleos Leadership Institute. Outside of work Rich enjoys playing tennis, reading, and exercising.

Talk: The Science of Performance

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We’ll leverage history, current events, and our cutting edge research to define what drives performance and most importantly, what that means for you at work. Every action requires a motive. Our motives determine how well do something. We’ll share how the root levers of motivation impact performance and what each person can do to improve their own performance and that of their team and organization. People can expect to walk away with a deeper understanding of the science of performance and insights for steps they can immediately take at both work and outside of work to boost motivation.
Balázs Lóránd

Balázs Lóránd

Head of AI Development Centre AT Continental

Balazs is currently responsible for the AI Development Centre of Continental at Budapest, the biggest team in Hungary focusing on deep learning based SW development. He has 20 years of experience as a leader in different positions and at various organisations, where he was able to analyse the dynamics of management. In the last 8 years Balazs worked for various multinational companies and established different teams, projects in the field of machine learning. Servant leadership is the most important concept influencing his practice as a leader. Balazs also has a research background, he obtained PhD from the University of Pécs where he was responsible for several management courses. In the last few years, he was a visiting lecturer of Central European University.

Talk: Early seniority and organizational maturity

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New professions are emerging continuously in our world, and we always need people with the necessary seniority to lead and direct our projects from a technical aspect. Learning a new profession from a technological perspective can be completed in 2-3 years in a newly established / pioneering field, although organizational maturity of the individual is not always developing that fast. As leaders, we are responsible for supporting our people, thus we need solutions to mature them as employees, not only as technical professionals. I will share my experience regarding certain solutions: e.g. development of line managers, coaching programs, lead by example and regular feedback rounds.
Damon Centola

Damon Centola

Author & Communication, Sociology and Engineering Professor AT University of Pennsylvania

Damon Centola is a Professor Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group. He is a leading world expert on social networks and behaviour change. His work has been published in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Soci- ology, Circulation and Journal of Statistical Physics. He is also a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads, a counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior. His new book, Change: How New Ideas Take Off and Take Hold, is a bold and paradigm-busting new theory about the complex way ideas and behaviors spread, and how to efficiently effect the change you want to see in the world.

Talk: Creating Change: How To Make Big Things Happen

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Details are coming soon
Bernadett Bene

Bernadett Bene

Java developer AT Morgan Stanley

Bernadett started to work for Morgan Stanley as a Java developer in February of 2020. This is her first workplace in IT since before graduating as a software engineer she worked in hospitality in the USA and in logistics in the UK. She successfully completed a reskilling academy in order to change her career into IT.

Magda Fabian

Magda Fabian

Software Developer AT Morgan Stanley

Magda currently works as a software developer at Morgan Stanley but previously worked for 4 years with kids. She worked as a nursery school teacher and taught English in a private kindergarten. In March 2020 she decided to change career and in October 2020 she started a programming school where she gained full-stack developer skills like Python, Java, React, CSS, SQL, and several soft skills like GIT, scrum, growth mindset and time management.

Gabriella Matyas-Kollar

Gabriella Matyas-Kollar

Chief Operating Officer for Technology AT Morgan Stanley

Gabriella Matyas-Kollar is the Chief Operating Officer for Technology at Morgan Stanley in Hungary and member of the local Technology Management Committee. Previously she worked for a global insurance company as CEE Head of Product Development. Gabriella graduated from the Global Executive MBA program at INSEAD, studied in France, Singapore, the UAE and San Francisco. Her interest areas include innovation and emerging technologies, also, how we can make virtual collaboration and employee engagement work efficiently in today’s fast changing environment.

Nyari Samushonga

Nyari Samushonga

CEO AT WeThinkCode_

Nyari Samushonga is the CEO of WeThinkCode, a South African tech academy that operates in Joburg, Durban and Cape Town. As an Entrepreneur and Tech Executive, Nyari is passionate about seeing Africa take its place as a maker of cutting edge technology. She has accelerated the recruitment of women students to the point of parity within the academy. In her role as CEO of WeThinkCode_ she has driven effective initiatives to scale the impact of the organisation. These include doubling the recruitment capacity and launching a home grown curriculum that caters to the South African market. A Chartered Accountant by training, Nyari has previously operated as the Managing director of ThoughtWorks Africa, a subsidiary of the global software development consultancy, and a Manager in Deloitte's audit and assurance division operating in both Harare and New York. Born in Zimbabwe, she also lived and worked in the United States and Tanzania. A passionate cyclist, she is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Talk: Going the distance- navigating organisational growth when the journey is as important as the destination.

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WeThinkCode_ is a dynamic Software Development Academy with a dual mission to train world class software developers and drive the inclusion of underrepresented groups. Leading the organisation through its growth from an EdTech startup to an established Social Enterprise has been a triumph of crystallising the core mission and building the machinery to deliver on it. We’ve gone from being able to hold context, plans and operational information in our heads to needing to build a network of human and technical systems to scale the operation. From using a lot of instinct to steer the organisation to having clearer multi-year plans. Join me as I share tips from the trenches on how to grow while keeping the orgnanisation’s soul intact.
Dawn Parzych

Dawn Parzych

Manager of Developer Marketing AT LaunchDarkly

Dawn is Manager, Developer Marketing at LaunchDarkly where she helps developers ship code faster and safer. She specializes in the socio-technical aspects of technology and how humans are often the hardest part. Her career in tech has included roles with companies like Catchpoint and F5. Her mission is to make tech more accessible and inclusive by using straightforward language and fewer buzzwords. Dawn recently relocated from the pacific northwest to the midwest and she's slowly adjusting to life without mountains and oceans.

Mariele Weber

Mariele Weber

VP of People AT Prezi

Talk: Mariele Weber's talk

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Details are coming soon
Crux Conception

Crux Conception

Founder AT Crux Conception

Crux resides in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and has over 20 years of Law Enforcement (LEO), Criminal Profiling and teaching experience.

Law Enforcement experience: Homicide Detective, Criminal Profiler, Gang Unit Specialist Detective, Hostage Negotiator, Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Officer, School Resources Officer (SRO), Five years as a Special Agent with the DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND (DHS)

Crux, now retired, worked as a Homicide Detective, Criminal Profiler and Hostage Negotiator with the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Police Dept.

Teaching experience: Currently, Crux is an Adjunct Professor: Psychology, Business Psychology, Social Media Psychology, Criminal Profiling, Criminal Behavior, Computer Psychology, Sociology (Group Dynamics)

Education: Bachelor of Science degree; Criminology (Ball State University, 1994), Master’s degree; Forensic Psychology (Walden University, 2012).

Talk: Enhanced Methods to Recruit Qualified Minorities in The Tech World

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This presentation will discuss how to cope with conversing with those from diverse backgrounds with ease and accomplish your daily connections with co-workers who come from different backgrounds, with a common comprehension goal.

•Necessities that make you distinct, skills that make you stand out. The diversities that make us rare and unique, if it’s your ethnic background, race, ethnic customs, religious beliefs, sex, sexuality, or form of individuality, may also be a cause of contention.

•Discover how to bring out that which is already within you and communicate, work with diverse individuals, and strike up a great conversation with one another.

•Also, this presentation will also contribute to your attendees fostering a positive change and cultivating a more inviting place of work.

•This presentation will discuss the impacts of diversity collectively, identifying what variety can be combined with how it affects a business.

•The presentation will assist with explaining what it signifies to be an inclusive place of work, offer comprehensive measures to assess best what degree one’s place of work fosters inclusion and diversity.

Allison McMillan

Allison McMillan

Director of Engineering AT GitHub

Allison McMillan is a Director of Engineering at GitHub. She's worn many hats including community builder at the University of Michigan Hillel, software developer, and Managing Director of a national non-profit. Allison also started a podcast about being a parent in tech, Parent Driven Development. She is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker and speaks on a variety of topics including experiential education for engineers, working remotely, and more. When she's not coding, you can find her encouraging her son's climbing skills, making faces at her toddler daughter, or pretending she has time to bake. Allison lives in the Washington, DC area.

Talk: Offsite Planning for the Faint of Heart

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Over the past year, we’ve all needed to sharpen the tools in our virtual toolbelt. More companies than ever are providing employees with the opportunity to work remotely… but how can we keep those individuals connected - to each other and to the mission of the company and their team? Effective in-person offsites are challenging and now we’re working to achieve the same alignment, engagements, and happiness for our employees virtually. It may seem impossible, but it’s not! In this session, you’ll learn about how to plan an effective offsite (up your in-person game or run one remote) and what specific planning considerations can be made to make your virtual offsite just as good, if not better, than an in-person one. Skeptics welcome!!
Amber Vanderburg

Amber Vanderburg

Founder AT The Pathwayz Group

Amber Vanderburg is a multi award winning international businessperson, keynote speaker, and founder of The Pathwayz Group. In 2016, she left her job in corporate HR to become the only female, only American, and only blonde Academy elite football coach for the Adidas Gameday Academy/Paris Saint Germain Academy in Bangalore, India. She worked with an international team of coaches to transform the organizational design, training development, and corporate culture to cultivate a higher-performing team. Today, Amber and The Pathwayz Group work with international teams that struggle with co worker tension, inefficient processes, and unmet performance expectations in an action focused approach to guide teams in the path to becoming more effective, more efficient, and more enjoyable.

Talk: How to lead change

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Here, attendees will learn how to lead effective change through ideas put into practical activities. Some change leaders are fantastic leaders while others were fantastic disasters. In both cases it begs us to ask the questions about how to lead effective change. In this chat Attendees will learn: How to effectively build relationships with others in the forming stages for maximum impact and buy in How to engage in healthy conflict and how to provide opportunities for ownership with in the storming stages of change discussions How to boldly make decisions and guide your organization in a path towards success How to maximize performance as a team unit
Michael Nir

Michael Nir

President AT Sapir Consulting US

Michael Nir, President Sapir Consulting US, is a team and enterprise agile coach; known for his passion, creativity and innovation; His Masters in Engineering and, training in Gestalt balance his technical know-how with emotional intelligence. Michael inspires people and teams to change, experientially and emotionally, while climbing the hill AND reaching the summit. The author of twelve books on influence, consumer experience, and Lean Agile project management, Michael delivers practical skills gained from eighteen years of experience leading change at global organizations in diverse industries.

Talk: Liberate Your Remote Team to High Performance How to revolutionize teams employing liberating structures to produce awesome results?

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Agile, Scrum, DevOps, Lean, Spotify squads and Scaled Agile were built on high contact team interactions leading to extraordinary performance, then Covid came and disrupted our models of face-to-face interactions. Remote and hybrid models are our present and future. As a team member, manager, leader, intrapreneur and change evangelist, do you know how to empower remote team communication to capture room intelligence? Or are your remote interactions basic, excruciating and lack results? Remarkable tools and practices are often hidden in plain sight; Liberating Structures is a framework for facilitation created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. It consists of 33 microstructures designed to build trust and enhance cooperation and communication between teammates. Participation is the name of the game with Liberating Structures; this framework is built around improving coordination by including and unleashing all participants. Join me as we discover, explore, and experience a world of unexpected engagement, collaboration and guaranteed high performance team results.

You will learn by doing:

• How to harness microstructures to instantly accelerate remote and hybrid team collaboration and trust

• Experience by doing unique and foolproof practices to enhance remote participation among individuals and teams

• Synthesize simple collaboration tools to influence in real-time high-performance team interactions

Bart den Haak

Bart den Haak

OKR Coach & Author of Lean OKRs AT Moving the Needle

Bart den Haak is an experienced expert in Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). As a coach and consultant, he has more than 10 years experience in applying OKRs and training professionals. He is the founder and CEO of “Moving the Needle,” helping tech companies to define their most critical Objectives. He has advised executive teams all over the world including Nike, ING, BinckBank (part of SaxoBank), Mural, Jampp, Mambu, Backbase, and Bol.com to use OKRs to their advantage. Bart specializes in Lean and Agile (software) teams to strengthen their current way of working with his revolutionary goal setting methodology: Lean OKRs. With his background in software engineering and Agile Product Development, he is positioned well to advise SaaS companies and their leaders on changing the way they operate for the better. Bart has recently written a book “Moving the Needle with Lean OKRs” that discusses how his Lean approach to OKRs can drive innovation through behavioural changes, empowering and motivating teams and bringing the soul back to OKRs.

Talk: Making OKRs Lean again

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OKRs are a goal-setting, strategy execution tool that involves setting ambitious goals that lead to measurable results. The thing is, over the years, OKRs have gotten too complicated - they need to be put on a diet - and that’s where Lean OKRs step in. They are hyper-focused on one single OKR to rule all others. Often, OKRs are not set up for success and thus tossed aside. I can name four (and a half) common reasons why your OKRs aren’t working. Among them, the importance of finding a rhythm for making OKRs part of your way of working, leading teams with trust, and getting the foundation in place so teams aren’t running before they learn how to walk.
Linda Rising

Linda Rising

Independent consultant

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, agile development approaches, and the change process, Linda is the author of numerous articles and five books. She was honored by the World Agility Forum in 2020 with their Lifetime Achievement Award.

Talk: Incentives: why or why not?

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It’s surprising how little of the research around incentives has made it into practice. There’s widespread belief that the debate is about carrots vs. sticks or if it’s carrots or sticks, what kind of carrots or sticks. It’s also surprising how the understanding of this fundamental topic eludes many well-respected, experienced practitioners and coaches. There’s considerable research that suggests what incentives work (and don't work) for individuals and teams. Linda will bring in the latest from cognitive neuroscience and help those of us who care about development teams to learn what works best.
Alex Kudelka

Alex Kudelka

Vice President of Sales AT Bitrise

Alex has spent the last 12+ years in early and growth phase startups, predominantly in SaaS. Before Bitrise he spent his time scaling revenue at Doodle while they made their breakout into B2B. Prior to Doodle he was an early employee at Algolia and managed their global BD team. His passion is deeply rooted in building anything from companies to lego sets, as well as french wine.

Talk: Scaling your revenue organization - what matters and what doesn't in the early days

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Alex will share with us insights on what the best-in-class revenue organizations do to grow their initial revenue organization.
Alan Watkins

Alan Watkins

Founder & CEO AT Complete

Alan is recognised as an international expert on leadership and human performance. He has a broad mix of commercial, academic, scientific and technological abilities. Over the past 24 years he has been a coach to many top business leaders and worked with the GB Olympic squad, coaches and athletes prior to London 20 l 2 and Rio 20 l 6. Originally trained as a medical doctor at Imperial College in London he worked for 11 years in the UK's National Health Service, in primary care in Australia and for a year in academic medical research in the USA. He ended up in Neuroscience research before leaving medicine to work with global business leaders.

Talk: Developing leadership teams - how to go further, faster

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Developing senior talent, building a world class leadership team and establishing a coaching culture that enables others to be exceptional isn't easy. It requires leaders to understand how to change themselves and develop their leadership teams. In this masterclass, through a series of live interactive exercises leaders attendees will identify which of the nine levels of team development (see figure) their team is currently operating from. They will learn why most teams never make it past level 3 and how building talent and developing your team doesn't just require leaders to be coaches but to become change agents. We will explore the six factors that transform teams and enable greater agility, energy and team resilience even in tough markets. With each new level of team development teams become more powerful in their ability to drive change, outthink the competition and grow the business. The quality of conversation significant improves as team develop and the focus shifts from 'reporting in' to the leadership team leading out from the top team.
Dénes Kemény

Dénes Kemény

Former Trainer and President of Hungarian Men's Water Polo Team

Talk: Lead your team to win

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Exclusive interview with Dénes Kemény, 3-time-olympic gold medalist-former Hungarian water polo player, trainer and president of the national Hungarian water polo team for men.
Jutta Eckstein

Jutta Eckstein

Coach, Consultant AT independent

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. in Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. She has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book on Company-wide Agility. This book focuses on synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agility.

Talk: Addressing Complexity by Learning fast with BOSSA nova

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The pandemic is a stark example of the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (short VUCA) world we currently live in and this world asks for company-wide agility. By synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agility, BOSSA nova is one approach to company-wide agility. Yet it is often unclear, where and how to start implementing this approach. As pointed out by the so-called Fearless Change Patterns, it doesn’t help to wait for the perfect moment when you have the resources and knowledge you think you need; instead, take the first baby step and start learning. Thus, for living in the VUCA world an open mindset to learning is essential that can be approached by the concept called probes – small, safe-to-fail experiments based on hypotheses derived from reflection on the current situation as well as on theory. In this session, I will share both the concept and some examples of probes implemented by different companies that can guide the probing in your company to establish a learning organization.