Dan North: Keynote: Kicking The Complexity Habit

Ceri Shaw: Join The Dark Side - Why Developers Should Choose Management

One of my Agile heroes is Amancio Ortega, founder of the Zara clothing company and the world's third richest man.  I use the manufacturing and retailing mechanism Ortega created, while growing Zara from 1 Spanish store in 1975 to over 2,000 worldwide today,  as my role model for Lean and Agile software development.  

Very little is known about Ortega  - Google him and you'll find just a few articles, a couple of pictures, and a very short wikipedia page.  One of those articles - "Rapid-Fire Fulfilment" from the November 2004 edition of Harvard Business Review - though, reveals how Ortega "turned the rules of supply chain management on their head" by abandoning long-range forecasts and tightly coupling their product development, manufacturing and retailing processes.  

Put more simply: Zara develop and manufacture small batches of their new products, try to sell them in their stores, abandon those that sell poorly, and mass produce those that sell well.  They judge success by the ringing of their cash registers.  Doesn't that sound a lot like the Lean Startup model?

This session won't help you become a retailing giant but it will help you understand how Agile and Lean should operate when we realise that our goal is not just to build software, but to build commercially successful products and solutions.

Clarke Ching: Zara - My Agile Role Model

Andrea Provaglio: Overcoming Self-Organization Blocks

When we build a product, we make thousands of decisions. We search for patterns, draw conclusions, and act upon limited information. It's all in a day's work.

In this talk, I'll explore the 5 most common cognitive biases and how they mislead our product decisions. These include our tendency to value a user's experience more if it coincides with our own experience (confirmation bias) and our tendency to forget that our users are not experts (curse of knowledge). 

You’ll walk out of this talk with ways to identify when your cognitive bias is creeping into your decisions, as well as tips and tricks on how to outsmart your brain and make better product decisions.

This talk is relevant for designers, product managers, developers, founders, managers, and anyone else who finds themselves making product decisions every day.

LeanAgileScot