Agile on the Beach 2021
2021-09-02..2021-09-03
Falmouth, United Kingdom
[Agile on the Beach 2016, Agile on the Beach 2018, Agile on the Beach 2019, Agile on the Beach 2021, Agile on the Beach 2023, Agile on the Beach 2024, Agile on the Beach 2025]
who it's for
product managers, engineering managers, agile coaches, platform engineers, devops engineers, tech leads, site reliability engineers, software architects
topics
database schema versioning; aggregation of marginal gains for remote teams; strangling the monolith migrations; operability: build it you run it; digital platform design and scaling; product discovery techniques; lead time Monte Carlo forecasting; testing workflow changes (kill the test column); feminist leadership practices in teams; hiring product managers with product EQ
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Ten years, but not decayed | Kevlin Henney | 01m |
A concise retrospective claims software craft not decayed after a decade, comparing concrete changes in practices, tooling, hiring and culture since the first… | ||
| The Semantic Schema Version | Julia Hayward | 33m |
Argues that publishing a consistent database versioning policy — using a migrations model checked into source control + a schema_versions table that records… | ||
| How the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains” can help Distributed Teams become high-performing | Anton Chekhov | 31m |
Claim: applying the Aggregation of Marginal Gains to remote teams—improving many small things by ~1%—produces outsized performance gains. Examples: British… | ||
| Operability and You Build It You Run It | Simon Skelton, Steve Smith | 42m |
Claim: moving from monthly monolith releases to a Google Cloud–based John Lewis Digital Platform yields over 5,000 deployments a year, provisioning new… | ||
| Quietly Strangling the Monolith - a real-world migration of a high traffic monolith | Gareth Thomas | 32m |
A production monolith (scholar pac on zop and zodb) grows from ~300 to ~2,000 schools with 35–40% yearly growth, serving 3.5k req/s at peak across ten servers… | ||
| Reawakening Agile with OKRs | Allan Kelly | 39m |
Argues OKRs fit between two-week iterations and long-term strategy as a 3-month, test-first management cadence that sets measurable hypotheses (not epics) and… | ||
| Transforming teams through Feminist Leadership | Patti Hicks-Whaley | 30m |
ActionAid UK applies gave away ownership of country programs and reshaped its board—added a Black female chair and two trustees under 25—to test feminist… | ||
| Jekyll & Hyde - Product Management for the grey areas | Andrew Nesling | 42m |
Product management sits between customer-facing product and internal service, so the approach uses the Cynefin framework to pick methods, builds platform… | ||
| Bringing product thinking into DevOps | Neha Datt, Marcel Britsch | 43m |
Product teams pair with DevOps to reorder work by risk and context, not by tooling hype: teams build a prototype automated 80‑page regulatory PDF that pulls… | ||
| Agile Leadership in 5 (not) easy steps | Helen Lisowski | 38m |
Argues that agile change is ongoing—called releasing agility—and lists five concrete steps: a clear shared vision, a strategy with a few touchpoints, having… | ||
| Agile metrics for predicting the future | Mattia Battiston | 44m |
Uses just start and end dates and small samples (5–11) to forecast work, not story points; computes a lead time distribution to say e.g. 88% of past stories… | ||
| Faster, Better, More! How to start and scale a Digital Platform for your organisation's teams | Adam Hansrod | 34m |
Defines a digital platform as a product of people, processes and tooling that accelerates other service teams and gives five glass‑tested criteria to decide… | ||
| Incrementally Improving Performance | Stephen Janaway | 44m |
Yearly performance cycles are replaced by monthly themed check-ins: 30‑minute, pre‑filled manager and employee questions that create bite‑sized feedback and… | ||
| Nobody needs an Agile Transformation | Phil Comelio | 43m |
Argues that organisations do not need an “Agile transformation” as a methodology but must shift to outcomes over outputs, with leadership owning goals… | ||
| Putting others first: How to develop a servant leadership style | Natasha Ah-Fat | 42m |
Organisational case study: a 12‑month learning journey with waves, formal and optional training, and checkpoints at six and twelve months produces 95% uptake… | ||
| Orienting for Outcomes | Mike Fosker | 48m |
Shows how to pick measurable outcomes over outputs and test riskiest assumptions first using thin slices, story maps, impact maps and the opportunity solution… | ||
| From Chasm to Kano - an introduction to product thinking | Matt Hosking | 43m |
Explains how to pick a narrow beachhead market, estimate its size (roughly double one year sales to dominate), and crossing the chasm by getting early-majority… | ||
| Product Discovery hacks | Darwin Peltan | 33m |
Advocates doing a short six to eight week upfront discovery to cut wasted delivery time, using an inception with hopes and fears, mapping top 5–7 assumptions… | ||
| Make it a thing! - The practice of software architecture | Jim Barritt | 45m |
Argues for a hard rule: Make it a thing! — convert vague principles into concrete artifacts such as architecture decision records kept next to code (they speed… | ||
| Mission Impossible: The Product Owner | Allan Kelly | 45m |
Argues product owners are overloaded by scrum and organizations, lacking skills authority legitimacy time to prioritise effectively, and frequently become… | ||
| How to Stop Testing and Break Your Code Base | Clare Sudbery | 44m |
Built a small iOS puzzle app and sped up feature work by relying on acceptance tests only, which leads to broken encapsulation, bloated classes, brittle… | ||
| Replatforming Online Search for a Major High Street Retailer | Stephen Tjasink, Sue Clutton | 49m |
A product team replaces a proprietary on‑prem search with cloud microservices using Elasticsearch and Google Cloud, deploys infrastructure as code with… | ||
| Acts of Heresy (and other amazing things to do with your organisation) | Stephen de Villiers Graaf | 36m |
Agility is not a framework to install or a certification to buy — it is earned through daily, hard decisions and experiments, not percent-complete dashboards… | ||
| Sponsor Talk | Christian Van Boven | 34m |
Covers a decade of work on the OpenTV platform and uses concrete cases — crypto price and mining‑rig demand, global component shortages, hiring delays — to… | ||
| Zombie Apocalypse! Overwhelm, Conflict, Stress (and hope) for teams facing the end of the world | Kermit Sargu | 44m |
Explains why stress, anxiety and burnout come from the amygdala’s guesswork using the brain in the hand model, cites 90 seconds for cortisol to subside, and… | ||
| Being fully you - to the workplace and beyond | Gitte Klitgaard | 48m |
Argues that professionalism combines craft competence and full humanity, not silence or a mask: know your work, admit when you don’t know, and bring honesty… | ||
| Satisfaction with abstraction, from individual contributor to leadership | Gwen Diagram | 41m |
Retros run every eight weeks using Mural with anonymous responses to eight quickfire questions (communication, goals, atmosphere, learning, implementation… | ||
| Faster Delivering Teams? Kill the test column! | Jitesh Gosai | 36m |
Claim: the usual "In Test" and Waiting for Test columns create hidden WIP and make testing the bottleneck so teams deliver slower. Evidence: sample board shows… | ||
| Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills | Kate Leto | 37m |
Argues that hiring must weight human skills alongside technical ones, citing EQ correlates with about $29,000 more per year, hiring mistakes costing 120–200%… | ||
| How to build an awesome product in challenging times with minimal resources | Jenny Bjorkman | 36m |
Edinburgh fintech launches roundups in five months on a shoestring, uses a design system so final UIs are already 75% complete before handoff, and automates… | ||
| nothing matches | ||